Houseboat on the Seine

M. Teurnier pushes his hand in front of my face, stares at me with his violet-blue eyes.

‘On vous a bien eu.’

I don’t know what this means any more than coulé. A young woman on the bank shouts to me in British English. I listen hard after all the noise.

‘Monsieur, he says you have been had!’

I also keep hearing another word that sounds like scaf on drier or maybe that’s several words run together. I look up at her.

‘Monsieur, don’t you realize how lucky you are? They are scaphandriers and the work is very dangerous.’

I look down at M. Teurnier. He seems to be embarrassed. I feel the rotted wood in his gloved hand. It’s like sponge. Maybe this is lucky, but it doesn’t seem like that to me. M. Teurnier undresses from his diving costume, stands briefly, shivering in his briefs, and dresses in his work clothes again. We walk across the street for a beer. I invite the young woman to join us. She’s somewhat leery, and I don’t blame her. I beg her to translate, she agrees and I order her a beer.

She’s all excited, it’s as bad as Rosemary with this damned boat when she first saw it. She babbles on in English.

‘These men are called les pieds-lourds because of the heavy leaded shoes they wear. This équipe that’s working on your boat is famous. Originally, it was a father and his sons. The father started as a scaphandrier in 1912; they specialize in renflouage, that is, bringing up sunken boats such as yours. You should be very proud.’

I don’t want to hear any more. This woman must be mad. I stare at her.

‘How do you know all this? It seems like very specialized knowledge, especially for a young Englishwoman like you.’

She smiles at me.

‘I am a student at l’École des mines. Also, I have always had a special interest in underwater work. A friend of mine told me about your boat sinking, and I came here to watch.’

Over the beer, M. Teurnier explains through the young woman that there is at least one completely rotten plank going from one side of the boat to the other. This is what blew out and caused the boat to sink.

‘But is it possible to bring it up again?’

His answer translates into the idea of shoving some large sheets of plywood under the suspect section, pumping to see if the boat will come up, then inspecting the damage.

The Surfacing Whale

So, that’s what we do. M. Teurnier dresses again in his diving costume, forces pieces of plywood under the leaking sections, then gives the signal for the pumps to start.

This time the boat starts rising and keeps on rising. Again it’s like a huge whale surfacing, only alive and well, more or less well. There are shouts of encouragement and applause from the village people along the bank. M. Teurnier stays down, manipulating the plywood until the hole or holes in the hull are covered. Within half an hour, the boat, filthy, waterlogged, has surfaced. M. Teurnier opens the only door to the cabin fully, and the last of the water flows out. I walk over the slippery gangplank and go inside. The entire interior is covered with dark brown mud, the consistency of thick crème fraîche, or nonemulsified peanut butter.

Again, like a latter-day astronaut, he’s undressed by his brother and jumps into his regular French blues. We go back to the café. The young woman who has been translating and instructing me as to the mysteries of les scaphandriers says she has a class and must leave. I try paying for her help with nonexistent money, but, thankfully, she’ll take nothing, which is about what I have to offer. She wishes me good luck and bon courage. Good luck, courage and more is what I need, all right.

We eat lunch at the nearest routier. Les frères Teurnier discuss what can be done. After a full bottle of wine and steaks with frites, we drive in the truck to a building-supply house. M. Teurnier buys five sacks of premixed, quick-drying, anhydrous concrete. We drive back to the scene of the crime, remove the rotted parts of the guilty board and pour the concrete over the entire area, mixing it with river water. We keep building small dams to hold the concrete in place over the damaged sections. We watch to see if the water will seep through or around it. M. Teurnier keeps looking out one of the mud-smeared windows. Everyone, except me, lights up cigarettes. Then he points out the window. One of the plywood pieces is floating away. He pulls it in with a grappling hood, then manages to hook the other as it too loosens. He’s smiling. Finally, I understand what’s happening. Now there’s no longer the pressure of water onto the boat holding the boards against the hull, so it means the leak is effectively stopped – more or less, that is.

We smile all around, a bottle of wine is brought out from the back of the truck and they somehow manage to open it with a bent nail. I don’t know what to do next. M. Teurnier takes his slug at the bottle and passes it on.

