Wooden Boats

Autumn lingered on the island, so that even at the end of October, with Rebecca nearing the halfway mark—her hull planked, caulked, faired, puttied, and painted below the waterline with red lead, and half her deck beams in—the days were warm enough that Nat needed to pull on only a couple of shirts and a wool sweater in the morning. He headed downstairs, ate a piece of toast sweetened with honey kept in an enormous jar and a bowl of cut fruit, then grabbed drawings of Rebecca that he’d worked on over the weekend, stuck them in his canvas shopping bag—his briefcase, he called it—and headed out the back door. This part of Martha’s Vineyard was thoroughly suburban, with tall trees and well-kept lawns. Nat crossed his own backyard and cut through his neighbor’s, strode up a dirt drive strewn with dried leaves from the surrounding white oaks, passed a small graveyard, then turned left on Main Street toward the town of Vineyard Haven. Nat has a distinctive walking style recognizable from a long way off: he bobs in a slow, hulking manner, his feet spread wide, legs almost bowed, and moves at an impressive though effortless clip. Remarking on this walk, a friend of Nat’s once laughed with appreciation and said, “He walks as if he’d spent his whole life at sea.” When Nat arrived at Beach Road, he turned left toward the water, passed the Black Dog Restaurant, and crossed the sand to the weathered G&B boatshop.

Duane Case was at work on one of two Bellas nearing completion. Jim Bresson, a young Frenchman, would arrive soon for work, as would Bob Osleeb and other regular G&B crew members. Nat had a few words with Duane. Doug Cabral, editor of the Martha’s Vineyard Times, had stopped by on Saturday to tell Nat that the boom on Liberty, his 40-foot G&B-built sloop, had snapped in half during a sail the day before; this irregular grain would need to be spliced, Nat explained to Duane. Nat paused in the office to speak with Ginny, then headed across the street, through the Ace Hardware parking lot, past stacks of Hinkley lumber, to Mugwump. Ted Okie had returned from vacation, ready to begin work, and Nat said, “He’s back. You missed the excitement.”

“I missed the red lead!” Ted exclaimed. The previous spring Ted, twenty-four years old and just out of New York University with a degree in urban planning, had been fishing around on the Internet for some kind of gainful employment when he spotted on the WoodenBoat home page a notice advertising slave wages in exchange for work on a 60-foot plank-on-frame schooner. He called Gannon & Benjamin, had a conversation with the ornery woman who answered the phone (Ginny), was given vague cautionary information, decided to show up anyway, and was soon put to work on Rebecca.

Nat entered Mugwump, walked up the plank ramp, climbed a small ladder built into the outside wall of the office, stepped onto the staging that circumscribed Rebecca, and headed around the transom to the port beam, where Pat Cassidy was managing the installation of the deck beams. Pat looked nervous when he saw Nat with the drawings, but Nat chuckled and said, “I didn’t change anything,” as he unrolled them. He and Pat discussed progress and today’s work. Not everything was marked on the drawings. Pat couldn’t, for example, check them to see where to put the block for a running backstay; he’d ask Nat where he wanted it, and Nat would look at the stock, the boat, the drawings, and make the decision at the moment. This was the nature of organic planning. Today Pat would continue to saw out and install deck beams with Daniel; Mark would bolt in cabin sole supports and begin work on the sole there. And Nat and David would head out to Dan’s, where much of Brad’s wood was stored.

With the framing of the deck moving so quickly, Nat figured it was time to get the decking down to Mugwump in preparation to be sawn out. Ross’s trailer, which the yard used to haul wood and small boats, was hooked to the back of David’s red pickup, which Nat drove to Dan’s land. Stacks of Suriname woods were “stickered” near a lichen-covered stone wall—stacked resting on thin sticks of scrap wood to promote drying on all sides of the boards—and Nat and David spent half an hour flipping over heavy planks, looking for Rebecca’s deck. They would examine one side of a board, staring at it for a while, and then, both of them grunting to push the planks over and jumping back to avoid crushing a toe, they would stare at the other side for a while, saying, “Oh, very nice,” or “Look at that sway,” or, when a plank had a crack through it, or its grain swirled like a weather-map hurricane, “Oops!”

