Richard Rich’s ladder truck has been zooming across the water for 31 years now.
The 26-foot boat is decorated like a fire engine year-round, he said, but it’s pretty hard to make out the emergency vehicle during daylight hours; to the casual eye it just looks like Rich’s vessel has been wrapped in an additional lattice of plastic tubing.
The real magic comes out at night. That’s when the outlines of Rich’s floating fire engine gleam and glitter against the dark river — complete with whirling emergency light topping the whole contraption like a cherry on a sundae.
“This is Christmas, to me,” said Rich, 57. “I’m single, I don’t decorate a Christmas tree. This is my Christmas tree.”
Christmas Ships season is almost here, with flotillas of decorated vessels parading up and down various local waterways nearly every night between Dec. 4 and Dec. 20. Check the website, www.christmasships.org, for a complete schedule of routes and optimal viewing spots. The website also includes photos and videos, a history of the 61-year tradition, ways you can donate, tips for new skippers and even some new skills they’ll probably master in return for the hard work and expense of this entirely voluntary, nonprofit project — like learning how to execute special maneuvers on the water, such as the curtsy, the cartwheel, the circle and the circle-within-a-circle.
A public Christmas Ships meet-and-greet is scheduled for 3 to 5 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 19, on the public dock in front of RiverPlace Hotel in downtown Portland; it’ll be a great opportunity to examine the ships up close — for that revealing view of their daylight selves — and meet the captains. Santa and Mrs. Claus will be on hand too.
Tag-alongs
For many new and returning skippers at an organizational meeting in mid-November — and in subsequent visits to a couple of their vessels — Christmas Shipping counts as Christmas itself.
Like Larry and Betty Aberg of Vancouver, whose boat, the Bubinga — that’s an African rosewood — also serves as a cozy Christmas nest, decorated tree and Nutcracker collection and all. Outside, the Bubinga is dolled up with a team of 10 running reindeer driven by Santa in his sleigh — while an alarmingly green Grinch, up above, grins over the presents he’s stolen.
“I love decorating,” Betty said. “It’s that time of year when everybody is happy. We just love to share it.”
That’s a far cry from her childhood, she said. Betty said she grew up poor and without any Christmas at all. So she’s always made sure to provide her own son with the best Christmas possible; now that he’s grown and on his own, Betty and Larry have spent the last few years devoting themselves to this floating Christmas parade.
They never saw it coming, they said. They only took a notion, one night seven years ago, to tag along after the convoy with a meek little string of lights. It was just for fun, Betty said — but then “Somebody comes on the radio and it’s like — ‘Hey who’s that last boat?’ ”
A frozen moment. Were the Abergs in trouble? Far from it. The friendly voice on the radio suggested they stop flirting from afar and join up for real.
“Everybody is so helpful and so supportive,” Betty said. “It’s really a fun group of people.”
And worshipped from afar, Larry added. He loves the crowds on land and even the carolers who sing over the water, he said. “I just love the reception we get. Everyone we talk to thanks us for doing it. It’s our way of doing something for community. It’s our way of spreading the spirit.”
Richard Rich, the floating fire engine skipper, said: “It is a bunch of really close friends who might not see each other for 10 months of the year. It’s kind of a big family reunion every November. It really feels like a family.”
100-foot view
Rich grew up in a floating home at the Oregon Yacht Club. He is one of seven brothers and said his parents “always figured they would lose one. It’s just too easy to lose one in the water.” He’s been working on the water since the early 1970s and continues to make a living doing all sorts of diving, maintenance and odd jobs with a small fleet of boats.
Somewhere along the line, a Christmas Shipping friend invited him out for some cold, wet holiday fun. Rich was immediately hooked — partly because he happened to own a whirling emergency light, he said. A helicopter? An airplane? A fire engine, he realized — and his fate was sealed.
At first, Rich spent way too much time trying to figure out how to make his engine’s truck wheels “spin”; since tires are black, he figured, the spokes would have to be lit up as they went around and around. It took a while before the proverbial light bulb went on over his head: black tires against black water and black sky would be basically invisible (and the glittering spokes would look like … what?). Rich wound up simplifying his design.
That was Larry Aberg’s advice during the November meeting: Keep it simple. Don’t get bogged down in too-clever details that squinting viewers will never notice. “Intricate detail that looks awesome close up won’t look like anything from a mile away,” he said. Instead, Aberg suggested, think in terms of bold (lit up) outlines. Try sketching your vision on the street or your driveway in chalk, large as life, and then backing up 100 feet to see if the idea comes across.
An electrical engineer by profession, Aberg covered the way decorative lighting technology has improved in recent years. Christmas Shippers used to have to string together what seemed like billions of individual, incandescent bulbs, figure out how to secure them to the ship and — crucially — how to keep them dry and protected; they also used to have to devote a second generator to lighting all those power-hungry bulbs. They get darned hot, he added.
Rich said he used to dip thousands of incandescent bulbs into red paint, one by one, and then tie the light strings to hundreds of feet of PVC piping with black electrical tape. “It looked like a plumber and an electrician got into a fight,” he laughed.
Nowadays, fortunately, there are plenty of affordable commercial products that make the job cheaper, easier and less energy intensive. Plastic-encased rope lights — full of LED or incandescent bulbs — are better protected, plenty bright and often programmable to create whatever sorts of illusions of movement you’re looking for, Aberg said (like galloping reindeer legs and spinning fire engine wheels). And black plastic mesh with twisty-ties has become the go-to method for lashing your lights to your craft, he said.
All of which has made life much simpler for Christmas Shippers, Aberg said — supposedly.
“Wires, wires, wires,” was his greeting to a visitor on a recent morning while readying Santa’s fleet of reindeer for their run on the river. “I’ve been running lots and lots of wires.”
In the water
Rich’s home is Portland’s Tyee Yacht Club marina, where he serves as the volunteer safety and fire watch officer. He makes it his business to know who’s here, what they’re up to and how it might affect the community of floating homes. He’s a safety-minded guy who says drinking has no place on the water. Larry Aberg said the same thing. Both men showed off the latest in personal flotation devices, boasting strobe lights and whistles that get activated the moment they hit the water.
Both skippers recalled the worst moment in Christmas Shipping anytime recently: In 2011, a guest slipped and fell into the icy water from a vessel that had finished its run and was docked at St. Helens, Ore. He was not wearing a life jacket. (Media reports don’t mention alcohol as a factor, but both Rich and Aberg did.)
“We heard the screams,” Aberg said. “It was awful.” Many ships responded immediately, he said, and many lights desperately searched the water. The man’s body was recovered later; his family has sued the owners of the vessel. The Christmas Ships organization was not to blame, Larry said, but what had been a fairly informal group has gotten a lot more formal and liability-conscious since then.
If you’re a Christmas Ship guest, expect your host to greet you at with a life jacket and to urge you to proceed with care and caution.
“It’s slippery,” Larry Aberg said.
