Assonance

Assonance (ass’-o-nance): Repetition of similar vowel sounds, preceded and followed by different consonants, in the stressed syllables of adjacent words

“When the going gets rough, you better start rowing.” This insightful saying is based on our experience fishing for mackerel and flounder in Little River, a narrow inlet that serves as home for lobster boats and pleasure boats hear Ocean Point, Maine. We were too poor to afford an outboard motor, so we rowed. Our rowboat was a 14 foot flat bottom work boat. It had belonged to my grandfather. It was rumored that he used it to offload Canadian whiskey during Prohibition.

There was a bullet hole in the starboard gunwale and and the slug was embedded in the port gunwale. My grandfather told me the bullet skinned his knees as he was returning to shore with four cases of gin. But my mother told me it was an irate husband who had taken a shot at him as he fled his yacht, caught “enjoying” the man’s wife on one of the fighting chairs. Luckily Grampy had tied his rowboat on the opposite side of the boat from where the husband had landed and tied up. While Grampy rowed like a 500 HP Dodge Hemi, the husband rummaged around below, looking for his .30-30. By the time he found it, and got off a shot, Grampy had almost rounded the point. It was a close call, but Grampy had many similar close calls, until he fell to his death while varnishing a spar at Hedgedon’s Boat Yard. His last wish was for a Viking burial—his corpse set adrift in a burning boat. My father found a beat up old boat in somebody’s front yard that had been turned on its side and made into a flower box. He dumped out the dirt and flyers and threw the boat into the back of his truck, stealing it from the “summer puke’s” yard. He wrapped Grampy in a sheet of canvas secured with tire chains, threw him in the boat, doused him and the boat with gasoline, and hauled the boat to a secluded cove on the Damariscotta River.

The family gathered at the cove at sunset to see Grampy off. They launched the boat in the river and gave it a push. My grandmother said, “I hope you get eaten by crabs.” Dad threw a match and Grampy and the boat went up in flames. The tide was going out, so the flaming boat took off down river. It was about two miles to the Atlantic Ocean.

A passing Coast Guard cutter saw the flames and pulled toward shore for a closer look. They saw the burning boat and the gathered people. The cutter’s Captain, using a megaphone, ordered everybody to raise their hands. They were under arrest. Everybody ran like hell through the woods to where they had parked their cars. This was before the days of DNA, so they made a clean getaway and Gampy sank to the bottom near the bell buoy at the mouth of Little River, where he was eaten by crabs.

But, here we were now in Grampy’s boat—I had inherited it from my father when he left home and never came back. He had used the rowboat to take summer pukes out to Fisherman’s Island to look for detached lobster buoys, and in July, to steal baby seagulls from their nests. We named the boat Leaker—we spent as much time fishing from it as we did bailing it out.

Anyway, we were going to catch some flounder. The tide was perfect. We had plenty of bait. We were ready to catch some fish! Then, the wind started blowing, making whitecaps and roughing up the water something fierce. “Leaker” was making creaking sounds like she was going to fall apart. It was time to get the hell back to the dock. I remembered the saying: “when the going gets tough, you better started rowing.” I ROWED! I rowed like a double-triple maniac.

We made it to the dock, tied her up, and walked home just as it started to rain. .

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.