Prologue

My friend, Bob, is a pretty interesting guy. He’s an inventor. His inventions aren’t always new; you could probably buy something that does the same thing if you had the money and knew where to get it. But whenever he runs into a problem, he tries to solve it by building or making something himself.

Bob doesn’t have much money, except a little from his paper route. What he does have is a junior chemistry set that his folks gave him for Christmas, and unlimited access to his dad’s junkyard.

The junkyard is a fascinating place. Besides the usual smashed cars and worn-out water heaters, there’s all kinds of useful mechanical and electrical stuff lying around. No one ever buys anything except car parts from the junkyard, so Bob’s dad lets Bob pick everything else over before it goes to the metal recyclers. Bob has a corner of the junkyard for the things he has collected that might prove useful, and an old metal shed full of tools he has found.

Bob’s like most boys; he likes bikes and camping and sports and reading and those kinds of things. But the thing he likes most is inventing. Whenever I’m in the mood to do something, I call his house, and if he isn’t there, I go looking for him at the junkyard. I usually find him in his shed, building something.

He can build things really quickly when he gets going. I watched him crank out his electric motor-powered bicycle one Saturday morning. It worked, too, on the first try. His one problem, though, is that he doesn’t usually worry about the fine details. He wanted an electric bike, so he just made one. It has a big, powerful motor mounted over the back wheel on a metal frame welded to the bike. The chain comes up from the wheel and hooks onto a sprocket on the motor’s shaft. For power, it has two big truck batteries squeezed into the frame above where the pedals used to be. One battery has to go crosswise because the frame isn’t big enough for them both to go the narrow way, so Bob’s feet can’t even get to the pedals. He solved that problem by welding a piece of pipe across the frame in front of the battery, to rest his feet on.

The only control he put on the motor was an on-off switch. That means that, as soon as it is turned on, it runs at full speed, which is twelve and a half miles an hour. If you’re not used to it, it can snap your head back pretty hard. Bob still doesn’t seem used to it. His head always snaps back when he starts, because he’s usually thinking about where he’s going or his latest idea. He could solve the problem by putting a rheostat on the circuit so he could accelerate slowly, but he can’t be bothered.

Going a steady twelve and a half miles per hour gets you places pretty fast, but it has its disadvantages. If you want to navigate on and off sidewalks, for instance, that’s a pretty fast clip. Or if you’re riding with a group, you can’t vary your speed so you don’t run into the person in front of you. Bob always gets ahead of me going uphill. I can sometimes catch up on the downhill side.

He test-rode it in the junkyard as soon as he finished it. He sat up on it and flipped the switch. It nearly jerked out from under him, but he hung on and steered it down the drive towards the junkyard gate. When he got there, a truck was coming in, so he took a quick left and made a circuit around the parking lot. He came back around to the gate and found that the truck had stopped just inside, blocking his way to the gate and leaving no room to turn and make another loop around the lot. Bob was trapped, headed at twelve and a half miles per hour straight towards the glass door of the junkyard office. I could see him pulling on the bike’s handbrakes, but they had no effect against that powerful motor.

I yelled, “Turn it off! Turn it off!” He seemed to hear me, because the motor suddenly stopped, and his brakes grabbed just in time to keep him from going through the glass door. The bike’s front wheel hit the door with a solid “Thump!” and Bob toppled over sideways.

I knew he wouldn’t change the way his bike worked, except maybe to build a cargo platform on it, so while he was working on something else, I put heavier-duty brakes on it that I got from a mountain bike. He still had to turn the motor off for them to work, but they stopped him faster than the old ones did. He doesn’t like me tinkering with his inventions, though, so I didn’t change anything else.

The Campout

I hadn’t seen Bob in a couple of weeks because my family went to see my grandparents way out in California. So the morning after we got back, I hopped on my bike and rode over to the junkyard to remind him about the camping trip we had planned for the weekend.

Bob was in his shed, as I expected. He was tinkering with something about the size and shape of an old canister vacuum.

“Hey, Mike!” he exclaimed. “Look at this!”

“What is it?” I asked. Now that I was closer, I could see that at one end, there was an electric motor and some kind of spool or reel attached to it. There was metal cable wound around the reel.

“This is a winch I got off an old Jeep,” he explained. “I also found some really cool high-power batteries that are a lot smaller than car batteries, and I don’t know what this was,” he gestured at the canister, “but it’s really heavy-duty, and just the right size and shape to mount the winch on the end of it, and put the batteries inside. I’m almost done with it.”

As I watched, he took a grappling hook and tied it to the end of the cable. He pulled a length of cable off the reel and began to swing the hook around his head. He launched it into the corner. As it flew, it pulled more cable off the reel, which spun freely. “I modified the gears on the winch to freewheel so I could throw the grappling hook,” he explained.

The hook had dropped amidst the junk in the corner of the shed. Bob picked up the winch assembly, which had handles bolted onto the sides, and pointed it at the corner. “Watch this,” he said.

He flipped a switch on one of the handles. The winch started up and began to reel in the cable. The hook caught on an old bicycle frame and began dragging it across the floor to Bob. When it was at his feet, he flipped the switch again, and the winch stopped.

“Pretty cool, huh?” he said.

I nodded. “What are you going to use it for?” I asked.

He grinned. “You know how hopeless I am at climbing trees, compared to you? Well, now I have a secret weapon.” He patted the device. “This thing’ll get me up into the big oak tree, along with all my gear, before you even get started.”

I nodded. “Have you got the wrinkles ironed out?” I asked.

“Pfaah! What wrinkles?” he scoffed. “You just saw it work. Here, let me show you what else I made.”

He led me over to a corner, where an interesting-looking contraption leaned against the wall. “This thing took me five days to build,” he said proudly. “It’s a beauty.”

I looked it over. It was about four feet long, sort of streamlined, with a propeller inside a little open cylinder at the bottom end. It had handlebars on the sides at the top, much like the other device, but these looked like they had twist-grip accelerators from a motorcycle. There were fins sticking out on three sides of it. “Looks cool,” I commented. “What does it do?”

“It’s a one-man submersible,” he said. “It will take me wherever I want to go in the river. I can control direction side-to-side and up and down, with just these two handles.” He showed me how twisting them different ways made the fins move, and how the motor turned on and off to make the propeller spin.  “The motor and the batteries are inside a waterproof case. The shaft comes from the gearbox out through this bearing here. The case and shaft and gears were part of a sump pump, so it’s made to resist being in the water all the time. I got the idea for the handles and the fins from a National Geographic article and from an old Aquaman comic book.”