He pulls me along with him to the boat just next to mine, downriver. He rings a bell hanging on the door, till somebody comes. It’s a very dignified-looking Frenchman. M. Teurnier rattles away in his Breton French. The man looks at me and speaks in French-accented, but clear, English.

‘I always knew that boat would sink someday, wooden bottom and no one taking care of it. You must remember, monsieur, you have bought a boat with a house on it, not a house with a boat under it. There is a big difference.’

So I’m not ready for more lectures. M. Teurnier explains the problem, I can see from his pantomime. He does it even when he’s speaking French to another Frenchman. He looks at me. The man, whose name is M. Le Clerc, looks at me. He shrugs and then concentrates.

‘I do not belive any chantier, I mean slip, around here would take a noncommercial ship with a wooden coque for repairs. You could have a sabot, a metal shoe, made and slipped under your boat, but that would be very expensive. I do not really know, monsieur. Perhaps it is best to accept the loss and have the boat destroyed. It will be nothing but souci, trouble, otherwise.’

His wife comes out with some cold white wine and frosted glasses on a tray with white napkins. She offers the tray around. I think of the bottle of red we’ve just slurped down, each wiping his lips on mud-encrusted sleeves of ‘blues’, after drinking. Contrast, the punctuation of life.

When we finish, M. Le Clerc gives us a slight bow of dismissal, his lovely tall wife smiles and we leave. His boat is really a masterpiece of how one can live in style on the Seine. I look back. It lies low in the water, and the upper floor has amber translucent windowpanes all along its length. I find out later it was once a chapel. River people who worked on the Seine used to thank the river gods or whatever gods they could count on for help there.

I pay M. Teurnier the two thousand francs, counting them out until there are only two bills left in my hand. He pulls a pencil from his ‘blues’ pocket and writes his name, address and phone number. With his thumb, he points to the boat, then with his finger points to his chest. I get the message: If I need help, call. They drive off. I hope one of them is the designated driver, but that doesn’t sound very French.

An Impossible Task

I spend two days checking everything to see if the boat’s still leaking. It seems OK. I hose down and clean out the interior, checking to see where the leaks were, and to a small degree, still are. Meanwhile, I’m cleaning all my furniture off in the river, trying to wash off the worst of the mud. Then, after I’ve dragged all the dried-out and falling-apart furniture, along with the mostly dry mattresses, sheets and so forth back on the boat, I remount all the floating doors. I’m ready to leave. My raggedy skin has mostly peeled off, and I’m dead weary, sick and tired, with the boat, with myself.

I stop by at the Le Clercs’ and ask if they’ll keep an eye on my péniche for me. They aren’t too happy about the idea, but agree to phone the farmhouse near the mill if anything goes wrong. I give them the number. They’re both worried about voleurs, that is, robbers. I hate to tell them, but at this point I’d be glad if somebody would come along and steal the entire shebang. I’ve investigated, and it would cost a minimum of fifteen hundred francs to have the boat towed away and burned. That’s what they do with witches and witchcraft anyway, isn’t it?

I sleep two days when I’m back with the family. The stone tent seems incredibly luxurious. I carefully try recouping my tan. When I arrived, my wife said I looked like a giant fetus, or a very premature baby. I feel damned premature.

I decide the only thing, against all advice, is to try stopping the leak from inside the boat. What else? I ask my older boy, Matt, who’s in high school, if he will help me with it on weekends. It doesn’t seem to scare him. Ah, youth, good spirits and enthusiasm; we’ll lick those devils and witches yet.

When we come back up to the boat from the mill, the hull has water in it, too much water for comfort, but it isn’t listing. We bail one whole day. After much asking around, we find a product guaranteed to be waterproof. Happily, Matt speaks excellent French. He has lived most of his life in France. He went to French schools for the first seven years of his education. Rosemary, my wife, speaks excellent ‘Ma Perkins’ French, as do most French teachers in American high schools, but I have virtually no skills in language. I can bumble about in French, German, Italian and Spanish, but can’t speak much of any of them. The happy part is that I understand much better than I speak, not always, especially in a complex area such as the resuscitation of our boat, unhappily.

