Drive
A young girl lay on a comfortably padded seat in the front of a small, wooden boat, staring up at the deep blue sky broken by only a few white, cottony clouds. The sun beat down on her face, and she knew that this sheer sense of peace and at-ease with the world could only come from a day such as this, with the hot son and the gentle waves, swaying the boat this way and that. She had learned this quickly, being only six years old, and this being only her third time out on her father's newly finished boat.
She remembered the night her father had finished the boat very vividly. It had been only a few months ago, but she was beginning to find it hard to believe that she had ever lived without this beautiful boat. She remembered watching him sand down the boat over and over again, not stopping until it was perfect, and so smooth that as she ran her hand over it, she found it hard to believe that this strange substance was the same material that made up the rough trunks of trees she would sometimes climb. Her mother told her that she had been watching him build the boat since she was a baby, sitting on her mother's lap. She couldn't remember watching him as a baby, but she couldn't remember a time when she hadn't watched him.
It was the same as always on that night that he had finally finished. She had been sitting on the lap of her mommy, the person she most trusted and admired in the world, one of the few places she felt truly safe and comfortable. She had known it was late for her to still be awake, although she had only recently learned to tell time and never wore a watch. She remembered laying her head against her mother's shoulder and looking up at the black sky dotted with points of light that sparkled as much as the ring on her mother's left hand.
Her daddy had been working on the boat again, which was what he had usually done when he got home from work. The little girl, Madison Lorelai Danes, affectionately known as Maddie, could proudly tell her friends that her daddy worked in a restaurant, the best restaurant in Star's Hollow. Her mommy and daddy had once taken her to a fancy restaurant with white tablecloths, telling her that their food was even better than Luke's, her daddy's name and the name of the diner he owned, but when she was served her dinner of spaghetti with meatballs, she could only remark to her mommy that daddy's was better. Her friends sometimes complained that their daddies could only make hot dogs and grilled cheese, and she would laugh and say that her daddy could cook anything, and cook it really good, too.
This night, as her daddy worked, doing things to the boat he was building whose purposes could only be guessed by a six year old, even one so well versed on the purposes of each type of wrench and screwdriver as she was, was much like any of the other nights she would sit on her mommy's lap on the warm, black asphalt that was her driveway, her gaze shifting from her daddy to the beautiful night sky. This night, however, did bear one difference.
Her daddy did something that night that he had never done before. He backed away from the boat and stood next to Maddie and her mommy, and stared up at the boat, as Maddie herself had done so many times before. Aloud, but neither to Maddie nor to her mother, he said, "I think it's done," in a voice much quieter than the one he usually used. Maddie had expected him to be happy, like she was when she had finished what little homework she had sometimes gotten as a kindergartener, but he didn't look happy. Not like he was when she had given him his father's day present last year: a picture she had drawn him herself. Not like he always was when he came home from work every day to a kiss and a hug from Maddie and her mommy. In fact, Maddie thought that she saw something on her daddy's face that she had never seen before: a tear.
Her mommy was watching her daddy too, but Maddie noticed that her mommy didn't look as confused as she was. "Daddy, since it's done, can I sit in the boat?" Maddie asked. "You told me I could sit in it as soon as it was done." Maddie had sat in the boat before, while her daddy was working on it, but a few months ago, as he had neared the end of the production stage, he had told her she couldn't sit in it again until after the boat was finished.
Her daddy looked at her for a moment without saying anything, and then her mommy answered before her daddy had the chance. "Maddie, I think it's about time for you to go to bed," she said. "Why don't you go in your room and put your pajamas on, and I'll meet you in there in a few minutes. I promise you can sit in the boat tomorrow."
"Okay," Maddie had said, disappointed that she couldn't sit in the finished boat, but excited at the opportunity to be inside of her house all by herself. She loved her family, but she had always thought it would be fun to be home alone, even though her mommy always told her that she was still too little.
She put on her pajamas, brushed her teeth, got a drink of water, turned on the lamp beside her bed, turned off the overhead light in her room, got in bed, then turned the twisty-type switch on her lamp twice, very quickly, so that it flashed from dark to Maddie's nightlight, which glowed a soft pink, before she could notice that it was dark.
Maddie lay in her bed, imagining how proud her mommy would be that she had not only put her pajamas on herself, which had begun to lose its novelty, but had completely put herself to bed. She smiled, excited for the moment when her mommy would come into her room to find Maddie already in bed, but then felt her eyes closing, and was too tired to fight it. She drifted off to sleep, and didn't see her mommy or her daddy until the next morning, although both told her they had come in to say goodnight, but she had already been asleep.