He hefted the device and dragged it to a barrel full of water. “Here, help me put this in,” he ordered.

I grabbed one handle and a fin, and between us we got it into the barrel, standing up on its propeller end.  Bob reached down into the water and pushed a switch. There was a whirring noise, and the water began to churn. The machine rose right up in the barrel until it was more than halfway out of the water. It was hard to keep it balanced. I held the top with one hand and the handle with the other. The machine began to thrash and wobble. Bob struggled to keep his side upright, but suddenly the machine climbed up another few inches and toppled over onto him.  Bob fell on this back with the machine roaring on top of him.

“Help! Get it off me!” he yelled. He let go of the handle to push the machine away, and the roaring stopped.

“You were holding the throttle open,” I said. “You should have let it go or backed it off so it would stay lower in the water.”

Bob crawled out from under the machine, grumbling and wiping dirt off his back. “It doesn’t have a throttle,” he said. “Just an on-off switch on the right handlebar.” He kicked the machine, then grinned. “Works pretty good, doesn’t it?”

“Looks very cool,” I remarked. “Have you tested it in a pool or anywhere?”

“I thought I would take it along when we go camping this weekend,” Bob said. “I’m making a rack for it on my bike.”

Bob’s bike was looking less and less like a bike all the time. It now had a super-heavy-duty folding stand to keep it upright with the weight of the batteries. I think Bob scavenged it from a junked motorcycle. He had added baskets for his newspaper route, a launcher for the papers on the handlebars (he stole that idea from Alvin Fernald), a speedometer (it invariably showed that he went 12 ½ miles an hour), a floodlight that ran off the batteries, an inverter so we could run equipment off the batteries, a rack for his toolbox, a charger for the batteries so he could plug in anywhere.... He didn’t always have all the stuff on the bike at once, but the racks were always there, along with hooks for tying on other cargo.

For the submersible, he was cutting up a couple of old bike frames to make a large rack that reminded me of a moose’s antlers. He assembled it upside-down on top of the submersible, to get the shape right, then welded it to the back of his bike over the electric motor. It hung out behind the back wheel, about four feet up in the air.

“Okay, let’s load it up,” Bob said.

I took hold of my side by one handle and a fin, and together we hoisted it into the rack. The bike settled back onto its rear wheel, but the weight of the batteries kept it from flipping over backwards. It didn’t seem very stable, though, and I wondered how it was going to handle. “Are you going to road test it?” I asked.

“Naw,” Bob said. “I need to get some other things done.”

“It looks like it’s going to be tipsy,” I said.

Bob looked it over. “Maybe I’d better ride it around the yard once.”

He threw a leg over the bike and pushed it forward so the stand flipped up out of the way. As he turned the front wheel toward the doorway, the bike began to lean sideways under the extra weight on the back. I saw Bob’s eyes open wide. Then he was on the floor, the bike was on its side, and the submersible was skidding across the floor to come to rest in the heap of junk in the corner.

I quickly lifted the bike so Bob could crawl out from under. “Center of gravity is too high,” he grumbled. “I’m going to have to put it behind the back wheel or something.”

“How about a trailer?” I suggested, as we picked up the submersible and checked for damage.

“Trailers are for wimps,” Bob muttered.

The submersible was all right. The bike had a bent basket on the side, which I pulled into shape with my hands. Bob cut the rack off the bike. “If I weld two long poles alongside the frame, I can hang this right behind the rear wheel,” he said.

“I don’t think it will handle very well,” I said. “A trailer’s the way to go.”

“Pfaah!” he snorted. He disappeared out the door. I found him rooting through a pile of long metal pipes. He found a couple that satisfied him, and a piece of angle iron. We dragged these back into the shop. He sized them against the bike, then cut them to length. He welded them to the sides of the bike so they stuck out behind the rear wheel about the length of the submersible. Then he ran two supporting pieces of metal up to the frame of the bike under the seat.

“Triangulation, that’s what gives strength,” he announced. He took the submersible rack and positioned it on the two long pieces. I held it in place while he welded it. (I had my own welder’s mask and gloves for protection.) He cut a couple more scraps of metal to brace it. It looked very interesting, sticking four feet straight behind the bike about a foot off the ground.

“Okay, let’s give it a try,” he said.

We hoisted the submersible into the rack. The bike’s front wheel came up off the floor as the bike tipped back and settled onto the ends of the poles. Bob hoisted himself onto the seat and pushed the front wheel down. He cautiously pushed the bike forward off the stand. “Steady as a rock,” he announced proudly. He pushed the bike forward and turned it toward the door.

When he flipped on the switch, the front wheel of the bike came up suddenly and the rack with  the submersible hit the floor with a loud “Clunk!” The back wheel skidded on the slick concrete, then grabbed, and Bob shot out the door, clinging desperately to the handlebars. He had no control over where the bike went because the front wheel flopped uselessly in the air. The rack dug two grooves through the gravel as Bob and the bike sped across the drive and into the huge pile of tires on the other side.

By the time I got out the door, Bob was lying in a heap of tires. The bike was somewhere underneath him, and the submersible was sticking through an old truck tire. I quickly set to pulling tires away until Bob could crawl out. The bike’s front wheel and fork were hopelessly bent, and Bob had a gash on his leg. One of the batteries had cracked open and was draining acid into the gravel. The submersible was okay. The rack was twisted sideways but still firmly attached to the bike.

I helped Bob back into the shed and got out the first aid kit. He had an exceptionally good kit because it got frequent use. “Ow!” he snapped as I poured peroxide into his gash. “Take it easy!”

“Oh, don’t be a wimp,” I said. I dabbed the area dry and squeezed some antibiotic into the wound. As I put a bandage on it, I said, “Does anything else hurt?”

He looked ruefully at his elbow. “I got a scrape on this arm, and I think I got some battery acid into it. Is battery acid toxic?”

“Probably,” I said. I dabbed peroxide onto the scrape and watched it foam.

Bob felt the rest of his limbs and his head. “I didn’t break anything,” he announced. “No other lesions, either.”

Once he was patched up, we dragged the equipment back inside. Bob sprinkled cat litter onto the dripped acid. “Dad says he’s going to start charging me for batteries,” he muttered. “He says I keep taking all the best ones.”

