Three Men In A Boat On The Neponset River - 1981
The four of them were in the parlor on the third floor by the front windows.
Johnny was sitting by the middle window, no shirt on, long black hair to his shoulders, a guitar near by to help justify his constant singing. This was his apartment.
The three men, and a nearby cat, had been playing the world conquest board game Risk for hours. They started when the sun was going down through the windows to the west on that mid-June afternoon into evening.
On the stereo system in the middle room a mix-tape was playing. "Sailing" by Christopher Cross came on.
Johnny grabbed a book to quote:
"Then we run our little boat into some quiet nook, and the tent is pitched, and the frugal supper cooked and eaten. Then the big pipes are filled and lighted, and the pleasant chat goes round in musical undertone; while, in the pauses of our talk, the river, playing round the boat, prattles strange old tales and secrets, sings low the old child’s song that it has sung so many thousand years—will sing so many thousand years to come, before its voice grows harsh and old—a song that we, who have learnt to love its changing face, who have so often nestled on its yielding bosom, think, somehow, we understand, though we could not tell you in mere words the story that we listen to."
Johnny spoke as Dan sat back in his chair and Daniel rolled the dice while pointing at Kamchatka on the game board map.
"I remember the excitement I felt when I first saw the Neponset River through the trees and greenery of the edge of the river bank. I was eight or nine years old I guess, the streets were closed to cars as the Memorial Day Parade went to the Cedar Grove Cemetery," he took a drag on the smoke. "There it was a large blue expanse, yet just beyond the familiar semi-wild for me playground of Dorchester Park. A whole new world of water. I wanted a boat. I wanted to come back another day. Let's take a trip down the Neponset River in your canoe, Dan, I think it is long enough for us three."
"Kamchatka to Irkutsk!" Daniel said as he took another swig of his beer from one of the many cans.
Smoking, drinking, playing games all night with music in the background.
"When I was a boy, just about eighth grade...." the mix tape began playing the Italian American flavored "Awe Shaddup You Face!"
"When I was in the eight grade I used to go to an ice cream parlor at Lower Mills on the Neponset River with girls, no pool parlors for me," Johnny said.
Dan worked in construction, but, was laid off for a few weeks anyway as things slowed down, or, something. Who knew. We were like boats on a river.
Dan took a deep hit off a smoke and said, "Did you see that John Philips from the Mamas and Papas was convicted of having recreational drugs, and sentenced to five years in prison. Allowed to do community service instead."
"That will teach him!" Daniel said as he moved his pale blue blocks into Irkutsk. He handed Johnny the dice. "Your turn."
The mix tape played Gary Numan's song "Car" and everyone perked up in their chairs and did a little robotic movement with dancing arms.
"Yes," Dan said, "but lets move beyond cars and feeling safest of all and onto the water and adventure like brave Ulysees or Leif Erikson or.... those who play Risk!"
"To the canoe!" chimed in Daniel.
The boat was in the cellar and lived in a hole cut in the wall. While made of light and sturdy fiberglass, the canoe looked like birch bark. Easy to carry for the three men.
Johnny was just turning thirty and Dan was twenty-five and Daniel, the little brother was just twenty-two. The three men were strong enough, and fit enough for a day trip down the Neponset River. A ten hour tour with plenty of breaks and a slow pace with the river flow to carry them along as they smoked and drank and talked and laughed and.... maybe cried.
The first list we made out had to be discarded. It was clear that the upper reaches of the Neponset River would not allow of the navigation of a boat sufficiently large to take the things we had set down as indispensable; so we tore the list up, and looked at one another!
Dan said: “You know we are on a wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without.”
Strange to think that the Neponset River seems to begin right at the edge of the big stadium in Foxboro. The source of the watery river.... is a parking lot?
The three men had Dan's wife drive them to Foxborough with the canoe on the roof of the station wagon and the limited gear and adequate beer and food and smoke were packed inside. Dan kissed his wife goodbye and Johnny and Daniel waved bye to their sister. Would they die on the river? Perhaps, but all three wore floatation devices.
The Neponset River begins as a skinny trench in a suburb built around cars and the highways and roads and streets and parking lots the vehicles need. No romance here. But the hardy trees seem to spring up everywhere in Eastern Massachusetts unless they are cut down.
