The devil made me do it. Had to be that — I'm too nice a person to have thought this up on my own.

In every one of us, the preachers will tell you, good and evil are at war with each other. Sometimes we can actually witness the battle within us. So it happened one beautiful day on the French Broad River. (The very setting sounds... well, naughty, doesn't it?)

As we headed up the Broad, just above where it comes together with the Holston to form the mighty Tennessee, Dave noted that the chart shows a powerboat manufacturing plant on an island in the river. Sure enough, around the bend we saw it, as slick and neat and sterile as the boats tied up to its canopy-covered dock. You have to understand, to lovers of character boats, handmade wooden boats, sailboats, vintage boats with lots of brightwork (as boaters call the shiny varnish so hard to protect from the ravages of the sun, especially the Southern sun), a power boat made of molded white fiberglass has about as much character as a bleach bottle.

Never mind that our Alice III is molded fiberglass. Her snug trawler lines, her dark green hull with matching scalloped canopy, her upswept forward gunwale and Dutch door more than make up for her plastic genesis.

The Bleach Bottles are all about speed and noise and a quiet lake turned into a turmoil of water-eroding banks and swamping canoes. And they all look alike to us, so much so that it's hard to tell which have been swathed in shrink-wrap plastic for transport and which have not.

There seemed to be a small crowd near one of the docks, and it appeared one of these soulless boats was being launched, its new owner watching anxiously as shrink-wrap was pulled off its bimini. Then we noticed a battery of cameras and lighting equipment on the dock from which another boat was pulling away. It appeared to us to be a commercial shoot, for an ad, perhaps.

“I wonder if we'll see ourselves in Powerboat Magazine,” Dave said. “And I wonder what they'll say about the boat in the background. `Why settle for this when you can have that?'”

“Hardly,” I replied, although I wasn't sure just which way he meant it. Noticing the orthodontically perfect couple in the boat suspending their smiles until we got out of camera range, I said, “I think she's saying, `Ooooh, that's so cu-u-ute! I want one of those.' And he's saying, `Shhh! We're being paid to make this Bleach Bottle SX26 look good.'”

Well, the French is Broad but not very deep. We motored on up to where she becomes too shallow to navigate, and made a reluctant U-turn. It was about then that Virtuous Me looked at that exceptionally clean water and decided this was a good time to do some wash.

There's nothing more virtuous than turning dank rumpled laundry into fresh clean clothes, washed, folded and ready to be stowed in the nets above our bunks. Doesn't matter where she is, what she's doing, woman wants things clean and neat and her family provided for. Can't help it. It's in the genes.

Scrubbed in the little blue bucket, rinsed in the river roiling past our hull, squeezed as hard as I could squeeze, the laundry soon hung on the lines in the stern cockpit. Virtuously. White socks and undies, T-shirts and checkered towels, my nylon nightie and Dave's boxer shorts with the German shepherds on them — all dancing together in a 4 mph breeze.

I relaxed in primal female satisfaction. The clothes would dry in no time, and to keep A3 from looking like a gypsy wagon, I'd have them off the lines before we got back to downtown Knoxville. But for right now, who's going to notice? And that's when primal devilishness set in and virtue took a hike.

Realizing that we were almost back to the Bleach Bottle Boat Works, I actually went aft and rearranged the laundry to make sure that the nylon nightie and the shorts with the German shepherds on them were on the side nearest their dock. T-shirts shimmied from side to side, white socks kept time with the checkered towels, and I stood out in the front cockpit in my green flop-brimmed sun-hat and faded denim shorts, and raised a bleach bottle of my own to toast the antiseptic clones lined up at the docks.

The bemused photographer, the people whose boat was being commissioned on this bright sunny day, the orthodontically perfect models in the blindingly white boat — they all just gaped. And then waved

They had the grace to wave at this apparition cruising through their photo shoot on the French Broad, and for anyone who's keeping score, I think the battle between good and evil drew a tie.?

Back to the Top of the PageBack to the Weekend Home Page