The next morning, when Maddie's mommy came into her room to say good morning, Maddie had a question. "Mommy, is Daddy's boat finished?"
"Yea sweetie, you watched him finish it."
"Then why wasn't Daddy happy last night? I'm always happy when I finish something."
"Daddy was happy, hon," Maddie's mommy told her, although she seemed to understand why Maddie had asked the question she had, "he just… I think he really loved working on that boat, and now it's done," she finished, although she was frowning, as if not sure whether to tell Maddie something else. She apparently decided for it. "Plus, Daddy's daddy, your other grandpa, started building the boat a long time ago. He died a long time before you were born. I never even knew him, but Daddy did. So Daddy just finished something that his daddy started. And I think finally finishing the boat… made him think of his daddy. And that made him happy… and sad, at the same time. Can you understand that?" Maddie nodded, but she wasn't sure if she understood it or not. Her mommy made sense in a way, but she couldn't understand someone being happy and sad at the same time. Much later in life, Maddie knew exactly what her mother had been trying to say, but as a six year old, she wasn't so sure.
"Good," her mommy said. "Why don't you get dressed, then we'll get you some breakfast. I'll ask Daddy if you can eat it in the boat."
Maddie smiled and nodded as her mommy walked out of the room. Maddie loved how her mommy never forgot things she had told Maddie she could do, like sitting in the boat. She'd never had to remind her mommy that she'd told her something like that.
Maddie couldn't remember the exact dialogue that morning or even what she had eaten for breakfast, only that it was much like any other morning, but she did remember what it was like the first time she sat in the finished boat. She clearly remembered her daddy lifting her up onto the swim platform and letting her climb into the boat on her own, although carefully spotting her from the back in case she should slip. Maddie's closest memory of the boat before that morning was of sitting inside the wooden shell of a boat on a sort of wooden box that her daddy had built as a seat. She had loved every minute of it, and it would have been fine, wonderful in Maddie's young mind, if the boat had still been exactly like that. But it wasn't.
Maddie climbed into the interior of the boat and gasped, mouth forming a perfect "o" as only a six-year-old's could do. Her daddy smiled, as if not expecting such a reaction. There were four padded seats in the back of the boat, all colored white with maroon accents. There was a seat behind the steering wheel, intended, Maddie assumed, for the driver, her daddy, to sit, and another seat with its back connected to the back of the driver's seat, facing the black, shiny outboard motor. Then there was another pair of seats like these on the other side of the boat. There were also strange open spaces in the sides of the boat's walls that Maddie wasn't quite sure the purpose of.
She ducked under the window-like thing that stretched from directly in front of the driver's seat to the front-facing passenger's seat, and found herself in a new section of the boat. Here there were three seat cushions covering the wooden-box seats Maddie had sat on the last time she had been in the boat. The seats matched the ones in the back color wise, white with maroon accents, and were arranged in a v-shape, the point of the v being in the front most part of the boat. The seat cushion that formed the point of the v was a triangle, and the other two seats were almost rectangles, Maddie had thought, practicing her identification of shapes, with the ends a little slanted. The seats were just large enough for two people the size of her mommy and daddy to sit, or for three, or even four people Maddie's size to sit. Each of the rectangle cushions had a little square-shaped pillow built into the wall behind it to act as a backrest or a headrest, depending on the way you were sitting.
Maddie climbed back under the window-like thing and saw her daddy still behind the boat, watching her. "What do you think?" he asked.
"Daddy, it's amazing!" she said, trying out a word she had heard the other day on TV. "When do we get to ride on it?"
"Soon," her daddy said. He looked at Maddie, running her hand over the top of one of the side compartments with a look of confusion, wondering what it was doing there. "Want me to give you a tour?" he asked, smiling in a way that let Maddie know that she hadn't seen all that there was to see on the boat.
"Yea," Maddie said, not in an excited tone of voice, but in a tone that let her daddy know that she was really interested.
"Okay," he said. He climbed up into the boat and showed Maddie around. He pointed out the holes in the walls first. "These," he explained, "are compartments where we can put things. We can store ropes and other small things."
Maddie looked at him in realization. That was what those strange holes were for. The next thing he showed her was the driver's seat. "This is the captain's chair," he said. "That's where I'll sit when I drive the boat. This," he said, pointing to a strange black handle to the right of the steering wheel, "is the throttle. You push it forward to make the boat go faster. Like this." Maddie watched her daddy carefully as he pushed the throttle forward. "To slow down again, you pull it back." He demonstrated this too, pulling it back the way it had come. "Straight up and down is 'neutral,' the boat's not going to go anywhere."
"What if you pull it back the other way?"
