The Dock We Built Back for Dad

Dad called me at ten after seven on a Saturday morning in July. I was on my back porch with my first cup of coffee, and I almost let it ring, because nobody calls that early with good news.

“Troy,” he said. “The dock’s gone.”

I set my cup down on the railing. I asked him what he meant, gone. Did a storm come through? Did the ice finally get it? There had been no storm. It was July.

“It’s not there,” he said. “I’m standing on the shore and it’s not there. There’s a jet ski lift where it was.”

My dad is Gunnar Halvorson. He is 81 years old. He was an electrician for forty-one years, the same as me, and he does not repeat himself unless something has knocked him off his feet.

I told him to stay put. I told him I was coming. He said there was no need, and I heard in his voice that there was every need, so I got in my truck.

The lake place is a little over an hour north of me, in the part of Minnesota where the jack pines start and the gas stations sell leeches next to the milk. Dad bought the lot in 1973 with money he saved wiring grain dryers.

He built the cabin first, two rooms and a porch, and then in the summer of 1975, the summer he turned 30, he built the dock. My mother used to say he spent more time on that dock than on the house, and he never argued with her.

It was forty feet long and four feet wide, five sections of eight feet each, framed in two by sixes and set on galvanized pipe legs with steel foot plates. Every October it came out. Every May it went back in.

I helped put it in and pull it out every year from the time I was old enough to hold one end of a section. My sister Leah did too, until she was old enough to find a reason not to.

Mom read on the end of that dock every summer of her married life. She had a lawn chair with gray and white webbing and a straw hat she kept on a nail in the porch. She passed five winters ago, in February, at home.

After the funeral, Dad tried living at the lake by himself for a year. It was too much house and too much quiet and too many steps down to the water for a man with two bad knees.

He took an apartment in town, nine miles off, in a senior building close to his church and the clinic. He said he liked hearing other people’s televisions through the wall. I think he meant he liked not being alone.

Leah had just come through her divorce that same year. She had been married twenty-two years, and when it ended she ended up with half of a small house and a lot of hurt.

She asked Dad if she could live at the lake place. Dad and I talked it over, and I told him I had my own house, my own mortgage and my own life, and that Leah needed somewhere to land.

So in the spring of 2023, Dad signed the deed over to her. He did it at the bank in town, all proper. He kept no strings on it except one, and he never wrote it down: he would come out Saturdays to fish.