Nice clean place

Saturday night I got in a panic.
I think partly because I was so tired from moving the boat and sunburned and feeling crappy from the medicine. I didn't feel very happy about having a boat in the water, particularly at Fred's Marina, a place of right wing assholes and  rotten boat docks and the spending of vast sums of money.
The straw really was they demanded I get insurance which I was like, No. Fuck you. You tea party cunts scream about the health care law and then you mandate I get liability insurance for a fucking rowboat? I don't think so. Prick.
Sunday I poked around on the Intertubes and really looked past the first Google page about marina and moorage in the Portland Area, sorting eventually by the address for the ones on Marina Way, the road under the bridge to Sauvie Island. There's a lot of docks under there.
Years ago I rowed the crab skiff, #7, down there and I found a little moorage with only 5 or 6 houseboats kind of run down and outlaw looking where they let me tie up for 15 dollars a month. 1997 I think or maybe 91 but anyway I wondered if there was some kind of similar off-the-radar scene.
The prettiest website was for a little joint called Marina Way Moorage and the prettiest thing about it was the 3.50 a month for a slip.
Those mugs at Dikeside with their 7.50 fuck them, rotten falling down no-hope piece of shit dumpyard anyway. And Fred's with the 104.50 plus insurance.
You get the picture.
Yesterday I took the 17 bus from 21st and Glisan to the turnoff for Marina Way and hiked in to the place. And I do mean hiked. A mile and a half, nice day, no cars, blackberries getting ripe and still perfect. I cut me a maple walking stick and made a good time out of it.
The place was as pretty as the pictures, clean, groomed, small but not tiny, a row of substantial but not pretentious floating houses, docks in fair condition, a dozen various outboard motorboats and a few small sailboats along the way. The maintenace guy steered me kindly to the "office"
Which was the nicest part, the lady was so kind, has been there for 44 years, not worried about very much, knows exactly what to do, found me a choice of slips and walked me over to look, so I chose a nice spot close to the ramp and wrote her a check in her wonderful homey little living room while watched intently by a gray macaw who really really misses the husband who passed away only a few weeks ago.
Exceedingly reasonable cost. $60 a month. And no bullshit.
Down at Fred's I spent a minute or two trying to do something about the pine-tar mess inside the boat. Luckily I had the latex gloves, so I took a rag soaked with thinners and I tried to wipe off the heaviest puddles of the goop. The two nice days of being right side up in the sun finally had started polymerizing the surface, and that, with the scrubba-scrubba, made the place a bit less of a disaster area for clothing and gear and kneecaps.
It was a pleasant hour rowing out into the channel and puttering about on the far side amongst the trash and flotsam and the goose poop on the island, and a pleasant pull into my new spot.
One thing it is best that I am by myself in the boat. There's just something liberating about the solitude when nobody is  looking. I cut those stupid rubber oar protectors off which makes the oars easier to adjust I will put some proper leathers on there soon.
I wasn't looking forward to hiking out to the highway. They said the kids used to just climb up the bank to the road but I couldn't find their trail when I did it, and I resolved to get in there with a shovel and a mattock and a bit of old rope and make myself a way up the bank, not really very far or very high, but I found myself thinking in a longer type term than I had expected.
But a nice clean place is very attractive to me.