We buy fifty-liter canisters and wind up with twenty huge containers of this black, gooey, smelly stuff. We pull up all the regular flooring in the boat and pour this goop into the hold, smearing it with broad spatulas into every nook and cranny. On top of this, we jam in panels of plywood smeared with it, then work in more of this black gunk over them, again everywhere we can reach. It seems as if it should work. Foolish optimism strikes again.

We came home black as minstrels. The only thing we find that takes this goo off is turpentine. We give each other turpentine rub-downs with old towels. But around our eyes and in our cuticles and nails, including toe cuticles, we’re black as coal miners. Matt’s wonderful about it, going to school each Monday looking as if he’s just come up from some Texas oil well-drilling operation. By Friday evening, just when we’re starting to look normal, we go back at it again. I can’t coax the girls, or my wife, near this messy operation. I don’t want to, it seems so futile. Some things are too much; this project comes in the ‘too much’ category.

I manage to buy a small, used electric water pump. We attach an automatic float to turn it on, just in case water starts seeping in again. I have a length of plastic tubing to carry the water out the window and into the Seine, where it belongs. This allows me to sleep somewhat easier nights, but the jinxed boat continues to leak, not ‘sink-leak’, but there’s persistent, consistent dripping, a small puddle of water floating on our ‘impermeable’ black coating each day. And we can not find from where it’s seeping. The whole affair is maddening.

Then, one day, as we’re scraping and shoveling out mud from everything, checking our pump regularly, our summer renter of the boat arrives. She’s not drowned, she’s fresh in a pair of toreador pants and a flowered shirt. I scramble up the bank to find out how the boat sank, what happened; is she all right. She smiles. She explains in her delightfully accented French English.

‘Well, I woke late and went across the street for some croissants and a cup of coffee. I didn’t need to be at the foire until one. When I came back, the boat was on the bottom, oop la! I didn’t know what to do, and I was already late to work. So, I plucked one of the most beautiful roses from the bank and threw it onto the top of the boat. It was sort of like a Viking funeral, you see.’

I don’t see! It’s like ‘you know’. People keep saying ‘you know’ at the end of just about every sentence, and most of the time I don’t know, but they’re really not interested in whether I do or not.

‘But couldn’t you have called to tell me what had happened? It seems the least you could do.’

‘I had your address in my address book, and I’d left it in the boat. I only knew you were in the Bourgogne somewhere, and no one around seemed to know your address.

‘By the way, do you have any insurance? I lost quite a bit of clothing along with my thesis and my typewriter.’

‘No, I don’t have insurance, I’d just bought the boat. You can look through the junk I’ve pulled out and dried off. They’re piled here on the bank or in the boat. It’s an awful mess, is all I can say. I didn’t see any typewriter, and if I did, I doubt very much it would ever work again. Everything was totally saturated with mud.’

‘Oh, well, that’s all right. I guess these things just happen. I’d better rush to work now.’

With that, she’s off, probably to some other foire in some other part of France. Maybe I should have told her why the boat sunk, about that damned powdered board, but I don’t think it would have meant anything to her anyway.

The Diaper Caper

It’s becoming clear we can never really stop the leak in the hold of the boat, at least not from inside. I’m becoming more and more desperate. Then, that week, an old friend and client for my paintings comes to Paris from California for a visit. He’s shocked at what he sees. Except for our family, and those wonderful Canadians, it’s the first real sympathy I feel. I tell him about my wild-ass, last-gasp solution to the leak problem. I’ve been lying in bed nights, trying to work my way out of this mess.

My friend, whose name is Arthur, manages and is in charge of research and development for a PCV-extruder plant in East Los Angeles. I ask if it would be possible to make a heavy-duty pool-type cover with grommets all around that I could then slip under the boat like a giant diaper. A huge smile wraps around his face under his thick wire-rim glasses when I tell him the idea. He admits it’s a fascinating and possible solution, only it would be expensive. I figured on that.

‘How much would it be, Arthur?’

I might as well know the worst. He looks at me, eyes twinkling, behind those milk-bottle glasses.

