CATEGORY: MRS. ANDERSON

One of the first things Bob purchased after we got married was a canoe.  For its “maiden voyage” we took it down to the Willamette River near Johns Landing.  This was before the large development of that name was built along the river. Little did I know, as we drifted along beside willows at the water’s edge, that within a year I would be working for a model making company, that I would be the builder of the larger part of the display model for that development, and that I would be making the miniature sailboats for the very river in which we were then dipping our paddles.

The water for the model was made of quarter inch thick rippled plastic of the kind from which desk-chair mats are made.  The owner of the model shop, who was making the model with me, spray painted our river from the back side so it looked very shallow along the edges and deep in the middle.  He did this by making the edges a blue washed sand color, then a very pale turquoise, then a deeper turquoise-blue, and on to deep blue for the largest part of the river.

By the time I went to work for the model shop, I knew something about sailing, so besides all the existing houses and buildings in the model that were not inside the development (carefully measured, but painted gray whereas the development was in color), I got to make sail boats on the river.  The hulls were long narrow white beads that we found at Howell’s craft store.  Using tweezers to hold them, I sanded them in half lengthwise on the miniature sanding wheel (part of the vast array of miniature power equipment owned by the model shop) to make a flat deck on top.  By chance the insides of these beads were a tan color so the hulls looked quite authentic.  I also slightly flattened the bottoms on one side, so the hull would tilt depending on how the boat was sailing.  The masts were made of insect pins and the sails were cut from the molded petals of a white silk rose.  I pretended that the wind was blowing from the east (like down the Colombia Gorge) and arranged all the hulls and sails so they were sailing just right for the wind.

This story started out to be about a canoe and ended up being about a model.  Bob soon made a mast, boom, sail, and movable side rudder for the canoe (which he painted with a Northwest Indian motif) thus turning it into a sailboat.  So his canoe could have been one of the sailboats in the model.  I will have to check Google Earth to see if it is still there.