We looked over the wreckage. The front of the bike was pretty much destroyed. The rack was twisted and useless, as were the two baskets. The submersible seemed unaffected. The other battery appeared to be okay.

“Well, I guess I got some work to do by Friday,” Bob announced. “I’ll start on it tomorrow. I think I’ve done enough for today.”

I had a lot of work to do that week, what with the yard having been neglected while we were gone. I mowed, I edged, I dug, I trimmed the hedges, I pruned the trees, I weeded Dad’s garden. My sisters never seemed to have to do this kind of stuff. They were busy with summer jobs, summer classes, music camp, church mission trips....

Finally Friday came, and the yard looked perfect. I washed the car before Dad could even tell me to do it, straightened up my room, and gathered my camping gear. I went to the kitchen and gathered some food. Then I called Bob.

“Dad gave me some venison steaks, because Mom and the girls don’t like them,” I told him. “We’re out of salt. Can you bring salt and pepper and maybe some steak sauce or barbecue sauce? And do you have any potatoes? We don’t have any. I have some fruit and vegetables and a few drinks and snacks.”

“Sure, I’ll take care of it. Salt, sauce, potatoes. I’ll see you in a little while.” Bob sounded distracted on the phone.

I put together my backpack: a few clothes, towel, soap, bedroll, hammock, insect repellent. Dishes and food went in a cooler that I strapped to my bike. My hatchet and machete were on my belt. I clambered onto my bike and rode to Bob’s.

Bob was in the driveway. There was a trailer attached to the bike, the kind that people carry a couple of kids in, but it held the submersible and the winch. His toolbox was strapped to his handlebars, a bedroll was lashed underneath it, and the two new baskets beside the rear wheel were crammed with stuff. I noticed his chemistry kit standing in one basket, next to a pair of flippers and a snorkeling mask. Bob had a big backpack on his shoulders and was struggling with the straps. “Ready to go?” he asked.

“You aren’t,” I said.

“Pfaah!” he snorted. “I’ve been ready for half an hour. Just making some final adjustments.” He heaved the backpack higher and got the waist strap to click. He threw a leg over his bike and straddled it. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Did you bring everything?” I asked.

“Sure. They’re right here in this bag,” he said, patting a bundle in one of the baskets.

“Okay.” We pointed our bikes down the drive, and I slowly pedaled into the street. Bob gave me a minute to get up to speed, then flipped on his switch. The bike jerked under him, and his feet flew into the air. He shot out into the street. He managed to get his feet onto the footpegs and cruise up beside me.

It was about half a mile to the edge of town. Fortunately, there was only one stop sign on the way, because stopping and starting was something of a production for Bob. This one went smoothly; he didn’t tip, didn’t lose any luggage, didn’t run into anyone. Outside of town, we followed a long country lane that wound through farms and woods. After a couple of miles, there was a driveway that branched off to the right. We turned onto the driveway and then onto a path that wound through the woods.

I went first, while Bob waited. The path was a challenge even for me on my mountain bike. I had been through earlier in the spring with my pruning shears and machete and had trimmed back the limbs that overhung it, and someone had smoothed it with a pick and shovel, but it made several turns, and one never knew if a limb had blown across it or if someone was coming the other way.

The trail was in pretty good shape this time. A couple hundred yards in, a branch had fallen from a big tree, so I stopped to heave it aside. I got whipped a few times as I cruised the rest of the way, but at last I was in the clearing on the riverbank at the other end of the trail.

I reached under my handlebars and pushed the button on my air horn. A loud “Honk!” sounded, and birds flew out of the surrounding bushes. A couple of minutes later, I heard thrashing and rattling in the woods, and then Bob came flying out. He skidded to a stop beside me, the trailer slewing up beside him. His right cheek was red where a limb must have caught him.

He gave me the thumbs-up, and we turned onto the trail that ran along the river’s edge. I rode ahead again and stopped every few hundred yards to honk for him. After three such legs, we reached our favored camping spot, a spot on a high bank under a huge oak tree that overhung the water.

We had our own system for camping, which involved hammocks as high up in the tree as we could hang them. It was risky, but so far we had had no serious mishaps. I unloaded my bike and arranged my gear. Most of it went in a bag tied to a long rope. The rest sat in a pile on the ground. I took one end of the rope and began to climb. Near the top of the tree was my preferred spot, where two large limbs were just the right distance apart and there were several handy limbs for getting out of the hammock or hanging my gear within arm’s reach. I quickly pulled up my bundle and hung my hammock. I put a sheet and the pillow into it, and hung the bag on a limb beside it. I tied the rope to a fork just over the hammock. It hung almost all the way to the ground. It was for “safety,” although if I ever had to slide down it, I’m sure I would regret it.

By the time I clambered back down, Bob was just finishing his unloading. He had his pack on and had slung a couple of bags over his shoulders. The winch was at his feet.

“Okay, now watch how easily I do it!” he exclaimed. He whirled the cable and grappling hook around his head and launched them into the tree. They looped over a limb about halfway up. Bob cursed under his breath and shook the cable to try to loose it. As his complaints grew more vocal, I climbed up and undid the hook.

“Do you want me to hook it near the top?” I asked.

“No! Just drop it and I’ll sling it,” he shouted.
I dropped it and moved out of the way. He slung it again and it fell back at his feet. He whirled it again and got it snagged in a limb just above his head, so he had to reach up unsteadily on tiptoes to unhook it. It was hard to do with his pack on. Finally, after two or three more tries, he got it up into the highest branches, where it wrapped around a couple of thin branches.

He flipped the switch and grasped the two handles firmly. The winch slowly pulled in the slack on the cable and then pulled itself up until it was over his head. Bob stood with his arms stretched high, holding the handles of the winch, but nothing seemed to be happening. From where I was, I could see that the cable was pulling the thin branches steadily downward.

Suddenly there was a “crack!” and the cable snapped free. I heard a loud “thump!” from the ground, and then Bob was cursing again and dancing, which was difficult to do with the pack and all the gear on his shoulders. The winch had dropped on his toes. He fell sideways against the tree trunk and lost a couple of bags. He sat down, let his pack fall behind him, and grasped his toes in earnest, vocalizing the whole time.

