Nothings More Fun Than Fooling Around On a Boat

Nothings More Fun Than Fooling Around On a Boat
Jon Donlon

Years ago my partner and I rented a live-aboard vessel and motored the French waterways. Traveling on the Sarthe, we slid past romantic villages with elegant, ancient stone churches always on the best riverside vista, given prominence on the landscape, the spikes of the steeples punctuating the horizon line well before any village became visible to us.

Back then, we’d perched on the fiberglass lids of the boat’s built-in stowage, sipping wine and nibbling cheese as the steady throb of the small, powerful Swedish engine chuffed us past springtime flooded meadows and fields. Now, jotting the notes for this text, I was taking the luxury train back from Tokyo and had snagged a section of the NYT from the bin; it carried a feature describing one couple’s life afloat on the canals of France. In between these events, my partner and I’d done a story on the “Campboats of the Atchafalaya Basin,” describing the fast being forgotten life ways of commercial fisher folk in that vast Louisiana wetland area.

Going in-bound from Tokyo, the regular express is fine, but outbound the cars tend to be packed, as the hackneyed but vivid expression puts it, like sardines. So the friend I was with and I got tickets for the ‘Romance Car,’ the luxury commuter, by paying a supplement. Then, like jackasses, we contrived to miss that train by jabbering over coffee. On a second attempt we’d had to get even more expensive coupons for the super duper Green Car with seats like papa’s Barka-lounger.

Finally, having carried aboard my single-serving container of Sake and my section of the Good Grey Paper, I settled back into a padded chair roughly the size of many entire apartments in Tokyo. I began to read the NYT story on a couple who “bought a century-old converted barge and set out to cover some of the thousands of kilometers of canals and rivers around France.” The feature, “On the Seine, Houseboat Dwelling” by Ariane Bernard, December 6, 2006 NYT, wonderfully written, immediately caught my interest.

As a teenager and young adult I’d read a series of books by Roger Pilkington, an Englishman who traveled by small boat here and there. I had a copy of “Small Boat to Skagarrak” in my backpack when I hitchhiked around the US, and over the years I read what seemed like a half dozen more of Pilkington’s books, which were always part travel narrative, part arcane history, part folklore, and part weird political screed. Then, interested in European canals, I found the several books of Tom Rolt and especially “Narrow Boat.”

Rolt had helped invent contemporary interest in leisure travel by water in England and save the failing canals, forming the Inland Waterways Association. In France, the transit is more riverine, more wild. In the evening as we went along we could “tie up” by tossing a simple anchor on the turf and hike into an inviting auberge redolent, in that region, with the luscious aroma of fatty rillettes du Mans, ready to trowel plaque onto my internal tubes and ducts. Later, the river would rock the boat and, while it was at it, rock us gently to sleep.

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