The men got out and carried the boat as needed from one little pond linked by culver and trench to the next. Back packs full, but getting lighter with each hour.
"Let's have second breakfast," said Johnny, somewhere in Dedham. They sat under a tree on the bank by the water and ate sandwiches.
"Did you see some lad named Marcus Sargeant fired six blank shots from a pistol near the Queen in London and startled her horse?" Daniel asked. "God Bless the Queen."
"I close my eyes and think of England," Johnny said. "And our uncle Frankie killed in an English prison as a teen."
"So long ago," sighed Dan.
A June day in Eastern Massachusetts in the early morning on the water as cars gleam in the far distance and airplanes fly overhead and insects buzz on the shore and the water splashed and.... all was right with the world.
"I think one of my earliest memories was going to some amusement park with my parents and my sister and I were in little boats going round in a circle, I was about four or five years old," Johnny said as they paddled along, "I put my hand in the water and wondered if there were any fish that could bite me."
"Afraid of fish in a barrel?" Dan remarked as struck a match to like a smoke. He looked at the matchbook cover. "Raynham Dog Race Track, just picture that, dogs running, lots of barking, unable to bet on a bay"
Dan looked up ahead at a small copse of trees on the bank, "The woods are lovely, dark, and deep... but...." The words trailed off as we splashed in the water.
Daniel was a reader of books, he had almost been graduated from Boston Latin School, but quit in his senior year in a fight with his father. For some reason. All that Latin and Greek.... for an electrician. Carpe Diem! The book Dan had read was from Hemingway, "Across the River and Into The Trees."
As the boat crossed the shadows of trees across the river Dan said, "I've had to much to drink and been tired and worn out, but, I didn't do what Papa Hemingway did and write a book about it. A thin soup."
Daniel said, "The Nobel Prize in Literature went to a foot-lose international traveler Elias Canetti' who wrote a three volume work.... about himself"
Dan asked, "Does anyone have a book?"
Johnny said, "I have a notebook and a felt pen and a pencil and a few crayons."
Daniel replied, "I have a beat up paperback copy of 'The Catcher in the Rye' that I always keep in my backpack." He shrugged, "in case something happens."
"Didn't that nut who shot President Reagan have a copy of 'The Catcher in the Rye?" asked Dan. "And the person who killed John Lennon in New York?"
Johnny was in the rear and acting as rudder with his paddle in the water. "What a laugh, a bunch of funny magazine article strung together by a graduate of elite private schools who thinks the world has been unfair and put up a false front.... imagine that."
"I'm outraged," shouted Dan.
"Aren't we all," whispered Daniel from the front. "The river looks like cold tea, clear, a little brown, old leaves along the bottom..."
"Look!" Johnny shouted, "the sign post up ahead, Mattapan Square. I think they closed the Pappa Gino's restaurant in that old stone building next to the trolley station. Too many robberies."
"Does the river have pirates?" asked Daniel.
"They are land based, and they see themselves as 'privateers' fighting some kind of 'get even' populist war against.... I know not who," mused Johnny, who often went off on lyrical nonsense with a kernel of damned truth.
"There used to be two different toy model stores in Mattapan Square. I remember looking through the window at about eleven years old and seeing plastic models of the American Civil War navy ships the Monitor and the Merrimack with a little Confederate Flag decal on one ship, a friend told me that someone was going to make the rebel flag illegal like the Nazi flag," Johnny related.
The three men in the boat could see the bright orange trolleys moving in and out of Mattapan Station right next to the river.
Johnny continued his personal history lesson. "When I was in high school, senior year, Steve Keenan a friend and classmate at Boston Tech was down near the river drinking beer with friends. The police came, the teens scattered, Steve Keenan ran onto the trolley tracks and was hit by a trolley and died. At seventeen he got a full page picture and memorial at the back of the yearbook. I remember a story of Steve standing on top of a snow bank plowed onto a sidewalk in Mattapan Square and reading from Coleridge's 'Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.' Steve Keenan was a 'theater of the Absurd' performer when none of us had ever heard the word. But, Steve's vaguely anarchistic performances in life came to an end on the edge of the Neponset River. Requiescat in pace et in amore."
Dan and Daniel raised their beer cans in solemn salute to one who fell in Mattapan.
"Steve Keenan's bones are buried in The New Calvary Cemetery close to Walk Hill Street," Johnny sighed. "And, we are left with lines of a poem about a men who killed a bird....