Nat retrieved three steel pipes about 2 inches in diameter and a yard long from the back of the truck. “Good old Egyptian technology,” he said. He backed up the trailer to the woodpile, and after they’d chosen a dozen planks, each 2 inches thick and some as long as 30 feet, they began to load them onto the trailer by first placing the pipes next to the board being loaded, then flipping the board over onto the pipes; once the board, weighing about 250 pounds, was on the pipes, it would roll with the gentlest push onto the trailer.

Nat got to work upon their return, first sharpening the blade of his plane on a stone at the back of the shop. He would spend the rest of the day adjusting by eye and jack plane the starboard sheer—“one of the most critical lines on a boat,” he noted—to make it perfectly fair. Two strangers who had heard about the schooner walked along the staging, having a look around. They were a middle-aged man and woman, one a pragmatist, the other a romantic. They hung over the transom and stared down into the cavernous hull.

That afternoon, after lunch, Nat walked back to the boatyard and out onto the dock. He hopped down into one of the yard’s launches and untied her to give me a tour of the harbor and to check on G&B boats. Gannon & Benjamin had built many of the boats here, and the boatyard crew took care of even more, checking their moorings and adding chafing gear when storms approached; they were the de facto caretakers of all the wooden boats in this harbor that was filled with them all year round.

Nat rarely praises things he’s had a hand in, but this harbor was an exception. G&B was completing its eighteenth boat in as many years, all of them designed by Nat; more than half plied the Vineyard Sound (others had gone as far south as the Caribbean). G&B had also repaired or brought back from the edge of death a few dozen more that remained in this harbor. Moreover, Nat and Ross had created an environment that was favorable to wood, that nourished wooden boats and informed their owners. Without G&B—a yard that could maintain and repair traditional wooden boats—many people who enjoyed wooden boats wouldn’t be able conveniently to own or keep them here because maintenance and repair would not be available. Combine Nat and Ross, and their work, with two other extraordinary wooden boat figures, beachfront neighbors Bob Douglas, owner of Shenandoah and Alabama (not to mention the Black Dog restaurants and catalog store), and sailor-shipwright Gary Maynard, who had restored Alabama and for years headed the Five Corners Shipyard, and you truly did have a harbor that was unique in terms of wooden boats.

(Anyone living on the other side of the country would want to trumpet Port Townsend, Washington, another wooden boat center that annually sees the arrival of hundreds of classic boats for its wooden boat festival. Scores live year-round between the port of Port Townsend and Point Hudson. Numerous workboats—seiners, longliners, halibut schooners, and tenders—still ply the waters nearby and make this a very active harbor in the repair and maintenance of traditional wooden boats.)

“It just happened,” Nat said. “When we arrived, in 1972, there was Alabama, Shenandoah, Venture, and us.” “Us” being Nat and Pam, who’d left their former home on the island of Formentera in the Mediterranean, crossed to the Caribbean and spent a year sailing there with their toddler, Jessica, before heading up the East Coast. At the time, Venture and Alabama were rotting away on their moorings in Vineyard Haven Harbor, Alabama not even capable of a day sail. A few catboats remained (beamy boats with the mast at the bow, typically half as wide as they are long), as well as a few lingering Vineyard Haven 15s (21-foot sailboats that once raced here as a class). But that was it. The message of the era was, Nat said, “Get rid of that nasty wooden thing—go fiberglass, and all your problems will be solved.” Many of the surviving wooden boats were sawn up and burned. Now, more than twenty-five years later, the harbor was packed with them, nearly ninety at the height of summer. In winter, all you saw was masts of varnished spruce reaching into the sky. Wooden boat owners are often the poorest yachtsmen on the water, tired wood vessels being the most affordable; thus many avoid the expense of hauling and storage every fall by leaving their boats in the water year-round, as Nat did. This is something you wouldn’t want to do with a fiberglass boat, but it’s fine, even good, for a traditional hull, since wood loves salt water—salt water preserves wood, and the hull doesn’t suffer from drying out during the winter. The drawbacks are that the topsides and deck are subject to extreme weather, storms are more frequent, and floating patches of ice can mark the hull.

