A Border Town Shaped by the Sea
Transcription of oral recording
“He took a dory out, a dory, to give kids a ride there although thirteen got in the boat and he said there’s too many and some’s got to get out. He took it out to give the kids a ride. It’s something, lot of ’em had never been in a boat. Well my sister got in, and, Ellen, and she got out, she was the thirteenth person to get in, so she got out. and we went out, up to Gardner’s Lake And either the waves came in over the boat or that he went to turn to take it back to shore and it flipped right upside down and everybody was dumped out right in the water. And two, two came up beside the boat, Leah Wilcox. she lived up over the hill from us, and Barbara Tyler saw a brother and sister drown. So she swam up to the boat, she could swim, and grabbed ahold the side of it, and Waldo Raleigh and Macky Knowles swam up and got the two of them, they pr...they must have been high school age, and Wyman Ramsdell gr...I had...I was so far gone that I just wanted to go to sleep and dream of a book that I had read about the sea babies or somethin’ I had read in school. I was nearly dead. ’Course I’d swallowed so much water, and Wyman Ramsdell who lived right there across the field from where I live now, he grabbed me by the hair of the head, and, but I would have drowned him because I was so far gone that I just wanted to go to sleep. I’s nearly dead, in other words, and so, they, my father, then the trucks, were, had sideboards on, in sections like three on each side of the truck, it wasn’t one straight thing. And the men were all down at the spring after water, with drinkin’ water. When they came back my father floated one of those sideboards out and they put me on that and brought me in. And then the Ridge minister Mr. Cassens gave me artificial respiration.”
Audio recorded November, 2008