I had managed not to fall out of the tree despite my laughing, so now I scrambled down to get the first aid kit. Before I got it out, Bob was back on his feet. He angrily gathered in the cable, whirled it a couple of times, and slung it into the tree. It wrapped several times around a large limb right where he wanted to go, and caught firmly. Bob flipped the switch and held firmly to the winch as it slowly rose into the air. It lifted him off the ground. He turned around once on his way up, while I whooped and cheered.

When Bob reached the limb, he punched the switch on the handle and the motor stopped. Before he could reach out to grab a branch, though, the cable began to whiz back out of the winch. Bob plummeted straight to the ground, from a height of about fifteen feet. His feet hit first, and he collapsed backwards. Fortunately, the winch didn’t hit his toes this time. It  just embedded itself into the soft ground between his feet.

I dashed over to where he was. “Bob! Are you all right?” I asked.

Bob lay on his back and muttered a steady stream of something unintelligible. He waved his arms in the air and kicked the object between his feet a couple of times. Then he sat up to catch his breath.

“Yeah, I’m all right,” he said. “Stupid freewheel! I forgot about needing a brake when you get to the top.”

He sat in silence for a while. I watched him to make sure he was okay. At last he stood up and went over to his bike. He unlashed his toolbox and brought it over to the winch.

Bob worked on the winch until supper. I built a fire and got the potatoes from his bag. I washed them in the river, wrapped them in foil, and buried them in the coals, along with a few vegetables and venison steaks. Then I climbed up into my hammock with a good book. My watch alarm went off after about 45 minutes. I climbed back down and dug the meals from the coals. They were done to perfection. “Chow’s on!” I announced.

Bob cleaned up his hands and came over to where I was sitting. He served himself a steak and a potato and cut the potato up. As he spread butter on it, he said, “Pass the salt.”

“Where is it? You were supposed to bring it,” I said.

“You said potatoes!” he said.

“I asked you to bring salt and pepper and maybe some steak sauce. Did you bring any sauce? Sauce is always salty,” I said.

Bob looked blank. “I heard potatoes. Did you bring any salt or anything?”

“Nope.”

He ruminated a while, then brightened. “I know! I’ll make some. Just give me five minutes.”

He set his plate aside and turned to burrow in his piles of stuff. I continued eating as I watched him set up his chemistry set.

“A salt is a combination of a base and an acid,” he muttered. “Table salt is sodium chloride. Do I have any sodium? What’s this? Empty. Do I have chloride? Some bleach, maybe? No bleach either. Well, this is a base. Okay. And this is an acid. Okay.”

He measured some powders together and added a few drops of water. The mixture foamed up and overflowed the mortar. He stirred it with a glass pestle until it stopped foaming. As the foam receded, a white residue remained on the sides of the mortar. Bob spooned some foam and residue onto his potato. “There we go,” he announced. “Do you want some?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I was using pickle juice to flavor my food, and it tasted pretty good.

Bob dug his fork into his food and took a big bite. He chewed a couple of times, then his eyes widened. His mouth opened. “Agh!” he exclaimed.

He spat out chewed-up potato and croaked, “Water!”

He looked around frantically for his canteen, then gave up and ran for the riverbank. He leaped over the edge. I heard a “thud!” as he landed on the beach below. I scrambled over to look. He had his head in the water. After a minute, he lifted his head and spat out a stream of river water. He immersed his head again.

When he appeared again a few minutes later, I had stopped laughing and was eating my supper. Bob didn’t say anything. He sat down, scraped off his potato, spread butter on it, and grimly worked his way through it along with a venison steak and some vegetables. I couldn’t resist a snicker every now and then. He eyed me angrily and kept on eating. As he finished, he opened his canteen and swigged down some water, and I couldn’t handle it anymore. I collapsed in laughter, tears streaming from my eyes. He looked at me coldly and picked up his dishes to take them to the river. He picked up the mortar and pestle, being careful not to get any of the foam on his hands. Then his mouth began to twitch. Suddenly a guffaw broke from his lips, and he was laughing as hard as I was.

We rolled around among our plates and laughed and laughed. Finally we composed ourselves enough to go down to the water’s edge and begin cleaning up.  Bob crouched over the water and dipped the mortar in it, and I started laughing again at the memory of him with his head submerged. He flung water at me, then began laughing again himself.

At last we finished and climbed back up to our campsite. I put my dishes into the ice chest and pushed the firewood into the middle of the coals so it would burn up. Bob fiddled again with his winch, then sat back.

“Well, I’ve got the gears back to where they were originally,” he announced. “I have to run the motor backwards to get the cable to come out. I think it will do for now, but when we get back home, I’m going to put another gear in it so it will freewheel when I want it to.”  He grinned a crooked smile. “I don’t know how I thought I was going to get down, anyway, with no reverse!”

He started the motor up and slowly ran a length of cable out. He picked up the grappling hook and whirled it around his head again. The first toss didn’t even come close to the branches he was aiming for. He ran out a few more yards, then tried throwing it again. Amazingly, it caught on a good strong branch high in the tree.

Bob started the motor and let the winch run until it was hanging before him. He stopped the motor and let it hang there. Then he took a long nylon strap and tied the ends to the handles. The middle of the loop hung just above the ground. He stepped on the strap and it sank to the ground. He started the winch again, and let it run until it lifted him a few inches. He stopped it again. “Hey, it works!”  he exclaimed. He swung just over the ground.

He started it up and rose steadily through the lower branches and into the heights of the tree. When he reached the top, with one hand he grabbed a branch while he turned off the winch with the other. The winch stopped and held its position. “Perfect!” he exclaimed. He stepped off the sling and onto a branch. “This is great! I should have thought of all this in the first place.”

He stepped back into the sling and lowered himself to the ground. He put on his backpack and slung the other bags over his shoulders. The winch raised him again into the middle of the tree.

Suddenly I heard him say, “Ow!” There was a snap, and something fell to the ground. The winch motor stopped. “Ow ow ow ow ow!” Bob whined. He muttered a long stream under his breath.

“Are you all right?” I asked. It was getting dark, but it looked like it wasn’t he that had fallen.

“Dagnab branch caught one of my bags and almost pulled my shoulder off,” he grumbled.

The winch started up again, and Bob rose to the top of the tree, where he hooked the bags over some small limbs and hung his pack from its straps next to where the winch was anchored. He went back down and brought up the other bag, which he tied by its broken strap.

