The devil made me do it. Had to be

that - I'm too nice a person to have thought this up

on my own.

In every one of us, the

preachers will tell you, good and evil are at war with

each other. Sometimes we can actually witness the battle

within us. So it happened one beautiful day on the French

Broad River. (The very setting sounds... well, naughty,

doesn't it?)

As we headed up the Broad,

just above where it comes together with the Holston to

form the mighty Tennessee, Dave noted that the chart

shows a powerboat manufacturing plant on an island in the

river. Sure enough, around the bend we saw it, as slick

and neat and sterile as the boats tied up to its

canopy-covered dock. You have to understand, to lovers of

character boats, handmade wooden boats, sailboats,

vintage boats with lots of brightwork (as boaters call

the shiny varnish so hard to protect from the ravages of

the sun, especially the Southern sun), a power boat made

of molded white fiberglass has about as much character as

a bleach bottle.

Never mind that our Alice

III is molded fiberglass. Her snug trawler lines, her

dark green hull with matching scalloped canopy, her

upswept forward gunwale and Dutch door more than make up

for her plastic genesis.

The Bleach Bottles are all

about speed and noise and a quiet lake turned into a

turmoil of water-eroding banks and swamping canoes. And

they all look alike to us, so much so that it's hard to

tell which have been swathed in shrink-wrap plastic for

transport and which have not.

There seemed to be a small

crowd near one of the docks, and it appeared one of these

soulless boats was being launched, its new owner watching

anxiously as shrink-wrap was pulled off its bimini. Then

we noticed a battery of cameras and lighting equipment on

the dock from which another boat was pulling away. It

appeared to us to be a commercial shoot, for an ad,

perhaps.

"I wonder if we'll see

ourselves in Powerboat Magazine," Dave said.

"And I wonder what they'll say about the boat in the

background. `Why settle for this when you can have

that?'"

"Hardly," I

replied, although I wasn't sure just which way he meant

it. Noticing the orthodontically perfect couple in the

boat suspending their smiles until we got out of camera

range, I said, "I think she's saying, `Ooooh, that's

so cu-u-ute! I want one of those.' And he's saying,

`Shhh! We're being paid to make this Bleach Bottle SX26

look good.'"

Well, the French is Broad

but not very deep. We motored on up to where she becomes

too shallow to navigate, and made a reluctant U-turn. It

was about then that Virtuous Me looked at that

exceptionally clean water and decided this was a good

time to do some wash.

There's nothing more

virtuous than turning dank rumpled laundry into fresh

clean clothes, washed, folded and ready to be stowed in

the nets above our bunks. Doesn't matter where she is,

what she's doing, woman wants things clean and neat and

her family provided for. Can't help it. It's in the

genes.

Scrubbed in the little blue

bucket, rinsed in the river roiling past our hull,

squeezed as hard as I could squeeze, the laundry soon

hung on the lines in the stern cockpit. Virtuously. White

socks and undies, T-shirts and checkered towels, my nylon

nightie and Dave's boxer shorts with the German shepherds

on them - all dancing together in a 4 mph breeze.

I relaxed in primal female

satisfaction. The clothes would dry in no time, and to

keep A3 from looking like a gypsy wagon, I'd have them

off the lines before we got back to downtown Knoxville.

But for right now, who's going to notice? And that's when

primal devilishness set in and virtue took a hike.

Realizing that we were

almost back to the Bleach Bottle Boat Works, I actually

went aft and rearranged the laundry to make sure that the

nylon nightie and the shorts with the German shepherds on

them were on the side nearest their dock. T-shirts

shimmied from side to side, white socks kept time with

the checkered towels, and I stood out in the front

cockpit in my green flop-brimmed sun-hat and faded denim

shorts, and raised a bleach bottle of my own to toast the

antiseptic clones lined up at the docks.

The bemused photographer,

the people whose boat was being commissioned on this

bright sunny day, the orthodontically perfect models in

the blindingly white boat - they all just gaped. And

then waved

They had the grace to wave

at this apparition cruising through their photo shoot on

the French Broad, and for anyone who's keeping score, I

think the battle between good and evil drew a tie.?

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