Often when he toured the harbor checking the boats, Nat would stop last, as he did this day, at his own boat. Venture had been given to him by one of the island’s most respected sailors and wooden boat lovers, Pat West. The only stipulation was that Nat make her right again. Nat conceded that had he realized how much work would be involved in restoring Venture, he wouldn’t have accepted, but he was glad now that he had. Pat West had sailed her when he was a young man in the 1920s and 1930s, when he would sway in the spreaders, spotting the swordfish then abundant in these waters for the boat’s ginswilling owner. When Pat bought her, Venture was more than twenty years old—considered an old boat—and by the time Nat got her, fifty years after that, she was a tired boat indeed. The planking was yellow pine from the southern United States, excellent material for a hull, but it had been fastened during its construction with iron nails. After thirty years or so, nails that sit in water rust, and the hull had become irreversibly punky and rotted with disintegrating iron all through it. Boatbuilders in 1910 were perfectly aware that iron, which was less expensive than bronze, rusted; evidently, though, they didn’t believe that a boat would need to outlast the iron that held it together. And yet here she was, replanked and gleaming in the autumn sun, blue water sparkling, almost ninety years old, her current owner fixing a couple of cups of tea on the galley stove.

Venture was a sweet boat to look at, and soothing to be aboard; sometimes Nat came here just to think. His younger daughter, Signe, twenty-five, had recently spent a summer living on her. The boat was a sixty-second row from the town dock, but once aboard you could feel absolutely solitary. If Nat was checking Venture, recharging her battery or performing any number of other chores on board, and if it was a fine day with a fair breeze, the strangest thing could happen. Venture ’s sails would go up when Nat’s back was turned, and then, amazingly, she’d be off her mooring, and before Nat could do anything about it, she’d be clipping past the breakwater and heading into the sound.

Nat Benjamin had come to believe in wooden boats through experience. You could fix a wooden boat. A wooden boat could save your life in a storm. The new boats with their plastic hulls and plastic hardware weren’t worth a damn at sea. He recalled one delivery, taking a brand-new fiberglass Bristol 40 from New England to Tortola. Midway he ran into a gale, not uncommon crossing the Gulf Stream in the fall. It blew for two days—not a terrible storm, but the boat took a beating. The foredeck hatch came loose because it was poorly built; water filled the bilge; the electrical and steering systems gave out; the batteries began to leak acid; bulkheads, the main ’thwartship structural pieces, popped out of the flexing hull. Nat eventually made landfall in Tortola, but when the owner saw his new purchase, he asked, “What did you do to my boat?” Young Nat replied, “I didn’t do anything to your boat. The sea did it.” She was all but totaled. A grin formed now within Nat’s shaggy, red-gray beard, his almond-shaped eyes squeezed, his teeth set, and he said, “You don’t really understand wooden boats until you’re in one and the wind lifts you up and slams you on your side and you charge through the waves.”

October chop lapped against the side of the boat as Nat sipped tea, the unique sound of water against a wooden hull creating a peaceful backdrop for a man whose past was filled with adventure and yet who seemed to all who knew him to be deeply at peace himself. Wooden boats—the integrity of the things themselves and the work they required—were a sizable part of that peace.