He soon had his hammock in place. He had to put on his headlamp to finish organizing his stuff in the branches around his bed because by now it was completely dark.

I took a short walk along the riverbank. A few hundred yards downstream, I began to hear voices in the distance. It sounded like a lot of people. I returned to our campsite. Bob had just finished getting set up.

“Hey, it sounds like there’s some group camping down in the Jones’s pasture,” I said. “What do you say we swim down there and check it out?”

“Hey, this would be a great time to try out my submersible!” Bob exclaimed. He ran over to where it was and started to pick it up.

“No, no, man, not in the dark!” I protested. “What if it gets away from you? You might never find it!”

He set it back down. “Hmm. I guess you’re right. It would be really cool to cruise along the river at night, though.”

We cast off our shoes and shirts and jumped down the bank to the beach. We ran into the water and splashed out to where the current would carry us along. It moved at a fast clip, and in just a few minutes we swept around the curve into view of the pasture.

There were several fires going, and I counted a dozen tents. We could see figures moving to and fro, and others sitting around the fires.

“Girl Scouts,” I said. “It’s their big campout.”

We floated silently past, looking to see if there was anyone we recognized. I only knew a few girls in Scouts; the local troop had a lot of girls from several other towns. It was too dark to see who was there. There was a huge pecan tree a few yards from the river’s edge, which made each fire disappear briefly as we drifted by. We swept around the next bend and lost sight of them.

“Hey, what do you say we go over there tonight and do something?” Bob whispered.

“Like what?”

“Like pull some tent pegs, or set off some firecrackers, or put dye in their milk or eggs. I don’t know.”

“Cool. The only problem is, it’s a dark night, and we don’t know how their camp is laid out or anything. I’d rather do it tomorrow night, after we get a good look in the daylight.”

“I guess you’re right. I’m bushed anyway.”

We climbed up the bank and found the trail by feel. We started back upstream, moving at a pretty good pace. I got whipped by a branch or two, but we made it back to our site without serious problems. I hung up my wet shorts, put on some dry ones, and climbed up the tree.

I was getting into my hammock when I heard the winch start. Bob rustled a few branches as he passed by a few feet away. Then I heard a thump and “Ow!” There were thrashing noises, then I heard the winch stop. Then silence except for Bob grumbling under his breath.

“What happened? Did you run into a branch?” I asked.

Bob didn’t answer, but his grumbling became more audible. I chuckled to myself, lay back in my hammock, and went to sleep.

I awoke to the sounds of birds chirping and Bob’s winch letting him down out of the tree. I rubbed my eyes, yawned, and sat up. Bob had carried his submersible over to the bank and was about to lower it with a rope down to the water’s edge. I watched as he carefully dropped it onto the sandy beach.

“Hey, Bob,” I said. “How are you going to breathe when you’re underwater?”

He grinned up at me. “I got that figured out,” he said. He went over to one of his bags and pulled out a diving mask and a snorkel. The snorkel had a length of rubber hose taped to it. The hose went through a styrofoam ball. “With this snorkel, I can go down as much as six feet and still breathe,” he said. He took his gear and jumped down to the beach.

I climbed down the tree. By the time I reached the bottom, he was out in the water with the submersible. He went out into the deep water with the goggles on and pointed the submersible upstream. Suddenly it roared to life and Bob was whisked away across the surface of the river, hanging onto the submersible. It looked like a torpedo. He did something, and the submersible disappeared under the surface. Bob vanished a split second later.

Suddenly Bob popped to the surface. “I’ve lost it!” he trumpeted. His voice sounded funny with the mask on. He put his face back under the water and began to search frantically along the bottom.

I scrambled over to the edge of the bank. Just as I was preparing to jump down, I saw something gray go drifting by in the deep part of the river. I jumped down, ran in, and swam as quickly as I could to catch up with it. It was the submersible, tumbling downstream. I got a hold of both handles, turned it upstream, and pushed the button on the right grip. The motor roared to life and began towing me across the surface. I flew up to where Bob’s head was just emerging from the deep.

“Did you drop something?” I asked.

“Oh, you’ve found it! I thought it was lost for good!” he said gratefully.  “Those controls are awfully touchy. It pulled me down right into the bottom, and I whacked myself against a rock and lost my grip.”

We floated back down to our site and I lugged it out onto the beach.

“Okay. It looks to me like you need a bungee cord,” I said, “and probably you should damp your controls so it isn’t so touchy. Maybe some flotation would be good, too, so it comes back to the surface on its own.”

Bob clambered up the bank and began rustling through his supplies. I heaved the submersible up and climbed after it. Bob had found a couple of empty water bottles and a length of webbing. He handed them to me.

“Here. Figure out a good way to use these,” he ordered. He began to rummage through his toolbox. He tossed me a roll of duct tape.

I taped the bottles in a row along the top of the submersible, like a weird tubular fin. Then I tied the webbing to one of the handlebars, close to the body of the submersible.

Bob found the tools he needed and began to tinker with the controls. “Need to lengthen the linkages,” he muttered. He bent some things, did some drilling, changed a wire, and eventually pronounced himself satisfied.

We lowered the submersible back down to the river. Bob tied the loose end of the webbing to his wrist and waded out into the water.

“You should probably go along the surface for a while until you get the hang of it,” I called.

Bob nodded. He flipped the switch and went roaring off upstream. He disappeared around the bend. A few minutes later, he came roaring back. He turned towards me, and the submersible roared out of the channel and across the shallows, dragging him behind. I could see his eyes wide inside the mask as his belly and knees scraped along the pebbles and dirt of the riverbed. He slid to a stop at my feet, with the submersible completely out of the water.

“Ow!” he remarked.

He stood up. His belly and legs were rubbed red from the friction, and his elbow was bleeding again. “Wow! What a ride!” he exclaimed. “Ow! That was awesome! Ow!” He dipped some water to rub on his raw skin.

“Very cool,” I said.

“You want to try it?” he asked. He began to untie the strap.

“Sure.” I took the strap and tied it to my wrist.

“One thing I discovered up there,” Bob said, looking at his scraped elbow. “The river is too narrow to turn this thing around in. You have to stop and swing it around.”

I hefted the submersible and dragged it out into the channel. It floated just below the surface, with the bottles barely clearing the water. When I pushed the switch, we took off rapidly. As we swept around the bend, I cautiously manipulated the handlebars to change directions. Then I twisted the left grip gently. The submersible began a shallow dive. I closed my eyes as my face went under. Then I twisted the grip in the other direction and we sprang back to the surface. I tried diving a couple more times, going clear to the bottom and along it a little ways on my last attempt. Then I stopped the motor and turned to go back downstream.