"That will make the boat go backwards."
"Oh."
"Want to try?" Maddie's excited face alone answered her father's question. "Okay," he said. "Put your hand on top of it, like this," he demonstrated. Maddie put her small hand on the throttle, and her daddy put his large, rough hand over top of it. "Okay. Forward," he pushed the throttle forward as he said it. "Faster," he pushed it farther forward, "slower," pulled it back again, "neutral. We're not going anywhere. Now, reverse," Maddie felt her father pull back on the throttle. "We'd be going backwards."
Maddie was looking at the dashboard, full of symbols, gauges, and buttons. "What are these?" she asked her daddy.
"This shows how much gas we have left," her daddy explained, as he pointed to one of the gauges. "Boats run on gas, just like cars. This one shows how fast we're going. And these," he pointed to a chart filled with red and green symbols that most intrigued the young girl, "Are buoys. They're like signs on the water. They tell you which way you can go. Oh, and see this button? Go ahead, press it."
Maddie pressed the small silver button, and to her delight, heard a little toot. "That's the horn," she said, thrilled to be able to tell her daddy something for once.
"Yes it is," her daddy said, seeming to Maddie to get as much enjoyment from it as she did. In reality, he delighted in watching his young daughter's face fill with such excitement. "Want to press it again?"
"One more time," his practical daughter answered. She again heard the toot, and giggled with pleasure.
"Okay, see these seats?" her daddy continued. "It's all one piece. See? It opens up." He pushed the backward facing seat toward the forward seat, and revealed another compartment. "We can put things in here, too. Your mom thinks this would be a good place to keep toys. What do you think?"
"Yea!" Maddie said. She hadn't thought of playing with her toys on her daddy's boat, but the thought of it excited her even more. She thought about playing with her Barbie dolls while sitting on the floor in the back of the boat, and her smile broadened.
Her daddy showed her a long, narrow, oval-shaped wooden lid that lifted off of the floor, a ski locker, he had called it, making more room to keep things. All of the seats in the front lifted up as well, and it seemed to Maddie that there was as much storage space as there were places to sit. The long window like thing that Maddie had ducked under to get to the front seats was called a windshield, "just like the window in the front of a car," Maddie remarked, and could be folded over onto itself to allow easier access to the front of the boat.
Maddie never questioned her daddy's knowledge about anything, never asked how he knew something, as one might imagine asking. She always took for granted that he knew everything about everything, fixing things, building things, cars, boats, sinks, air conditioners, tools, cooking, everything a daddy was supposed to know and more.
"How do you like it up there, Maddie?" her daddy asked after he had climbed down and helped Maddie to do the same.
"I love it," she said in a simple, matter-of-fact tone. "When can we ride on it? Tomorrow?"
"I still have some setting up to do, sweetie," her daddy told her. "So not tomorrow, but soon."
Maddie's very first trip out on the boat came two weekends later. Since then, the little boat had become her very favorite place to be. Her first trip out, they had spent the day cruising, getting to know the boat, the way it acted, and the lake, Maddie sitting on the left front seat, which soon became her favorite, sitting up with her upper back against the backrest. She came to love the feeling of the wind on her face and the excitement of hitting bumps from other boats, "wakes," her daddy told her.
While they were out the first day, Maddie's mommy had seen other boaters tubing, pulling large rafts behind their boats. She had thought it looked like fun, so she had convinced Maddie's daddy to buy a tube. The second day out, a week later, they were able to try it out. Maddie's mommy went first, and then she let Maddie ride with her, sitting on her lap. Maddie loved it, it was fun. The feeling of the wind and the bumps from the tube was even more exciting then from the boat. It felt like they were traveling so much faster on the tube, although in reality they were going more slowly. On top of all of this, Maddie felt as secure as she ever had sitting on her mommy's lap.
Maddie's mommy kept trying to get her daddy to ride on the tube, but he didn't want to. He said he wanted to give her a few more boat driving lessons before letting her pull him, but Maddie's mommy said he was only using that as an excuse not to ride. Maddie thought her mommy was a pretty good boat driver, but she didn't tell her daddy that.
And now here Maddie sat, halfway through her third boating day. She had taken a tube ride with her mommy, and then one all by herself. She liked it by herself, but she thought she liked it a little better with her mommy. It was more fun when she had someone to talk to.
Now it was just after lunch, and her daddy had pulled into a sort of bend in the lake, a cove, he called it, and threw a heavy hook-shaped thing, an anchor, into the water. He told Maddie it would keep the boat from moving, but she didn't think it was working very well, because every once in a while they would move a little, so that soon they would have made a full circle, and been back where they started.
