Wooden Boats

Ross returns from Maine as scheduled and is back at work on Monday morning. The winter storm predicted for Thursday night arrived hours early and dumped so much snow on the island that only those who could walk to the shop from home could work, and with both bosses gone, few had any motivation to do that. On Monday Bob says, “I’m glad Ross is back.” This is because work now resumes in earnest, with redoubled effort for the lost days. Ross gives morning instructions to cut extra floor timbers, one for each bent frame at stations where the engine will rest and where the mast will be stepped—“places that will have a lot of stress,” he says, adding, “Weight is a consideration in a powerboat.”

Bolts between 14 and 24 inches long, two for each timber, must be fashioned; Ross determines their measurements from the drawing on the lofting floor. Jim begins to plane thick pieces of angelique for the floor timbers. The tropical wood has a distinctive odor when it’s freshly cut or planed. Jim puts his nose close to the wood, winces, and says, “Zees angelique smells like where za cows are on za farm.”

By Tuesday morning Nat has returned to the shop as well. He enters wearing a green vest, green wool sweater, green beret, and pale-orange Carhartt work pants, and carrying his canvas briefcase. Jim is running a plane across the edge of a floor timber he’s fixed in a vise, Bob and Bruce are discussing the timber Jim is planing, and Ted and I are listening. When we see Nat, we all say hello and “Welcome back.”

Nat heads toward the outer shop. “I see you got her turned upside down.” He regards Elisa Lee, then has a look at the Bella. Duane says, “Welcome back!” “Thanks,” Nat says, and then, “This is looking good.” He and Duane discuss the toerails and the cabin trunk until Ginny scoots past them and turns left into the shop, headed for her office. As she passes, Nat says, “Well. Ahem! I better see what Mrs. Jones has for me.”

“Great,” he says. “A lot of fun.” He and Pam covered many miles on foot through the Georgia woods, he says, and saw all kinds of animals, including wild pigs and armadillos. Then he says, “Oh, those woods! Longleaf yellow pine, hickory, live oak. It’s a boatbuilder’s dream—to see every shape of a boat in those trees.”

In addition to the two new constructions, a major repair has been under way all winter on the 40-foot sloop Liberty, which Nat designed and G&B built in 1986 for Primo Lombardi, the owner of a pizza joint in Oak Bluffs. Likely the first American boat to be built of Suriname timbers, she’s a sweet vessel, as just about all Nat’s designs are—simple, powerful, with moderate displacement but also relatively low-riding and thus sleek-looking and surprisingly quick and easy to maneuver.

WoodenBoat magazine has critically reviewed only one of Nat’s boats, a 30-foot yawl named Candle in the Wind, but the writer of that 1992 commentary was Joel White, one of the most respected designers in the industry and the son of the great literary stylist E. B., a man who not only devoted his life to wooden boats but also looked at boats with an eye toward what might be lasting about them, what truths they might point us toward. In Nat’s design he apparently found abundance.

White began his review by calling G&B a boatyard “of the old school” and describing the new yawl as a “fine example of the quality of design and craftsmanship that has made Gannon & Benjamin well known to a small but discerning circle of admirers.” White had contacted Nat for some background on the boat, and Nat, addressing the design requirements given him by the Englishman who commissioned her, had written in a letter, “I am convinced that performance, comfort and looks are all compatible, and to design and build a boat for a family to enjoy is the most reasonable request.”

White looked carefully at the attributes of design and the aesthetics of “this old-fashioned boat that I believe has implications for the future.” One of his convictions, and a perpetual theme in his designing and writing until his death in 1998, at the age of sixty-six, was this: “The greatest fun in boating usually comes in the simplest boats.

“Most modern boats,” he continued, “are simply too complicated. They are so full of systems, which too often fail to work, that the feeling of self-reliance—that wonderful ingredient in the pleasures of cruising—is now missing. The modern cruising boat makes the owner a slave to the systems and to the chore of keeping them all working. The Loran isn’t working?—well, we can’t sail without that. Call the electronics man.” White’s command: “Keep it simple.”

Candle was one such example of old-style simplicity. “The hull reminds me a bit of small English cruising designs of the 1930’s,” White noted, and he went on to remark on the design elements—the things that made the boat tick, as Nat would put it—including the hollow from the garboard up to the firm turn of the bilge, the displacement, the waterline length, the displacement/length ratio, the slight cutaway of the forefoot, the rake of the sternpost, the fact that the 4 feet 9 inches of draft allowed the 2-ton lead-ballast keel to be low enough for good stability. There was “nothing revolutionary in the lines plan,” he conceded, “but a very nice combination of elements to produce a fast, shapely hull that looks right under its old-fashioned gaff-yawl rig.”

The proportions of that rig were, White wrote, “perfect.” “So many new boats built today with gaff rigs suffer from ill-proportioned spars, clumsy rigging details, and a lack of knowledge of how things were done a century ago. Candle in the Wind, with her eye-spliced shrouds and wooden blocks, would not have looked out of place in a turn-of-the-century regatta.”

Five years later the man who commissioned Candle, H. Nicholas Verey, died of leukemia, and family affairs had to be settled, one of which was selling the boat. Happily for Vineyard Haven Harbor, she was bought by residents of Martha’s Vineyard and returned to live here year-round under G&B’s patient care.

White might have made similar comments regarding the simplicity, lines, and design of Liberty or most any of Nat’s boats—they all shared these attributes. Benjamin-designed boats weren’t all perfect, and some were quite a bit better than others, and even within the same design—the Canvasbacks, the Bellas—some boats were better than one or another sister. Ross admired Nat’s designs but was not without his opinions about them. The sloop Swallows and Amazons Forever, with her slack bilge, never really worked for him—he thought her homely, felt sorry for her. Nat himself was not particularly fond of his catboat, Seasons. But then he didn’t like catboats generally, so perhaps it had been difficult for him to muster the passion for that distinctive style and rig.

Liberty, though, she was a fine vessel, tropical hardwoods bent into classical lines. And now she had a new owner, Doug Cabral, the editor of the Martha’s Vineyard Times, who’d purchased her with his wife, Molly, and another couple. The previous owner, according to word around the yard, had wanted just a little more boat than he could actually afford (he was boatstruck), and he hadn’t maintained her well or even sailed her all that much. Cabral and friends had sailed her for the summer with the agreement that G&B would haul her out for the winter and restore her to perfection, or, in the words of Cabral himself, make her “a proper boat finally.” So there she stood, on blocks beside the shop, towering above all as they took their ten-thirty coffee break. A portable staircase rested against planks, staging that had been built around her waterline. To get to her, you took fourteen bouncing steps from the dirt up to the staging and from there ducked beneath the red, white, and blue tarp that sheltered Robert Bennett and Chris Mullen, and soon Nat, in their work.

Doug Cabral, seated at his computer in the second-floor offices of the Times, has been able to turn to the left and look out a sliding porch door and watch his boat being worked on all winter. He admits it’s a distraction, but not half as big a one as the boat will be this summer, when he’ll see her moored just off the G&B dock, tipping back and forth in the harbor, nodding to him at his office desk, beckoning like a mistress, “Come to me.”

