The Great Northern Goat Debacle 12-14-17

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The Great Northern Goat Debacle - Excerpt From My book 12-14-17

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When I was Ten, I joined The Boy Scouts and it was to become my Favorite thing in life. Since we had a small farm, my folks wanted me to also join the 4-H. I wasn't too keen.. I had enough farm chores already, but I was willing to give it a go. A neighbor down the road offered me three Toggenburg Goats, a Billy and two nannies and delivered them to our farm in a small trailer.

"Oh how cute!" exclaimed my mother. "The little darlings look just like 3 little brown deer!" Bingo did not like them from the start. They were too small to be cows or horses and too big to be dogs and on top of that they had horns and were not friendly! There was to be an ongoing feud between them which caused no end of trouble.

Now the neighbor told us they were mischievous and trouble making but he failed to mention destructive. They would climb on the vehicles in particular and jump around until all of them looked like they had been in a hailstorm from the dents of their tiny hooves. They would climb trees.. no kidding.. and get up in some crotch and bleat plantifully to be rescued and while I was climbing and risking life and limb they would hop down and run off as if nothing happened. I was starting to take on Bingo's attitude toward them and started wondering whether 'roast goat' could be entered in the 4-H fair... probably not.

One particular day I heard my mother scream bloody murder and I peered out of the barn carefully and saw all of her laundry strung all over the yard, and here she was the leaf rake in two hands, swinging like a golfer in pursuit of the two offending goats, one with a pillowcase still in its jaws. From my mother's mouth came such a stream of words that neither my Stepfather or I ever suspected she knew! She turned and saw me standing there aghast, and her anger turned toward me and she screamed "Those goats have got to go! And I mean today!" The 'cute little darlings indeed went back and I did not need to go to 4-H after all. Bingo and I gave each other a boy and dog smug expression and went back to our chores.

Scouts, on the other hand, was a dream come true. I mean every day we did cool stuff! We sent Morse code and earned badges, and hiked, and learned Civil Defense. It was the cold war time and in school we had drills and learned to 'duck and cover' and dive under our desks when the siren wailed, in case the Russians launched the A-Bomb at old Portsmouth. In the corner of the old Cellar Dungeon I and 2 friends built a bomb shelter of stacked cement blocks and sand bags.

Old George Hall was our scoutmaster.. and old was sort of an understatement.. he was in his 70s and moved slowly but his mind was sharp as a steel trap.. he said so himself! He was a woodworker supreme.. a cabinet maker of many years and restorer of fine antique furniture. And Old Mister Hall loved boats. He had dreamed of them as long as he could remember and sailing off to Tahiti or somewhere.. and we Scouts would become his redemption.. yes sir!

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Before Halloween he unveiled his secret plan. We were going to build a sailboat and we scouts would sail out around Portsmouth harbor and patrol for secret Russian U-Boats, that everyone knew were hiding out there and fouling everyone's lobster trap lines!

We all agreed the pictures of the boat were impressive.. a real beauty. It was a Grand Banks Dory and boats like this had ventured offshore more than 200 miles and returned.. and several had crossed the Atlantic to England before.

The shop was cleaned out and we started in and Mister Hall did the power tools part and it was not that hard to build at all. It was 19 feet long and seated 5 with two pairs of oars and a sail. A dory is almost unsinkable. Ballast was rocks in the bottom and if it overturned the rocks fell out and it righted and the waterlogged crew bailed it out and crawled back in and then had to row it home. It was destined to happen three or four times that I remember.

Now a dory doesn't just sail, it skims and almost flies. It is a toboggan skimming over watery whitecaps and guided by our body weight as we leaned like bobsled racers with whoops of delight.

We read the true story of three English scouts, 11, 12 and 16, who sneaked away and sailed a boat like ours across the channel to Dunkirk and saved a bunch of soldiers from the beach, three wounded in the boat and almost 8 clinging to the sides to ride home dragging through the icy water. It was a time, an era for Scouting! We dreamed, we aspired. grownups did not interfere, we were on our own with the Scout Buddy System and we never had a mishap we couldn't handle.

Our troop dropped our own lobster traps with Clorox bottle floats labeled BSA and no one ever bothered our traps. We sold lobsters on the pier where restaurants came to buy and the money went into our scout troop fund.

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The day came when we were sailing and little Billy Wilson yelled "there's a periscope!" We all looked for the sneaky U-Boat everyone said was out there.. and it sure looked like one.. something sticking 6 or 8 inches out of the water moving fast leaving its own small wake behind it. "maybe its a Loch Ness monster" volunteered Charlie and someone mumbled "dumbass" and we all sniggered.

We decided we better report it before the U-Boat leveled Portsmouth, so Charlie stood on the seat with his back to the mast and flagged out the Morse code to shore, where we knew Mister Hall watched us dreaming he was also sailing. He must have seen it, cause in minutes out came a fishing boat and eased along side us and we told them what we saw. They saw it with binoculars too and cautiously set out after it.. the Russian U-Boat everyone knew was in our harbor.

We watched them follow it.. more than half an hour, slowing down and then speeding up, always with that little wake behind it. Finally they heaved to and we caught up. Its a lure, the mate said with a twinkle.. lost its weight and skimming the surface. they are trolling for cod out here. We looked at one another silently.. we all knew it.. we would never hear the end of the Russian U-Boat scare. It ranked right up there that summer with my 'Great Northern Goat Debacle'.

© Copyright 2018 by Daniel Blankley. All rights reserved.

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