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TERRY WOKE ME UP the next morning pounding on my door at 5 a.m. Mr. Jenkins would be here soon, he said. We were too tired when we got in the night before to assemble the lift frame over the port hull, so we had to do that this morning before we could load it onto the trailer. Terry had everybody in the family running around in a frenzy before Mr. Jenkins backed into the driveway. Mom and Janie were staying behind, spending another day packing up the last few things in the house that we would need. After we moved the port side hull over to the lakeshore today, we would still need to make one more trip with Mr. Jenkins’ truck and trailer tomorrow to carry the crossbeams, the deck structures, and all the miscellaneous parts like the two masts, rudders and assorted gear that was part of the ship. Terry had negotiated with Mr. Jenkins until he agreed to make that last trip for four hundred dollars—half of what he charged for each trip with a hull in tow. I guess Terry had been right. Mr. Jenkins didn’t have much of anything else to do after moving the hulls for us, and even after buying diesel he would be able to put another three hundred dollars in his pocket for this last trip.
“It will be the most he’s ever made in three days in his life. But now we’re down two grand just to get the ship to the water! Do you know how long we could live on two grand in Kiribati, Robbie? At least a year, maybe two when I get the rest of you up to speed on spearfishing and coconut palm climbing. That’s why we have to get out of U.S. waters fast, Robbie! Those idiot yachties that tie up in marinas every night go through that much in a week or two here, and they’ve taught every business owner on the coast to overcharge anyone they see coming in a boat.”
I didn’t know about any of that, but I knew two grand was a lot of money, at least that’s what Mom said, considering she didn’t make that much in a whole month at her job. I still didn’t know where Terry got all the money he spent on the boat. Even though he cut every corner he could when we built it, it still took a lot, and he had to have some left, even though he claimed people like Mr. Jenkins were breaking him. I know my Mom didn’t have any money saved up, but she did get three thousand dollars when she sold her Toyota Camry to my cousins she gave our TV to back when this all started. She didn’t really want to sell her car, but Terry said she had to, because where we were going we’d never need a car again.
Mom also owned the house that Grandma left her, and while it wasn’t worth a lot in Calloway City, it was worth a whole lot more than her old car. Terry wanted her to sell it, but she flat out refused. He said we’d never need a house again either, and she argued that you just never had any way of knowing about those kinds of things. She said she could buy another car someday if she needed one, but she wasn’t about to give up that house because her mother had left it to her, and it was where she grew up. Besides, my cousins needed a bigger place to live, and she had promised them first dibs when we were ready to move out. She agreed to rent it to them for three hundred dollars a month.
“Three hundred dollars a month! They can’t live in a homeless shelter for that kind of money! They ought to be paying at least eight!” Terry said.
“It’s Calloway City, Dear. This isn’t Memphis or Jackson. Besides, you said we didn’t need much money to live on the boat. You said we would catch fish, and that the wind was free, and that anchoring anywhere we wanted was free, and we wouldn’t have to pay taxes, or buy car tags or insurance. You said that a dollar was worth ten times as much in some of those island countries as it is here, and that there wasn’t anything to buy there anyway. If all that’s true, then three hundred dollars a month ought to help a lot!” Mom said.
“It will but it’s the principal of it. They ought to be paying more! And if you sold the house, we would be set for life, living on the boat. When this country goes up in flames, that three hundred a month is gonna be gone with it!”
But Mom wouldn’t budge when it came to the house. She refused to sell it no matter what argument Terry presented. So eventually he quit bringing it up, because the important thing to him was that we were leaving. That was his number one priority through all of this anyway.
A lot of our essential belongings like pots and pans and stuff for the tiny kitchen in the boat that Terry said we had to call the “galley” were already packed in the hulls before we started moving them. The galley was in the starboard hull, the one that was already at the lake, and the “head,” which was the silly boat name for a toilet, was in the port hull that we were moving today. Terry made us get rid of all kinds of stuff we wanted to keep, saying there was no way everything we had in the house was going to fit and we didn’t need it where we were going anyway. I didn’t think we had a lot, because we had already gotten rid of half our stuff when we moved south from Indiana. But Terry said we had to make room for the important things, like navigation charts and guidebooks, as well as spare parts and tools. He said we didn’t need any winter clothes and that once we got to the Gulf we could throw our shoes overboard too. Janie said that would be a cold day in hell but Terry said where we were going cold would be a distant memory.