Cabral, a tall, beefy fifty-three-year-old with short gray hair and the skeptical, no-nonsense demeanor of any self-respecting newspaperman, runs a good paper; both he and the Times are well liked on the island. It’s one of two papers published here; as a glance at the classifieds indicates, his is the year-round newspaper for the island resident, whereas the Vineyard Gazette, a broadsheet, caters to the summer people. Both are decent small-town newspapers, though, and Cabral is perfectly suited to running the news for the year-round Vineyarder. He’s been here since 1969, when he delivered boats and free-lanced for boating magazines. Thirty years a resident, with a wife and children, a dog, and a house up-island, he’s seen the changes in the Vineyard, its transformation from a secluded rural retreat to a tony, wealthy, overcrowded destination, a destination that he argues almost always disappoints the first-time tourist.

Oak Bluffs and Edgartown are the only towns that sell alcohol, and the island’s best beaches, such as Lucy Vincent in Chilmark, are indeed open only to residents of specific towns and strictly guarded from June through September. Furthermore, the island is no longer, in Cabral’s words, the “hard-bitten, antique outpost” that longtime Vineyarders like to imagine it is. Martha’s Vineyard has become, according to him, suburban.

Nat, he says one wet March morning while Elisa’s frames are being faired and readied for the ribbands, “marches to a different drummer. . . . He’s a mild, decent man.” His personal life is steady and predictable. Ross, in contrast, is “mercurial” and “rigid.” When Ross moved houses for a living, Cabral remembers, his main problem-solving method was to find a heavier sledgehammer. He senses that perhaps “Ross feels uncomfortable in a house,” musing that he may be better suited to the forest. “Ross is none of the things you want in a modern human being,” Cabral concludes with a grin.

He admires and respects both men and says that to those longtime residents who summer in ramshackle cottages passed down through the generations, “Nat and Ross are an important ingredient in their memory when they’re away from this place.” Their “unusual, anachronistic work” jibes, he says, with that antique-outpost notion of the island.

It is also true that Cabral loves wooden boats and is grateful to Nat and Ross for their work. “I was infected young, and I’ve never been able to get rid of the disease,” he says. Asked why he favors wooden boats, he doesn’t wax nostalgic or fly off the handle about cathedrals and curves; he simply says they’re what he prefers. Some people like Picasso, some prefer Goya, he says, and it’s the same thing with boats—sometimes you just know, “That’s for me.” The newspaperman is not boatstruck, but throughout this winter he’s nevertheless been itching for summer, when Liberty—“one of Nat’s cleverest designs,” he says—will be back in the water. “Nat is not distracted by what’s going on in marine design,” he explains.

Cabral is furthermore a great admirer of Nat and Ross’s craftsmanship and method, applauding their simplicity and praising both men for being “very conscientious in the construction stage. They’re very honorable in putting a boat together. It probably reduces their profit margin. If they have a profit margin. It’s an achievement these days to do decent and authentic things.”

Cabral scratches his head at how the partnership of these very different men can be so harmonious, but somehow it works, he says: Nat the public voice, the designer and fine craftsman; Ross the brilliant mechanic, the engineer and cast-iron motor of the operation. “Nat is much better at the finish work,” Cabral says. “The work Nat does will look better than the work Ross does, but Ross will get it done faster.” And for Rebecca he reserves the highest praise: “It’s a gorgeous piece of work,” he says, citing the extraordinary joinery, the exquisite lines of the planking. The whole boat, he says, inside and out, seems to have been built to the standard of the fine finish work on the inside.

Even when Nat and Ross themselves are nowhere to be seen, their differences are evident in their toolboxes, which float here and there about the shop and personify exactly the same qualities that Cabral points out. Nat’s toolbox is a spacious rectangle whose handle-bearing ends curve up and out in an hourglass shape; the handle itself repeats this curve, treating it as a design element—wide at the sides, narrowing at the grip—and is attached with a perfect dovetail joint. Nat composed the box out of three woods—pine, maple, and oak—whose visual contrast is now diminished by a decade’s use. Most revealing is the handle, which is flat so Nat can use the box as a surface, a mini-sawhorse, when he’s working in a cockpit or small interior space. The box is elegant in design and construction, but its ultimate elegance is in its function. This box is very much Nat Benjamin.

Ross’s toolbox is a dull, uniform brown, splintered and ragged on the sides, pocked, chipped, scratched, scraped, and so loaded with heavy tools that Ross has had to attach with duct tape a supporting bar of wood to the broom handle running across the top to keep the thing from crashing to the floor when he lifts it. But even this beat-to-hell box contains an elegant logic. It’s a working toolbox, meant to carry tools; it isn’t supposed to be art or a fancy showpiece. Indeed, any time spent making such a thing fancy is, to Ross, time not spent getting the real work done. Now and then Ross looks at this toolbox and says, “It’s really time for a new one,” but then his eyebrows lift and he gets back to work. As long as it does its job, there’s no real reason to build a new one. Ross is a man who cares strongly about toolboxes, who knows that the workman is, or should be, invested in his toolbox; he therefore instructs every new apprentice to build his own box as his first order of duty, and he points him to the scraps of tropical hardwoods stacked against the wall beside the wood-burning stove.

On the day of Nat’s return, Ross walks out to the “Pepe’s” pickup and retrieves a heavy construction of metal and brings it inside to show Nat. He sets it on the table saw to have a close look at the thing. It appears to be composed of only a few working pieces, a central threaded shaft an inch or two thick, like a giant screw, with parallel arms, connected to a large bronze disk that slides up and down the length of the shaft—or is supposed to slide. The piece seems to be from the era of the metal lathe and planer, the era of cast-iron machinery, and it’s fairly well coated with either dry, oily sludge or rust, except where there’s the corroded verdigris of the oxidized bronze. It’s the mechanism by which a rudder is turned from the wheel in the cockpit by means of a worm gear.

Several years ago Ross read a classified advertisement for a boat in Fort Lauderdale. Wooden boats, if you don’t take care of them, will sink, and this one had sunk right in the marina where it was docked. The ad was in WoodenBoat, placed there by the owner, who hoped to cut his losses. The boat was free for the taking to anyone willing to haul it out, the ad said. Ross paid four grand to have it transported to Vineyard Haven, wanting its parts, including the lead ballast, which he’s using for his own boat. This worm gear also came off that boat. It lies now on the ship’s saw as if stilled in a sepia photograph. Certainly it’s nothing that could work today.

But Ross grabs a can of lubricant, shakes it, and begins to spray the metal pieces. Nat gets in there, too, scraping away built-up crud. Ross turns it over. Nat hits it with more spray. Gunk slowly comes off; lubricating oil pools beneath it. Slowly the bronze disk and threaded shaft along which the disk moves budge, coming back to life. It’s as if the two men are reviving a living organ. Soon Nat has the whole thing turning smoothly and without resistance. He tries to jiggle the disk that rides up and down the heavy thread; there’s no play in it. “The thread is very good,” he says. “It’s very nice.”

