Stories from Scowtown: Tales from Life on a Columbia River Houseboat

By Bob Mulcrone

Stories FROM Scowtown is a collection of short stories about our life on our floating home and the community of personalities who lived there. Our little enclave of floating homes attracted an assortment of folks, from artists to athletes to teachers and retirees. The homes were a collection of sweet little cottages dotted with flower baskets to sleek contemporary homes with mirrored walls and white furniture. Others chose a more casual approach with their home, constructing it with anything that floated by. So pour yourself a glass of iced tea, sit back in your lounge chair, and enjoy the stories. Then close your eyes and dream with the setting sun on your face.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662446894

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Stories from Scowtown

Tales from Life on a Columbia River Houseboat

Bob Mulcrone

Copyright © 2022 Bob Mulcrone

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-6624-4688-7 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-4689-4 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

In the Beginning

What's in a Name?

The Waltz of the Gravel Barges

Neighbors

A Supporting Cast of Neighbors

Disasters on the High Seas

Fishin' for Shoppin' Carts

The Adams Rite of Spring

Get Along, Little Loggies

Ode to Lorraine and Bernard

Speeders

Opening Day

Attack of the Broom Hilda

County Fair Time

Beachcombing without a Beach

Hark! The Ark

The Fun House

Hammers Don't Float

Let There Be Light

Rocks in My Head

Why Winter Sucks

The International Incident

The Wernotta Yacht Club

Here Comes My Bride

Fredi

The Ballad of LA Bob

Don't Leave Home Without It

The Christmas Ships

Just Call Me Mr. Stinky

Inferiority Complex

The Winter from Hell

Epilogue

About the Author

In your honor, Bob

For all the love and happiness

You brought to me.

And yes, I'd say I do

All over again.

You will be forever in my heart.

Love, Mary.

Introduction

You don't have to be crazy to live on the water, but it sure helps. Many of the earliest houseboat communities in Portland, Oregon, were located on the Willamette River and were known as Scowtown. First inhabited by loggers in the late 1800s, those hardy river dwellers managed to survive flooding and falling in. Despite opposition from City Hall, these waterborne communities grew even as they survived adversity. Some of those early Scowtowners faced the possibility of becoming landlubbers when seasonal high waters receded, leaving them high and dry on land, where some decided to stay, at least until the flooding resumed the next spring.

From 1900 through the 1940s, various houseboat communities flourished. Scowtowns were abundant during the Great Depression. Known as Upper, Middle, and Lower Scowtown, theses various communities were located between the different bridges that spanned the Willamette River. As other moorages were built on the Oregon Slough and Multnomah Channel, more houseboats sprouted up on the nearby Columbia River. Those houseboaters also carried that same rugged survival instinct of those original Scowtowners.

If you were to trace the origins of Columbia River houseboats, you would discover that many began as nothing more than a storage shed for fishermen built on a small floating dock. As their owners desired something more substantial, those structures were enlarged. Other houseboaters added cooking facilities and a place to sleep. Eventually, boat owners who wanted more comforts inside their floating garages added weekend accommodations and, in doing so, thus was spawned the weekender or combo. To clarify an endless source of confusion, let's set one bit of semantics straight. A boathouse is a floating garage for a boat. A houseboat is a floating home.

Subsequent owners, trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, have elaborated on some of the older floating homes. In recent years, houseboat living has become more acceptable and more desirable. New houseboats are now carefully constructed with energy efficiency and living amenities as the primary considerations.

As resistant as houseboaters are to change, rising prices and ever-increasing moorage fees from the waterlords have changed the complexion of houseboat communities. Once a haven for people who worked on the river, the lunatic fringe and low-income residents, houseboat living has become more and more the domain of the affluent. These stories are dedicated to those earlier residents, particularly the crazy ones I knew.

In the Beginning

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Then he or she (that's still open to debate) covered the earth with water and created wind so we sailors would have a place to play. Next, some distant relative of Adam and Eve (let's call him Larry) invented the sailboat, and now some of us spend our time worshipping in the Church of Larry.

As self-ordained deacons in the Church of Larry, Russ and I hoped to spend a pleasant Saturday sailing our brains out on the Columbia River that day. The road of life is paved with good intentions, but that particular day, I encountered a life-changing detour.

