MAY 12, 2024 – Blogger’s Note: This post is yet another interruption of The Neighbors series. The title of this immediate post (and tomorrow’s) is a reference to Maynard Pirsig’s philosophical discourse in chronicling his “oneness” with a motorcycle on a wind-in-his face trip across big sky country of the American West. Likewise, “Zen and the Art of Dock Installation” is far more contemplative than practical. The practical, however, is what led to the contemplative. To understand fully the considerations featured in tomorrow’s post, a degree of acquaintance with the nitty-gritty is necessary. In other words, not to worry: the details are not as excessive and devoid of meaning as they might seem at first. They are the key to understanding the metaphorical.
This weekend I installed our dock for the millionth time . . . okay, okay; I exaggerated. Make that the thousandth time. But this time was different for reasons I’ll amuse if not edify you with in due course. A certain irony accompanied this season’s installation in that last February I’d purchased a branch new dock, which will be fully installed later this month by the distributor. The new setup is not cheap, which explains in part why I, scion of frugal Swedes on the one side and thrifty Scots on the other other, have installed our dock every year for decades; a dock that I think of more humorously than pridefully, as an “engineering marvel.”
My wife doesn’t call it that. She calls it an unsightly, overly jerry-rigged contraption straight out of a swamp in hillbilly country.
Over the years, a friend or two has been on hand for the annual ritual of installing the engineering marvel—or hillbilly prop, take your pick—but they’ve politely refrained from ridiculing the dock’s appearance; they’ve focused more charitably on the intense labor involved in assembling all the parts of a design straight from my odd-ball drawing board. “Why don’t you hire someone to do this?” my captive volunteer laborers often ask. I know what they’re thinking: If my wife and I can afford a boat to go with the dock, let alone a cabin to go with the boat, why can’t we pay a couple of guys for a couple of hours at the going Northwoods hourly rate to slam things together?
But that’s just the problem—a couple of guys slamming our dock together. The quirky design requires a refined method of assembly to ensure that the result is a sturdy dock that’s dead even with the entire horizon around the big oval-shaped lake. Only once have I put installation in the hands of outside professionals . . . so-called. That year was right after my hernia operation. No heavy lifting for that spring. But one month from the professional-install and two months out from the operation, a big blow across a two-and-a-half mile fetch brought waves that turned the assembled dock back into its constituent parts. I wound up re-doing all the work.
A second time I hired someone to deal with the dock was a month after my stem cell transplant for treatment of my multiple myeloma. I paid a guy to take out the dock, which requires far less finesse than putting it in, but I was not satisfied with how he’d stacked the pieces, especially since I’d given specific (if elaborate) instructions for doing so to render the next year’s installation more efficient.
Dock aesthetics aside, if you insist on combining quirky with persnickety, as I have all these years, you wind up doing things yourself. Cost savings become secondary though not entirely irrelevant.
Despite our purchase of a brand new, brand name manufactured dock, for reasons more boring to write about than to read, this year again I had to install my old engineering marvel but . . . down our shoreline a fair distance from where it had always been placed and where the new dock will be.
Nothing had changed about the old dock; only its location, but this change of venue created three new significant challenges. The first was the necessity of transporting all the pieces: two-and-a-half-inch pipes with cast iron brackets and auger tips; two 12-foot 2 x 6s and four10-foot 2 x 6s outfitted with joist-hangers and a large stack of 2 x 4s, all part of three modular frames; 12 specially designed (by the writer) “shoes” made of 2 x 2s screwed onto foot-long 1 x 6s (four such shoes per frame); five six-foot 4 x 4 beams that rest on the pipe brackets and, in turn, support the “shoes” holding the frames; and nine sections (three per section of dock) of 1 x 5 decking screwed down on 2 x 4s that fit over the three frames. In the past all of the foregoing was stored no more than 20 feet from the water’s edge. The new location was more than 200 feet away.
The second big challenge presented by the new location was the steep 10-foot embankment rising from the water. The old spot had been at a sizable cutout of a berm that decades of ice floes had created. Access to the water—and for passing all the aforementioned materials from land to sea—was far easier.
Third, as is the case all around the lake, heavy-duty boat lifts are installed to match-up with the corresponding docks, not the other way around. This method is universal because of its simplicity and accuracy: once your dock is in, the boat lift installer knows exactly where the lift should go. Again, for reasons too convoluted for explanation here, our boat lift was installed two weeks ago 30 feet out from shore. Since the dock was not yet in, I’d had to don waders and use varying methods to determine where the lift should go—out in deeper water but not so far that my engineering marvel wouldn’t reach it. I then had to direct the water-forklift operator to place the lift according to my best guess.
When I headed up to the lake alone first thing Saturday morning—my wife is still on her Alaska expedition; our in-town son was preoccupied with more pressing matters than the dock installation—I used the three-hour drive to organize myself for the project ahead. I would have to return no later than late Sunday afternoon, which meant I had to achieve absolute efficiency. But first, a gazillion problems needed to be solved, such as how best to transport all the materials and necessary tools to the site—exactly what tools I’d want and need; how to determine exactly where to locate the first section of dock to ensure that the far end of the third section would line up just to the outside of the NE post of the lift (where the controls are located); how to construct a platform to support the shore end of the first section of dock; once the dock was installed, how to access it from our shoreline trail that runs along the top of the steep embankment.
It was a Zen-like time, I alone with my thoughts; no music, radio, or phone calls; just careful step-by-step analysis of every detail of every aspect of the mission that awaited me. (Cont.)
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
