# 5: Wilbur

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Wilbur Liked to tinker. The problem was that Wilbur was of limited financial means. He was a day laborer when he could find work, unemployed when he couldn't. He lived in an old trailer house out side of town and tinkered in a small shop in the back. He built things. Wilbur was pretty smart when it came to “things.” Not so much when it came to people, especially gurls.

From time to time Wilbur got “bees in his bonnet” as his grandmother had used to say before she passed on. He became obsessed. He became fixated on one idea and followed it through to the bitter end. Unfortunately many of those ends WERE bitter, at least for his social life.

This last one had been particularly so. It had cost him a girlfriend. Odd that. Imagine a girl that didn’t like guns, motorcycles or boats. It was probably just as well for Wilbur. Still, he was feeling sad. He decided that he needed some “me” time. That meant total isolation. He’d go to the lake. He looked at the primary cause of his love-life’s failure and loaded it up with food and gear. Then he climbed aboard and rode away.

The lake he went to was difficult to reach in the extreme, really hard to get to. No automobile could get near it. Not even a jeep. The trails were too narrow, steep and twisty. For many miles he was either in low gear crawling up a skinny goat track, or going down one. At the bottom were arroyos. At the top were ridges. No, definitely no place for a four wheeler. In fact a person on foot would have a hard time. His little battery assisted, two wheeler was a great climber. That’s why he’d built it, to take him to places where no man had gone before. Going downhill stored energy so that it could be used going back uphill. So far it seemed to be working fairly well.

He was in no hurry and didn’t need to go fast. Attempting to go fast in this terrain was a recipe for disaster anyway. Eventually he got to where he was going. Then Wilbur disassembled his two wheeler and reassembled it into a small boat.

His design was ingenious. Every piece, every part did double duty. For example, the front wheel and fork became the rudder while the drive wheel become a center mounted paddle wheel, the frame work was reassembled to become that of a boat. The reconfigured frame slipped into a nylon “boot” that, while folded up, had done duty as a seat cushion. The result was a skin-on-frame boat.

It didn’t take him long and he was ready to go. He made sure everything was strapped in appropriately and climbed in. It was time to do some serious fishing.

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The Next Episode will be
# 6: Bad News…
The Previous Episode was
# 4: Soggy Hell…
The First Episode was
# 1 : Prologue…
......
Book One: SoulStone
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