At least we got to take our bicycles, which was a big deal for me because I had just gotten a new bike the Christmas before last and I sure wasn’t about to leave it at home. Janie complained about getting screwed out of the chance to have her own car like all her friends did. She had gotten her license when she turned sixteen and she drove Mom’s car some, but what she really wanted was to have her own like a normal teenager. Terry told her she wouldn’t have been able to drive it long anyway even if she had one because the oil would likely run out before she hit twenty-five, and it was a waste of time to learn a useless skill. He said she would be an expert sailor and navigator in no time at all though, but Janie said she could care less about driving some stupid, slow sailboat.
* * *
Moving the second hull certainly went smoother and took less time than the first, mainly because we didn’t have to hassle with the park rangers at the lake this time. What we did have by now though, was a small crowd of people watching, trying to figure out what we were doing. Most of them were fishermen coming and going at the boat ramp, and old folks from the RV campground nearby. I heard all kinds of speculation as these onlookers muttered among themselves, some of them snickering and making jokes about our workmanship and others calling the two hulls “boats” because they still couldn’t visualize the two being joined together to form one vessel.
Terry ignored their comments as we worked nonstop to level up the support cradles on the asphalt parking lot. We had to align the hulls precisely parallel at the right distance apart so the crossbeams could fit in the chocks on the deck that held them in place. I know this sounds easy, but it wasn’t. The final adjustment was done inch-by-inch, using car jacks and pieces of wood for blocks and skids. It took the rest of the afternoon to get them leveled and set up exactly the way Terry wanted them. If we moved the front end of one hull one way, the back end would get out of line all over again. We adjusted them at least a hundred times before they were right.
By the time we finished and started disassembling the lift frame for the last time, the onlookers had gotten bored and left and I was exhausted and couldn’t wait to get back in the truck to go home. But as we left, I realized that Terry hadn’t been kidding all this time, and now this boat was going to be home. The house we were going back to tonight would soon be a memory left behind, that thought made me more than a little nervous and sad. What was it really going to be like, living on a sailboat? I realized I was about to find out, for better or worse.
Our next trip to Bay Springs Lake was our last one. We didn’t get going until early in the morning the day after coming back from unloading the two hulls, because it took most of the afternoon before to load the four crossbeams, two masts and other assorted boat parts onto Mr. Jenkins’ trailer. Even though most of the stuff we were taking with us to live on the boat was already aboard in the two hulls, Mom and Janie still managed to pack her car so full that I once again had to ride in middle of the truck seat between Terry and Mr. Jenkins. The Camry wasn’t really hers anymore anyway, but my cousins had agreed to rent it back to her for the day if she knocked off half the three hundred they owed for the house rent that month. They said she could just leave it with the key in it at the lake and they would come get it that coming weekend. Terry was furious with her for giving them a break on the rent, but we couldn’t all fit in Mr. Jenkins’ truck anyway, so he finally shut up about it.
We were back at the boat ramp parking by mid-morning and set to work immediately unloading the parts off the trailer so we could finish the final assembly. It wasn’t long before a crowd gathered again, this time bigger than before, especially now that we had Mom and Janie with us, as well as a big assortment of strange looking parts painted the same color as the two “boats” everyone was talking about. Getting the heavy crossbeams from the trailer up to the decks would have been a difficult job, but one advantage of having all these gawkers was that Terry was able to recruit some of the men to give us a hand. With all that manpower, the beams and decks were quickly lifted into place and then Terry set to work lashing them firmly into position.
“You ain’t gonna just tie it together, are you?” one of the fishermen asked. “That rope’ll break soon as you get down to the Gulf and hit some weather.”
“Not this stuff, no sir!” Terry answered. “This is low-stretch Dacron rigging line, with a breaking strength higher than an equal-sized steel cable. But even if it weren’t, these lashings wouldn’t fail due to quadruple redundancy! The Polynesians were colonizing the Pacific four thousand years ago on big double canoes lashed together with rope made of coconut fiber. A catamaran like this has to give to the sea, that’s what a lot of today’s designers don’t understand. Bolt it together so it can’t and the waves will work the connection points until you get stress cracks and broken hardware. The old way, as usual, is better and cheaper too!”
A couple of the other fishermen were standing at the stern of the starboard hull, snickering as they moved the big rudder back and forth, and mumbling something about how “they must not have been able to afford proper hardware.”