Maddie had just finished her peanut butter and potato chip sandwich, which she could swear tasted better on the boat than it ever had in the house, and was thinking about going swimming.
Swimming in a lake was so much more enjoyable to Maddie than swimming in a pool. It was bigger, and colder, and waves rolled into the cove, rocking the boat and Maddie, lying in the cool water, nothing supporting her but her life jacket. She loved jumping into the clear, green water from the swim platform of her boat, and climbing back onto it from the short ladder that extended into the water to do it all over again. When she eventually got bored with jumping in over and over again, she would get one of her parents to give her a way to jump, usually an animal. Her mommy was better at this than her daddy, who would over and over again choose the same animals: dogs, cats, and normal jumps like cannonballs. Her mommy on the other hand would come up with elephants, seals, horses, unicorns, all kinds of crazy things for Maddie to figure out how to copy. She'd do things with her hands, like stretching them out in front of her to form an elephant's trunk, and jumping in this way.
This particular day, when Maddie's mommy and daddy got tired of swimming, tanning, and sleeping, which neither of them had a chance to do for very long because Maddie continually woke them up to play with her or make up a jump for her to do, Maddie's daddy made her get out of the water so that they could leave the cove and cruise on the boat for a little while. It could sometimes be difficult to draw Maddie from the water, but she loved cruising as much as she loved swimming, so he didn't have much of a problem with this.
"Can we go tubing again in a little while?" was her only question.
"We'll see how the water is," was her daddy's response. "Maybe."
On weekends, the lake had a tendency to get overcrowded with boaters, trying to ski, tube, and cruise around. Unfortunately, this made the water bumpier than usual, which wasn't a problem for cruising, but Maddie wasn't sure she'd like tubing so much in water like this, and although they never told her, Maddie's mommy and daddy weren't quite comfortable enough with the boat and the water yet to want Maddie tubing in water too choppy. She was their six-year-old daughter, and although they could sometimes be a bit overprotective, she seldom knew of it.
Maddie sat in her usual seat and listened to the rumble of the motor as the boat started. She could smell the exhaust from the outboard motor, a scent she was unsure of at first, but had quickly come to enjoy, as it, in her mind, was associated with everything good that came out of a day on the boat.
The water, as a fairly open channel of the lake came into view, on a late Sunday afternoon, was calmer than it often was at this time of day, this time of week. Although lakes could often be just as or more crowded on Sundays than Saturdays, it wasn't bad at all. In the part of the lake where they were, Maddie counted three boats, including her own. It looked like good weather for tubing, but Maddie's daddy had other ideas first.
"Maddie," he called to her in the front of the boat, "come here a sec."
She obediently stood up and slowly made her way to the back of the boat, stabilizing herself with her hands against the seats. It's a little difficult, and arguably not always the best idea, to walk around while a boat's moving, but Maddie managed it fairly easily. She stood beside her daddy with one hand on part of the boat, and looked at him, nonverbally asking what he wanted.
"Come here," he said, moving over and indicating for her to stand in front of the wheel where he had been standing not a moment ago. "Take the wheel," he told her. Although she was unsure, she took the steering wheel in both hands, her daddy's one hand still doing all the steering. "Now, turn the wheel in the direction you want to go. It's fairly open here so you don't have much to worry about, but try to go in a relatively straight line." Maddie was surprised as her daddy took his hand off of the wheel and let her steer for a little while. "Perfect," he said, after a moment. "Now, take this hand," he tapped Maddie's right hand gently, "off of the wheel and put it on the throttle." Maddie remembered what the throttle was from her grand tour a few weeks ago. "Yea, just like that," he said, as she did it. "Now, if you need to slow down, pull this back. You remember."
To Maddie's surprise, he sat in the backwards facing chair behind the captain's seat that Maddie stood in front of, and took his hand off of the throttle, letting her drive all by herself. Occasionally he'd point in a direction that he wanted her to go, or tell her to slow down or speed up a little. When he felt that they were getting too close to shore or to another boat, he would briefly take the wheel in hand, although he'd still let Maddie hold on. Now and then he'd say something like "Nice job sweetie," or "you're doing just fine."
As a six-year-old, Maddie never knew a greater feeling than driving that little wooden boat all by herself. She felt like she was on top of the world, like she had power. She had an entire boat under her control. Six-year-olds rarely got to drive anything, and she knew it. She was never prouder than at that moment. She knew it wouldn't be the last time she would get to do this, and she knew she might not remember this one specific instance, but she knew she would always feel the same way about driving the boat. She knew, if subconsciously, that forever she would remember this feeling, "When daddy let me drive."