The wind was blowing out of the east, gusting from the Columbia River Gorge. I grew up in Washougal at the mouth of the Gorge. (Washougal in the Chinook Indian jargon means Place that should be left out in the sun to dry.) For a change, it wasn't raining, and the wind was blowing, so wasn't this what we wanted? Not that day.

You see, this was not your ordinary kind of wind coming out of the Gorge. It was reaallllllyyy windy. I mean, it was blowing stink. I've seen Gorge winds blowing so hard that people disappear. You'll be walking along and find empty shoes where people once were. With discretion being the better part of valor, that was a day when you choose to oil your teak or clean out your icebox. Around here, when the east wind gusts, it shifts fifteen degrees on the compass.

Russ and I both agreed that as much as we loved to sail and even though it was nice and sunny, we didn't want to spend it stuck on a sandbar.

Russ offered up an alternate idea for the day, saying, Hey, why don't we go into Portland and look at houseboats? I had never even given houseboats as much as a thought. Russ was an architect who had just moved down from Edmonds, Washington (near Seattle). The day wouldn't be a total wash, and this houseboat idea intrigued me. I don't drive, but Russ had his little pickup, and that solved how to get there.

On our drive to Portland, we swapped sea stories. Russ told me about some of the houseboats he had seen on Lake Washington and Lake Union in Seattle. I had always enjoyed being around the water, and this was sounding more and more interesting as we drove on.

We got to Jantzen Beach about twenty-three sea stories later. Jantzen Beach is a contradiction of terms. It is neither a Jantzen nor a beach. Located on an island between Vancouver, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, in the Columbia River, Jantzen Beach was once the site of an amusement park. The amusement park, including the Big Dipper roller coaster, had been torn down in the early seventies to build a shopping center.

I can remember as a kid coming to Jantzen Beach with the Boy Scouts or the School Crossing Guards to spend a day riding the Bumper Cars or Tilt-O-Whirl and feeling that hot dog come up your throat as you waited in line to ride the roller coaster. Even in those days, the glory that once was Jantzen Beach was already fading. Now it was gone, only to be replaced by a mall, a mausoleum of what once was. The island was now home to several boat moorages and houseboat communities.

We pulled into one of the parking lots for the houseboat moorage closest to the shopping center and wandered down the steeply inclined ramp that led to the docks below. I could see there was one continuous row of wooden docks that ran parallel to the shoreline. Every several hundred feet or so was a long fingerlike dock that was perpendicular to the shoreline. Houseboats were attached along the downriver side of these walkways. Signs designated each of these fingerlike rows as D walk, E walk, and so on in alphabetical order. We were a little hesitant at first to do much snooping, so we just walked along the main walk following the shoreline.

The day was one of those rare days in the Pacific Northwest with blue skies and sunshine that makes everything look better than it might on a more typical gray, rain-soaked day. All around, we saw endless varieties of floating structures and, of course, boats, boats, and boats everywhere. Boats glided up and down the channel. Boats were tied up to houseboats. Dinghies lay overturned on docks. Sailboats nuzzled up to little floating shanties. Canoes were tucked up on walkways along the sides of houseboats.

And water was everywhere.

Houseboats came in endless varieties as well. Some were the familiar aluminum-sided variety that you see so often in boat moorages. Some looked like little floating boxes that had railings and porches that must have evoked their owners' personalities. Others were more elaborate affairs with angles, shingled walls, and little paned windows that made them look like beach cabins. Some were contemporary, some were rustic, but they were all different. In a world of homogenization, something very different was going on here, and I liked it.

Russ and I were so busy pointing out these curiosities that we must have been like the hicks who come into town to get their egg and butter money and end up gawking at the sights like we've never seen a three-story building or a flush toilet before.

Land ‘O Goshen! I ain't never seen sumthin' like this since my brother went outside to go to the bathroom and the hogs ate him!

Look it all them purty shiny things! Jes like in the motion pitcher show!

And that was when we first saw the sign.

It said Hal Boggs Realty with a long red arrow pointing This Way. We continued gawking and talking until we got to P row. Walking down P row, we saw that the signs led to