Terry ignored them. He had already explained the rudder-lashing concept to me, Mom and Janie so many times I had it memorized word for word. Yes, the rudders will be lashed on. No, the lashings won’t wear out for at least twenty years because there is no chafe and the rope will be painted over like everything else. No, stainless steel hinges wouldn’t be better, because they would require screw holes drilled into the hull and every hole below the waterline is just another place to invite rot to get started. Those were the main points, but ultimately the reason that trumped everything else was that James Wharram designed it that way, and whatever James Wharram said, Terry believed. The only thing he believed in more was epoxy resin.
“I hope you don’t think y’all can just sail that thing down to the Gulf,” another of the fishermen said, as he followed Terry around the hull, watching him tighten the lashings with additional wraps of smaller line called “frapping turns” to cinch them down. “It’s more’n three hundred miles down the river. Then you got the locks to go through. And then there’s all the bends and sandbars, not to mention barge traffic and bridges and power lines to go under. You just can’t sail a boat down the Tenn-Tom. What you’ve got to have is a motor.”
Terry rolled his eyes as he looked at the man and explained what he thought was obvious. “We never planned to sail down the river. That’s why we do have motors; two outboards as a matter of fact!”
“I hope they’re big ones. You’re gonna need a lotta horsepower to push a boat this big.”
“Once again, looks can be deceptive; it actually doesn’t take much at all. Look at the lines of the hulls at the waterline. See how fine the entry is? They’ll slice through the water like a knife and with little effort. Two fifteen-horsepower motors would be ideal, but I’ve got one nine-point-nine and one eight for now. All we need to do is push it at hull speed, and they’ll do just fine for that.”
“A nine-point-nine and a eight! Hell, I got a Mercury 150 on my seventeen-foot Nitro! And it still ain’t fast enough! I can barely hit fifty with it wide open on flat water!”
Terry didn’t answer, but just turned to me and Janie with a look of ill-concealed contempt for the fisherman written all over his face, winking as he whispered a reminder to us not to forget what he had said before about go-fast bass boats. I thought the old used motors he had bought looked awful small for such a big ship too, but I didn’t dare say anything. Questioning Terry’s judgment on anything to do with the boat was the same as flat out begging him to launch into one of his rants. I kept quiet and helped as much as I could in getting them out of the back of Mr. Jenkins’ truck and lifting them up to the decks.
When they were up there, Terry installed them one at a time in the two motor well openings in the decks on either side of the steering wheel. Each motor well had a hinged wooden sled with a place to clamp the motor mount brackets to on the back of it. The sleds looked like miniature wooden boats themselves, and Terry said the reason we needed them was to have a way to lift the two motors clear of the waves when we were sailing. When they were lowered down, the bottoms of the sleds would rest on the water’s surface and the propellers would stay submerged like they were supposed to. It seemed complicated to me, but Terry insisted the sleds were necessary. He said we didn’t want any drag from the props slowing us down when we were sailing, and with this arrangement the motors would be stowed high and dry under the decks when we were crossing the ocean to the islands. I finally just had to believe him, because I still couldn’t quite picture what sailing was going to be like anyway, having never been on a sailboat. Terry said it was like a religious experience, and that once I felt the boat come alive and harness the power of the wind I’d be hooked for life and never be able to get sailing out of my system. I wasn’t sure about that, but I was looking forward to finding out if I’d really like it or not.
After we got the motors mounted securely on their brackets, there were still a bunch of big parts on the trailer that had to be lifted up to the decks and lashed in place. These included the long cockpit seats that had storage boxes underneath for all kinds of gear like extra anchors, fishing spears and life jackets. We also had all our bicycles and the extra jerry cans of gas to lash to the railings, and the blue tarps to set up as temporary awnings until we got the masts up and could rig them properly. Then there was all the steering mechanism that included the tillers that attached to each rudder head and a bunch of ropes and pulleys to control them from the big steering wheel in the center. I knew from hearing Terry correct me a thousand times that “ropes” on a boat were really “lines,” and that ‘pulleys’ were called “blocks” and the steering wheel was the “helm.” But I still didn’t think of them that way when I saw them. I thought we were sailing away to get away from all the dumb rules on land, but Terry had so many rules on the boat I didn’t know if it would be better or not. We had been building the boat for so long that I sometimes forgot that he was a teacher when we met him, and a teacher’s job was to make people learn dumb stuff and follow dumb rules.