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
Dan splashed water in the air with his paddle. "Do you think you could drink this water, there is no salt."
Johnny reached down and touched the cold water with his hand. One could see clear to the bottom. "I wonder if there are any factories or such upstream still dumping right into the river, there shouldn't be.... but..."
"Or the old fashioned illegal hook up to a storm drain from a home by the river," Daniel added. "You know what those people are like in the town of Milton."
The river was about thirty meandering miles from the source to the Atlantic Ocean. The Neponset River is used as the southern boundary of the City of Boston, passing through the neighborhoods of Readville, Hyde Park, Mattapan and Dorchester, and forms the northern border of the city of Quincy. In addition, the Neponset touches the towns of Foxborough, Walpole, Sharon, Norwood, Canton, Stoughton, Westwood, Dedham, and Milton.
The watery way was widening out and they could see River Street to the north through the trees and bushes and tall grass and rocks. There are lots of rocks along the Neponset River, the area was under a mile or so of ice about ten thousand years ago during an Ice Age. Apparently there were lots of loose rocks in the ice from moving back and forth over the Earth. As the ice melted, down came all the loose granite unto the area of Eastern Massachusetts and the Neponset River basin.
"To the north is the parking lot and back of the building were I went for my Boy Scouts meetings when I was twelve to about fourteen," Johnny said pointing at a structure through a chain link fence. The trolley tracks were now on the southern bank of the river. The water flow seemed to slow, but the men could still just drift along and simply guide the boat. Overhead the sun gleamed and was shining through the many trees along both sides of the river.
"I remember how much I liked the woods craft and exploring aspect of activities in the Boy Scouts," Johnny mused. "After all the years of Catholic education at Saint Greg's, with the emphasis on reading, writing, adding.... I still don't know the multiplication tables."
"Nor do I," said Dan.
"I can sing the song I learned in second grade," Daniel queried. "That might help."
The men got out because there was an impassible section by boat at the bridge to Milton at Central Avenue. On with the back packs, which were lighter still, and canoe over head, they walked across the street when the coast was clear of cars or trucks. A big orange trolley clanged a bell as it crossed the same road to their right.
The falling waters of the Neponset River in this very area provided the energy for the country's first water-powered grist mill, gunpowder mill, paper mill and the Revere Copper Company, among others.
The upper stretch of the Neponset River, in Foxborough, Walpole and Norwood, is steeply sloped, dropping about 228 feet over its first 12 miles, and so the earliest years of the Industrial Revolution brought the Neponset to prominence.
In 1635, a man named Israel Stoughton built the first dam on the Neponset (only the second dam in the entire New World) for his grist mill. It was the first of three mills for flour, gunpowder and paper making. The water power was used to turn large wheels and stones to crush wheat into flour and such.
Back into the water the three went. Down to the sea in ships, indeed.
"So we have had industrial workers in this area for over three hundred years," Dan said. "A lot of work, a lot of power taken out of the river."
The river's recorded history begins in 1619 when Native Americans traveled down the Neponset River to Thompson's Island, where they traded furs with English settlers.
"Before Europeans arrived," Johnny opined, "the area was inhabited by Neanderthal tribes. Evidence of habitation along the Neponset River also includes the Middle Archaic (circa 5000 BC) at sites such as Green Hill near the Blue Hills. "If the Neanderthals could see us now."
"I don't think they can," Dan replied. "They are trapped in your imagination."
Daniel recited some pertinent facts about this hub of colonial industrial activity:
"In 1765, a chocolate mill was established by Dr. James Baker and Irish immigrant John Hannon (later known as Walter Baker & Company producing Baker's Chocolate) in the Lower Mills section of Dorchester, and in 1770 Daniel Vose's Wholesale Shipping Warehouses at the second Milton Town Landing at Lower Mills were at the peak of their operation." He took a deep breath. And a swig from a can.
"Ship building and commercial shipping were the major river industries at the estuary. In 1773, George Clark built a paper mill on remnants of Trescott's Lumber Mill, which became the Tileston and Hollingsworth Paper Mill in 1836. In 1826, the river became the terminus of the Granite Railway, the first commercial railway in the United States."
