The Floyd Cartwright Boat

Life in the 50’s and 60’s in northern Minnesota was pretty simple at best and the objects of entertainment didn’t go far from hockey, ball games, a little .22 and fishing poles. Probably topping the list for me though was a neighbor’s homemade boat. To know the boat, a person had to know Floyd, or was it the other way around? Anyway, Floyd was an interesting person, never married, lived with his mother, was always smiling, had one weird laugh and loved to fish. Often when he was on his way home from fishing and he saw us out in the yard, he would stop and show us his catch which seemed to always be one to two pound northern pike. To put it in Floyd’s words, “just the right size for mama’s frying pan”.

I have no idea what the origin of this boat was. I guess I just assumed that it was made by Floyd himself, but thinking back on that I’m sure he would have told us if that were true. This boat probably would not pass as a boat today and I’m sure the safety folks would have had a conniption fit over it. It was about 10 foot long, three foot wide at the widest, flat bottomed and not very deep or stable. Every year it got a new coat of dark green paint, and it leaked very little but we still took a couple coffee cans with us when we used it. This brings me to another question of my youth as I don’t ever remember asking Floyd to use his boat so I assume dad had taken care of that little detail. If we were using it and we saw Floyd pull up to the lake we’d row like crazy to get back because the last thing we wanted was to have Floyd on our bad side. Funny thing was though, he never invited us kids to go fishing with him. I get the feeling he knew what kids brought to the fishing hole and he wasn’t willing for it. I’m amazed though that he never complained to dad concerning the condition we left the boat in at times. Many times the only thing we could catch was 3-5 inch Perch which invariably got left in the bottom of the boat. This always seemed to give Floyd’s boat a very distinctive odor which you could smell a hundred feet before you got to it. Although we used his boat quite a little, I don’t remember having a whole lot of luck catching pike out of it.

At times when the fishing was slow we would tuck the poles away and use the little boat for a floating dock and go swimming. I remember one such day that we fished our way across the lake, drifting with the wind, only to realize when we got to the other side that there was no oars in the boat. There was nothing to do but strip down and pull the boat back across the lake. Even though there were three of us it took quite some time pulling against the wind. One thing about it, with that much exposed skin and the multitude of Minnesota mosquitoes, there was no problem keeping all three in the water pulling.

There was a couple summers, too, that the wild rice was abundant and since the lake was on Dad’s land, us kids would harvest it for a little spending money. Of course we had no boat so we borrowed Floyd’s. It worked quite well because it was flat bottomed and could go in shallow water. Here again we may have forgotten to ask Floyd, but I’m sure he knew what it was being used for as there was always a residual that missed the tarp we had spread in the bottom of the boat to catch the rice. Anyone that knows anything about wild rice knows it has a beard on it. It’s not as bad as barley but it can be plenty irritating on hot sweaty days. It also finds its way into every crack or crevice there is in the boat.

So when I think back on Floyd cleaning the dead fish, frogs, worms and rice and who knows what all out of that boat before he repainted it, I wonder what thoughts he had towards us kids. Was that smile of his genuine or was it painted on? My guess is he was glad that we were Dad’s kids and not his. All I know is I’m glad we had use of that old boat. What greater entertainment could a kid have?