Bob at the Plaza by R. Murphy Read Free Book Online Page A

he observed, “You’ve seen how the water’s getting higher, right?”
    “Sure.”
    “If the water keeps rising, and with all of the rain and melt-off we’re getting, it will, it’s going to wash off all the shale on my lakefront and I’ll be in big trouble. But if I can cover up some of the shale with these big rocks, these rocks will protect my shoreline and I might not get flooded.” 
    I looked around, noticing the composition of Stan’s beachfront for the first time. Tiny bits of shale made up the property, with no grass or ground cover to hold the pebbles in place.  A wall built at the edge of his land comprised of the substantial rocks he dug out of the water could form a breakfront that would absorb most of the destructive pounding of the waves if the water rose. A bitter, frigid task.
    I tried to imagine another way to accomplish the same results without spending hours standing in churning, icy waves. “Couldn’t you buy something, maybe like cement blocks, to build a breakfront?”
    “Too much money when I can get these rocks for free,” Stan responded, moving constantly through the waves while scanning for buried stones. “Besides, you can’t build permanent structures in the lake without a permit.”
    “But won’t you run out of big rocks eventually, after you pull them all out?”
    “Nah, the lake always pushes things around, and the currents keep uncovering new rocks. You just have to grab them when you see them, before they get covered with shale again.”
    Reluctantly, I shifted my gaze from Stan’s lakefront, with its stub of a sturdy protective wall, to my own beach with, metaphorically speaking, its naked lakefront butt hanging out and getting spanked by the waves. “So, Stan, do you think I should, uhhh, do something to build up my own lakefront?” I asked, dreading his answer.
    Stan paused his slow rock-searching shuffle through the shallows, straightened up, studied my beach situation for a moment, then said, “It wouldn’t hurt.”
    Ahhhhh, nuts. I was afraid of that. Another one of those homeowner situations where everybody except me knew what to do, and how to do it. Some people are meant to live in apartments or condos, hiring professionals to maintain their homes, and I freely admit I am one of those people. What I know about fixing lakefronts, roofs, heating systems, retaining walls, gutters and holding tanks could fit onto the head of a pin, with room left over for a thousand dancing angels. I’d never seen an ad in the yellow pages for ‘Lakefront Builder-Uppers’ either, so I was pretty sure I was on my own.
    “Hey, Stan?” I broke out of my incompetent-homeowner reverie.
    “Yeah?’
    “So all you have to do is pile up the rocks into a wall?”
    Stan looked at me, deadpan. “You don’t think that’s enough? Standing in a freezing lake and heaving a ton of rocks into a wall?”
    “No, no, no. That’s not what I mean,” I back-pedaled frantically. “I mean, after you pile the rocks into a wall, are you done?”
    “Nope. Then you shovel shale behind the rocks to make your lakefront higher. Or reinforce it with sandbags. If you’re lucky your wall will be higher than the water when the water rises.”
    I’m no engineer, mind you. But I didn’t need to be an engineer to know this project would require a lot of work. Hard, physical, dirty, cold, wet work. Especially if you remember that I’m a woman of a certain age with a predilection for books, cookies, and wine, who avoids strenuous exercise whenever possible. A slightly out-of-shape woman with no extra money in the bank to pay a ‘lakefront builder upper’ repair person even if I could find one in the yellow pages. I could see the path the next couple of weeks would take, and it wasn’t pretty.
    “I suppose I have to buy some waterproof boots, huh?” I yelled to Stan as he fished for rocks toward the far end of his property.
    “Yup,” he hollered back. “You don’t want to be standing for hours