“I feel pretty lucky to be able to make a living this way,” Nat continued. “I wouldn’t be a good house builder—all those straight lines.” He’d worked as a carpenter during his first years on the island, since there was virtually no wooden boat work anywhere, and working at a fiberglass yard was unpleasant for him. He liked to use the work of the traditional carpenter as a contrasting example to explain his appreciation for wooden boats, to address in part the reason he had devoted the last twenty years of his life to building them. “One is straight, the other is curved,” he said of the house and the boat. “With one, you order all the wood, it’s premeasured and cut, and you just hammer it together. It’s like a giant Erector set. With the other, every piece is handmade. Nothing is measured with a ruler and cut at a right angle. All the pieces are cut to size in relation to the other pieces. Nothing is measured the way we normally think of measuring. A house, you mark everything with a tape measure; a boat, you measure with battens and tick sticks. One is stuck in the mud; the other you can sail away on!”

Nat arrived at work on foot each morning with his canvas briefcase, checked in with Ginny, returned some calls, and then headed over to his largely solitary work at Mugwump. On Wednesdays he left at one, aimed up Main Street toward home (his seaman’s lurch recognizable from far away), ate some leftover beans or instant soup, and spent the rest of the day at his drawing board. Nat was quiet as he worked. A loud clearing of the throat and a “Let’s see here” were his most common sounds. Gentleness seemed to infuse his efforts, whether he was bending in a frame or performing the finish carpentry of a cabin trunk’s dovetail joints: he gave the impression not just of working on a piece of metal or wood, but also of reflecting on it as he worked it. And as he worked, fine evidence of his labor and mind tugged at moorings in the harbor.

From the look of Nat at work in the shop or at the helm of When and If or Venture, you’d never guess how unlikely this circumstance was. And not simply that he had been designing and building plank-on-frame boats successfully for nearly twenty years and supporting a family by this work, beating hard but steadily windward, not only against the currents of contemporary marine design and the marketplace but against contemporary culture generally. Nat never studied naval architecture at a proper maritime academy. He didn’t even graduate from high school—he kept getting thrown out or disappearing on his own. A boat bum for the first part of his adult life and more or less alcoholic for most of it, an irresponsible young parent and husband by his own solemn admission (off sailing when Pam gave birth to their first child on a rural Mediterranean island), an entirely self-taught builder and designer, he was now one of the most respected men in the business; he’d stopped drinking years before and was the model of the devoted family man, as well as a loyal friend to many and active in community affairs, especially when they concerned preserving this working waterfront. Given another life, he said, he’d pursue something different, music or writing, but in this life he was happy to build boats.

Garrison, New York, was a leafy, provincial town when Nat grew up there in the 1950s, a commuter town where husbands in suits would take the train fifty miles south into New York City every day and return to the country in the evening. Activity swirled around the train station and the general store, the hubs of the town. There was only one black man in Garrison, and he collected garbage and shoveled coal—most of the furnaces were still coal-fired. There were plenty of kids to play with along the river or on the train tracks. When Nat talks about his childhood, he recalls the movie Stand By Me, based on a Stephen King story about a boy’s coming of age in a small 1950s town. “That was my childhood to a tee. Walking on the railroad tracks, getting into trouble. Stephen King was born the same year I was, the same year Ross was, nineteen forty-seven.”

While Nat himself terms his upbringing “middle class” (an assertion that one close friend and cousin calls “ludicrous”), the fact is that he is descended from political prominence and privilege more deeply blue-blooded than I could feasibly make up. His background is a history lesson in American politics and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage, beginning with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic governor of seventeenth-century New Amsterdam, before it became New York—a direct ancestor whom Nat says he is not proud to claim. He is also a distant descendant of the Livingstons, a prominent family during colonial and postcolonial times. Robert Livingston sailed in a wooden boat to the shores of the British colonies of America in 1673 and then settled in Albany. Two of his offspring became members of the Continental Congress. The latter, Robert, was one of the committee of five men who drew up the Declaration of Independence.

A direct descendant of the Livingstons, Hamilton Fish likewise went into American politics, becoming, in the mid- to late nineteenth century, a member of the House, a governor of New York, a senator, and the U.S. secretary of state. His son, grandson, and great-grandson, all named Hamilton, were also distinguished members of Congress. And the next in line, young Ham Fish, Nat’s cousin, is also a politician, having served as a state senator in New York and run for congressional office in two campaigns. Nat and Ham remain deep friends and often sail together.