The last parts to go on board were the two masts, but we weren’t going to “step” them (Terry’s nautical term for standing them up) here at Bay Springs Lake. He said that would have to wait until we reached Mobile Bay because there might be power lines and bridges to go under on the Tenn-Tom that were too low, and besides, the waterway was too restricted for much sailing anyway. He said the masts were going to be in the way until we got them stepped, but we would just have to work around them. He had built a couple of two-by-four cradles to support them in the horizontal position, and with the help of some of the men at the boat ramp, we got them up there and got them lashed down securely. Both of them were as long as the boat, so they didn’t stick out at either end, but we had to duck under them to go across the bridgedeck from one cabin to the other.
Janie wasn’t much help during the assembly process, especially later that afternoon when whatever school was nearby let out and two older boys showed up at the boat ramp with a ski boat. They zeroed in on her right off and, after gawking at our catamaran and asking a few stupid questions, asked her if she wanted to go fishing. I knew Janie hated fishing and wouldn’t know what to do with a fish if she caught one, but I could tell by the way she was looking at him that she liked the oldest-looking of the two boys. He was the one driving the four-wheel-drive Silverado they had towed the boat with, and to me looked like he was at least eighteen and maybe twenty. If he was still in high school, I thought he must have flunked a year or two somewhere along the way.
I didn’t really care what she did because when she was around, Janie was just in the way most of the time anyway. She would have her chores on board once we got to sailing though; Terry and Mom had already talked about that. Terry said there were no passengers on a sailing ship and that everyone had to do their equal share of the work, which he assured us there was a lot of. I didn’t see how sailing could possibly be as much work as building the boat, but I knew I was about to find out one way or the other soon enough. I was just ready to get underway and see what it was all about. Some parts of the building had been fun, but I was tired of it and especially tired of sanding and painting. I still had dried paint under my fingernails and in my hair from the week before, and I was glad I wouldn’t have to paint any more, at least for a while. But Terry said a boat was never finished, no matter if it was sailing or not. He said there were always improvements to be made and maintenance to keep it from falling apart.
“It’s entropy, Robbie. Entropy never slows down and never sleeps. You can’t beat it but if you stay on top of things you can keep it in check.
“What is it?” I had asked, never having heard that strange word in school or anywhere else.
“Disorder, Robbie. All things tend towards disorder, including us. The whole world is falling apart. That’s why we’ve gotta keep moving. If you don’t work fast enough building a boat, the damned thing will start rotting before you ever splash her. And once she’s launched she’s already in the process of decomposition. There are the U.V. rays from the sun, breaking down the paint and the epoxy, and even the sails and rigging lines. There are the cycles of hot and cold that cause the plywood to check and crack the fiberglass over it, letting in rainwater and dew. Then there are bacteria in the rainwater and later the mildew and fungus starts to grow in the wood. Then below the waterline there’s the weed that starts growing on the hull first, and then the barnacles. Let it go and pretty soon it turns into a reef. Every bolt, screw, nail and fitting will rust, even the expensive stainless steel they put in the fancy yachts. Wiring in the interior corrodes from the inside out and pretty soon navigation lights and instruments won’t work. The list goes on and on, Robbie. Everything on a boat from the bottom of the keel to the top of the masthead will self-destruct and in short order. It’s the Law of Entropy.”
“So what’s the point of even building a boat then? All this hard work is for nothing if it’s all gonna fall apart anyway.”
“Not as long as we don’t let it, it won’t, Robbie. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You won’t see a lazy crew on a voyaging ship, Robbie, especially not a wooden ship. No sir, back in the days of the real sailors all ships were made of wood and it took men of iron to sail them!”
“Then we can beat the entropy?”
“Absolutely! The only other choice is to die. All we have to do is keep moving and keep working. Anybody that isn’t is dead already.”
I kind of understood what Terry was saying. I felt like most of the people back in Calloway City where we’d been living acted like they were half-dead. They didn’t go anywhere and they sure weren’t building any ships like we built, or doing much of anything else. I thought we did a pretty good job even if our ship didn’t look like the fancy yachts in Terry’s books. I still didn’t see how it was going to start falling apart anytime soon, but from the way it sounded Terry was going to make us work on it all the time anyway. I wondered if I was even going to have any fun when we finally got to the exciting places he promised us we were going. It didn’t suck as bad as going to school, but it would still suck if we went to some island somewhere that had coral reefs and crystal clear water like I’d seen on Animal Planet and I still couldn’t go swimming and snorkeling because I had to work on the boat.
