long arm farm

…Cass County deputies received a report at 10:15 a.m. that a man was riding a “makeshift kayak” in the Red River south of town. He had been spotted by a resident who lived in a development at 100th Avenue South, off County Road 81, said Joel Stading, a Cass County sheriff’s detective….

They located him staying at a riverside residence in rural Moorhead. At that time, they learned his “boat” was really a fiberglass casket cover, about 2 feet deep. It didn’t look like the actual lid to a coffin, but was casket-shaped and looked like it might have been used to protect a wood casket, Stading said.

“Apparently, it had washed up in his yard in the flood of ’97,” Stading says. “He had several of them and said he had used them for things like planting flowers.”

The man, described as a 49-year-old Detroit Lakes man named Charlie, was piloting the coffin-craft with homemade oars but was not wearing a personal flotation device, according to deputies. Computer problems on Sunday night kept them from accessing the incident file, so they did not have Charlie’s full name…