Tale of the Mooring Maids

When I sat down to write this column, I wanted to say something about the moorings.  Since I don’t own a boat, the moorings are really someone else’s problem which puts them right at the top of my list of things to deal with.  Trouble is, all faithful Mariner readers already know what I think about the moorings, so a straight rehash of the facts is right out. 

Now, if I were a real columnist like Mike Barnicle, I’d simply call up my brother and have him dictate a column over the phone, but since Jim doesn’t know anything about moorings (I checked), I suppose I’ll have to write this one myself.  Then I realized that the reason this whole mooring thing seems so ridiculous to me is that I come from the source of all knowledge, the People’s Republic of Cambridge.  Back there, we had a  way of dealing with problems like this.

First, we set up a committee to investigate the problem.  In the interest of diversity, there’d be representatives of the Brazilian, Portuguese, West Indian, Italian, Hispanic, and Irish communities along with one plain old white person and one plain old black person.  Down here, I suppose we could require each member of such a committee to trace his lineage back to a different county in Ireland while reserving one seat for a person of English/Scottish descent.  Like every appointed body on the South Shore, one seat would also have to be reserved for a member of the Coastal Coalition.

The committee meets once a month for several months at an expensive Chinese restaurant, with dinner on the town tab.  Every official gathering in Cambridge somehow involves an expensive Chinese restaurant, which in a real food-town like Cambridge, is great fun and makes public service much more attractive.  There being no expensive Chinese restaurants in Scituate, our committee could meet at Barker Tavern and order in fake Chinese accents.

After months of arguing about whether or not the commuter rail is at the root of the mooring problem, our committee eventually issues a report.  Not only are the moorings public property, but so are the boats that are attached to them, along with whatever vehicles are used to get them in and out of the water.  Boating is a basic right, the report declares, just like privacy, health-care and the right to bear machine-guns.  That being the case, a percentage of the boat supply is to be set aside for the use of the boatless.  The rest of the boats are reserved for the use of town residents who will sign up to use them on a waiting list maintained, naturally, by the harbormaster.

The report also identifies the moorings as an under-utilized revenue source.  As such, the annual mooring fee is immediately raised to its true market value of $18,000.  More importantly, in a continuing revenue sense, the report defines a three page list of boat parking violations ranging from non-functional bird propellers to failure to leave boat bumpers deployed.  A fleet of mooring maids will be hired to write boat parking tickets, which, of course, the nominal boat owners will have to pay.  The question of boat names is left unresolved though the report does note startling levels of sexism, wealthism, bad spelling and, of course, bad taste among marine monikers.  The last hundred pages of the report deals with the uniforms, civil service and collective bargaining status of the mooring maids.

A multi-cultural festival is held to celebrate the work of the committee.  A range of music, from lively reels to soulful ballads, is played, and authentic English, Irish and Scottish food is served, though, not surprisingly, all the action is at the Guinness booth.  The moorings are not mentioned, as, by this point, the people who started the argument have all gotten faculty appointments out-of-state and everyone who’s left is heartily sick of the issue.

So, as you can see, there’s a simple solution to almost any problem if you just take a modern, inclusive, approach to it.  Tune in next week as I explain the magical connection between the police chief’s civil service status and a lifetime appointment for the fire dispatcher. 

John Rodley