Houseboat on the Seine: A Memoir

  But before that, I check with both my neighbors to see if this cable belongs to either of them. Begrudgingly, they tell me it belonged to the man who owned the boat before me. I figure, finders-keepers.

  At Chez Mollard, I buy a six-foot-long solid steel bar about two inches thick. I’ll drive this into the top of the bank with a sledgehammer I found in the bottom of the metal boat, covered with oil. The handle of the sledge was rotted, but I bought a new handle at the hardware store in Le Pecq. It must be a ten-pounder and gives me a great feeling of power.

  I dig a hole about two feet deep and fill it with concrete. Then I drive the steel bar into the wet concrete and through into the dirt below. I swing that sledge and watch with joyful wonder as the bar sinks in about half an inch with each of my swings. I drive it down until only about a foot and a half sticks up out of the concrete. I’ve tilted the bar at an angle away from the boat to keep the cable from slipping off. I stamp down on the concrete around the bar.

  I tie my cable to the back bollard of the metal boat with a pair of half hitches, then hook a rope to the other end of the cable and tie a rock to the end of the rope. After about three tries, I manage to heave that rock up onto the bank. I rush around to retrieve it before the weight of the cable and rock pull it back into the water.

  Now I need my winch again. I keep it tied to the same tree I was using to pull the boat in from the sandbar. I run it up and around the newly sunken steel bar. I have the cable locked through the hook of the winch. I start cranking until the cable is tight around the bar, the boat pulling in perhaps another six inches. Then, I pull on the end of the cable, make a tie around the bar and finish with a pair of half hitches in opposite directions so it’s almost like a square knot.

  When I loosen the winch, the cable stays taut and the bar is firmly sunk in the cement without budging. I go through the same procedure at the front of the boat. I figure that should hold. I don’t know, now, how I could have been so naive.

  Skiing and Swimming Al Fresco

  Winter comes, and the American school has a ski trip up into the Alps at a place just across the French border in an Italian ski resort called Bardonecchia. Rosemary and I are asked to chaperone and help with the sponsors of the trip in exchange for free transportation, free hotels with meals, even free ski passes for all the family. We can’t resist; the kids are as excited as we are, or even more. We sign up. The trip is in February.

  Already, in January, the river has been rising. I keep tightening my cables and adjusting the perches. Perches axe long poles attached to the boat and tied to trees on the bank to keep the boat away from the land. The big cables pull the boat toward the land, the perches keep it from floating up onto the land and perhaps getting stranded there. I feel I’m finally becoming something of a river man. I continue adjusting the height of the gangplank, moving the iron bar up another pair of holes in the support, according to the plan Sam has devised. I keep ahead of the rising water easily. I’m not too worried. Things seem to be working as planned.

  Our ski trip is everything we had hoped for. No one in the family is hurt, and the kids all improve their skiing. Rosemary and I ski our usual snowplow-cautious ways down the easiest slopes but have a good time. We are returned by bus to the school, where we have our car parked. Then, we drive from school with our considerable luggage to a bizarre sight!

  First of all, when we come around the corner at the café, our boat and all the other boats along the berge look as if they’ve been lifted out of the water to be on exhibition. Shocked, confused, we dash forward. The river has risen and is more than a meter deep over the chemin de halage itself! The river is five meters up, over fifteen feet higher than normal! Our boat is swung out at an angle again, almost perpendicular to the berge, and the gangplank is holding on to the boat, but the land end of the gangplank has swung with the current at a cockeyed angle!

  I can’t even think of any way to board if we wanted to. Our neighbors are running around like crazy people, fastening things down and cursing us for abandoning our boat!! The beautiful black or green Seine is a raging, yellow muddy river now; it looks like the Amazon, with rippling waves as the water courses along its rampaging way. The river has risen so completely, it’s covered the island across from us so it looks like one huge wild river with whitecaps all the way to the bank on the other side of the island.

