The Dock We Built Back for Dad

He learned fast. He has his grandfather’s hands, long fingers and square nails, and I never noticed it until I watched them on a framing square.

We built on sawhorses in the grass above the shore. One section at a time, frame first, then the decking. Kip set the gap between every plank with a sixteen penny nail as a spacer, the way Dad’s drawing said, three eighths of an inch, crown up.

By noon we had one section done. It was heavier than I remembered. Two by sixes and cedar, eight feet by four, and it took both of us to carry it down to the water.

I waded in to my knees and set the first two legs. Kip held the level. We set the height off the shore, the way Dad always did, so the deck would sit about a foot and a half over the water and drain right.

The lake bottom on that flat spot by the birch is firm gravel. Dad had known that in 1975. He had chosen the sand spot for the old dock because Mom wanted to wade in without stepping on rocks, but he had marked this one on his drawing too, with a little X, and written good bottom, second choice.

Brett came out of the house around one. He was in work jeans and a ball cap, and he stood at the top of the hill with his hands on his hips and watched us. I nodded to him. He nodded back. Neither one of us came closer.

By dark, which in July up north is close to ten, we had three sections built and two in the water. We had sunburned necks and Kip had a blister on his thumb the size of a dime. He didn’t complain once.

We slept on the floor of Dad’s old shop, which Leah had left alone. I lay awake a while listening to the loons. I could hear my boy breathing in his sleeping bag next to me, and I thanked the Lord for him, and I thought about my father at thirty, doing this exact thing, with nobody to hold the level.

Sunday we set the third section and quit early. Kip had a summer job at the hardware store Monday morning, and I had a service upgrade on a dairy barn that couldn’t wait. We drove home sore and quiet with the empty trailer rattling behind us.

That week something happened that I didn’t plan and didn’t know about until later.

Lake people talk. There are about forty cabins on that lake, and maybe a dozen of them belong to families who have been there as long as ours. They all knew Gunnar Halvorson. Half of them had his wiring in their walls.

They had seen the old dock come out. They had seen the planks on the brush pile. And that weekend they had seen Gunnar’s son and grandson down at the water with sawhorses and a coffee can full of drawings.

Nobody said anything to Leah. Nobody said anything to Brett. That isn’t how it’s done up there. But by Wednesday, I found out later, half the lake knew what we were building and why.

When Kip and I pulled in the next Friday evening, there was a stack of cinder blocks by the shed I didn’t put there, and a note under a rock on the top one. It said: For the sawhorses. Your legs are too short. A.

That was Alvah. He is seventy-seven and has lived on the north shore since 1968. He fished with Dad every Saturday for thirty years, until his hips went.