At the Headwaters

The story of how I got the boat is interesting, but the story of the boat itself is intriguing.  I’ve had trouble tracking down documented information on it, so basically everything I know about the boat I learned from John.  Landau is a company that still exists and produces pontoons down in Missouri.  Representatives from the company say they’ve never made such a boat, and John swore it came from a company out of St. Paul that, in the 1960s, was specializing in steel-hull river boats.  Steel hull boats with built in axels, drop-down hydraulic wheels and welded on trailer hitches protruding out of the front, that is.  I didn’t fully believe it until I was driving down County Road 39 on the way to Lake Maria State Park when I serendipitously spotted one in ruin in the tall grasses of some guy’s field. 

If you look at the bottom of the hull, you see an ugly, but very solid weld line running the circumference of the boat.  The owners before John were welders, and had decided that the trailer-in-a-boat set-up was not a good one (for about 10 reasons that instantly come to mind), cut the bottom off, and welded on a new steel bottom.

John bought it in the mid-1980s, and did extensive river cruising in Midwest Rivers:  the Missouri, Ohio, Minnesota, St. Croix and Mississippi.  It was on the St. Croix at a marina when a couple drunks went through and smashed a bunch of boats – this one got a 2×4 straight through the cabin windshield. This was one of the reasons it was pulled out of the water and parked in John’s back yard.  When he had a heart attack, and then related health problems, the boat became low-priority and it sat in the back yard and steadily decreased in condition. One of my favorite truisms is that everything eventually comes full circle; in this case, the original problem – the windshield – has become my biggest nemesis of the whole project.  More on that later.   

We had it hauled on November 2002.  John wasn’t too keen on messing around with it in the winter, but it actually worked out quite well.  It had been a mild early winter, and there was no snow, but the ground was still frozen solid.  I hired Cross Country Boat Transport in Hastings, Minnesota by phone and told them exhaustively about the boat.  When the guy got there with his fancy hydraulic trailer system, though, he was completely grumpy.  He didn’t like the way the blocks were placed under the boat because it conflicted with getting the trailer under it.  He just sort of wandered around, smoked and swore under his breath for a while, until finally I told him that if he couldn’t do it, he should just take off, and I’d pay him for his mileage.  He decided to give it a shot, and it went a bit slow, but fine, and we were soon on the road.

The boat was hauled to my grandmother’s farm in Lake Elmo.  My friend Matt, sister Sarah and I had spent the previous weekend shoveling and sweeping 20 years worth of hay and dust in the top hay mow of the 100-plus year old barn.  The building was a Germanic earthen bank-barn, meaning it was built into the side of a bank of land. This allowed access to top storage floor by tractor, or originally horse and wagon, to bring in hay for winter storage.  It was also a pretty good place to store a 28ft boat for free.  Two huge sliding doors gave entrance to the loft, and it was simply a matter of opening them up, placing the blocks (correctly this time, of course), backing it in, and carefully resting it on the blocks.  It’s been there since 12/12/2002.

All culpability rests squarely on the shoulders of my father. Between road-trip vacations in the Bronco IV to Montana or to Florida in the CB-equipped RV, or some other such adventure, I remember my father regularly saying things like “Wouldn’t it be fun to ride motorcycle down to Panama” or “We should drive across Canada.”

The one that stuck in my head was “It would be great to take a boat down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.” He repeated that statement a couple years ago while peering down on Lock #1, located below the Ford Bridge in St. Paul. The proclamation rolled around in my head and commingled with ideas I had had about refinishing a houseboat using environmentally friendly building principles, for no other reason than to do it. It probably would have met the same fate as all the other half-baked daydreams I had, and have, but for some reason this time there was a sense of purpose. And at that moment, a plan was born.

I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have a boat. I didn’t really even know anything about boats, other than the fishing boats and canoes I grew up around in Northwestern Wisconsin. So it was a haphazard effort to locate a boat with limited, but very specific set of criteria: a) it had to have the capacity to live aboard b) it had to cost very little to acquire and c) it had to float. Our most promising candidate was a houseboat out of Iowa, which was listed in the want-ads as a nice 26 ft aluminum hull ’79 Mastercraft that was listed for the bargain price of $1500. It had been swamped in a storm, sunk in shallow water, and then hauled out. My main concern wasn’t really its ability to fulfill criterion “c”, but more about the water damage and mold problems. So we passed.

Figuring that what I was looking for might not be best found in the typical classifieds, I went on the offensive. One evening I logged on to www.twincitiesfreemarket.org, a unique reusable item trading site, and placed a wanted item posting among the desperate pleas for children’s clothing and washing machines:

Do you have an old houseboat that needs some work that you want to get rid of? Let me help you out! I’m looking for an old houseboat that needs renovations that I can restore and float down the Mississippi River. Please call or email.

It was less than a week before Dave emailed me and said he didn’t have such a boat, but he did know someone who did. Technically, Dave said, another guy had given him this project boat, but since he was restoring a sail boat, he didn’t have the time, money or energy for this one. So perhaps I could have it, Dave hinted, but there was to be a drug deal-type get-to-know-you session first, to make sure I was the real deal before I was allowed access to the man with the goods. So Dave and I had a couple odd driveway meetings, in which we talked about boats, Minneapolis neighborhoods and the weather. Finally, Dave set up a meeting, which he would also be present at, for me to meet John and see the boat.

We met in John’s Southwest Minneapolis yard on a gray day in October. He was a slow moving old fella with a penchant for storytelling. His stories were told in a deliberate, accented speech that was punctuated by ending his sentences with the listener’s name: “This is a fine boat that has seen quite its share, and it shows, Peter.” (I recently realized, while listening to Nixon’s White House tapes that he sounded eerily similar to the voice on the tapes belonging to Henry Kissinger. John is from Spain; Kissinger from Germany, so I don’t quite know what it is, but it’s haunting). The boat was jacked up on blocks and wrapped in a mass of gray vinyl tarps, as it had been for the last several years.

With much caution and even more liability disclaimers, John informed me how to gain entrance to the boat. I climbed up, slid under the tarp and gently hopped on to the rear deck of the craft. It was dark, and I had no idea what to look for anyway, so I basically walked through and focused on not allowing any sharp, rusty objects to gain entrance into the bottoms of my feet. I stood for a moment inside the calm, dim cabin, which was strewn with wires, rotted wood and miscellaneous boat pieces and it gave me the feeling of being in a newly-found archeological ruins. This was it.

I popped my head out from under the tarp, and my huge grin was met with John’s huge, knowing smile. We went inside, and after much more storytelling, I wrote him a check for $50 for the title to the boat, and, just like that, I was the owner of a 28 foot, steel, modified V-hull 1961 Landau Land and Water cabin cruiser with a Volvo-Penta Aquamatic 80 I/0 engine.