III
Monday is clear and frigid, the cedar-sided boatshop crisp against a deep-blue morning sky. Duane, who works alone on the Bella off the outer shop, prods the fire in the stove, lighting shavings and feeding it scraps from a large bin beside the stove. Hand tools that are too cold to handle in the morning can be set here until they’re warm enough not to freeze to the skin, and cans of roofing cement will be hung over the stove to soften in the frigid temperatures of February. Jim sweeps sawdust into huge piles. A new stack of wood sits outside the shop in the dirt-and-gravel lot, a delivery from Jim Aaron that came at four yesterday afternoon and was unloaded by Aaron and Ross—locust and oak from western Massachusetts. Ross arrives this morning shortly after eight. Jim, Ted, Bruce, and Duane stand around him waiting for directions. Ross tells Bruce that he pulled out potential crooks—where the wood grain curves—from the locust as they were unloading; Bruce should go through them with the sawn-frame patterns, looking for matches. There are some severe curves at Elisa Lee’s aft stations, and Ross is after pieces of wood whose grain has an identical curve. “We want the grain to grow right out of that frame,” he explains to Bruce, who nods. “Use locust if you can, it’s the closest to angelique. Don’t make do. If it’s not good enough, we’ll get you what you need.” These frames, with their grain, are some of the most important pieces of the boat.
Ross instructs Ted to move the oak that’s stacked outside the shop into the woodshed—a red wooden structure directly behind the shop—sorting it as he goes by type: “Good oak—framing oak, steaming oak—and shitty oak,” Ross says. To Duane, he says, “The oak marked as ‘steaming’ was gray. It had ‘bending oak’ written on it. It was dry as popcorn.” Not ideal, that is, for bending along the inside of a boat hull. The clutch of boatwrights moves outside the shop as Ross says, “Let’s get Nat’s keel timber on sawhorses.”
Now that Nat and Ted have adzed an inch off its surface, the main keel timber is close to its ultimate dimensions—7 inches wide and 22 inches tall at its largest points, and 30 feet long. The one-ton timber must now be moved from its spot outside, around the corner between the lead smelter and the steamer, and into the shop, to be placed on blocks above its pattern on the lofting floor. With nothing more than some rollers and levers, five boatbuilders complete this task in twenty minutes. There is something energizing about beginning the workweek this way—moving a massive boat timber—in part because it’s a feat that really shouldn’t be possible in this age of motorized assistance, and yet it is easily accomplished by flipping the timber onto rollers and levering it forward. Moreover, when the main keel timber is in place, it feels to everyone as if work on the boat has truly begun: there it is, the first piece, the boat has started. When it’s fixed on the blocks a few feet above its image, Ross picks up a pattern he’s been working on and says, “This is the last piece of the backbone,” and then he heads into the shop to saw it out. With virtually every part of the keel made, and the first timber in place, they can begin putting the boat together.
Jim fastens his pieces together first, clamping the knee to the forekeel and, with a drill bit nearly 1½ feet long, boring a hole through the two pieces. He tries to drill straight, but the angelique is hard, and drilling it requires a lot of pressure. The drill bit bends. When the bit at last emerges from the other side, he’s slightly off center in the 5-inch-wide piece. He shakes his head. He tries again. The next hole is even farther off center, and so, concerned, he asks Ross to drill the third hole. Ross does, and his comes out off center.
Jim, feeling slightly vindicated, says, “Maybe eets za grain of za wood.”
Ross responds, “Maybe we’re just drilling them crooked.”
The holes aren’t dangerously off center—they’ll do—but they’re not perfect. Jim unclamps the pieces, smears the surfaces with tarlike roofing cement, and reclamps them.
Ross has made the first bolts, in lengths between 12 and 15 inches, out of ⅜-inch bronze rods, cutting their threads using the metal lathe and a die. He fabricates the heads for the bolts out of an old, oxidized propeller shaft that’s been lying around, first lathing the corroded exterior off so that it’s uniform and bright as a new penny, then drilling a hole through its center, cutting it into disks, and finally pushing a thread-cutting tap through each disk. Two dozen ⅜- and ½-inch-wide bronze keel bolts and their heads, some as long as 3 feet, will be fashioned on this lathe to hold the keel pieces together.
The heads are countersunk into the angelique; 1-inch-thick plugs will be glued in over them. Jim wraps cotton caulk around the bolt head and then pounds it through the hole, countersinking it with a spike. The cotton will help prevent corrosion by absorbing any moisture that may seep in. Ross has been careful not to cut excess thread near the head, since exposed thread increases the surface area, and the more surface area, the more potential corrosion. Corrosion won’t be a problem for the first twenty or thirty years of a boat’s life, Ross says, but after that it can be if it’s not prevented at this point.
When Jim has the three pieces bolted together in their final form, a big stem and forekeel, with a 90-degree bend, he must finish chiseling the rabbet, the V-shaped groove that rolls across the length where hull and keel connect. When planking begins, the bottommost plank, the garboard, will be fastened into this groove. Jim continually checks his progress with a small block of wood ⅞ inch thick, the thickness of the planking.
Nat walks through the shop and stops to watch Jim work. Jim chisels carefully, slowly.
“Cut a pocket out here and here and here,” Nat says, pointing to three spots on the rabbet outline, about a foot apart. “Then connect them. For some reason it’s easier to read.”
