I must have been about four years old, because I know this happened before 1954 — the year Hurricane Carol arrived and turned a lot of things upside-down, including that very same boat. But before the hurricane, before any of that, there was just my father and his buddies deciding they wanted to water-ski.

And of course, if you want to water-ski, the obvious next step is to build a 17-foot speedboat in the basement.

That’s what he did. No hesitation. No problem-solving meetings. No permits. Just a man, a few friends, and a big idea in a small space. Our basement windows were the usual tiny kind — maybe twenty inches high and a couple of feet wide — the sort of windows you’d expect to see potatoes passing through, not a full-sized boat.

So while he was building this thing down there — sanding and shaping and making it beautiful — people kept asking the same question:

“How are you going to get it out?”

And he would just shrug and say, “I’ll get it out. I’ll figure it out.”

That was my father. He wasn’t what you’d call an intellectual man, but he was brilliant in his own lane. He could fix or build almost anything, and he trusted that part of himself completely. Working for “the man” never appealed to him. He liked figuring out life the same way he figured out that boat — with a little stubbornness, a little charm, and an unshakable belief that the solution was in there somewhere.

Eventually, the boat was finished. It filled the basement like a houseguest who had overstayed their welcome. And now the question wasn’t just theoretical anymore. Now it was real:

How do you get a 17-foot speedboat out of a basement with twenty-inch windows?

There were two windows side-by-side with a stretch of brick between them. My father realized that if he removed the brick, he could make one nice long opening — just long enough to slide the boat out lengthwise. Simple. Elegant. Terrifying.

The tiny concern in all this was whether the house might fall down.

But he worked it out. He built a header beam inside, something strong enough to carry the load once the bricks came out. It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just quietly competent — the way he was.

Then he took out the bricks.

And the boat slid out of that basement like it had always intended to leave that way — which, of course, it had. His way.

So the boat left the basement, the house stayed standing, and life went on — with just a little more proof that sometimes the craziest plans work out fine when you trust yourself enough to see them through.