This is why Nat and Ross regard the old worm gear as such a special piece: only a few moving parts made of steel and bronze. You could depend on it almost forever. “We took this off a boat that was built fifty years ago,” Ross says, “and are putting it in a boat built fifteen years ago. And we’ll expect it to outlast us.”

This is the perfect summary of the way their world works, the only way they will have it work. The way they determine it will be. Their world has few moving parts, and what parts it does have are meant to last. It is true of the worm gear, all but breathing once again in a puddle of fluid on the ship’s saw; it is true of their toolboxes, and the Bella and Elisa Lee in the outer shop this very moment, moving piece by piece toward their summer launch dates; and it is true of the halted Rebecca. The worm gear represents the reason they don’t rely on fancy equipment, modern steering devices, electronic navigation systems, or anything made of plastic. Such things are unreliable, and if something is unreliable, it is no good—period—even when it’s working. If you can’t depend on something absolutely, then it is by definition temporary, and something temporary is something that needs to be fixed or replaced. These builders use only tools and equipment and build only boats that can be depended on absolutely. Doing otherwise is, for them, unnecessary.

Recently David McCullough asked Nat for help with some pages he was working on. McCullough is the author of Truman, the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography and paean to the thirty-third president of the United States. Millions know McCullough’s forthright voice from Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War, and still more know him as the host of The American Experience series on PBS stations across the country. That is, if they haven’t already read any of his fat, compulsively readable books about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal, and other historical events. He was currently at work on a book about America’s second president, John Adams, Adams’s wife, Abigail, and their times. When he arrived at a particular event in Adams’s life, he called Nat for some insight into navigation in the eighteenth century.

Still standing with them at the ship’s saw and the worm gear when this information comes up, I ask how either of them could advise one of the country’s best and most popular historians on techniques of eighteenth-century navigation. Nat and Ross reply in happy unison, “Because it’s how we do it now!”

Nat says that he and Ross both chartered and delivered boats in the 1960s and 1970s, before the advent of the Global Positioning System, when the most complex navigating device on a boat was likely to be a Loran or radio direction finder, both of which were “pretty much useless,” according to Nat. Nat had taught himself how to navigate by sextant in his early twenties, and Ross had, too, so they never had to rely on electronics to get safely to and from distant points of land, so long as they had that ancient navigating device, which relies not on a man-made satellite launched into space and wires and electricity on a boat, but rather on the seaman’s own eyesight and the position of the sun (which latter Nat and Ross consider to be a pretty permanent and dependable measuring device). The stars, too, can be handy jigs for making your way across the surface of the earth.

But Nat did something even more valuable for McCullough than confirm details of navigation, refine descriptions of the types of waves a captain would encounter on that part of the ocean (McCullough remembers that Nat asked him to reconsider describing the sea as “turbulent,” for instance; the sea in question is now “steep”), or explain why the North Atlantic was so treacherous in winter, the time of the voyage in question (because there were no sophisticated weather-detection systems then, ships were often blindsided by monster storms: “If you’re out there,” Nat says, “and you got hit by a nor’easter like we had last week, and you’re above Cape Cod, you’ll be driven up on the rocks, and everyone will die. There was no emergency rescue. It was dangerous”).

The time was February 1778, in the middle of the Revolutionary War, and Adams had to cross the ocean to France to help Ben Franklin with treaty negotiations. He brought with him his ten-year-old son, John Quincy. The dead of winter was a time when few ships went to sea. Moreover, the British navy was blockading the colonies precisely to prevent any attempted passages. Adams might easily have been captured, in which case he’d have been delivered to the Tower of London and likely hanged. The city of Boston teemed with Tories and British spies, so Adams could not board the ship there; instead, the ship was loaded in Boston and then sailed off the black, rocky beaches of what is now Quincy, where Adams and his son waited at dusk in a driving snowstorm.

The voyage proved to be every bit as difficult as might be expected given the winter and the war, and then some. Just about everything that could go wrong on a voyage did. Working from the log of Captain Samuel Tucker and from Adams’s own diary, McCullough’s narrative describes a nightmare crossing. The ship, commissioned the previous year by the Continental Congress, was a U.S. frigate, a fast war vessel more than 100 feet long, carrying sixteen guns. On this voyage, it was caught in a tremendous storm; it was hit by lightning; the main mast split in two; crew were killed; and a battle was fought with a British ship.

“I wanted to get it right,” McCullough tells me. “And I wanted to make it as horrible and vivid and exciting as it really was. So I asked Nat to read it for me. And I think this is a measure of the kind of guy Nat is, the way he approaches everything. He got up a chart of the North Atlantic, and by using the captain’s log, he plotted the whole voyage of that ship, which I’m sure has never been plotted before. He determined for me, as I now say, that the storm actually blew them two hundred miles off course. That’s a lot of miles off course.” This voyage, which has been written about in only a cursory way until now, was an important event in the history of America and a fundamental experience in the life of one of the country’s founding fathers. Writing to Thomas Jefferson many years later, Adams would describe the crossing as a metaphor for his whole life. McCullough is the first to write in detail about this significant journey, and he is indebted to Nat for his counsel and expertise: “He was extremely helpful, but he was also clearly enjoying all of it, and that’s what he conveys in his work. He’s enjoying all of it. He loves it. You can tell a lot about somebody by what they love, and he loves that work.”

Nat and Ross built a Bella for McCullough, named Rosalee for his wife. McCullough loves that little boat so much that he and Rosalee sometimes row out and just sit on her, don’t even sail—she’s simply a lovely object to behold and a lovely object to behold things from. The boat, he says, is a joy to own: “I would like to own that boat even if I never went out in it, just to look at it. The way one would love to own a painting or a great piece of furniture.”

McCullough has known Nat for twenty years and Ross for longer, and so I paid a visit to his home in West Tisbury—classic New England architecture with eighteenth-century origins—to hear this prominent historian’s thoughts on the Bearded Ones. McCullough is not quite six feet tall, but he seems to tower in the door frame because of his snowy, precise hair, his bright-blue eyes, his hearty complexion and handsome visage, and because of that gift of a voice, a voice that’s resounding without being loud, a voice that carries a natural conviction and authority in its cadences. He wears a crisp blue oxford shirt and a navy cardigan sweater vest, buttoned, exactly what you’d expect of a past president of the American Society of Historians.

We sit in his living room, whose walls are lined with books, a watercolor of Rosalee, under construction at G&B, leaning up from the floor against volumes of history. In his work, as in his conversation, McCullough concentrates on the amazing and the remarkable. He elevates lives and events, holding them up for the reader at their most thrilling angle so that the light catches them just so. He prefers to focus his considerable skills as an observer of history, as a writer, on what is best, as opposed to the good and the bad in equal measure, or simply the trashy and sensational.

“They’re incorruptible,” McCullough says. “They really are. That comes from working with their hands and loving what they do and dealing with the elements. They’re aware of which way the wind is blowing. The real wind, not just metaphorically. The real wind. The tides. They’re like a farmer or a hunter: people who know who’s really in charge.