Jim nods. He considered this but he didn’t trust himself. He soon develops a rhythm and a feel for the rabbet. Every now and then he takes a break, holding the chisel and mallet in his left hand and stepping back to regard his work. He draws his fingers through the groove in the dark-brown wood and says, “Eet’s a nice curve, eh?”
He continues to work and takes it through the sweep almost to the end of the forekeel, which will be attached to the main keel timber. He’ll wait till it’s all together before finishing it. Ross stops beside Jim to look at his work. “Oh, nice rabbet,” Ross says. He reflects for a moment. “That’s a beautiful thing.”
When Jim has completed the rabbet, he and Nat attach the stem construction to the keel timber. The stem requires two people to carry it, but a single sliding-bar clamp can hold it up on the keel timber. Soon they have the new stem set up and fastened to the keel, and the first prominent line of the boat has been created, the long, straight keel tapering slightly into a tall, plumb stem. From the side, half of Elisa Lee’s profile has been determined. Stand before this and you can imagine a boat coming at you.
They proceed to prepare the pieces for fastening. Nat stands at the back of the keel timber and says, “This timber has sort of a twist in it.” He then walks to the stem to check its fit. He gives the stem a couple of shots with a wooden mallet to center the piece. “We can draw our center lines,” he says. “We’ll cut this off and fair it here first, a little bit, with the Skilsaw.” Jim works on the vertical faces that connect, pushing them together as tightly as possible and then taking a crosscut saw to the seam and sawing through the crack to make them flush, a technique known as kerfing the ends of a scarf. Nat and Jim will spend two and a half days more chiseling out the rabbet along the entire length of the keel, finishing their work with a tool called a rabbet plane.
The bosses—“the bearded ones,” as Ginny refers to them collectively—are continually beset by friends stopping by, sometimes to ask advice about their boats but more likely just wandering through, wanting to watch and chat. One afternoon Dan Adams wanders in from the beach. Nat is up on top of the keel, drilling ½-inch keel bolt holes through 3 feet of keel timbers.
It’s the first anyone has seen of him since Rebecca shut down. Dan is of average height and corpulent, covering with a ball cap a bald scalp and a horseshoe of short, dark hair, his blue eyes narrowly set in a jowly, oval face. He regards the keel coming together, Nat standing atop it with a drill. “So you’ve become a lobsterboat builder now,” Dan says.
Nat’s teeth set in a half-smile, and he answers, “Hey, I’d love to get back to work on the schooner. You know when that’ll happen.” He hops down off the keel, and he and Dan speak quietly, the keel between them. Dan leaves shortly thereafter.
Nat says Dan is “kind of pathetic . . . I feel sorry for him.” The man continues to shrug off the Rebecca situation.
Meanwhile, Bruce, Ted, and now Bob Osleeb have been bolting together sawn frames and cutting them out on the ship’s saw, having found as many crooks of locust as possible for frames with big turns in them. They’ve also been cutting out angelique floor timbers, triangular pieces notched to fit over the keel and beveled to match the attaching frames. When these pieces are completed and all the bolts have been cut on the lathe—two for each floor timber—then the frames can start to go on. Holes are drilled one by one through the keel pieces, smoke and damp sawdust erupting out of each as the drill works its way through the angelique; every scarf, every attaching surface, is slathered with warm roofing cement; long bronze bolts are sledgehammered through floor timbers and keel pieces; nuts are ratcheted tight on the other end. The frames are bolted to the floor timbers almost as soon as they’re made.
Nat drills many of the holes, first with a short bit, then with a long barefoot auger that bends when he puts his weight on it. He must repeatedly pull the bit out, bang off the clots of wood, and then continue to drill to the other side. Bolts are then sledgehammered upward through these holes, lengths of cotton caulk having been wrapped around their heads before they’re driven home. Before these U-shaped frame-and-timber structures are set up, 1-by-6-inch boards are nailed to their tops, athwartships at the sheer, to steady and support them. All work efficiently together, and the frames rise one after the other, so quickly that the boat seems to be inflating like a hot-air balloon.
Jim stops to step back and look. For the first time the shape of the boat can be visualized along the guides of the sawn frames. “That’s one of the most beautiful moments of boatbuilding,” he says. “After that,” he adds solemnly, “it’s not so beautiful.” Then he laughs. People who enter the shop, and other G&B workers who pass through (such as Chris Mullen and Robert Bennett, repairing Liberty outside the building), halt, stare, and shake their heads, grinning. With darkness coming on fast, the next-to-last frames and timbers are bolted in. Just two weeks after the first pieces of the puzzle were cut out, Elisa Lee is starting to look like a boat.
Ross intends to flip this skeleton upside down, fair the frames, bend in the oak frames, plank her up, caulk and fair the hull, and then flip her right side up again. He thinks it will make the work much easier, especially at the back of the hull, which is practically flat. Nat, though, feels it may be more trouble and harder on the boat to flip her twice, the second time when she weighs the majority of her anticipated 14,000 pounds. Nat says he’s leaning toward building her right side up. She’s just too heavy a boat, and she takes up so much space as it is that there’s scarcely enough room to move around her now—if they flip her upside down, the widest part of the boat will be right along the floor.
But Ross says, “I just can’t imagine planking, fairing, and caulking her right side up. Half those planks are on the bottom”—he makes a curving right angle with his hand—“and my knees and shoulders just don’t work that way anymore.”
Ultimately, Nat stops playing devil’s advocate, and he and Ross agree that it is best to build the boat upside down.