The Benjamins landed in America even earlier than the Livingstons, in 1632, on a boat called Lyon, emigrating from Sussex, England, and prospering almost immediately and for more than a century, until somebody bore a son with a talent for losing money. But this latter man, unfortunate though he was in the ways of finance, himself had a son named Park Benjamin, who made his own way in the world. At the age of twenty-six, Park abandoned ownership of a shoemaker’s shop and became Captain Park Benjamin of the good ship Prosperity, a trading sloop that traveled between Norwich, Connecticut, and British Guiana, and this made all the difference for the family. Captain Benjamin became one of the most famous of the Norwich sea captains; the local paper was filled with stories of his adventures. Working just after the Revolution, a time of great maritime prosperity, many captains on the East Coast amassed fortunes by both exporting and importing. Park and his brother developed a plantation in Demerara, British Guiana. They arrived there with cattle, lumber, and flour from the States and left with sugar, coffee, and rum. Park bore a son in Demerara, also named Park, who caught a tropical disease that left one of his legs permanently shriveled. Young, lame Park would go on to have a career as a poet and editor and is chiefly remembered for bringing to wide attention a new author then in his early thirties, Nathaniel Hawthorne. When Park was thirteen, the family had returned permanently to Connecticut, but his father, Captain Benjamin, needing to oversee his holdings in British Guiana, had set sail once more from the East Coast in June 1824, bound for South America. He was never seen again. Pieces of the boat found by other vessels suggested that the ship had run into weather; young Park also lost his older brother in the wreck.

Nat’s direct forebears seem to have been an effective group, by and large. But if it is true that we become what we do, and if what we do can possibly be transmitted by our genetic material in any way, then there is some logic in Nathaniel Benjamin’s attraction to boats, and in the fact that the progenitor of this side of the Benjamin clan was a captain lost at sea.

Nat’s paternal grandfather died in 1928 but left the family enough money to last through the Depression and late into the 1960s. Nat’s father, William Hoffman Benjamin, known as Hoff, grew up in a “fairy-tale world,” Nat says. Born in 1910, Hoff graduated from college smack in the middle of the Great Depression. “When the rest of the country was dying for work,” Nat said, “he went off shooting caribou in Greenland with some of his well-heeled buddies from college. They got on a fishing boat in Norway and went to Spitsbergen and Iceland, shooting at everything that moved and having a blast. While the rest of the world was broke. He loved to talk about it, tell stories about that trip. That was his ultimate trip, that was his life as a young adventurer.”

Hoff became a real estate broker in Manhattan. He and his wife, Joan, had their first child, Bunny, in 1941, and then later John, and last Nat. Nat thinks there may have been something unusual about the year 1947. Both his sister and his brother fell right into the world of their parents, while he rejected it. He was always hanging out with kids from the wrong side of the tracks, and by the time he was fifteen or so, he began to see his parents’ world a little more clearly. John Cheever territory, he calls it. “I couldn’t stand the people. My parents’ generation. I got on with my parents OK—not that well with my mother—except I couldn’t stand their whole generation. The whole double standard. I was brought up to call everyone Mr. this and Mrs. that as though they were somebody I should really respect. And then when you’re fifteen or sixteen, all of a sudden you realize that he’s sleeping with her, and she’s doing this to him, and that’s when I sort of said, ‘I’m not gonna take it from you people anymore.’ I just couldn’t buy the whole act.”

His parents sent him down to a prep school in Scarborough (“There were a few of us who wouldn’t be tolerated in elementary school,” he says of the local school system), but that didn’t last long, either. Next he was sent to the Lenox School in Lenox, Massachusetts, another prep school. It wasn’t all bad, he recalls. He loved being away from home, a sentiment likely shared by his mom (though they’ve since reconciled, Nat says, “I didn’t get along with my mom from the day I was born”). He made friends easily and loved sports, but he couldn’t abide the insufferable teachers. “I didn’t perform well for them,” he says, concluding, “Aside from the friends and the sports and the trouble I got into, I really didn’t enjoy anything about school.” His cousin Ham Fish says that “Nat was mischievous and uncooperative from an early age . . . a hellion.”