Janie said we’d be the only ones down there in the islands on an ugly old homemade boat. She said she’d seen a movie back when we still had a TV about some people that cruised around on a big yacht. She said nobody used sails anymore and that real yachts were like small, private cruise ships and they had air conditioners and real showers in them and even washing machines and dryers.
“You know Terry said we’re going to have to wash our clothes in a bucket! And that we’re going to have to bath in seawater because we can’t waste freshwater.”
“He said seawater is clean,” I countered. “Especially way out in the middle, away from land.”
“Clean? How can it be clean if fish take a crap in it? It’s nasty, Robbie! Hell, even whales crap in it! Can you imagine how big a whale turd must be?”
I didn’t know for sure, but I figured it must be pretty big. Terry said where we were going we were certainly going to see whales. He said some of them would be longer than our boat too, and forty-six feet is pretty long. He also said we were going to see a lot of sharks, but that we wouldn’t have to worry about them because they wouldn’t mess with us if we didn’t swim at night or stay in the water a long time with a bloody fish when we were spearfishing. I couldn’t wait to go spearfishing, but I knew I was going to be scared of the sharks when I did.
I wasn’t worried too much about what other people thought of our boat like Janie was though. I knew some people might think it was ugly, but I was proud of it because I helped build it. Maybe it was homemade and maybe it wasn’t perfect, but I could see what Terry meant when he said she had “nice lines.” He said James Wharram’s catamarans were his interpretation of the originals that the Polynesians sailed thousands of years ago. He pointed out the upswept bows and the long overhangs on the bow and stern of each hull and talked about how they would lift to the seas and ride over them rather than plunge through them like a lot of modern catamarans. He called most of the modern catamarans “condomarans” anyway and said they weren’t good for anything but tying up to the dock to have a place to drink margaritas right next to the rest of the shore bastards.
When we finally had all the pieces and parts lashed down, our catamaran really did look like a ship sitting there near the edge of the lakeshore, her twin bows pointed towards the water like she was ready to go somewhere far away. There was still a lot to do to get organized and ready to splash her. Terry said we had to have a christening ceremony to give her a proper name and invoke the blessings of the various gods of the sea and wind. It was already too late in the day for that by the time we were finished though, so he said we would sleep aboard with the boat still “on the hard” and get up at first light for the christening and launch.
When they found out they weren’t going to get to watch us try to get our huge catamaran in the water that afternoon, most of the fishermen and campers who had been hanging around wandered off or went home. Terry told them to come back in the morning if they wanted to be a part of it, and most of them said they would, but I didn’t believe them and neither did Terry.
Janie finally showed back up just before dark when the two boys she’d taken the boat ride with came back to the ramp to haul their boat out on the trailer. I knew she’d been drinking beer with them because I could smell it on her breath just like I sometimes did when she came home from Friday night football games at school. I’m pretty sure Terry knew too, but he never said anything about it because he just figured it was easier to get along with Janie if he let her do whatever she wanted. Mom would have been mad, but she couldn’t smell much of anything most of the time. She’d had a stopped-up and runny nose ever since we moved south to Mississippi and said it was allergies due to all the stuff blooming here year round. Terry told her that once we got out to sea the salt air would clear that right up.
“Salt is the cure for everything, and there’s no purer place to get it than out on the open ocean, far from the pollution, filth, and stench of industrialized, commercialized and urbanized land! Where we’re going, you’ll breathe better than you ever have in your life, Linda, that’s a promise!”
I didn’t know if that was true or not, but when it got dark in the boat ramp parking lot where the boat was assembled, even the lake air felt different than the air back home in Calloway City. It was cooler and scented with pine from the surrounding forest. This was going to be our first night to sleep on the boat; even if it was high and dry “on the hard,” as Terry said was the proper nautical term for a ship out of water. I was excited about it and nervous at the same time. My bunk was in the forward part of the starboard hull in my own tiny cabin, which was separated from Janie’s cabin in the back of the same hull by a small central area where we had a built-in desk and bookshelves and where a wooden ladder went up to the hatch opening onto the decks. Although it sounds like a lot to say that I had my own cabin, the truth is the whole thing wasn’t much bigger than the closet I had in my bedroom back home. A cabin in a boat is different than a room in a house though, and like Terry said, with the built-in bunk and every little space and nook and cranny utilized for storage, there was enough room. After we sat outside eating the sandwiches Mom had made at home before we left, I finally climbed down to my bunk when it was time to go to bed. For some reason I kept calling the old house in Calloway City, home. It was going to take a while to think of the boat as home in the same way a house was.