A speedboat in a bathtub displaces almost as much water as there is; has to already be turning even as it achieves full speed —
pigeon
BP’s dad making a rooster tail
In elementary and middle school, I had exactly one best friend at a time. Always boys, always in some way a little bit outcast but not outcast in the same way as I was. I was a serial monamicitist. Usually these friendships ended or trailed off when the friend moved away, or grew away finding their own circle or identity or pack or whatever.
Speaking of pack, we were Cub Scouts (or maybe Webelos? — what a weird word for the intermediate wolf-pack ranking in the quasi-militant vaguely Christian ur-cult that was Boy Scouts — some said it meant “we’ll be loyal scouts” but I always read it as “we be lost”) in whatever grade we were in when BP was my main friend.
BP was like a scrawny, doofusy, miniature version of JJ from Outer Banks. In fact, I can’t even watch that show without thinking of BP. Except instead of fishing and treasure hunting and boats, it was three-wheelers and shit talking and — boats!
BP’s dad ran a respectably successful auto mechanic shop and used car dealership, on a corner pretty close to my dad’s house. I would often hang around there to gaze longingly at the Vespa bikes they had for sale (but that’s a different pigeon). Stocky, smiling, amiably sarcastic, he was an enthusiast for any kind of motor or engine — cars, trucks, bikes, those fun-as-hell but doomed three-wheelers, and fishing boats with big, shiny, black Mercury outboards.
One thing that dads did back then, maybe they still do, is show up and do something cool for the scout pack, or den, or troop, or whatever the fuck it was called. BP’s dad’s big thing was accompanying us on one of our “camping” trips (there was a big cabin, almost a lodge) to Lake Wappapello, and giving a few of us at a time a ride in the boat.
When it was my turn, I was with BP of course, and a couple other kids I don’t remember. There we were, cruising around the green, taking in the sights, the swampy shores, the rolling forested hills. BP, not content with this bucolic languor, started shouting to his dad, “Do a rooster tail! Do a rooster tail!”
BP’s dad obliged.
At the time, and ever since then actually because I never looked it up until now, I assumed the iconic rooster tail was accomplished by simply going a lot faster, suddenly — something any lazy redneck could do by yanking on a lever. Turns out, not so! It’s a bit more of an actual technique than that. In my memory, the boat picked up speed, canted like a toy boat being swooshed around in a bathtub, and a gargantuan spout of lake water shot up, towering above us, to the thrilled laughter and cheers of a little pack of little boys.
As far as I know, our group was the only one to be treated to this extravagant flourish. Something about not wanting to disturb some people who were fishing nearby.
Trying to figure out what it is about this particular pigeon, I find it fits, as do a lot of them now that I’m starting to think about them overtly, in a category of “ambivalence.” I guess I’ve always been more of a quiet sort of fish, meandering around the shallows, exploring minute textures of the inlets — but just about everyone wants to make a splash and flash in the sun occasionally, no? It’s not just about noise or extraversion; I think it’s about tempo and familiarity. I’m a Water Rat but sometimes I dream of being a Sea Rat.
I remember bobbing there in the aftermath with a kind of defensive resentment — I was a nascent environmentalist without the conviction of an articulated “ism,” I suppose. This man-made intrusion of ridiculousness into what I thought of as the rightful serenity of the lake (never mind that the lake itself was formed by human intervention and engineering) was fun, yes — the surge of power, the giddy feeling of motion in the gut! But at the same time, it wasn’t right, somehow. The connotations — gasoline, pollution, raucousness, declaration over questioning, yelling over listening, tromping over sensitivity — they tainted the purity of the spectacle for me.
Well, one person’s fractal ecosystem teeming with invisible whispering lifeforms is another person’s bathtub or arena or stomping ground. Some people like to play video games where you scurry around and do mortal combat, while others wish you could just explore the game world at your leisure, wish the details would keep resolving and the map would keep expanding beyond the edges of the programmed path. I guess that’s why Minecraft has both survival and creative modes.
Within a year or so, BP and I would part ways, more or less amicably and without any sort of fanfare, as middle school and high school hardened our identities. No idea what happened to him. Hopefully not what happened to JJ from Outer Banks at the end of season four. But I hope he’s had some good adventures nonetheless.