“Nat and Ross are like people were a hundred years ago. We forget how tough the elements were. We forget how tough people were.” McCullough remembers encountering Ross in the shop and seeing that he had a badly wounded hand—in fact, a burn that had become infected. “Ross, what happened?!” he asked. Ross acted as if it were literally a scratch; he hadn’t had it looked at by a doctor or even bothered to wrap some gauze around it.

For McCullough it’s a matter not simply of toughness in a historical way, but rather of toughness combined with a knowledge about how the physical world works. The more he learns about eighteenth-century country people like the Adamses, the more he admires how much people knew how to do, just as a matter of course. Nat and Ross are like that, he suggests.

“Also, because they’re so good at what they do, they have a confidence that gives them an exceptional degree of calmness. They’re very calm, even in the face of things’ going wrong. They’re not show-offs, they’re not baloney artists. They know who they are and what they do. They’re grounded, as Quakers sometimes say; they have an inner ballast that comes from their work. They’re inner-directed, and such people are rare in our time. They are trustworthy. I would trust Nat Benjamin with . . . anything. I’d certainly trust him with my life. I would trust those men—if you were going to do something really difficult, if you had to go across the country in a covered wagon and face unexpected dangers, hardships, the need for innovation and resourcefulness, could you pick anybody better to have with you than those two guys?”

Nat walks through the shop, stops at Elisa, and says, “Everything fairing out all right?” Bob affirms that it is. People are continually noting how fat this boat is; most are used to seeing a slim sailboat hull filling the shop. When Nat, the man who made her fat, hears this, he says, “It’s gotta have that. If it’s too narrow, it’ll just dig a big hole in the water.” He clears his throat and heads up the portable stairway and into Liberty. Bob says, “As soon as we get this faired, Ross is going to line it off.”

Lining off a boat is the first stage of planking. Ross must determine how many planks there will be and how wide each one will be at any given station—in effect, draw the shape of each plank onto the skeletal hull. The planks will each have their own individual shape; each will have an edge beveled to make room for the caulking, and many—those fastened at the turn of the bilge—will be hollowed, or backed, out. Ross will also mark on each station the important lines, some of which won’t correspond to a single plank, such as the load waterline (where the boat will actually sit in the water), and the sheer as well as the sheer at the raised deck. These marks will also determine the ribbands, the long strips of spruce that will be put on temporarily for the purpose of bending in the oak frames.

The first thing Ross will do is divide the hull into three sections of more or less equal length: the bottom of the boat, the turn of the bilge, and the topsides. Much of the bottom and top will be flat and can therefore take wider planks. The turn of the bilge includes a severe curve at the after stations and therefore requires narrower planks to reduce the amount of backing-out that’s required.

Once he’s marked those dividing lines, he will then consider station five, where the girth is widest, decide the maximum width of any plank at that station in each of the three sections he’s marked, and simply divide the length by that number to come up with the number of planks for each of the three sections. He will then divide the length of each station by that number of planks to determine the width of the planks at each station, marking off each plank on each station with his stick rule.

I am there, at Ross’s side, as he does this. I am asking questions. I am helping with the measuring. I am taking notes. But I still don’t understand what is going on. And once he begins to take the patterns of the actual planks, I will become so lost as not to see a thing. My confusion is fascinating to Ross—it happens all the time. The planking appears to be a mystery, a physical conundrum. How do you draw the outlines of all the planks on the skeleton hull, those planks that narrow and widen and bend, then figure out what a bent piece will look like when it’s flat?

I am convinced the process cannot be adequately described in words. Howard Chapelle, an American maritime historian and wooden boat authority who wrote A Complete Handbook of Wooden Boat Construction, has described the process of planking a boat, and Ross has actually tried to read it. “Chapelle does not know how to plank a boat” is Ross’s evaluation of Chapelle’s planking description.

Ross says the most reader-friendly, clear description of boat building is Bud MacIntosh’s How to Build a Wooden Boat. I tried no fewer than twenty times to head-butt my way through his descriptions. Not gonna find out there. Not available. It can’t be described in words. You have to do it. You have to see it. You have to lift a pattern off a boat, put it down flat on a board, cut that shape out, and see for yourself how it bends around the hull of a boat. And then do it again and again.

“After you plank a few boats,” Ross explains, “you can look at the lines that you’ve lined off, and you know which planks are going to be S-shaped and which planks are going to curve the other direction. And until you’ve sprung enough planks on a boat—well, I’m only just getting really good at it, after twenty years of doing this.”

But, in almost the same breath, Ross will go on about how easy it is, about how any child can do it if someone’s there to show him how. “It looks like a mystery but every process is simple, just plain simple,” Ross says. “There’s nothing difficult about it once somebody shows you how it’s done.”

And both will admit that it can look to the uninitiated like a complex, even mysterious process. They joke about “the smoke and mirrors” of the work, about “the mysteries of boatbuilding,” because it’s so simple to them. In a way it’s like an optical illusion that, once seen, can’t be ignored.

When Ross has the important lines marked on the stations, Bruce and Bob begin to fasten the ribbands. One line gives him trouble, and he finds himself moving a ribband around to get it just right—the top of the turn of the bilge, one that’s fair and will also complement the line at the bottom of the turn.

Ross drops to his hands and knees and sweeps away nails and sawdust and ribbands, saying, “I’m going to check this on the floor.” Then he stands back up and looks at the line he’s drawn and the sheerline and says, “I don’t know why these are so far off.” He and Bruce have clamped a ribband at the bottom of the turn of the bilge. They eyeball it; then they squat and peer along its length. “That has to go up, and this one has to go down,” Ross says.

Ross continues to mark off all the planks on the starboard side, dividing the length of each section of each station by the number of planks in that section. He uses a plastic calculator to do all the dividing. Ross says, “I love this thing.” In his knotty, creased hands, the calculator looks newfangled. It reads 5.433. “I just wish it did it in eighths and sixteenths,” he adds.

Ross takes the measurements from the starboard frames and simply transfers them to the port frames. He then screws a line of ribbands on that side, splicing them with a buttblock, along the low sheer. He notes that a guardrail will go on this plank, and it’ll be a different color from the hull. “It will be the most distinctive line you’ll see in the boat,” he promises.

He and Bruce put a third ribband on, but as it bends around the foremost frame toward its goal, the rabbet of the stem, a piece of wood is in the way. Two 2-by-10 planks have been nailed together and rest on edge on blocks, here as on the port side; these support the weight of the boat. Ross needs the end removed because it’s sticking out too far. It’s 4 inches thick, really too deep to take off with a Skilsaw, though a chain saw would go through it in a snap. Ross looks around, spots a big old handsaw on the lofting floor—it’s sometimes referred to here as a cordless—and in moments his arm is pumping like a steam locomotive and doesn’t stop until the unwanted wood drops to the floor. Ross bends the ribband around and drives a screw through it, fixing it to the stem.