  We drop our bags, and I strip down to my skiing long Johns. I wade into the cold, roaring river up to my chest and make an attempt to pull the gangplank back into place. The current is unbelievably strong; it almost sweeps me away. Matt strips and comes in to help. With much struggling, we manage to fasten the wayward gangplank with a piece of rope to a tree upriver. This we do with a rope I’d left in the high crotch of a tree after one of my last transports on the roof of the Hillman. Thank God it’s still there, barely above the water.

  We find out that the town, in the emergency, is supplying what look like heavy sawhorses to anyone who needs them. Not only has the river flooded its banks, but it’s all the way up into the streets in most parts of town. We manage to commandeer two of the heavy sawhorses and tie them to the upstream tree. We also tie them to the gangplank, which we lift with great difficulty onto these sawhorses. The gangplank is bucking and surging, trying to break away. I crawl out on it, not looking down into the wild river. From the front deck, I unhook the heavy metal ladder we first used to go down into and out of the metal hull when we were clearing out the oil.

  I drag it down to where the bottom of our gangplank disappears into the surging water on the chemin de halage. Matt jams the other end into the bank leading up to the slightly above-water boule courts across from us. We tie this, too, to another upriver tree. Next, I scramble back onto the deck and carry some leftover planks from the downstairs flooring and fit them over the metal ladder. Now, we almost have a functioning gangplank we can use to board the boat.

  Rosemary and the girls, with the luggage, have retreated to the café. The café is just barely out of the water. Men are piling sandbags in front of it. Mr. Sisley would have loved all this, but not me! Matt and I go back to grab our bags before they are washed away. It’s the first time I notice the crowds watching me in my long Johns and Matt in his Skivvies hustling around madly in the freezing cold.

  Like drunken acrobats, we carry the luggage across the gangplank and store them inside the boat. It’s so strange, with all the action and noise outside, the boat seems calm, floating above it all. But it’s very damp and cold. I check to see if the electricity is still working, and it is. I start the electric heaters and light the butane heaters: Considering our dress, Matt and I should feel colder than we do. Wonderful stuff, adrenaline.

  The question now is, does the family spend the night on the boat with me, or do we hunt up a hotel where they can stay overnight.

  After we have the last of the luggage stowed on board, I scurry down our newly wobbly, makeshift gangplank, then wade through the water again. I want to see if that iron bar I’d driven in so deeply on the bank is secure. It’s OK, but the support system with which I was supposed to lift the gangplank is completely underwater! I can even see it, but definitely can’t reach it.

  I run to the back of the boat and find that the knot I tied in the cable to the bollard has slipped, and that’s been the trouble. I scramble and splash through the water to rescue our winch. Matt and I hook the cable to the winch, pull taut, then wrap the cable around the bollard. We start cranking, pulling the boat back in toward shore. Whatever sandbar might once have been is long gone. The current is incredible, sending splashes up at us on the upper boat. When we have the boat hauled back in, we fasten it tightly.

  Rosemary and the girls come down to look at the situation. Matt and I maneuver our aluminum ladder, the one I bought to build my stairway from upper to lower boat, and tie it down to the gangplank along with the other ladder. We anchor it to the fence surrounding the boule court, which is about a foot above water. The angle of the gangplank up to the boat
is frightening.

  Matt, using the sledge, drives stakes on the downriver side of the ladder, and we tie the whole mess together. We put more planks on the top ladder. We also string a rope tightly from the boat, at the door all the way to the boule-comt fence. If anybody’s going to walk this plank, they’ll need something to hold on to. Even pirates might be a bit squeamish.

  Rosemary decides we all ought to stay. I’ll move our car up higher into town so it won’t be inundated. We’ll commandeer some more sawhorses and planks from the town. It seems we’ve done all we can for now, and both Matt and I are starting to shiver, although the boat is warming up.