I made most of the return trip underwater, straining my eyes to see where we were in the channel. I estimated where Bob would be, and twisted the left knob suddenly so that the submersible shot to the surface and clear out of the water. Just as my face broke the surface, the submersible splashed back into the water. I saw Bob to our left, turned the submersible in that direction, and cut the switch. I glided smoothly to a stop at his feet.

Bob’s eyes were wide with admiration. “Very, very cool!” he commented.

We spent an hour playing with it, until the battery died. Then we ate breakfast. Bob was very enthused.

After breakfast, he replaced the battery, put on his mask with the long snorkel, and went for a ride upstream. He came back a few minutes later and glided to a stop on the shore. His face was ashen. “I feel terrible,” he said. “I’m about to pass out.”

I took his elbow and helped him to sit up in the shallows. “I was cruising along,” he said, “and I started feeling yuckier and yuckier. I stopped for a minute, and then I felt fine. But coming back down, I started to pass out.”

I thought for a minute. “I bet it’s the snorkel,” I announced. “The hose is too long to let new air get in once you breathe into it.”

Bob feebly snapped his fingers. “That’s got to be it,” he said.  “I have to breathe out a different way. The mask covers my nose. I’ll have to breathe out of the corner of my mouth.”

He took a few deep breaths, then eased himself into the current again. He started upstream. A few yards along, he dived underwater. A minute later, he surfaced, spluttering. He popped his mask off and coughed and hacked. He floated back down and waded out. “It doesn’t work to breathe out of the corner of your mouth,” he wheezed. “I got water in my mouth and into the snorkel.”

I went to my backpack and dug out my swimming goggles, which only covered my eyes. I handed them to Bob. “I don’t know how easy it is to breathe in through your mouth without your nose being covered,” I said.

Bob put the goggles on and stuck his face in the water. He instantly lifted his head back out and coughed and sneezed. I snickered. Bob glared at me. Then he sat and thought.

“I think the solution is a shorter hose,” he announced. He went up to the toolbox and cut the hose in half and retaped the ball to it. Then he went back into the water. “I’ll have to breathe really deep, to make sure I get some fresh air each breath, and not go too deep,” he said. He practiced a while until he could lie face-down underwater for several minutes without problems. Then he took the submersible out into the river again and headed upstream.

He came back and reported that he had discovered that if he cut the motor and waited until he stopped, he could swing the submersible around and start in the other direction in just a few seconds without coming to the surface. He had to work hard to be able to float just below the surface, though, or water would get in the snorkel.

Bob spent about half an hour practicing. Before long, he could go for long distances underwater, with nothing showing except a foam ball covered with duct tape and a length of green hose. It was not very conspicuous. He also became adept at pushing it under the surface before he started it up, so it wouldn’t make so much noise.

“So, you ready to go see what the Girl Scouts are up to?” he asked me, his teeth gleaming.

“Sure,” I said. I got up from where I was sitting in the shallows and started towards the bank.

“Where are you going?” he called. “I want to cruise through there with the submersible!”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “You won’t see much underwater.”

“That’s okay. We can stop before we get there and look around.”

“Okay,” I said.

We swam out into the current and floated downstream. In a few minutes, we were just around the bend above the pasture. We drifted ashore on the pasture side of the river and crept cautiously forward. We could hear voices and splashing. There was a willow tree at the water’s edge just at the bend, and we crawled under it.

The river seemed to be full of girls. A number of them appeared to be doing laundry, while the others swam and splashed. The river had been dug deep and wide here, with a sort of rock and gravel dam to help keep the swimming hole deep. Most of the girls were in the shallows on the pasture shore.

“I’m going to cruise right past them,” Bob whispered.

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” I whispered back. “They’re sure to see you.”

“Pfaah!” Bob snorted. “They’re all caught up in what they’re doing. I can just cruise along the other bank and go right past them. They’ll never see me. Even if they do, they can’t swim that fast.”

He got to his feet and returned to the submersible, which was a few yards upstream. I stayed where I was. Bob put on his mask and took the submersible out into the depths. He waved at me, then dropped under the surface. I saw the snorkel jerk and began moving rapidly downstream.

I’m not sure exactly what happened next, but suddenly there was screaming and a circle of girls whacking at something in the water with their wet clothes. Then I glimpsed Bob in the middle of the circle with his mask still on, getting pummeled by the furious females. There was no sign of the submersible. I wondered if he had remembered to use the strap.

I watched Bob getting pummeled for a few more seconds, then decided I had better do something about it. I crawled out into the water (no one was looking my direction), took a deep breath, and swam out into the current. I swam underwater to where I could see a lot of legs and splashing. I swam up behind them, and saw the strap trailing off downstream, still firmly attached to Bob’s wrist. The submersible was under the surface because someone was standing on the strap. I cautiously made my way to it. Just as I reached it, something whacked me on the back of the head. I grabbed the handlebars and received several blows on the back. Then I pushed the button on the right grip.

The motor roared to life. It thrashed around in place for a second, while I got whacked a few more times. Some of the blows really stung. Then the strap snapped taut against my leg, I heard a scream, and we took off slowly through the water.

We roared through the shallows, gradually picking up speed, spray going everywhere. I could hardly see anything. The strap was still taut, so I knew Bob was in tow behind me. My knees were dragging over dirt and tree roots, so I turned to the left where the water was deeper. Suddenly I saw the pile of rocks the farmer had dumped to make a sort of dam. I banked sharply left, aiming for the spillway over the dam. My feet dragged painfully across the gravel, and my chest bounced over a boulder, knocking my breath out. Then we slid over the top of the dam, and dropped into the deep water beyond it. I dived the submersible and skimmed along the bottom going downstream for ten or fifteen seconds before surfacing.

We came to a stop several hundred yards downstream from the swimming hole. I looked back behind me and saw Bob, coughing and spitting and looking quite groggy. He had lost his mask and snorkel, his chest was raw, and in general he looked rather the worse for wear.

“How are you doing, buddy?” I asked him.

“Pfaah,” he said, spitting dirt and blood out of his mouth. “Not too bad, considering I’ve been pounded by a thousand angry Girl Scouts, dragged across the beach, scraped over rock piles, and then nearly drowned.”