At one-thirty Ross hops into the “Pepe’s” pickup. When it doesn’t start, he hops out, finds a metal pole, opens the hood, and, sliding the pole deep into the truck’s innards, gives the starter motor several firm thunks, then tosses the pole into the back of the truck, hops back in, and revs the diesel engine. He hasn’t had time to fix the starter, which has bad brushes, but he’s content with the current method of ignition, in conjunction with the light switch dangling to the right of the steering wheel connected to the solenoid, and the toggle switch that turns on the glow plugs; still another electrical cord, with a male end, hangs out of the front grille, attached to a block heater that lets him start the engine even after the most frigid nights. He might have gotten rid of this old truck by now if that diesel engine weren’t so efficient.

The truck is like his toolbox; in fact, they’re both versions of the same thing: Ross himself. On the seat beside him are an old shirt and a socket set. A bolt of steel cable is tipped over on the floor on the passenger side, along with a coffee can attached to a pie tin (a bird feeder made years ago by Ross and Lyle for Jane, Ross’s mom, who lives now in Vineyard Haven; she wants it fixed). Duct tape holds the glove compartment closed. On the dash are two face masks (useful when sanding lead paint off a hull), a ripsaw, a broken wooden toy gun, and a roll-up tape measure.

Ross backs out of the gravel lot and heads up State Road toward the old Ag Hall fairgrounds, stopping to pick up a cup of mushroom-barley soup and a multigrain roll from the Black Dog Restaurant. He rolls past Alley’s General Store, where one can buy a flannel shirt, a quart of milk, and a mop and rent a video—a real general store, with unfinished hardwood floors—past the West Tisbury Congregational Church, a classical, white-sided structure with a tall steeple, a green lawn, and a white picket fence at the corner of Music Street, and turns right, into the old fairgrounds. About a hundred grassy yards down, Brad Ives, Ted Okie, and Myles Thurlow are deconstructing part of a 150-foot-long open structure that used to shelter the stalls for the livestock at the county fair every August. “Oh, look at that,” Ross says when he’s close enough to see what’s been removed so far. “Some nice plywood. Looks like five-eighths. I like that a lot.” There is now a new Agricultural Hall and fairgrounds, so this structure is no longer used. G&B will scavenge some ply, good 28-foot trusses, and electrical wire.

At 2:25 Ross descends through the trusses, drops to the ground, and is soon barreling toward the West Tisbury School on Old County Road to pick up his son. Every Thursday he brings Lyle back to the boatyard for a couple of hours. Lyle, a healthy butterball of a nine-year-old, with shaggy blond hair, freckles, large, white teeth, and a round face, builds things—sailboats, devices for firing rubber bands—while Ross finishes work. The two then return to the small, unfinished house in the woods where Ross now lives.

He began building it on a lot he owned a couple hundred feet down from his first house, as a guesthouse, but when he and Suzy split, Suzy stayed in the house Ross had built for the two of them, and Ross had to hustle to get the new one livable. He recently got the plumbing working (obviating chilly trips to the outhouse he’d put in), but it can be cold inside in the winter because he hasn’t laid the hardwood floors yet; what he has now is sturdy but temporary flooring, and you can see the ground here and there through cracks. The two-story house is 24 feet square. The dining room and kitchen are one and contain an old couch and a dining table Ross built. The kitchen counter is made of beautiful, heavily varnished mahogany, fine as any yacht brightwork. A freestanding column of bricks, a raised hearth and chimney, faces the den, where Ross has recently finished building shelves. Upstairs are a bedroom and what will eventually be another enclosed room, but isn’t yet. There’s still much to do elsewhere, too. The bathroom, with its claw-footed tub, isn’t fully enclosed—you can see into it from the den downstairs. The exterior is covered with tarpaper, waiting to be shingled. Ross has plans for a huge wraparound porch, but now there’s nothing but mud off the makeshift front steps, and the general white-trash appearance of the place is beginning to bug Kirsten, who’s been spending increasingly more of her life here.

Despite its work-in-progress state, the house is nothing but warmth and honesty, and it’s only after a while that I realize why this is. The house feels old, as if it had been part of these woods for half a century already. Look at those old mullions, the wavy, imperfect panes they hold; they don’t make windows like that anymore. The bricks of the fireplace are old, and so is the granite mantel, which Ross and Kirsten found when walking near a quarry in Maine. The main posts some years ago supported When and If during her repair. This is a new house, but Ross has built it out of used pieces he’s been able to buy or scavenge from teardowns across the island over the years. The house really is old if you measure it by the age of its parts, and so its soulful antique warmth feels genuine. It’s new construction and restoration at the same time.

In the same way that Ross’s toolbox and his truck are unvarnished images of his interior makeup, his house is likewise simply a kind of hologram of his being. From the beginning his actions seem to have been driven by a fundamental compulsion to take things apart and put them back together better than they were. There’s no way to set about making this your life’s work, no course of study, certification, or sequence of events that leads to it. You simply begin doing it because you can, because it’s what your body loves, and eventually it becomes your work and livelihood through a kind of willed inevitability.

Ross was born in 1947 in Michigan, like Nat the youngest of three. His father’s work, as an executive for the company that made Diamond Crystal salt, required the family to move several times, but Ross spent his formative years in Darien, Connecticut. It was, he says, “the best childhood anybody could hope for.”

Ross was the classic all-American suburban boy, enjoying high school for what it was and working summers at the yacht club in Darien, where, under the guidance of a high school math teacher, he helped to maintain and repair boats, still mostly wooden ones. His father taught him how to sail in a fiberglass boat but eventually bought a wooden powerboat for the family to cruise in. When Ross graduated from high school in 1964, he had no real desire to go to college, but having no convincing alternative to propose, he gave in to his parents’ wish and attended North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

If he had to study something, it was obviously going to be mechanical engineering, given his inclination to take things apart to see how they worked. He’d been that way practically from birth, and his brother, too. It wasn’t just a matter of Ross’s dismantling a broken clock as a boy—he took everything apart, figured out how and why it worked, and then put it back together. It went beyond clever boyhood curiosity, becoming a real aggravation in the house because too often the contraption being dismantled was exactly what Mr. or Mrs. Gannon needed. Ultimately they forbade Ross’s activities.

Ross got on fine in college, despite the fact that in the mid-1960s, in the conservative South, most people didn’t wear jeans to class, the way Ross did. Nor were they amused by that hippie ponytail. And so for a while Ross was an outcast. It didn’t bother him, though, and in time he came to be regarded as a friendly adversary among his fellow students.

Ross was classified 1A but had no intention of fighting in Vietnam. He lacked the funds for grad school so instead enlisted in a program that trained German shepherds to sniff out land mines. This was interesting work, and he was glad to be fulfilling his service requirements in a defensive capacity. He turned out to be good at it and was chosen, along with one other young colleague, to travel to Okinawa to train marines to work with these dogs.