So in 1963, at sixteen years old, he up and left, headed down to Texas, where he found work on a ranch in a small town south of Houston run by a well-known Texan, part American Indian, named Blackie Clark, a rancher and oil-field troubleshooter. Nat did tractor work and maintenance until he learned to ride, and then he held his own rounding up horses. At the end of the workday he’d sit in the shade of a pecan tree, drinking whiskey and playing dominoes with the other cowboys. He felt far from blackboards and homework, the hypocrisy of suburban New York, and he liked it that way. But Blackie took a genuine liking to Nat and, concerned about the boy’s best interests, convinced him to return and finish high school.

Nat gave school another shot. His brother went to St. Mark’s, a prestigious prep school, and then continued on to the University of Pennsylvania—which was what one was supposed to do, Nat had been told. The attitude in his family was, he says, “If you didn’t go to a good prep school and an Ivy League college, you might as well go jump off a bridge.” But was he going to school, he wondered, just so he could put on a suit and commute to the city for the rest of his life, like his father? That just didn’t make sense to him, and so he left school again, never to return. He headed west, to San Francisco, where he found a job as a carpenter, his first extended work with wood. After a time he headed into the mountains to ski. Then he returned east and tended bar in Newport, Rhode Island, well before he’d reached legal drinking age.

From Newport, an East Coast yachting hub, Nat wangled a berth on a boat being delivered to the Virgin Islands, a 32-foot plastic sloop. But the captain was a drug addict who wigged out off the coast of Virginia. A whole new crew and a new captain flew down to Norfolk, and the previous crew were told to go home. And they all did. But Nat lingered on the dock. He had all his gear together and was ready to leave, but the new captain, Christopher Fay, looked him over. Fay sensed something interesting and unusual about this kid. He looked at Nat as he was about to go and said, “Why don’t you stay?”

Nat did. He learned to sail by watching and by asking questions. Captain Fay took his time reaching the boat’s destination, island-hopping in the Bahamas to the Abacos, across the Yellow Bank to Nassau, then the Exumas, and down to San Salvador, finally arriving in the Virgin Islands in January. By then the delivery captain had to return to the East Coast, but with the season just starting, the boat’s owner wanted to charter it. He asked the captain if he knew of anyone. The captain shrugged and said, “How about that guy?” pointing at Nat. The owner asked if Nat was interested, and Nat said, “Sure!” He had been a cowboy, a carpenter, a ski bum, and a bartender, and now, still just twenty years old, he was the captain of a yacht.

As the captain of a boat, bopping around the West Indies, Nat was for the first time introduced to that renegade society of “wonderful and crazy boat people,” as he calls them. The social upheaval of the 1960s was at full volume, and so there were many such renegades. Pam Stevens was one of them. A blue-eyed blonde from outside Boston, Pam had left art school to see a little bit of the world and had found work as an au pair for a Guadeloupean couple. She lived on a beautiful wooden powerboat that was tied up, by chance, exactly where Nat’s boat was docked, in Yacht Haven Marina, St. Thomas. Nat had all but thrown the lines to Pam when he sailed in.

That year, when he was just out of his teens, subtle changes began to take place in Nat. Till then he had been both exuberantly reckless and smart enough to get away with it unharmed. But you can’t live on a boat and spend your days sailing without learning something, and if you have an active mind and an observant nature, you can’t help but begin to grow up. “I wanted to do a good job,” Nat says, “and become respectable. Become respectable at something. I liked the people.” And then he adds the critical piece of information about himself, the essential ingredient in any successful beginning, the trait that all success shares: “I liked the people who were good at it, who had good boats.”