He grinned. “Nice rescue, dude. I thought I was a goner there for a while.”

“No problem,” I said modestly.

“This is a remarkable machine,” he commented. “When you started it up, it pulled you, me, and two or three Girl Scouts for about ten yards before the girls managed to get untangled. Then it dragged you and me across the bottom of the shallows and over the gravel for another thirty yards before we got out into the channel. That’s a lot of power.” He examined his knees, which were scraped and bloody. His elbow was running red down to his hand.

I thought about Bob plowing along the bottom of the river pushing Girl Scouts in front of him, and snickered, then started to laugh. After a minute, Bob joined in. We roared and thumped each other on the back. I was trembling from the adrenaline.

Finally I calmed down enough to say, “There’s a posse of Girl Scouts just upstream, headed our way. We should probably go now.”

“Lead the way, maestro,” Bob said.

I pointed the submersible downstream and pushed the button. We roared around a couple of bends and came to a halt under the overhanging limbs of a willow.

“This looks like a good place to get out,” I said. I stood up and began to walk toward the bank.

“Hey, where are you going? I want to use the submersible to go back upstream. I bet I can get past them this time,” Bob said.

“Right,” I said. “I’m going to hike back up there, get my bike, and ride into town for the undertaker. See you in a while.”

I spent several hours in my hammock, recovering from the ordeal. Bob treated his wounds and changed the battery in the submersible before he got some rest. He was soon asleep. I dozed off a little later.

We awoke in the late afternoon to the sound of female voices. “Girl Scouts,” Bob whispered. “They’re going on a hike on the other side of the river.”

From where we were high in the tree, we could see a couple of sections of the trail that went up the other side of the river. The girls were walking along, wearing backpacks and talking up a storm. As the voices faded, Bob said, “Did any of them see our campsite?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “No one said anything.”

Bob sighed. “This is my favorite campsite. I would hate to have to find somewhere else.” He brightened. “Now that they’re gone, let’s go see what we can do at their site.”

“Okay.”

We gathered Bob’s supplies and a few tools and the winch and trudged down the trail to where we could see the pasture across the river. There was no sign of anyone. I crossed the river below the dam and sneaked back up. After several minutes, I tiptoed into the camp and began checking all the tents. No one was there. I signaled Bob, and he waded across the water below the dam, carrying his bags on his shoulders. He slipped once, but only one of the bags got wet.

We spent some time wandering through the camp to see what caught our attention. Bob was impressed with the clotheslines loaded with laundry. “Look, they even brought clothespins!” he exclaimed.

I wanted to run the clotheslines up into a tree and booby trap some tents so they would collapse, but Bob said, “No, I want to do something really big.” He thought a minute, looking up at the huge pecan tree.   A bonfire was laid out underneath it, and a canvas gazebo stood nearby. Bob snapped his fingers. “I know! You know how they always tell ghost stories at night around the campfire?”

“I know Boy Scouts do. Do girls do that?” I asked.

“They got to. It’s like a Scout tradition. Anyway, we rig a rope up in that tree so that, just as they’re hearing a really spooky story, a phosphorescent ghost swoops down and glides right over their fire. They’ll probably fall over backwards and get marshmallows all over themselves!” Bob cackled with glee.

I looked dubiously up into the enormous tree. There were no limbs for a good twenty feet. Bob said, “We’ll use the winch to get up there and rig the rope. We can make a ghost from some bedding or something.” He began rooting through his bag. He pulled something out that looked like a candle. He had an evil grin on his face. “A flare! This ought to get their attention!”

“How are you going to get a ghost to swing and light a flare?” I asked.

Bob thought a minute. He looked at the river. “I bet if the rope was tied here, and someone swung from that limb over there,” he pointed to a long, thick limb on the pasture side of the tree, “he could swing out over the river and drop right into the channel.”

“Someone meaning who?” I asked.

Bob looked at me. “You could do it,” he suggested.

“Or you could,” I said.

Bob took the winch and let out a long length of cable. He tried throwing it up into the tree, but couldn’t get it to go high enough. Finally, disgusted, he handed the grappling hook to me. “Here, you try it.”

I swung it in a circle beside me, letting cable slip through my hand until it was just clearing the grass. Then I slung it up into the tree. It draped over a large branch about thirty feet up.

“Perfect!” Bob said. He started up the winch. As it reached chest height, he picked up his bag of equipment, stepped into the strap, and rose up into the tree. It was hard work to climb onto the branch once he reached the top, but he managed. He ran some cable out of the winch, then lowered it to me by hand. I rode up and climbed onto the branch beside him.

Bob pulled a coil of rope from his bag and dropped one end down until it was just above the ground down below. He pulled it back up several feet, tied it to the limb, then pulled it the rest of the way up and tied a loop at the end. “We can step in this loop and swing,” he said.

“We?” I said.

“Okay, wimp. I can.”

Bob took the loop and cautiously worked his way along a big limb on the side away from the stream. The tree was so massive that he was able to get almost thirty feet away from the trunk. Nearly all of the slack was pulled out of the rope. Bob pulled the rest out and secured the rope to a limb. Then he crawled back.

“Now I need a costume. This is going to be awesome,” he said. He lowered himself with the winch and disappeared in the direction of our campsite.

While he was gone, I slid down the rope and amused myself by exploring the tents and putting rocks under every sleeping bag and twigs into the pillow cases. I found a saltshaker and put sugar in it, and shuffled laundry around between the different lines, leaving rocks in pockets and underwear.

Bob was back before long with my sheet and a roll of reflective tape. He took a knife and cut a hole in the very middle of the sheet.
“Hey, that’s my sheet! Why didn’t you use yours?” I protested.

“A ghost with Mickey Mouse pictures wouldn’t be very impressive,” Bob retorted. “Here, help me draw bones on this with the tape.”

We drew the rough outlines of a skeleton on the two halves of the sheet. Bob put it over his head. “How do I look?” he asked.

“Like a Krishna who’s afraid of traffic,” I said. “You just need to shave your head.”

The sun was behind the trees now. I said, “Don’t you think you should test the rope first? Make sure you can reach the river and all that?”

Bob glanced at the river and up at the tree. “It’ll work,” he said confidently. “Besides, they’ll be back any time now, and I’ve got to get way up in the top of the tree so they won’t see me. I’ll go up now and lower the winch to you.”