Ross had been in Okinawa a month when his father, age fifty-six and recovering from heart surgery, grew ill with an infection where a plastic valve had been inserted into his heart. The illness proved fatal. Ross flew home, helped to straighten out family affairs, and eventually headed back to North Carolina to continue working in a civilian capacity. It was summertime, and he would travel through the soupy heat to an air-conditioned office to write reports. He hated being in an office. He was adrift and miserable.

When a friend invited him to sail from Connecticut to Martha’s Vineyard for a Fourth of July celebration, Ross accepted, and he had such a good time, loved the island so much, that he saw no reason to return to North Carolina, other than to quit his job and pack his bags. He’d been rebuilding a little Porsche that was half finished but drivable. He sold it to a friend who wanted it to drive to Mexico to pick up some mescaline (the friend promised to pay the balance due with the profits and was as good as his word), bought an old pickup with the proceeds, loaded up his belongings, and drove north. His Porsche days were over—he’s never not owned a pickup truck since.

Ross found a place to live and began work as a free-lance carpenter, teaching himself as he went along. In no time he had an employee. And shortly thereafter, when the Steamship Authority called for bids to remove a building where it wanted a parking lot, Ross came in lowest and found himself in the business of taking things down as well as putting them up.

Most everyone who lived year-round on the island in those days knew Ross. The look of him alone was memorable—the big ponytail, the chiseled nose and fierce blue eyes, the brilliant smile flashing from within the bushy beard. To boys and men younger than he was, he seemed bigger than life. This guy moved houses. He jacked them up and pushed them hundreds of feet back from eroding shores.

Ross tore houses apart. It was dirty work, and heavy lifting, but Ross was good enough at it to make money. He formed a ragtag crew to tear things apart. His friend Mike Carroll remembers that it was almost as if Ross wanted to see who could do the most daring work with a lit chain saw in hand, like leaning off a rafter to take down an adjacent beam that was . . . just out of reach. For Ross it was a matter of getting the thing done—If you won’t do it, gimme the damn chain saw—and he’d haul himself up and do it. You could say what you wanted about why, but Ross got a job done before the people who were supposed to do it had even finished discussing it.

For all the muscle he brought to the work, though, all the problem solving by force, it wasn’t gross destruction. It was planned and careful: Ross knew he could use this wood that clattered to the ground in a heap. The stuff most people sent off to the dump—old wood from old Vineyard houses, pincushions of rusted nails—was, if you just looked at it for a moment, remarkable first-growth wood from prewar construction. So Ross would tear things down and use the good stuff—free wood of a quality all but unavailable anymore—to build new houses.

He could build almost as fast as he could take down. He’d put up at least a house a year, build it right out of his head, and all those houses would seem to be from a better age of materials and construction and craftsmanship. Ross built about fifteen houses in the 1970s, using mostly material he’d taken down himself. Other builders commonly bulldozed the stuff and sent it to the dump, but there was Ross taking the nails out of perfectly good oak and tossing the timbers into the back of his truck, grinning the whole time. It was just a matter of watching how things worked, noticing how pieces of wood came together or came apart. Everything was possible.

So Ross, and the friends he would gather to help him do the work, moved houses, dismantled them, and put them back up in better shape than they’d previously known. He made a decent living working for himself, with time off in the dead of winter to make some more money sailing charters in the Caribbean. There was nothing more telling about Ross Gannon, and the way he operated, than the name of his company: And Friends. Somehow Ross eliminated himself from the public persona of his business and emphasized everyone else. He was the natural leader, all but swinging from a rope with a blazing chain saw in hand to get that piece no one else could reach, but when “Ross and Friends” shortened itself to its most revealing form, Ross could be left alone to do his work.

The Vineyard 15—“15” for its waterline length—is a classic little sailboat that was designed by Erford Burt in 1934 specifically to negotiate the heavy currents and choppy waters of Vineyard Sound. Dozens were built over the years, and Vineyarders still look at the remaining Vineyard Haven 15s with deep nostalgia. The design was so successful, in fact, that a dozen fiberglass versions were built in the 1960s and 1970s and came complete with a sales pitch: “Trade in your old woodie, and we’ll make you a glass boat with all the trimmings from your old boat.” Few of the fiberglass models exist today, though three plank-on-frame 15s, in good sailing condition, still ply the sound.

When Ross bought his, a boat called So Long, those 15s that remained could be bought for less than their original cost of $1,000. Many were cut up for firewood, but many others survived, and Ross restored So Long to good condition, figuring things out as he went, just as he’d once done with his mom’s and dad’s appliances. When he finished, he sailed her for a couple of years, then sold her for a profit and bought a bigger boat in need of repair and fixed that, learning what worked and what didn’t, what was broken and why, sailing her for a summer or two or three, and then selling her at a profit. He did this over and over, living summers on the larger boats.

That was how he existed for the better part of two decades, living a working-class life, to him an idyll on this rural island—largely solitary, dwelling in his work, inside himself—until 1990, when his son was born. It was then that Ross, as one friend puts it, “decided to bite the bullet”—settle down, that is, and make a go of family life with Suzy, an ideal that ultimately proved untenable. His moving out only intensified his adoration of Lyle. Ross has sometimes said he’ll never be able to have another child because he can never love anything as much as he loves this child.

Now Ross has Lyle every other weekend and sees him two days a week, while custody hearings continue. On Thursdays, when he and Lyle get home from the boatyard, Ross fixes dinner and helps his son with his homework; they may play a game, or build something, work on a jigsaw puzzle, or read aloud. Ross won’t have a TV in the house, though occasionally, on one of the alternating weekends when he has Lyle with him, they’ll borrow one to watch a movie, such as Old Yeller, for a special occasion. At 7:55 on Thursday nights, he walks Lyle up the hill back to Suzy’s, returns home in the dark, reads, and goes to bed. On Tuesdays he heads over to the West Tisbury School early to be a kind of teacher’s assistant, thereby wangling an extra couple of court-allowed hours near Lyle. The split between Suzy and Ross, who were never married, was a lopsided and bitter one. Suzy isn’t giving a fraction of an inch that she isn’t required by law to give, and Kirsten’s increasing presence is gasoline on the fire (Kirsten happens to be here this week, but she’s leaving in the morning for two and a half months’ fishing in Alaska). To all who know Ross, Suzy, and Lyle, it’s a sad and unfortunate situation for all three.

Ross rockets toward school. He knows that if he makes it before two-thirty, before the corridors become a river of students streaming out, he can meet Lyle at the door of his classroom and not lose an instant of today’s five and a half hours with his son. (Bob once looked over at Ross when he and Lyle were in the shop and said, “He loves that kid so much it’s scary.”) Ross slows at the flashing yellow light and turns in to the parking lot. This is the highlight of his day. He says hello to the crossing guard, and she says “Hi, Ross” in return. Ross walks with a bounce into the school. Classes are just starting to be dismissed, but the bright, carpeted corridors are calm and orderly. He sees a few of Lyle’s classmates in the hall, putting on their coats, and knows class has just let out.

