Hospital Visitor: Schooner Days MXLVII (1047)

by C. H. J. Snider

Idyll of a Sewer Slip—I.

THE lay there in The Hospital, like a city order out-patient with no home to go back to. "The Hospital" was the sewer slip at the foot of Jarvis street, south of the muddy Esplanade, the year 1898. When Jarvis was New street and the western of the town York, here had been the market wharf. Now the place was a yard for stone, sand and gravel flanked by a slip into which "raw sewage," very raw sewage, poured night and day.

She was humped and hogged and draggle-tailed, and black as a faded old felt hat. Her sides were shingled with pieces of hammered-out tomato tins, tarred canvas, and even thin boards, tacked over butts and seams to keep the oakum in. If she was afloat it was because the water in the slip was too thick for her to sink through.

That, indeed, was why she was here—to get her seams clogged by the slime and scum. Every time the angel troubled the cess pool, great blobs of sewer gas burst around her in obscene eddies and the seams sucked a little more filth and gas-tar in which kept the water out.

LAKE ERIE BORN

The name and address printed on her baby back when she left the launching cradle in 1864 was "P. E. YOUNG of PORT DOVER." It was still there.

She had been born a Lake Erie scow, square at both ends. For thirty years Toronto's Esplanade had known her as the Paddy Young. By 1898 the oldest wharf rats had forgotten that when she first came to Lake Ontario she had hailed from Wellington Square, with Wm. Hall as owner. Wellington Square itself was a forgotten port by the time of this Spanish American War which 1898 ushered in.

On the last haulout, Capt. Jim, who knew his Bible and practiced it, had daubed her all over with tar. Noah had pitched the Ark within and without with pitch. Lew Naish, glad to be clear of such a heart-breaker, promised six coffin handles — you could get them for 25 cents apiece then — to nail on the sides of the funeral remains. They would have brightened her up. Anything would.

Capt. Jim felt blue as he sat alone on her rail, watching the sewer gas bubbles burst this day. He himself was so crippled with rheumatism from the wet stonehooking calling that he was barely able to get around. Young Burns, his standby, was dying of consumption, down on Trinity street. Slabsy was in jail again. Liverpool Andy had declined a "site" in the rattletrap unless, as he specified, it carried with it freedom from pumping and the privileges of catching carp in the hold.

Bilgewater was so chronic in the Paddy that bottom grass and slub had grown luxuriously between her skin and ceiling. She needed four able-bodied men for a crew, but she was no longer able to carry enough stone to give a living for two. Sometimes it took a month for her to make one trip. She would have to hole up in Oakville, Port Credit, Frenchman's Bay or Whitby, while her crew took the scow, out into the lake on a quiet day, loaded it, sculled it back to where she lay, and gently unloaded it aboard. Then, half full of stone and water, she would have to wait her quiet chance to float as far as the Toronto market.

"Dang it," said Capt. Jim, "if anybody offered her to me as a present now I'd give him a dollar to take her away. If I had it."

ANGEL OF THE POOL

A man with a reddish moustache appeared. He was out of place at The Hospital. He wore good clothes, the fashionable snuff-colored ones of the year, and a new brown felt hat. Capt. Jim thought he might be an alderman from the old City Hall on Front street above.

"How's business, captain?" he asked.

"None," said James, who was captain only by dockside courtesy and lifelong experience.

"Sell her for $100?"

"Why, mister, they was $2,700 spent rebuilding this vessel, and—"

"Twenty years ago. She needs more than that spent on her now. She'd cost me $3,000 before I got through. Too much. Well, no harm in asking. So long."

"Wait a minute," called James,, "did you say cash?"

(Answer next week.)

THE "PADDY" IN HER PRIME