‘How about two of the best paintings you’ve done this year. I’ll let you choose. I don’t have much time – I need to be at a conference in Geneva tomorrow. How’s that for a deal?’

‘You’re on. I can’t thank you enough, Arthur. The only thing which permits me to accept this wonderful gift is I know the paintings will be worth more than the pool cover, the boat, and most of this river before we’re both dead.’

We measure all around, and Arthur writes it down in a small notebook.

‘I’ll even send it air freight. I have a special rate through the company. It should be here within two weeks. What color do you want, blue or green?’

‘Green to match the Seine.’

‘That water looks more black than green to me.’

‘OK, then black.’

‘No, we’ll be optimistic and make it green. Maybe by the time those paintings are worth all you say they’ll be, the Seine will be green again.’

Arthur didn’t know how predictive he was.

Two weeks later, I receive a call from a transporter for air freight. Luckily, Matt’s home so he can translate for me. Trying to understand a Frenchman on the phone is quite a task, no pantomime. He says he has a package addressed to me and wants to know if I want it delivered. He claims there are customs duties to be paid as well as his transportation costs. I tell Matt what to ask, I’m already suspicious.

‘How much are the customs duties, monsieur?’

Matt’s face falls. The customs duty is sixteen hundred francs, about four hundred dollars. I don’t have anything nearly like that. I know the package is the pool cover I’ve been waiting for. I ask Matt to tell the man we’ll come out to look at it ourselves. Matt smiles at me.

‘We’ll come out to look at this package. Who, by the way, would authorize anyone to pay customs on something like this without having seen what’s in this package?’

Matt tells me the transporter is furious. He says he’s already paid and can’t realize the money back from customs. Matt winks at me; he’s enjoying himself.

‘That’s your problem. You should have consulted us first.’ We both smile.

After some more hassle, he admits he could probably recoup the customs duty money, but we need to come sign some papers. He tells us the number of the air-freight terminal where the package is being held at Le Bourget. Also, he tells us that after tomorrow, there will be storage bills to pay as well. What a farce.

Next morning, I’m working my way through the twists and turns at Le Bourget to Freight Terminal A5. I have Matt with me. One day missed at school isn’t going to matter; he’s not complaining. After several false leads, we find the warehouse where they’d put the package. The warehouse is huge! The package is huge, too. The officials there want to know what a ‘pool cover’ is. That’s what Arthur had written on the customs form. Matt tries to explain. I want them to open the package. Matt is telling them what we intend doing with it. The customs officer keeps repeating, ‘Pool cover? Qu’est-ce que c’est?’

There’s a woman at a desk nearby. She says clearly, ‘Piscine. C’est pour une piscine.’

Matt smiles and verifies. The man talks through and around poor Matt, insists we must pay the customs duty.

I have Matt tell him it isn’t worth that much. We don’t have money to pay. It becomes apparent after much back and forthing that we aren’t getting anywhere. He’s not going to accommodate us. The freight man is in a sweat. He has the papers for me to sign so he can recuperate his money. I don’t give a damn, once in a while these middlemen need to lose. I reach over and sign the papers with a large X. I turn to Matt.

‘Tell him it’s all his. If he wants, he can cut it up into small pieces and use it for papier hygiénique. He can ‘pisc-ine’ it if he wants, I don’t care, let’s get the hell out of here.’

I turn away quickly and stride out from the customs house. Matt is about to ‘pisc-ine’ his pants. He’s sure the cops are going to chase us. Even so, we’re both torn between being scared stiff and laughing our heads off. Matt keeps looking out the back window, but there’s nobody following us. I wonder what the customs man told his wife over dinner that night.

That’s the end of ‘operation diaper’. I’ll never know if it would have worked. I can’t imagine what they’ll do with such an odd-shaped huge pool cover, either. I don’t care too much. I write and tell Arthur what’s happened. He phones back, laughing. He’s sympathetic, but he still wants his paintings.

A Visit to a Graveyard and a Decapitated Dragon

We go back to the boat, and there’re about six inches of water in the bottom of the hull; the automatic pump didn’t turn on. We prime it till it’s working again and bail like crazy. Two hours later, the hull is more or less dry. I’m going more or less berserk! I’ve reached the point of having the boat destroyed after all.