He enters the classroom and scans it. He looks around some more, and then the glazed expression of someone completely lost comes over him, as if he didn’t know where he was. His heart sinks. Lyle isn’t here. Ross walks over to the teacher, who explains that Lyle was out sick today. Ross nods. He is cordial and calm. You wouldn’t know from his expression now that anything was unusual, but when he leaves the classroom, he mutters, “That’s a load of crap.” He walks back down the corridor and says, “That’s why Lyle said he wasn’t going to see me Thursday.” The teachers know, the crossing guard knows, that Ross is leaving without his son because Suzy never bothered to tell him Lyle wasn’t in school.

Ross returns to the outer shop and climbs up on the aft frames of Elisa, knowing that he won’t see his son again till next Tuesday and that there’s not a thing he can do about it. He lunges into work, not the fine work of fairing but instead heavy work, twisting and bending and wrestling the ribbands around the hull, crunching them against the angelique and wrenching the bar clamps tight against them, then driving screws through them, sinking them deep. When a ribband must be tapered off to fit into the bow stem’s rabbet, Ross grabs a hatchet and smashes away at it, sending chunks of spruce flying through the air. His love will depart for months in Alaska in the morning, his son is being withheld from him, and a ribband takes the blows.

The following week begins slowly. Ross is out, but no one appears to know why; some think he’s working at Bargain Acres, others believe he’s ill at home, which seems unlikely. Ross gets a bug every now and then, but it’s never reason enough for him to miss work. Bruce, Bob, Jim, and Ted fasten the rest of the ribbands on the frames—twelve of them on each side—so that upside-down Elisa has a distinct hull shape, and then they begin to cut frames for bending out of white oak planks planed to 1¼ inches thick. Some of the frames toward the back of the boat must be kerfed—that is, cut down the middle for 2 or 3 feet from the top—so they’ll conform to the 90-degree turn of the bilge without breaking; the inner half of the kerfed frame will be several inches higher than the outer side.

Talk in the shop is enlivened by the opening of the movie Message in a Bottle, starring Kevin Costner as a wooden boat builder, featuring Robin Wright Penn as The Woman, and directed by Luis Mandoki. Producers from Warner Brothers were on the island early last summer, overseeing the boats they were renting: two Malabars, beautiful 42-foot Alden-designed schooners. The movie has opened on the mainland and is scheduled to be shown at the theater in Vineyard Haven this week.

Gretchen was off island and saw it first thing, mainly because she loves the Malabars so much; for her the Malabar, and particularly Jim Lobdell’s Malabar, ranks with other great works like David or The Last Supper. She’s in and out of the boatyard all day long, her trilling laughter a beneficent counterpoint to the buzzing of saws and planers, and as she strolls through the shop, she stops to chat. Bob immediately asks about the movie. She says it was surprising how little the filmmakers showed the boats actually sailing, for all the hours they spent filming them.

By the end of the day Tuesday Bob has asked everyone in the shop, “You going tonight?” Jim, of course, is going, with Ted and maybe Chris Mullen (whose wife, Tora, refuses to pay good money for such a thing). Duane and Myrtle will be there; Ginny, too. Bob can’t wait, and he clearly wants this to be a group outing, stopping just short of suggesting that they all wear their Carhartt work clothes and carry pencils behind their ears.

The movie house in Vineyard Haven is a lovely little theater with the ticket window and concessions right there under the marquee, looking out onto Main Street. You get your popcorn at a split-level door inside. The theater seats 244 people, and it’s an intimate experience because of how little it has changed over the decades. At a recent showing of The Wizard of Oz, parents and children enjoyed the Lion’s long solo until the Lion froze, mouth agape, and the entire image tipped and rolled right off the screen. An audible crash followed: the projector had fallen over. “It’s a real Vineyard experience,” says Bob.

Movies stay at the theater for only a day or two before moving to the theater in Edgartown and then disappearing back off island, so it’s easy for Bob to marshal the G&B force. Jim and Ted and Chris arrive last, having drunk enough rum to make the saccharine story palatable, Jim chuckling down the aisle to a seat in the front row.

Costner plays a boatbuilder whose true love has died and who carries the blame for it; another woman appears on the scene to restore his heart before his fateful end. His job as a boatbuilder is all but incidental, providing only some scenic backdrop and the suggestion of a romantic spirit in Costner. The story runs along predictable lines through its “tragic” conclusion: just as Costner has forgiven himself for the death of his love, he takes the boat he built out for a sail, is caught in a storm, and drowns trying to save a woman and child whose boat has smashed on some rocks. The G&B boatwrights are mainly respectful in the darkened theater, but one scene has Costner carefully sanding a sawn frame during a quiet and solemn moment. Jim, who has been using block planes on Elisa’s sawn frames, finds Costner and his sandpaper so hilarious that he guffaws out loud. Other than that, though, people sit through the sentiment with minimal groans. When it’s over they all gather in front of the theater, in the quiet chill of a deserted Main Street.

There is much chuckling, as might be expected. The people who do the work in real life, having just seen that work as depicted by people who make movies for a living, find it rich fodder for comedy—especially the end, wherein Costner dives into the “turbulent” sea wearing a heavy sweater and foul-weather gear. (It did look good on him, though.) “And leave your boat,” says Jim. “Zat’s a good idea.”

Nat, it’s really no surprise, won’t see the movie. It’s not that he’s not interested; it’s that this Hollywood depiction of his profession, the work of his life, is, according to reviews and comments he’s heard, not simply inaccurate in its details but worse—it’s completely contrary to what he and Ross do. He liked having Warner Brothers around, liked the director (“very clean clothes, pointy shoes”), and had hoped they’d film the story here, in his shop. At the time it had seemed like a kick, and why not, especially given that Hollywood was famous for overpaying people. But now that the movie is out, and it’s clear that it’s a paint-by-numbers love story, he’s happy to have the work of Liberty’s worm gear and also her bilge pump to occupy his time. Hollywood, by its own admission, by its cumulative values and its overarching ethos, is fundamentally about artifice. That’s what its essence is, that’s what drives it. The venerable Mr. McCullough observed the following about Nat Benjamin: “My instinct tells me that the essence of what Nat does, of what he makes, and of him, is trustworthiness. Trust. It has to do with the opposite of artifice, the opposite of sham, the opposite of surface: content.” In other words, a beautiful, strong toolbox that doubles as a sawhorse. Worm gear. Angelique timbers. Rebecca. Elisa. Liberty.

Ross returns late in the morning on Wednesday and climbs up onto Elisa’s forward frames. He left his house yesterday only to get some aspirin and return to bed. First it felt like a flu bug in his stomach; then it turned into a crushing headache and body aches. Bob looks at Ross and, alluding to the Lyle situation, says to me, “Stress.”

