What’s up Dock?

This is the dock. But it's misleading because this is only half of the dock. Still, you'll get the idea.

We spent the weekend Up North for a last hurrah! at the cottage. In a few weeks Robby’s folks will close it up and declare the 2009 season over… Poor un-winterized little cottage must be shut up for the winter months.

This weekend we enjoyed the cool nights with fires in the fireplace and Lady’s delicious spaghetti sauce. The weekend was gorgeous– lovely September blue skies instead of the rain that the weathermen had warned.

The weather was a slight balm to the wretched task of pulling out the dock for the year. We have a great dock– it’s wooden and long. It ends in a nice platform. The neighbors have a fancy aluminum dock that is so long we once staged a “Dock Walk” that mimicked the Mackinac Bridge Walk. We had t-shirts printed up and we pretended to take a rest at the halfway point. When we reached their platform we celebrated while they sat, bewildered, in their boat. Their dock has lights strung along the length so that, at night, it gleams like the cliched necklace of jewels on the water.

Our dock is more simple. More homey. It is sturdy and straight and practical. The wood planks sometimes bow and bounce unexpectedly. The sections are, for the most part, worn smooth with an odd splinter here and there to keep the danger alive.

This weekend we pulled the dock out. We envy the floating docks we’ve seen in the south where the water does not freeze. Our little lake will be frozen by Thanksgiving and any docks left lazily in will become spinters pushed up against one of the shore banks.

Robby did the bulk of the heavy lifting. The rest of us– Lady, Padre, and me– pitched in to pull out the sections and lug them up the ever-shorter remaining dock to the shore where they are neatly stacked for the winter. The sections requred two of us at a time. One person can handle the standards. The trick is in the timing and trying not to end up crossing on the dock when someone is hauling in a piece.  Trying to keep Jack off the dock was also a challenge. He’d tied two of his little plastic boats together with a long string and was floating them in the inch deep water left near shore. The lake is so low at this late date that Robby had to walk the standards out to deep enough water to rinse off the muck and mussels from the flat bases. (Meanwhile I calculated whether we could get the neighbors to cheat their fancy aluminum dock towards our cottage splitting the difference between their lot and our’s on the neighbor in-between so that we could avoid this unpleasantness next year.)

It didn’t take us long but we were all sore and achey afterward. None of us are used to heavy lifting and so our shoulders especially took a hit. Lady made us her ridiculously good BLTs and spaghetti to assuage our moaning.

The lake can freeze now. We’re done with it.