"As a boy I used to smell chocolate down near this part of the river. When the factory whistle blew at 4:30 pm I was supposed to head home," Johnny related. I remember once, down by the railroad tracks, some bold teens broke open a railroad freight car with cocoa beans for Baker Chocolate. The full sized beans were in rough sacks and someone ripped the bag open. I tasted a chocolate bean and it was bitter."
"Did you spit it out and throw it in the river?" one of the others asked.
"Could we grow chocolate plants on the banks of the Neponset River?" Johnny asked. "I don't think we are warm enough around here."
"Just a stone's throw from the river at Baker's Chocolate," Johnny said, "is the house of the girl who kissed me in the cloak room in Saint Gregory's Elementary School when I was six years old. The other kids ran to the nun and said Elizabeth Templeton kissed Johnny. The nun said that she would not have blamed me if I punched the girl for that unwarranted act of impurity."
Daniel remarked, "My elementary school was across the street, the Gilbert Stuart, Whitey Bulger and the FBI burned it down to protest busing for integration in 1974."
"Satan never sleeps," said Dan.
"The Lower Mills Boston Public Library used to be in an old bank building on the same street," Johnny said. "I remember going to the library with our sister Mary after school to hear a 'Story Time' with the pretty librarian who read 'The Spiral Staircase' in chapters to the kids sitting around her on the floor in the room facing Washington Street."
"So, what was the solution to the mystery?" Dan asked. "Mystery fans are obsessed with solutions."
"I don't know, I don't think I went for the final chapter," Johnny said. "I thought it was interesting to have a pretty woman with lipstick and ear rings on who was like a teacher, but, unlike all the teachers I had at Saint Gregory's who were nuns in black habits with head coverings. I was looking at the librarian a lot."
Near the Cedar Grove neighborhood there was a children's playground next to the river. "Paddle lightly, she can hear," Johnny said and pointed to a house just past the playground. "Maryjane Kelliher lived there, she was my first real girlfriend in the eighth grade when I was fourteen."
On the south side of the river were the green hills of Milton, and to the north Boston, and Dorchester and Cedar Grove, a small enclave with one road in, lots of trees, a river and a trolley track runs through it.
"Another girl I was involved with," Johnny said, "and also near the Neponset River. I was in the eighth grade and turning fourteen when the gaggle of girls at Saint Greg's began to organize 'house parties.' A small group of girls and boys would gather at someone's house with their parents at home. Maybe we would be in the furnished cellar, or they would clear the dining room for dancing. The boys all wore sport's coats and ties and the girls were all in dresses. Small record players with 45rpm disks provided the music. A few fast dances, then some slow dances.
The river was wider still, and the blue sky overhead was more visible as there were less trees blocking the view. The three men paused and drifted.
"I didn't even like her, really, I didn't dislike Maryjane," Johnny mused looking toward the north bank and the girl's house. "She picked me out as a boy who would be invited to dance with her, and, I went along. None of my other small circle of friends were going to these parties. I remember a girl moved into a house right near my parents house. On the night President Kennedy was assassinated she had planned a party. I was afraid the adults would cancel, but they didn't. So we partied on the night of JFK's death as young teens thinking of our own world.
"I can't remember anything much of going to the party, we used to have bottles of soft drinks and potato chips and popcorn in bowls at a table. Things wrapped up around ten o'clock and we all walked back to our homes by eleven o'clock.
"We listened to Jan and Dean 'Surf City' and a 'I've Leaving it Up To You' with Grace and Dale singing. The danceable 'Sugar Shack' with Jimmy Gilmer. I had no inkling then that the 'sugar' referenced in the song might be some kind of physical romantic intimacy.
The Beach Boys were on the first single 45rpm record I bought, "In My Room." We also dance that night to Jan and Dean's "Surf City." I remember Jimmy O'Hara's real estate agent father who live on the next street saying 'all the new trends come out of California, and maybe he should subscribe to a California newspaper.'
"In a way, I just let myself be paired up with Maryjane so I could go to those parties and be part of the group. But, we 'dated' for a year. She was a few months older than me, and although she had a reserved personal style, she was in a hurry. She had cystic fibrosis and was expected to have a shortened life. She married young and died before she was twenty-five.
