The Johnboat Ramp at Lake Week

Kelly turned off the water. She did not ask me how. She did not ask if I was sure, or if it was safe, or what her brother would say.

She dried her hands on the towel, reached past me to the hook by the door, and held my truck keys out in her palm.

“Bemidji’s forty minutes,” she said. “The home center’s open till nine. Get the good seat, Mike. The one with the high back. Don’t get the cheap one.”

It was seven-forty. I kissed her on the forehead and went.

I drove that county road with the radio off, drawing it in my head. I have been a heating and cooling tech for twenty-one years. Most of my job is making a space work for what somebody needs.

A johnboat is a flat aluminum box, stable and low. The problem was the bench seats. A man who cannot use his left leg cannot climb over a bench or sit on one without a back.

So I needed a plywood deck across the middle of the boat with a swivel seat bolted to it, one that could face the dock for the transfer and then turn to the water.

And I needed a short ramp from the dock down onto that deck, stiff enough for the chair and two people, tied off at both ends.

The kid at the lumber counter in Bemidji had a sunburn and a Twins cap and was maybe nineteen. I showed him the sketch I had done on the back of a gas receipt, and he read it twice and said, “Oh, this is for a boat.”

“For my father-in-law,” I said. “He’s in a wheelchair. He hasn’t been fishing in two years.”

He looked at the sketch again and said, “Give me fifteen minutes,” and he took a full sheet of three-quarter inch plywood over to the panel saw and cut it to my numbers without charging me for the cuts.

Then he walked me back to the fishing aisle himself and pointed at a padded high-back swivel boat seat with a pedestal base.

It was the one Kelly meant. Beige padded vinyl, armrests that folded up, a lever that locked the swivel.

I bought the plywood, four treated two-by-fours, carriage bolts and lock nuts, deck screws, outdoor carpet, two ratchet straps, rope, and that seat. It came to two hundred and ninety-one dollars.

The kid helped me load it. When I was pulling out, he jogged after the truck and knocked on the window, and when I rolled it down, he said, “Hey. Good luck with your guy.”

I got back at a quarter to eleven. Kelly had left the porch light on and a plate of cookies on the dash of the truck, and I ate them sitting in the cab in the dark.

You do not run a drill at the lake after ten, so I set my alarm for four-thirty and lay down next to Kelly. I did not sleep much.

At four-thirty the lake was gray and the mist was coming up off it in slow sheets, so thick I could not see the far shore.

The water was flat as a tabletop. Somewhere out in that fog a loon was calling, over and over.

I carried everything down to the dock in four trips. Then I got down in the johnboat on my knees with a headlamp and a cordless drill and went to work as quietly as I knew how.

The two-by-fours went across the ribs, screwed to the old bench brackets. The deck went on top, screwed down every six inches, with carpet stapled over it so nobody’s foot would slip on wet wood.