  The first thing after we’re all settled in, Matt and I take showers. We check if there’s anything to eat. It’s Sunday night and no stores are open, but there are some eggs, butter, a can of string beans and a package of noodles. There’s also a well-aged baguette we bought for the train on the way home. We find some wine and apple juice.

  So we have a nice meal, feeling like frontier people fighting the elements. Matt and I have put on sweat suits and rescued out clothes from where we stripped them off; the river is still creeping up. It’s well over the boule court now.

  Matt decides to sleep up on the floor of the living room instead of down in the crew cabin. He says the roar of the water against the side of the boat down there would keep anyone awake.

  We gather together all the flashlights and candles we can muster, so everybody has some kind of light if the electricity goes off. I climb in bed knowing that early tomorrow I’ll need to climb up on the roof of the upper boat with a Swedish bow saw and cut off some of the branches that normally hang romantically over the boat. They’re now trying to press their way through the roof and into the boat. That’s about all we’d need, leaks in the roof. The last thing I do is set my wrist alarm to go off every two hours. I go zoom deeply to sleep. I didn’t sleep much in the couchette coming from Italy.

  ∨ Houseboat on the Seine ∧

  Thirteen

  Digging Out

  It takes a lot longer for the water to go down than it took to go up. I paint a calibrated line on one of the trees beside the gangplank and mark it every day.

  At first, the river keeps right at its high-water mark, and there isn’t much change for almost four days. I ask around concerning where all the water can be coming from because it isn’t raining at all in Port Marly or in Paris. The skies are blue and high with a few racing clouds and bright sun.

  I find out that it’s been raining all over France, and just about every river is overflowing. It seems the wonderful snow on which we skied in Bardonecchia was part of the same precipitation that is causing the flooding. The good news is that La Navigation has declared the flood tide has been reached and we can expect the water to go down, unless there are more storms up the Marne, the Eure, or the Yonne.

  I go back, check my marks, and nothing’s changed. I wonder what would happen if it started teeming rain right here on the Seine, then realize that most of it would be downriver from us and wouldn’t matter.

  The next day, sure enough, the river starts to go down, over two inches that day. When I look out the next morning, it’s down a good foot. At breakfast, we celebrate with croissants instead of our usual bread and butter. I’m wondering what I can do to avoid the same kind of catastrophe with other rains and floods.

  Everything is covered with mud up to where the water has risen. I buy a plastic hose at Le Couier, the hardware store in Le Pecq. I buy two lengths to make fifty meters of hose. I figure with this, I can reach all parts of the boat and gangplank that are coated with the mud. It reminds me of squirting mud off all the furniture as I pulled it from the wooden boat the first time. Am I going to spend the rest of my life spraying mud off everything we own?

  I can now take the aluminum ladder off the bottom of the gangplank. I see the surface of the chemin de balage about three feet down. The heavy metal ladder with the boards on it will be enough for the family to climb up onto the gangplank. As the water goes down, of course, the steepness of the gangplank decreases. I decide when this mess is cleaned up somewhat, I’m going to nail one-inch strips of wood along the gangplank so it will be easier to climb up and down without slipping.

  I search out my bow saw, actually my Swedish imitation of same, lean the ladder from the gangplank against the roof of the boat and climb up into the foliage of the trees hanging over the roof. I inspect and no serious damage has been done. I start by cutting off the branches that are actually gouging the roof. I throw the branches I cut off the roof into the still raging Seine. They’re biodegradable. There’s a regular flotilla of branches floating past the boat all day long. The flood’s ripped out just about any vegetation that could be uprooted.

  I cut away all morning and, after about two hours, have quite a pile of willow branches on the roof. I trim any branch that comes within a meter or so of the boat. That should give me another meter or more of flooding without any damage. If it goes any higher than that, I’ll have more to worry about than just the roof. When I come off the roof, the water’s receded another half foot. I squirt with the hose, the trees, the gangplank, anything I can see with mud clinging to it. I notice M. Le Clerc, my downriver neighbor, doing the same thing. We wave to each other. Maybe finally I’ll be accepted into this hermitlike boating community. Bad enough that I don’t know the first thing about boats, but I’m an American. How low can one sink? I know how low, just as low as this boat could sink and then ram into his boat. I definitely need to discover some better way of mooring our boat.