"I guess one could say I 'dated' her for a year, but, we never really went anywhere," Johnny continued as Dan and Daniel sipped and smoked and dipped their paddles in the calm water. "We went to the same school in eight grade, but I think she got kicked out of Saint Gregory's Girls High School and went to the infamous Woody for ninth grade. We never were in a car together that I can remember, we walked to the ice cream place in Milton just over the river, walked to her house and nearby public play ground and park. Or, she and a few girlfriends would walk down to Ashmont Station and my neighborhood and we'd talk and interact. I remember Karen Dolan taking out the illustrations from the book 'Green Mansions' that Saint Gregory's girls were reading. The nun had instructed each student to take their copy of the book just handed to them and rip out the black and white pen and ink illustrations that were vaguely sexual in showing half naked savages and a wild girl in the jungles of South America. Catholic schoolgirl Karen Dolan had secretly pocketed some of the verboten images," Johnny was known for speaking in paragraphs."
Dan spoke up, he was a great traveler, "I read the book 'Green Mansions' and listened to the audiobook after you recommended the work to me."
"We are in green mansion territory right now," Daniel added.
And, they were. Just a splashing of water could be heard.
"Maryjane gave me a 'tennis sweater' for Christmas in 1964 and she was an advocate of the 'college' style as opposed to the pompadour Elvis Presley style we with leather jackets and greased hair we called 'rat' back then," Johnny added.
"One evening Maryjane took me across the Neponset River, and into the wilds of Milton and Turner's Field," Johnny looked to his right at the Milton river bank. "She was more of the organizer and initiator in the relationship, she was a female who was slightly older than me, and she had a clock of death ticking in her head with her chronic life shortening condition," he mused.
"We were two teens sitting on the grass on a pleasant evening behind a stone wall looking down at the Neponset River," Johnny offered. "She let me feel her breasts, or, maybe she guided me."
They paddled on to the east toward the sea, Johnny looked back over his shoulder. "When I was a freshman in high school I put a ladder against the back porch and snuck out in the evening when Maryjane was babysitting at an apartment up on Washington Street. I think that was her plan. As I walked up Mercier Avenue I saw my friend Jimmy O'Hara and didn't know what to say as he was playing ball in the street in the evening darkness. I just walked by and didn't say anything. Later he said he thought I might be sleep walking. What a lack of social skills, or experience.
"She was the one who called me to 'break up' and I was sad, even though, I didn't like much about her, really, I just wanted all the social arrangements that went with having a girlfriend," Johnny mused.
"I saw her for the last time at the fundraising carnival at the Carney Hospital probably in June 1965. I had been winning at some game of chance were one bet nickels and dimes for a color ball drop. I watched and only bet when a certain color had not come up for a while. I strangely won again and again and soon had a pocket full of quarters and dimes and nickels. I met Maryjane and some girlfriends and we spoke as old 'lovers' and we got on one of the rides, some kind of spinning and rising contraption. As we sat together and the machine whirled us around, the loose change in my bulging pockets began to spill out and the carney worker on the ground was scooping up my gambling winnings. There was a lesson to be learned there...."
"What was that?" asked both Dan and Daniel together.
"Quit while you are ahead, change coins into paper money, stay away from old girlfriends," Johnny pronounce solemnly. "I never saw her again."
"But, I did like kissing her, I think I was in her house once down next to the Neponset River." He sighed, "All those years ago, and then I heard she got married young, just as I was getting married young, from my mother."
"Maybe six years later, 1974 or so, I saw a friend from then, Barbara Madison, sitting with a man in a downtown Boston fast food joint. I spoke with her of Maryjane Kelliher's death which by then was more than a year gone. I said my friends and I should have gone to her wake or funeral and Barbara nodded and we shared a few words. I think I heard she died a few years after that."
"This is like the river of death," Dan said.
"So long ago," Johnny reminisced. "Almost twenty years. I was a child, she was a child, near Neponset by the Sea."
"Indeed," Daniel added.
They paddled along and the river got very wide and there was a smell of salt in the air. The Atlantic Ocean was near.
There was lots of march grass, no trees near the river now.
The men and the boat approached another bridge over the Neponset River, but, this was a large, wide draw bridge, with gates and horns and flashing lights, at times. But, no need for raising the bridge for a three man canoe.
To the south there was the Neponset Drive-in Theater with the large parking lot and the screen towering in the sunlight of the day.
"We could see the drive-in movie screen from Maryjane's back porch," Johnny remarked, if you like silent movies."
