Good Gosh!... Canals??!! Have We Been Spirited (Moved?) onto a Narrow Boat?... Ridiculous??!!...

 

Memoirs of a Geezer

  

Reflections and Observations -- A Bright Passage from the Fantasies of Youth to Illuminations of Advanced Maturity!

This Episode:           Good Gosh!...  Canals??!!  Have We Been Spirited                                                (Moved?) onto a Narrow Boat?...  Ridiculous??!!...

What is it about relocating in the Age of Geezerhood that's strange, almost ghostly, like a haunting!  I look about myself and I'm on the stern, tiller in hand, ploughing resolutely on a slender canal, slowly, as if having just having acquired my own narrow boat.  Have to reach my destination...  many canal miles to navigate!!...   

Its predominant color is dark blue, the boat, that is.  "Geezer One -- Destination Unknown!" painted boldly in brilliant white, emblazoned on the side, in unmistakably large lettering!  "Not for Hire"!  I recognize the font!  It's "Shrikhand Bold."  I'm quite certain...  

(I think I acquired this font during one of my recent attempts at fashioning a logo design for a client...  Good Grief!!  Was the client a British narrow boater??!)  

Very strange indeed, eerie.  I awake in the night gripping the tiller, knuckles white, bulging.  My hand cramping!  I cannot seem to release my vise-like grip.  My thoughts

So many tunnels in the
canals!  Scary sometimes!  

slip from sloshing water, bleating sheep, honking and quacking geese and ducks.   I moor along the tow path side, tied up to a bollard, sweating profusely...  I pad to the kitchen and check the batteries, walk cautiously along the gunwales to check the elevation of the solar panels at the top of the boat...    

Wait a minute....   What!!??  I'm in the bathroom.  I grip the sink.  Turn on the faucet and splash water on my exhausted

mug.  Still, I rock back and forth as if the motion of the narrow boat and those passing on my left cause a wake and an uneasy loss of balance! A passing captain, right hand on his own tiller, waves with his left!  Smirking!  Who was that?  Someone I know?...,

Insane! bizarre!  It's the move, the relocation.  Odd dreams?  Panic?  Maybe it's "Narrow Boat Journeys"?  Television programs show them on certain, strange streaming channels!  Maybe that's it...   Channels, Canals...!!!  Is that the catalyst??!!

I must get back into bed.  I must sleep.  I must focus my thoughts away from Narrow Boats and thousands of miles of British canals.  Realign dreams!  In another incarnation,

Ghost Canal Boat?  Was it actually 
lost under the turbid ripples?  Does it plow
aimlessly, Haunting the canals
to this very day?

perhaps?  Transporting coal to foundries and iron works!?  That damn steam train!  It's destroying our haulage business...  We'll lose everything...  Wait, I'm awake again.  It's that "alarm-like" freight train just south of our building, across the river!  Couple of hundred noisy freight cars and oil tankers, clanking along steel rails!...  Making a hell of a racket!!

The steady clacking of the narrow boat engine.  Four miles an hour...  I'll never get to wherever the hell I'm going...   More sheep!  Swans dart across my bow, paddling furiously for the safety of the other side of the canal!  DRAT and BLAST!  I drop my windlass into the canal.  I must don my snorkel and sea goggles and execute a search.  I hate plunging into the filthy canal soup!  I must recover the windlass!!...  Without it I cannot raise the paddles, cannot allow water to flood the lock chamber!!...  

I'm submerged in the liquidity of the dream.  A length of rope is caught in the propeller,

something else....   trapped...  weeds, snarled, waterlogged, putrid, immoveable...  I must raise the weed hatch, stare below, remove the tangled mass...  Can't motor forward...

Obsessed?!  Alas!  Most likely!  Watching too many Narrow Boat adventures.  "Cruising the Cut," "Great Canal Journeys"...  others perhaps?...  That's the trouble.  They invade my dreams...  Hypnotic images!  Those darn things are taking over my usual fantasies!!  I'm drowning in them!  Waterlogged!  That's the whole trouble.  I must start watching mountain climbing adventures...   No...  I might sleep walk, climb, trip...  fall off the balcony!!  HELP!!

Humbly submitted 07-10-2025 -- Joel K.