He patted his pocket to check on his flare, tied the sheet up out of his way, and winched himself up into the tree. He lowered the winch to me by hand, then started climbing higher up into the tree, pulling the rope up after him. He was nearly invisible by the time he had climbed as high as he could go.

I crossed the river with the winch and the bags, and winched myself up into a tree on the other side where I had a good view. After a few minutes, I heard voices, and then the Girl Scouts trooped into the camp. They immediately set to work cooking. The sun set as they were eating. In the twilight, I could see them cleaning up and washing dishes in the river. Then they gathered in a circle around the fire under Bob’s tree. They sang a bunch of camp songs, the scoutmaster talked, and I heard a lot of laughter. As it got dark, one of the older girls got up and told some sort of story. There were loud reactions and boos and laughter.  By the firelight, it looked like marshmallows were being toasted.

The scoutmaster got up again, and from the sound effects it sounded like she was telling a long and involved ghost story. I strained my eyes looking up into the tree for Bob, but I couldn’t see him among the limbs.

The scoutmaster’s voice rose as she neared the end of her story. I heard occasional gasps from the girls. Suddenly the scoutmaster screamed. A bright light flared up in the branches of the pecan, then flew in a graceful arc to land right in the campfire. The flames suddenly flared up about ten feet. There was a cackle of fiendish laughter, and a figure in a flapping sheet swooped down from the tree and right through the flames. Girls screamed and scattered. The figure swung out over the river, but instead of dropping into the water, swung back over the fire, still cackling.

Most of the girls had fled, but I saw someone run towards Bob and ram into him just after he came back through the fire. He swung in a new direction then, spinning. His cackling stopped. He swung back through the fire and collided with the gazebo, tearing it loose from its pegs. The gazebo fabric tangled around his legs. He kicked wildly. He swung back through the fire, then back again, dragging the canvas through the flames and coals.

The girl who had bumped him pushed him again, and another girl on the other side of the fire hit him with some sort of stick. The canvas suddenly burst into flames. I heard Bob yell, then I saw him drop right into the fire. He stumbled out, rolled over a couple of times, and crawled into the river, still trailing burning canvas. One girl appeared to be splashing him, trying to make sure the flames were out. The other followed him into the river and whaled on him with the stick as he lunged out into the deep water and disappeared from view.

I decided that it would not be a good time to lower myself with the winch; the noise might give me away. I watched the camp for a few more minutes to see what would happen. The scoutmaster was trying to bring order and make sure no one was hurt. The two girls by the fire were looking out into the river for Bob. I unhooked the winch, tied it over my shoulder with the strap, and carefully slid down the trunk of the tree.

I spent some time trying to decide what to do next. Should I go look for Bob, or return to camp? I decided that Bob would eventually come back to camp, as he was obviously able to crawl and swim. I shouldered the winch and silently crept up the trail.

When I got to camp, I decided against building a fire for fear it would attract unwanted attention. However, as I looked around, I realized there had already been unwanted attention. The bikes were gone, my cooler was gone, our drying clothes were gone, and so was everything else that we had left around.

I climbed up into the tree by feel to get a flashlight.  My rope wasn’t where I expected it to be hanging. As I got higher into the tree, I bumped my head on something hard and metallic.  I put out my hand and felt a tire and a handlebar. The two bikes were suspended high in the tree!

I found my hammock, and discovered that it was full of wet clothes. My bags were still there, but the clothes bag was empty. I located my flashlight and took a look around. The bikes were tied to my rope, as high up as could be. All my clothes had been dipped in the river, tied in knots, and piled in my hammock.

Bob’s bags were hanging where he left them, but I guessed that his clothes had undergone a similar fate. His hammock had a suspicious damp lump in the middle.

I climbed down the tree and began searching the bushes. Eventually I found the cooler in a low fork of a tree. The toolbox was behind a rock. Most of the other bags were dumped together in the middle of a patch of prickly shrubs. I lugged everything back to the campsite.

I was still searching for the submersible when I heard rustling. “Mike? Is that you?” came a loud whisper.

“No! I’m the Girl Scouts, come to drag you back and finish roasting you!” I hissed back.

I heard a ‘thump!’ and some muttered cursing. “Ow! What’s the doggone submersible doing here?”  Bob grumbled. He stumbled into the clearing, dragging it along, and wearily sat down with his back against a tree. “Bring me the first aid kit and a flashlight, will you? I got to take a look at my ankles.”

“I got to find it first,” I said. I began to sort through the pile of bags.

In the dim glow from my flashlight, I saw Bob look around. “Where are the bikes?” he asked.

I grinned and pointed up, holding my hand in the light so he could see the gesture.

“You put them up in the tree?”

“No, idiot! They did! They scattered all our stuff into the bushes, tied the bikes up in the tree, and just wait till you see what they did with our clothes!”  I located the first aid kit and another flashlight and handed them to Bob. “I can’t imagine how they pulled your big old bike up there. Must have been a bunch of them. I bet the whole bunch of them were over here on their way back from their hike.”

Bob took the flashlight and shone it on his ankles. There were several huge ugly blisters and a few more scrapes, as well as bleeding from the scrapes he already had. He sighed and dug out the antibiotic ointment. “Help me put a bandage on these, will you?” he asked.

I opened a couple of packages of gauze and taped big squares over the blisters and some of the scrapes.

“Boy, what a day!” sighed Bob.

“Do you think we should stay here tonight?” I asked. “They might come after us, since they know where we are.”

“I’m too tired to go anywhere else,” Bob said. “I need some sleep. Let them come.”

He wearily got to his feet. He took the winch, let out some cable, and feebly slung it into the tree. It hooked on a branch far from where he needed to go. He muttered something and began climbing the tree the usual way. He bumped into the bikes, muttered again, and resumed climbing. After a few minutes, I heard more muttering and a series of plops as his knotted wet clothes hit the ground beside me.

“What happened over there? Why didn’t you jump into the river when you first swung?” I asked.

Bob groaned. “My genius for improvisation. I swung so high that I thought I could get in another swoop and then drop. Some idiot bumped me sideways, and then everything went haywire. Shut up now and let me sleep.”

I put away the first aid kit and climbed the tree myself. I stuffed my wet clothes into my clothes bag, lay back in my damp sleeping bag, and surprised myself by drifting off to sleep within minutes.