Sunshine & Ian

Dayton, Tennessee:

Jus' passin' on through - First we met Sunshine. She came dashing over to us when she saw we parked near the funky green houseboat she calls home. She's 8 months old and tried to be fierce, barking aggressively at us - but when I told her sharply . . . "Hey! none of that! we're friends!" . . . she immediately melted, wagged her tail, started dancing around us and wanted to play as we leaned over to pet her.

Her owner - Ian, put her in his pickup while we talked. He explained how he found Sunshine in the parking lot, a tiny 5 wk old skinny bundle of puppy, abandoned - a "drop off" he called her. Not wanting a dog - his emotions gave way though, when that first day she sat on the gang way to his boat without moving for 2 hours.

With easy movement and a friendly southern drawl, Ian first answered my questions about what's it like to live on a houseboat on a small Tennessee river - "Great!". Being a boat mechanic, he waved his hands at all the other houseboats and said, "I've worked on and fixed all of'em". He went on to describe how he's rebuilt everything on the junked green boat he found - that it only needs an engine now, all the other systems (water, waste, heat) are in great working order . . . and being divorced, he now has a girl friend who shares his dream of owning a 65 foot barge, loading it with his truck and all their belongings and boating down to Pensacola, Florida to live in the warmth.

Ian said he needs the warmth now because he sounds like a 'bucket of bolts' in the cold Tennessee mornings - all his joints crack and creak, mainly his knees and legs because of a horrendous motorcycle accident - hitting diagonal RR tracks during the first few minutes of a rain - remembering only keeping his legs together as he flew off and slid feet first towards a guard rail.

Waking up in the hospital days later with 2 broken legs and other fractured bones - a cop stood over his hospital bed writing a ticket for riding without a helmet. Weeks later when he could walk, he took the officer into the field where he finally landed. They searched and searched and eventually found his helmet that saved his life, cracked in half like an egg in the back and only held together by a thin piece under the chin.

Lucky to be alive, he got out of that ticket!