I had stopped by to see him at his invitation. That, in itself, was unusual as, like most bachelors, his most important possession was his privacy. But he had something that he wanted me to see, and I was a trusted member of his unique guild. How I knew him, what was my actual association with him: all of that is unnecessary to the story.

What is necessary is to know that, next to his privacy, he valued his reputation the most. Again, that is a trait common to bachelorhood. Rather than viewing himself as peculiar, he viewed the challenges of ordinary life as frivolous. He did not try to find a place in the world for his life. Rather, he strove to find a place in his life for the world. And the world wanted to paint him in a certain manner, while he chose to have the artistry that was his life secreted from the world.

Greg was determined not to be humiliated or isolated for his oddities. One spring, he purchased a canoe. One problem: he didn’t know how to canoe, in spite of being raised mere miles from a lake. Undaunted, he decided that he would learn to canoe, before he launched the boat, so that he would not be humiliated when he took the canoe on its maiden voyage. How to do this?

As circumstance would have it, he lived in a small shack that sat on a meagre footing. He had wanted a basement, and had been laboriously excavating by hand. After two months of digging, he had a sizeable cellar under his cabin, approximately twenty-two by twenty-five feet. Unfortunately, the spring had been particularly wet, and the clay depression had filled with water, running in from the sloped sides. This was an ideal opportunity.

Dark one night, well after midnight, he slid the boat into the hole. It fit perfectly, with bow and stern barely clearing the sides. The boat floated. He tossed the paddle into the boat, donned his lifejacket, and climbed into the canoe bending low to clear the floor joists above him. As he did so, his weight eased the canoe lower into the water. Too low. Nose and heel grooved into the wet clay, and as he attempted to seat himself, the two points of balance gave way.

In an instant, the boat flipped, its gunwales digging further into the mud. Greg, tossed upside down as the boat flipped. It lodged itself securely in the goo.

“All I could think of,” he told me later, “was that someone would find me, drowned, and the headlines in the papers would read ‘Man drowns in boat in his own basement.’”

As I held my sides in agony, laughing uncontrollably, he continued, “There was no way I was going to let anyone know that I had done something so stupid. So I turned over on my knees, and used my back to winch the boat in the air. But all that happened was that my knees sunk deeper into the mud.”

I was in excruciating pain, my sides throbbing from laughter, as he concluded, “I had to use the paddle to dig a channel out from under the canoe. It took me almost an hour!”

He then led me around the side of the shack, where the canoe, still stuck in the quagmire, remained under his house.

“Want to buy a canoe?”

Then he concluded, “You won’t tell anyone about this, will you? I don’t want anyone to know I can’t canoe.”

Between my heaves of giggles, I assured him that no one would know.

Not likely, though!