Forgotten Tales of the Boat Punks: The River Bed
By Robert Earl Sutter III
16 Oct 2009
Forgotten Tales of the Boat Punks:
Winter On "The River Bed"
by Robnoxious
I returned to Minneapolis in the Autumn of 2005 from a journey of three months down the Mississippi River in a shanty boat called The Leona Joyce. What to do now after having spent three months floating down the river with no job and no rent? Hmm. Most importantly, where could I live thru the harsh Minnesota winter without a job and without paying rent? Winter squatting was not a popular sport in this climate.
After some couch surfing my friend Peat invited me to winter out on a giant double-wide-trailer-size boat house that he inherited from the owners who had been booted from their roost downriver in St. Paul by bureaucratic-capitalist-hater types. For a country that claims to cherish freedom, why does it seem there is less and less of it every day?
Tho we never painted a name on our boat house, Peat came up with "The River Bed". It was were we slept every night, our bed on the river.
First we moored on the Mississippi River at about 17th & Marshall in North East Minneapolis, down the railroad tracks our trail led home. The River Bed was tied up right above the train bridge, just above the old beaver dam. There was another boat there too, a smaller house boat with a big hole in the steel hull. It was sunk in shallow water, slightly tilted. Peat spent the previous winter out on this one, but was much more excited about the plush accommodations and level floor of the River Bed. A friend of ours moored his small shanty boat alongside, the prophetically named "S. S. Circle of Death". We used it as a dock.
We spent the winter there with Peat's dog Ged, our guardian with the deep bark of soul rattling power. The boat had a 55 gallon steel barrel wood burning stove. We collected logs that had been cut into convenient rounds by the power company as they cleared the high tension lines next to the river. Before the river iced over we took the aluminum john boat down to collect the wood. In the winter the river's edge froze and we slid the bike cart out there to collect the rounds. I picked up a splitting maul and wedges and we were in business. The chopping of wood kept you warm until the fire got going.
Two giant pontoons floated the house, filled with 55 gallon plastic barrels surrounded by a lot of spray foam. You know those little cans of spray foam you can get to seal cracks with, well apparently you can order a truck size can to come and squirt the stuff wherever you want it, and that's what the guy did who previously owned it.
There was a main room, a kitchen area, an enclosed porch, the pilots house up top where Peat's room was. I emptied out the room that was formerly the shower room and built a loft in there. Cozy. Funny, I always seem to find myself living in spaces that were previously bathrooms. There was a deck out back and a deck up top, lots of big windows, even a sliding glass door so you could strip down and jump in during the middle of winter, polar bear style. Brrr!
Here at this spot on the river the train bridge to the south was the view out of the kitchen window. Short trains would run along it every day, no more that a dozen cars, grainers headed for the plant on the west bank. Looking upriver we could see the lights from the cars on the old green steel Lowry Bridge, now torn down and long gone. Being down on the water, fifty feet below, all we could see of the city were the beautiful green and brown banks of the river. It was country.
We watched snow fall on the river, beavers and ducks swimming, the occasional booze drinking humanoid wandering down to sit and watch the water go by, a moment of solitude. We watched and listened to the ice floes coming down, scratching along the plywood hull of the boat, making a terrible racket, piling up on the beaver dam that lay against the train bridge. The ice floes were like that Russian video game, all the pieces floating down locked us into a solid block, and we became iced in for the winter. Now the boat did not rock with the water, it was solid. We could walk around on the ice. I shoveled off a space below the rear deck of The River Bed and put on ice skates, our own personal skating rink courtesy the Mississippi River and old man winter.
I worked on a photographic show while hunkered down that winter, a collection of choice photos from our journey, summer swimming and boating on the Mississippi River. I built and painted frames for the photos to be hung at the Hard Times Cafe. That was my winter project. That and chopping wood, staring out the windows, feeling a bit lonely at times. No phone. No electricity. No lover. Cold winter. Minnesota. After the art show was hung I felt the post-parting depression. Now what?
Then the Bloomington House burned. A dozen of my friends packed into the punk house that happened to be next door. Madness! Peat and I invited the survivors to come live on The River Bed. At first it seemed unappealing to them but after awhile packed in that madhouse full of refugees The Meatman (Zoe) and Flora decided to come to live with us. The Meatman built a room in the front of the boat on the sun deck, which was all windows. A better summer home perhaps, but she loved it. Cinque and Luke also stayed out there awhile, tho I think my memory is fuzzy on some details because I took a vacation to California to visit family, not to escape Minnesota winters tho, I love the winters there.
Mike, who worked for the local weekly newspaper, took The Meatman's picture while she was bundled up and walking along the bank and put it in the newspaper. Famous! Mike lived along the river, we would see him out in his aluminum john boat, one hand on the tiller of the outboard engine, the other hand on his camera, snapping photos as he zipped along. We would hear the motor coming, and look out the River Bed's picture window to see the flash from his camera.
"He just took a picture of us." Peat said.
"Yep." I replied.
During the winter two water patrol officers visited the River Bed, Peat was the unfortunate one at home. He was told to move the boat as soon as possible, an amusing request since the boat was totally locked in ice! Well, as soon as the ice thaws, they acquiesced.
The trouble seems to have come from the people in the business above us who were worried about liability or something, since we were adjacent to their property. Peat had gone to talk to them, asking permission to moor down there, even offering to pay some money. That was the mistake, we realized. There is a saying: It is better to sin and be forgiven than to have never sinned.