While he was gone, Bob, Jim, Bruce, and Nat got in a number of steam-bent frames—the first of thirty on each side. First the boys cooked them in the steamer, and Nat would say, “Get in the cage, Bruce,” because as frames get secured perpendicular to the ribbands, the hull looks more and more like an actual cage. Bruce or Jim usually worked inside. When all were ready and in position with clamps in hand, a steaming-hot frame would be pulled from the steam box, the box’s door slid back in, and wedges malleted down to keep it shut tight. Nat or Bob would then slide the frame through the ribbands, and Jim or Bruce would bend it into place. Jim would lie flat on the blocks and push up on a frame with his feet to get it where he wanted it to go; from the outside, Bob or Nat would pull it toward the ribbands till it was close enough to get a clamp around it, then use the strength of a bar clamp to pull it the rest of the way, flush against the ribband. Then Nat or Bob would drive drywall screws through the ribbands into the oak frame. The work required three people—one in the cage, one up at the keel with screws and a battery drill with a screw bit, one on the floor with clamps, screws, and a drill.

Once the majority of the frames are on, the crew can begin spiling planks and fastening them to the two different types of frames, sawn and bent. Planks finally make it a boat. And Ross will spile the first plank this afternoon, the garboard, which fits into the rabbet along the keel. “We call it spiling,” he says, “but all it is is lifting the pattern. The first time you see it, it looks complicated, but it’s so simple. There’s no counting, there’s no numbers, it’s something a child could figure out.” Ross, up on the keel of Elisa, takes the measurements straight off the frames. The garboard is an important piece of the boat, the piece of the hull that attaches to the keel, and Ross, wanting the sturdiest wood at his disposal for it, will use angelique instead of wana, which will compose the rest of the hull. He transfers the measurements to a plank more than 20 feet long, pounds a nail in at each point on each station, runs a batten along the nails, whittles a new point on his pencil, and marks the first edge of the first plank. He removes the batten and nails, then grabs a Skilsaw. Stooping over, he runs the saw along the freshly drawn line. When he pushes the saw through the end of the plank, the narrow piece he wanted removed doesn’t fall to the floor. “That didn’t go through?” he says. “Doggone it.” He lowers the blade another ¼ inch and makes the cut again.

Outside, Jim is taking advantage of the fact that the steam box has been cranked up to bend some deck beams. These oak beams are 7 or 8 feet long and 2½ inches thick—hefty pieces. Jim bends these big pieces, not so much for strength this time but rather because they are available—were he to saw out this curve, he’d need to find bigger pieces of wood and attain the shape by cutting off big chunks of them. By bending it there is no waste, and the added benefit is that the continuous grain makes a deck beam stronger than one sawed off in the same shape. These deck beams run athwartship and are fastened to the sheer clamp to provide critical structural strength. They will incidentally support the deck, which is curved so that water will spill off it. One day the beams will be visible to the owner as he reclines in the bunk and gazes up.

Jim has nailed blocks of wood in an arc on the platform at the top of the steps outside the shop. He has exaggerated the bend by several inches, knowing that when released, the wood will jump back. He hefts a steaming piece of oak from the box, up the steps to his frame, and clamps the center and right end. Bob is on the ground with a clamp, the platform at chest level, ready to help. Jim braces his back against the door of the shop and pushes the left end of the beam with his feet. Bob pulls with one hand, a clamp ready in the other, but the piece of wood begins to twist in the middle, so they stop. Ross, seeing from inside the shop that they’re having trouble, comes out for a look.

“Yeah, I’ll say.” Ross retrieves a mallet from the shop and returns to pound on the spots where there’s some twist—whamwhamwham! He straightens up and says, “I wonder how it will keep its shape.” Bob wonders about leaving the beams out in all this weather—should they be covered? Ross says, “I’d just let them sit right out here in the hot sun and dry out, because that’s what’ll make them hold their shape.”

Part of the routine of the boatyard is lunchtime, from one to two. Throughout the winter you can usually find most of the crew eating lunch in the boatshop. If it’s very cold, they’ll sit inside, near the fire. If it’s moderate, they’ll sit in the brighter, roomier outer shop between Elisa and the Bella; and on warm, sunny days, which are not infrequent throughout February and March, they’ll sit along the dock like birds on a wire.

Bob Osleeb almost always brings a sandwich packed in a Tupperware container. David Shay always brings a thermos of coffee, which he drinks with his sandwich and sunflower seeds. David is the quietest of the boatyard workers. He stands well over six feet, has thick brown hair just going gray, blue eyes, and a bushy mustache, and will hover for patient hours at a stretch burning off the varnish on a Liberty hatch, never saying more than hello—and often just raising his eyebrows—in greeting. He’s forty-nine years old and knows nothing about building boats. He does know welding, though, having learned it in prison, so when the yard needs any welding work done, he’s the man.

Before he went to prison, David says, he “didn’t do much of anything except sell marijuana.” He had a wife and children and a house in Maine and ultimately got out of the business because it was too precarious, given his growing family. But in 1994 he was lured back by a former associate for one last deal, what was to be a favor for the associate. In fact, the man was a rat; he drew David into a sting to reduce his own sentence, and David went to jail for three years. The Federal Correctional Institution in Morgantown, West Virginia, was so clean, and the facilities so modern, that inmates called it Club Fed. What hurt David most was being away from his children. His marriage ended while he was inside, and the government confiscated his house in Maine. David was released on October 4, 1997, three years almost to the day after he was incarcerated. He spent the rest of that year in a halfway house in Boston and arrived on Martha’s Vineyard on New Year’s Eve. He came here because his ex-wife, Betsy, and their kids had moved here. He needed to be near his children. Betsy was a friend of Gretchen’s, and of the boatyard’s, and she asked Nat and Ross if David might have work here. This is his first legitimate job, and he’s grateful for it. Once the weather gets better, he’ll begin welding the new cradle, the heavy construction of I-beams on wheels that will slide up and down the rails and into the water, hauling boats in and out. And before the year is out, he’ll have learned a good deal about building boats.

David will sit on a plank at lunchtime, beside the hull of the Bella, and it will bend under his weight. He’ll pour black coffee into the thermos cup and quietly eat his sandwich and nuts. Jim will pull up a crate or a ramshackle stepladder and sit across from David, eating cold cuts and cheese purchased at the A&P. Bob and Chris and Duane will sit on the ever-bending plank as well, Chris opening a tin of sardines. Sardines are a common lunch item among the boatbuilders. Because wood is abundant here, you need only roll back the lid of the can, pick up a small wedge of wood, wipe it off, and use it as a spoon for the oily fish, eaten straight out of the container. Tasty, convenient, and inexpensive. Someone else will pass around a bag of chips. And sooner or later the conversation will come around to boats and sailing. On a day when Nat is elsewhere at lunch hour, he is, briefly, a topic of conversation as well. All are aware of and respect his skills as a sailor. David Stimson, working on a small skiff on his own at Mugwump, describes Nat’s acumen simply: “He knows how to make a boat go.” The boatwrights respect his seamanship, which at its most elemental might be defined as the ability to get your boat and your crew to safety in dangerous conditions. And they are admiring and envious of the places and distances he’s covered on the sea.

“It was in the Atlantic, pretty far out,” Duane recalls, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “It was at night. The weather, I believe, was rough, but it wasn’t a storm. Apparently the guy went over when Nat was below. So he didn’t even know the guy had gone over. The guy was in the water for several hours. Nat turned the boat around and found him.”