“Probably the most important lesson I learned was safety and sobriety at sea,” Nat says. “Because I did have a bad grounding coming into Christiansted, St. Croix, at night. It was a bunch of crazy people on the boat, and everybody was stoned or drunk or both, and we had no compass light and the flashlights were not working, no engine, and sailing into this fairly complicated harbor. I’d never been in there before. I had a chart which I could barely read. We had to go through a narrow passage, then around this reef. It was something that now I just wouldn’t do—at night without a good chart, without my compass light, I just wouldn’t do it. But then, anh, no problem. And we hit the reef. We had gotten around one reef, and I had to make a sharp left turn and I didn’t make it sharp enough, couldn’t really see anything, and we grounded on this reef.

“We were fairly near town, and someone came out in a Boston Whaler and took my passengers, my friends, ashore and then they towed us off and we tied up at the dock. And the next morning I dove down to see the damage. There wasn’t a lot of damage, sort of scoured the bottom of the keel, but it was a real eye-opener, a real awakening for me. I’ll never forget it.” Recalling it, Nat appears to shudder. “It sobered me up. From then on I never really drank much at all when I was sailing.

Nat made his first significant ocean voyage that winter, from the Virgin Islands southeast to St. Bart’s, an alluring French island they’d heard so much about from fellow sailors, and he and Pam weren’t disappointed. “We go back there from time to time doing charters,” Nat says now, “and it’s a booming French tourist place. It’s still beautiful, but it’s jammed with people, the richest of the rich, and huge, fancy yachts, so I’m glad we saw it in nineteen sixty-eight. We were the only yacht in the harbor. There were other boats, but they were working boats, island traders, old power vessels.”

He and Pam sailed back to the United States on an “English-built thing,” Nat says, Axel Heyst, named for a character in Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory who avoids all ties with the world. It was one of the first boats built using an experimental technique called cold-molding, a wooden boat held together by a lot of powerful adhesives. Nat and Pam returned to Garrison because Hollywood had descended there to film Hello, Dolly!—Gene Kelly directing Barbra Streisand—and there was easy money to be made. It was during that summer that Nat received what would be a fateful call from a friend in Garrison who knew a man who had a boat tied up in a marina in Malta, a 38-foot Block Island schooner named Tappan Zee. The owner wanted her delivered to Long Island. Nat called the man, struck up a conversation, and soon was offered the job of delivering it.

Late one night he was walking through a remote Italian town with his big duffel, a sea bag, on his shoulder, when, with a terrific screech of brakes, a little Fiat came out of nowhere and plowed into him. Gas was expensive in Italy, and it was common for drivers to shut off their engines when coasting downhill. This driver didn’t have his lights on, either. Nat never saw or heard the ghosting little car till the sound of brakes broke the night’s hot stillness, by which time there was nothing he could do. He felt his body hit the hood and smash into the windshield, shattering it; he tumbled over the top of the car and onto the ground.

“È morto,” a voice above him said. Nat groaned, coming to. The crowd gathered around him realized that he was alive—his big sea duffel had likely saved him—and he was taken to a hospital that had no hot water, flies buzzing and crawling over everything, syringe-happy nuns dancing about, sick people moaning through the night. When he woke in the morning, he couldn’t wait to flee. He found himself badly bruised, but nothing apparently was broken, so he lifted his duffel, hobbled aching to the front desk, said “Arrivederci,” and walked out. He was greeted by the man who’d run him down; he’d come to the hospital to find Nat. The man spoke no English, but Nat inferred from what few words he could pick up and from the man’s tone—and also from the way he was jabbing a finger at his car—that he was demanding that Nat pay for the damage. The Fiat was pretty well totaled, Nat had to admit. As neither spoke the other’s language, though, there was little for an unsympathetic Nat to do but limp to the side of the road and stick his thumb out. The first car that approached stopped to pick him up. The driver, wide-eyed, said, “I can’t believe you’re alive. I was there last night. I saw the whole thing.” Nat, thus proven blessed, traveled south and boarded a boat for the short hop to Messina, Sicily. Then, Nat says, “I hitched a ferry over to Malta to meet my ship!”