The next day I receive a phone call. It’s from M. Teurnier. He says he has something to show me. He’s downriver from me and he’ll pick me up and take me to his boatyard. He also says he’ll drive me back in the afternoon. This is all tough to get across on the phone, especially without the pantomime. Under duress, my French must be improving. I’m hoping I understood him correctly, there are so many different ways I could be wrong. I’m also wishing I had Matt with me. It’s the story of my life apparently – my boat life, anyway – half the time not understanding what’s going on, and what I do understand isn’t going well at all.

I’m doing some adjusting on my little pump and bailing more water out when M. Teurnier arrives promptly as he said he would. He pulls up to the bank where I’ve been trying to glue my furniture back together.

He goes down the bank past me and looks around the inside of the boat. He comes out shaking his head and motions me to climb into his rattletrap of a car. His head just about clears the dash so he can see out the windshield. To make it possible, he has three ragged pillows to boost himself up on, giving him a few centimeters of height, and half a chance.

The seats in the back of the car have been ripped out, and the space is filled with grease-smeared tools and pieces of cut metal. He drives the way a madman should.

After half an hour of twisting, turning driving, we stop in the middle of nowhere. His house turns out to be a houseboat pulled up onto a section of land, a sort of small island between branches of the meandering Seine. He pantomimes with his arms how the river rises with floods.

It turns out, he moved his boat up onto the land when the flood was high, then, as the water went down, he built concrete foundations under his boat. He laughs and slaps his knee as he tells this. It certainly makes for a peculiar-looking house.

We go inside and I meet his wife, who speaks a little English. She tells me their daughter is studying English at school and will be home soon. It turns out the daughter will translate. M. Teurnier pulls me by the arm down to one of the riverbanks. I can see this is the equivalent of a boat cemetery. There are half-sunken rusty boats everywhere, from rowboats to enormous barges. They’re all rusting into nothingness. Men are cutting and arc-welding on all sides. The smell of burnt metal dominates everything, even the foul smell of the river.

M. Teurnier is dragging me over to an abortion of a filthy barge. To me it looks something like a giant sea dragon with its head cut off. It’s rusted everywhere, and where there isn’t rust, there are streaks and puddles of oil smeared haphazardly.

Now I know this kind of thing might be heaven to a real boat person, but it looks hellish to me. Before I acquired my sinking violet of a wooden boat, my marine experience had been limited to some rowing of rowboats in parks, a few fishing trips on hired fishing boats off the Jersey shore, two half-day excursions in Arthur’s sailboat out of the marina in Los Angeles, and playing with boats in my bathtub as a child. What I’m seeing in front of me is an unmitigated horror. I find myself flinching, I want to escape.

But, M. Teurnier leads me across a watery canyon between the bank and this filthy wreck. He’s jabbering away and gesticulating all the time. Lord, what am I getting myself into now?

I’m looking back to the comforts of M. Teurnier’s goofy boathouse up on stilts, on dry land, searching for some remnants of sanity. It’s then I see what seems to me like a scene from an Ingmar Bergman film. A small girl in a pinafore is running, jumping and skipping over this desolate landscape littered with rusting, sharp shards of boats and parts of boats. She’s shouting as she comes.

‘Papa!’

A French Angel Named Corinne

M. Teurnier’s face lights up and he winks at me. He moves over to the narrow plank bridge onto this derelict boat, but there’s no need. She lightly dances across it the way her father did. She runs into his arms, seemingly unaware of the contrast between her beautiful ruffled dress, covered by her school tablier, a sort of apron, compared to her dad’s mud-, sweat- and oil-covered ‘blues.’ He gives her a swing in the air. I assume she is to be our translator for whatever there is to translate. I’m right.

She pushes her face up to me for the typical Breton three kisses. I manage it, but I’m almost pulled off my footing on this slippery deck covered with various unplanned, unannounced booby traps. I almost fall into her. She appears to be about eleven years old and is absolutely bursting with enthusiasm. She looks me right straight in the eyes, hers blue as old M. Teurnier’s must have been fifty years ago. M. Teurnier speaks to her quickly, and she turns to me.