Farewell to the original Jimtown Raft

If all men end in shipwreck, we shouldn’t have expected better for our raft.

After a cold October rain on Sunday afternoon the Jimtown Department of Public Works burned the original Jimtown Raft.

 It was the end of something.

Of what, we’ll leave to the poets.

The Jimtown Department of Public Works doesn’t keep any of those on staff: they’re hard on pencils and liquor.

What we can say is that she burned good and hot.

“How old is it,” asked Anita Chisholm, the Department’s oft ignored Voice of Commonsense.

The answer, maybe ten years old, didn’t fit.

It didn’t seem long enough.

So much water having passed under all our keels since her husband, Mayor AJ Sears, had told Jamie and I that we could put the lumber for a new raft on his account at Highland Building Supplies.

He had made the cardinal mistake of not first defining how big of a raft.

“Pressure treated,” Darrel, perched behind the project Desk at Highland had inquired after being handed our wish list.

“Come on with it,” we’d replied.

Two weeks later a 20 foot long ship-shaped raft emerged from the barn, was dragged on skids down to Jimtown Beach and launched with all the fanfare a small beachside community can muster.

Floating on teet-dip barrels provided by area dairy farms and proudly wearing a pirate flag donated by Carmen Perry, the raft drew children from across Antigonish County to brighten our little shared patch of sand.

For the rest of us, it was a place to go when the weather got heavy.

To sit and watch it ride swell upon swell, holding its bow into the wind.

Innevitably, each season the Jimtown Department of Public Works would become complacent, feeling secure in its latest mooring contrivances.

A Nor’easter would barrel down the Gulf.

The raft would disappear.

A frantic search of the bottom of St. George’s Bay would be launched.

Hand-wringing about the potential liability of having created a hazard to marine navigation would occur among some.

Then it would be found and a go-for-broke rescue mission would be hatched.

It was at these moments that the Jimtown Department of Public Works was at its best.

 A few of them were recounted as the old girl burned on Sunday.

We don’t keep a big ship shaped raft in the water anymore.

We’re a less ambitious municipal agency for it.

That’s alright.

The children still come to play at being ship’s captains on the high-seas aboard its replacement, which sits parked safely on the sand each summer.