The Patch at the Boat Ramp

The bow was the first thing I saw, because it was pointed right at me when I pulled into the ramp lot. A white boat looks fine from fifty feet. From ten, it did not.

There was a hole in the hull about a foot back from the point of the bow, low on the port side, the size of a dinner plate. The gelcoat around it was spidered out in cracks like a dropped windshield.

The glass underneath was broken through. I could see daylight inside the front storage compartment when I bent down, and a little pile of wet river gravel sitting in the bottom of the bilge.

It was ten minutes after seven on a Thursday morning in late October. The lake was flat and blue, and the bluff across the cove was just starting to turn orange and brown at the top.

Tobin had called me at seven. He runs the bait shop at the top of the hill above the ramp, and he has known me since I was nine years old and bought my first minnows from his father.

“Tessa,” he had said, “your boat’s sitting in the ramp lot on its trailer. Hooked to nothing. The bow’s stove in.”

I had told him that couldn’t be right, because my boat was with my brother-in-law, and my brother-in-law had said one evening.

“Well,” Tobin had said, “it’s here. I saw him pull in with it last night right at dark. He unhooked it and left.”

So there I stood, looking at the boat I had paid for with eleven years of charters, sitting on its own trailer in the corner of a public lot like somebody had dumped a couch.

I want to tell you about that boat so you understand what it was to me. It is an 18-foot fiberglass bass boat, white with a gray stripe, eleven years old when I bought it used and fifteen years old that fall.

I paid for it the way most guides pay for anything. A charter here, a charter there, four hours at a time, putting a little in a coffee can and a little in the bank, for eleven years.

I guide bass fishermen on Bull Shoals Lake in north Arkansas. I am one of maybe a dozen women in these parts who do it for a living, and the only one I know who learned it from her father in the same cove where she still launches.

That boat is not a toy. It is my paycheck. When it sits, I do not get paid. When it is on the water, Corwin and I make our house payment.

I walked around it twice. Then I got down on my knees on the concrete and put my hand flat on the hull beside the hole, the way Dad used to put his hand on a horse he wasn’t sure of.

The trailer was fine. The motor was fine, as far as I could tell, though the skeg had a fresh bright scrape on it. The hull was what took it. He had hit something hard, bow first, at speed.

River gravel does not come out of Bull Shoals Lake. The lake is rock and clay and old drowned timber. Gravel like that comes from the White River below the dam, where the bars come up out of the water when the generators shut off.

I sat back on my heels and understood all at once what he had done.