"I do," Daniel said. "Buster Keaton, yes!"
"Silence!" Dan said.
There was a boat club on river near the bridge on the Quincy side and lots of white boats in the water and on land next to the building. In the distance a commuter train moved across the river on a dedicated bridge. Airplanes flew overhead toward Logan Airport. On the roads traffic moved and stopped, the Southeast Expressway was overhead downriver with cars and trucks and buses moving along.
"Port Norfolk, to our left, is mentioned in the book Moby Dick," Dan opined. "Melville wrote that Dorchester farmers were afraid their daughters would be sweet talked or grabbed by sailors at the port. I'm still worried."
"One of the prettiest girls I ever dated was from Port Norfolk," Johnny said. "Mary Bellrose lived in a house that is a stone's throw from the Neponset River."
"It's like you go down to the river to meet females, or something," Dan lifted a beer to his lips.
"I joined a band that Jimmy O'Hara and Sandy MacDonald and Lee Mulligan from my high school had formed. They were going to be instrumental, but.... I could sing. I played rhythm guitar, poorly, while Sandy played lead, mostly chords as rhythm because he was not very good either. But, girls liked us. We got a job playing at Saint Ann's dance on Neponset Avenue. During the breaks from our playing, they played records, and I went out to dance, and lots of girls wanted to dance with me. I was the lead singer, and not too bad looking. I met Mary Bellrose who was a year younger than me and went to Saint Ann School. We agreed to meet, after school, at the Adams Street Library, and we were off on an almost two year relationship. I loved kissing her, and, beyond. But, not all the way, or, even close. Enough to make dreams. What a pretty girl."
"I did go places with Mary Bellrose, we went to a number of movies, downtown, local, we went horseback riding in the Blue Hills one Saturday in pleasant weather. I especially remember going over her house after a Midnight Christmas mass at Saint Ann Church and going back to her house and her mother went to bed and I was a sixteen year old boy in the parlor alone on the sofa with a very pretty buxom fifteen year old girl. What could go wrong. Lots of kissing and touching and hugging. I remember going down Galivan Boulevard past the Neponset Drive-in entrance and it was almost four o'clock in the morning on Christmas Day. My father was going to punish me by 'grounding' me and not letting me out to socialize for a while, but, my Grandmother was on her only visit from Ireland and she said to my father 'It's Christmas' and somehow I got off. I was married and a 'father to be' within two years, but, not to that girl."
"Any port in a storm," Dan said.
"Correct," added Daniel.
"I launched myself to sea right around here, after seeking out Mary Bellrose in vain one day," Johnny pointed to the vast expanse of the mouth of the river, and beyond, the Atlantic Ocean. "I came down to Mary Bellrose house in Port Norfolk during the February school holiday in 1966 I guess. She wasn't home. She was the lead trumpet in Saint Ann Marching Band.
"So, Frank McNamara and I walked along the shore and banks of the water. I spotted a wooden shipping pallet and an abandoned wooden door and I maneuvered the door on the pallet and had a makeshift raft. I got some kind of pole and embarked on a voyage on the Atlantic Ocean with a view of the big gas tanks on the shore, where Frank stayed. Mary Bellrose was a memory as I looked at the water around me.
"But, after a while I noticed a boat farther out, and then I think there was a helicopter overhead. Wow, someone was being rescued, and I had a front row seat. Well, I was standing. I saw a police car on shore behind me and then realized that the police were waving for me to come ashore. So, I punted to the police and wondered what I had done. I was the one being rescued. I was in no trouble. But, people on the Southeast Expressway had seen me drifting out to sea and called the police and authorities.
"There were photographers, and I put my hand up to cover my face. I gave the police a fake name. I gave them a false address. But the cops put me and Frank in the cop car and drove to Ashmont Station area. I realized I'd have to tell the truth and they just delivered me home, no knock on the door or lecture. The next day, my voyage was in both of the major news papers, the Record American, and the Globe. 'Nice Day For A Sale' was one headline. One paper had a picture of me holding up my hand, and a scared looking Frank McNamara who looked like Tintin."
"And all because you were searching for a girl," Dan said.
"The face that launched a makeshift ship on the mouth of the Neponset River kissing the Atlantic Ocean"
"Down to the sea in ships"
"And a story of three girls along the Neponset River comes to an end," said Johnny looking back at the river behind him.