In the spring the ice melted, we were floating again! The arrival of spring is always exciting, but for us, it meant we had to move the boat house or be fined. Mike and Peat, both in their aluminum john boats with outboard motors, got behind the River Bed, one on each corner, nosed into it, and pushed it upstream with Ged and I on board. Like the space shuttle with it's two rocket boosters. We were boating! How exciting after a long winter locked in ice to see ripples of liquid water angling away from our bow.
Very slowly we moved upriver. As we passed by Gabby's, the bar with the balcony and dock on the river, they tooted their horn for us and we waved back. This is the high point of my boating experience in Northeast Minneapolis. (My birthday party on Ant Island a couple years later was also totally awesome.)
Under the old green steel Lowry Avenue Bridge we went, looking up thru the grating at the wheels of cars as they passed over head, singing that strange unintentional industrial music. Ged and I ran around excitedly on the River Bed, going from front deck to back deck to side window. After many long winter days, to see the view changed from our windows, ah! This is what a boating is all about! You don't like where you're at? Pull up anchor and move on.
Ahead lay Ant Island, our new home. No one seems to quite know why it was named Ant Island, I guess someone had an experience with ants there. It is made entirely of sand, probably created by channel dredging, and now covered in large trees and shrubs, a nesting place for Canadian Geese and home to several beavers. We tied up the River Bed to the channel side of the island, away from the power plant to the east. We thanked Mike and celebrated! Now moored to an island, we felt secure from any villainous city slickers who might wander down to the river: they would have to swim to get us now.
Our method for getting from island to shore was Peat's john boat with two oars attached, it was locked up on shore with a chain if nobody was home. If one of us was on the River Bed the john boat would be on the island, so the person on shore would scream, blow a boat whistle, and sing Ramones songs to get the person on board to wake up and come row the boat to pick us up. It was a little inconvenient at times, but the situation made it awesome. Here comes your friend, rowing a boat to bring you home. It never got old for me.
During our stay on the island the S. S. Circle of Death was brought up and we used it as our dock and third bedroom. Flora lived on it and brought her long haired white cat, The Donut. At this point I think we pissed of our Canadian neighbors on the island. Nesting season was near over, but The Donut did find and attack a few goose eggs in an abandoned nest that had been unfortunately located in the middle of the trail we used to cross the island. The geese became resigned to our presence, hissing if we got too close. Only the beavers seemed to accept us, swimming under the boat, coming out of the water during one late spring snowfall to wrestle on the bank. I came out and stood there twenty feet away watching them cavort and wrestle, snowflakes gently drifting down around me. I watched them go, two furry heads swimming down to where I thot their house was, a pile of sticks on the downriver side of Ant Island.
During our stay the power plant began converting from coal to natural gas. One morning we awoke to the sight of a tall crane holding a steel dumpster high in the air with a bobcat inside of it outfitted with a huge jackhammer attachment. Using this odd arrangement they began assaulting the old brick walls and soon had demolished the entire side that was our eastern view. Ah, nature. The hard hat wearing workers looked at us, we looked at them, life went on. In the paranoid freak out world we lived in, we were surprised it lasted as long as it did: a group of odd characters living a stone's throw from a piece of vital infrastructure. Terrorists? We were all white, nobody had a beard, and none of us ever unrolled a mat to pray.
Spring rolled in and the trees filled with leaves. Marshall Terrace Park, which we walked thru to get to the island, filled with kids playing baseball, accompanied by their wealthy and powerful parents (rumor had it some of them were court judges). They took note of the river-rats passing thru the park and the strange boat on the island. One of us had a conversation with a person on shore, who was looking out on the island, "They have furniture out there! If I can't live on an island, then they can't either!" And so goes the reductionism of freedom, down to the lowest common denominator: a future of cell-like cubicles where everyone is equally enslaved.
The water patrol returned. Peat was ticketed for being illegally moored. The River Bed had no working motor, it would be hard to move it around constantly to avoid the iron boot heel coming down on us. We decided to give the boat away to someone who lived on the river. If you owned waterfront property it was was legal to have a number of boats moored on your property. We asked to stay on the boat for a month at the fellow's house in order to have time to find new residences. He declined, saying he didn't want strange people walking around on his property. A year later a bunch of artists from out of town come and he lets them tromp all over his property. This is not the spirit of the river, this is the spirit of a greedy city slicker. I imagine he let those artists on his land because he thot they would make him famous. It is unfortunate to harbor ill feelings for a person, because it is the hater who falls ill. Whatever my feelings, the fact remains: he acted like a selfish asshole.
It was decided. We all moved out of The River Bed, piling possessions into the john boat and walking them thru the park, past the young privileged baseball players and their disapproving families staring at us. I remember as we left, I shared a shotgunned beer with The Meatman, and then we laughed. Ha ha! Good times! We made it!
With spring upon us, what to do now? Begin building shanty boats to take to Pittsburgh and spend the summer going down the Ohio River! Ya, that sounds great. That's what we did. I wrote about our Ohio River journey in my book "3: Collected Works by Robnoxious". I have about a dozen left. Get yours while supplies last.
Thanks to everyone who loves the river and the people on it.
To get the zine with this story and many others, along with numerous photographs of the boats, write to me:
robotearl@gmail.com
or go to: counterclockwisepublishing.wordpress.com
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