Boy and Boat

by Bruce Hutchison

From the Vancouver Sun, 28 July 1978

The boat was new, homemade, flat-bottomed and painted in a hideous pattern of yellow and blue. But to the old man on the shore of the mountain lake it seemed familiar. He had seen such boats before now, had built them for himself, long, long ago. The boy pulling the oars and the shaggy black mongrel dog beside him were familiar, too. They reproduced, without knowing it, a lost chapter in the story of Canada.

At this hour, shortly after daybreak, no one else had returned on to the lake. It was the right time to catch trout before the clamorous speedboats and water skis drove them into hiding. The boy fished patiently with a trolling line, a flashing spoon and a worm for bait. Trout and dog, of course, were as essential to the story as the boy, inseparable companions and timeless.

When the boat came nearer to shore the man saw that the boy was red-headed, freckled and deeply tanned—a portrait of boyhood incarnate, universal and unchanging throughout the ages. Everything looked exactly as it should to a man who had once been a boy and remembered the story.

Evidently the morning's luck was good. Answering the man's discreet inquiry, the boy held up a fish almost nine inches in length, a rainbow trout with the glowing unmistakable stripes on its flanks, the best of trout and unique to the Pacific slope of America.

Who, the man asked (knowing the answer), had built the boat? The boy said he had built it all, alone, of lumber from the abandoned sawmill further down the lake. Why the colour scheme of yellow blobs and jagged blue streaks?

The boy pondered that embarrassing question for several moments. Finally, his face turning as red as his hair, he disclosed his secret. The boat, he said, was named The Golden Dawn. The yellow blobs represented the sun at its rising and the blue streaks indicated a morning sky.

Though the words were halting and confused, the man understood at once, understood better than the boy. Here, as the boy could not know, was the imaginary but only true gold of innocence, the dawn of youth perpetual, the story written in a rune common to all mankind.

As the man knew too well, it was not the story in the newspapers and repeated hourly on the radio. But for a few more years the boy would remain mercifully ignorant of the world’s practical affairs.

He had yet to hear, for example, that the nations spent $400 billion annually on weapons designed to destroy their civilization in half an hour or less while the United States government and Supreme Court were gravely alarmed because a hydro dam threatened to destroy the snail darter, a species of tiny, inedible fish, unlike the noble, rainbow and not worth catching. The boy knew nothing of Russian purges, economic crises, terrorist plots and the solemn lunacy that masqueraded everywhere as human wisdom and brilliant statecraft.

Alas, he would learn the facts soon enough. The gold would fade and the blue turn grey. In the meantime he was satisfied with his boat, his clumsy masterpiece. He needed no gasoline engine when he had oars, no water skis when lie could catch trout, no other society when his mongrel dog accompanied him. He had no problems, made no demands on the national economy, lived as nature intended before the golden dawn of the technological era, the ever-rising standard of life. Yes, everything was as it should be on the quiet lake.

The boy rowed away but suddenly turned back and offered the nine-inch rainbow to the man as a shy gesture of recognition, a humble tribute to age. The man accepted the gift lest life offend the giver, though he didn’t want the trout.

Then, of sudden, the summer idyll collapsed. The boy said he was working at odd holiday jobs and saving up to buy a second hand outboard motor for his boat and already had almost sufficient money. Still more wonderful, his father had even promised him a speedboat of genuine fibreglass, with an engine of 50 horsepower, when lie graduated into university, some years hence. That prize was worth waiting for.

Boat, boy and dog slowly disappeared in the morning mist. The man returned to his cabin, cooked the rainbow and ate a gourmet breakfast. But somehow he didn’t much enjoy it now.