  Sam to the Rescue

  I’m squirting away, beginning to think of lunch, when Sam, our hero, casually walks up the gangplank as if it’s the aisle of a church. I turn off the water. Sam is checking the cables that have stretched considerably in the rush of the flood. He’s wearing rubber boots.

  ‘Hey, Sam, want to buy a boat, slightly used but very cheap?’

  ‘Hi. Matt’s been telling me about what’s been going on out here, so I took off from school today to see just what’s happening. Our boat’s fine, rode right up with the water, didn’t even need to adjust a cable.’

  ‘Well, as you can see, the water’s gone down almost a meter here, and I’ve been spending my time washing off the mud from everything and trimming the trees so they won’t drive their way through the roof.’

  Sam points behind me.

  ‘What happened to your perches!’

  I looked where I’d braced them rather lightly. They’re gone and I hadn’t even noticed.

  ‘Guess they got washed away in all the confusion.’

  ‘I was afraid of that. You’ll need to work out a complete new system for mooring this boat or the whole thing’s going to wash downriver with the next flood. I think I have an idea of what we can do to keep La Navigation happy and I don’t think it will cost too much. They’ll never let you get by with tying to a tree after this flood, especially after they’ve put in all that work keeping your boat in place. They’ll probably be sending you a bill. You know there were pictures in two French newspapers of this boat about ready to take off for Rouen. You’ll be hearing from the head of Navigation in the next few days.’

  That’s all I need. I look at the mess the boat is in now. My pride and joy is only a mass of twisted cables and mud, with a gangplank skewed all out of joint. I’m about ready to give up again, but not Sam. He’s inspecting the cables and ropes holding the boat in place temporarily. He does his dance up the gangplank.

  ‘It won’t take much to fix this so they won’t have a thing to complain about. It’ll cost some money, but when we’re done, you can come through a flood as high as seven meters without having to adjust even one cable. It’ll all go up like an elevator in a sixteenth-arrondissement apartment.’

  I look at my unhappy boat. I realize the reason the gangplank has twisted so is that it was bearing all the weight of the water pushing against the boat trying to shoot the whole shebang up on the chemin de halage, or maybe
even up on the boule court, or, as Sam says, on a Normandy beach. Now that would really be trouble. I look at Sam. He’s back climbing around inspecting what Matt and I did.

  ‘OK, Sam, how much? I’m just about running totally short on liquid money. Liquid river I’ve got, but money is something else.’

  He shimmies up the gangplank, using a tree to brace himself. He doesn’t even wet his boots.

  ‘Let’s go inside and I’ll explain how we can do it.’

  In the boat, I hunt up a pencil and some paper. He spreads this out on our table. He hunches over it with his arm wrapped around the top of the paper the way you’d expect a lefty to write, even a lefty by default. He has his head down close to the paper. He explains as he draws along. He doesn’t use a ruler or guide of any kind. He has such control, he can make a straight line or a curve totally freehandedly.

  ‘You see, the problem is to have your cables and perches attached to the boat and the land at exactly the same level so they’re parallel to each other.’ He draws this in quickly. ‘Also, we should have cross-cabling to stop the boat from shifting up- and downriver with every ripple in the water the way its been doing. Then we can drive two more nails into each of the boards on that gangplank because we won’t need to worry about the boards splitting. It’ll be a lot stronger then.’

  He looks up to see if I’m with him. I nod. He’s making it all very clear, maybe too clear.

  ‘I really think the first thing you should do is replace that rusting cable. It’s not going to hold anything if there’s a serious flood.’