I
Ross strides into the shop on the first day of planking all energy and grin. He rotates his cocked right arm, which feels perfect after a shot of cortisone from the doctor. “It’s like magic,” he says, then hops onto the port side of Elisa to take measurements. The first plank of Elisa Lee is hung on the twelfth of March, and the planks proceed steadily and smoothly without stopping. March is a mixture of snowy, cold blows that toss the big schooners in the harbor, waves crashing on the beach, and brilliant, warm days, a combination that somehow helps to make this among the most productive months of the winter.
Jim drills a hole through the keel where two pieces have been scarfed together and finishes inserting the stopwater, a piece of cypress that will absorb any water that may migrate up the joined surfaces.
Ross takes his measurements inside the shop. Planks of wana 1½ feet wide and 20 to 25 feet long, all planed to ⅞ inch, are stacked in the center of the room. Ross flips the top piece, not liking the grain or the checks, and examines the one below. The wana takes a long time to dry, and as it does so, it can split right up the middle of a plank. At about 20 feet long, this second plank appears clean and stable. He puts 1-inch-thick blocks from the scrap box by the wood stove beneath the board so he can run a Skilsaw through it right there. He finds a broom and sweeps the sawdust off it. “Oookay,” he says. “Let’s see how fast it’s going to be. I’m going to put this against the edge of the plank that’s already up there”—referring to the angelique garboard fastened into the rabbet. He sets a long, slender batten on the board, running its entire length. “I saw a little bit of a curve there, so I’m going to put that there,” he mutters to himself. He drives a nail to hold the batten for a slight curve. “Sight it for fair,” he says, “and just put that line down. It’s so close to straight I can get away with it this way.” He whittles his pencil down to more graphite and drags it along the length of the batten. At each station on the board he has written the width of the plank he’s drawing; having just penciled in the top of the plank, he measures from this line the indicated distances and then connects the lines by driving a nail into the board at each station at the indicated width and pressing the batten against these nails. He crouches at the foot of the plank to sight the batten, then drags his pencil hard the length of the plank. He presses so hard, and the wood is so coarse, that he needs to resharpen his pencil halfway through.
From stations nine through two, the numbers on the plank read 4½, 4
,4⅞, 5, 4⅞, 4⅛, 4⅞, 4¾—the various widths of the plank in inches.
Jim has come in here to work on a plank, too, beside Ross; he’s sawing out one he’s already drawn. Ross waits for him to finish with the Skilsaw, watching. When Jim finishes one side of the plank, Ross lifts the broom and sweeps sawdust off it so he can see the other lines.
“Boy,” Ross says, “you got a lot to plane off.”
Jim looks at his cut, which runs about an inch above the line he’s drawn. “Yah, maybe too much,” he says. “I’m going too fast.”
“Don’t go fast because I’m looking over your shoulder.”
Jim explains that he never used a Skilsaw before he came here, and it’s more difficult for him because he’s left-handed. He finishes the remaining cuts, lifts the board, an estimate of the eventual plank, and fixes it in two vises on the workbench that runs the length of the shop’s eastern wall. He finds his jack plane, presses it down on the edge of the plank, and begins to shave fractions off the board. Walking the length of the board with both hands on his plane, he removes long ribbons of wana, so bright and clean they’re almost peach-colored. Ultimately, though, he concedes how much wood he has to remove and plugs in the power planer to take the plank down more quickly to size.
Ross eventually builds a jig on the power planer to make it easier to plane at an exact right angle; he loves the way his revised tool works, and says of the planks, “They’re perfect.”
Each plank is made fair, then square. The plank is then clamped in place to check its fit against the preceding one; a pencil is used to mark places where it needs more planing so that the inside edges will be flush against the plank above. Depending on where the plank falls on the frame, it may need backing out—at hard turns of the hull, the flat surface of the plank needs to be slightly concave to let it rest flush against the curving frames. Then a caulking bevel will be planed out. A plank may be unclamped, planed, reclamped, reexamined, unclamped, and planed again numerous times before it achieves a perfect fit and can at last be fastened with bronze screws counterset into each frame.
Ross and Jim work the port side of the hull, and Bob and Bruce work the starboard side. When Jim and Ross get their first planks fastened, Bob, working with the lackadaisical Bruce, already feels behind, senses the pressure of Ross’s speed. When Ross hears Bob tell Bruce this, he says, “Don’t go faster just to catch up. Let’s keep the quality the same on both sides.”
Bob nods, and Bruce comes at him from the other direction, baiting him as they work.
“Don’t start,” Bob says to Bruce. “I just got here, and you’ve got me on four things.” To himself he says, “He sets a bit down and expects me to know where it is.”
“I set it on top,” says Bruce.
Bob says, “Don’t forget to mark the edges.”
“What edges?”
“I gotta teach you again?” Bob, to himself: “He’s still a child.”
Chris Mullen wanders in hefting a battery for his boat’s engine, intending to recharge it. He picks two bronze screws up off the floor and asks Bob, “Are these your fastenings?”
“Are they inch-and-a-half ?”
“Are they? Seems kind of short.”
“He wants to leave ’em short in case it ever gets refastened,” Bob explains.
Eventually, if the boat is taken care of, and not damaged by the hurricanes that are a regular feature of the Virgin Islands, where the boat will live, all these screws will be taken out, and new ones will be put in—a good thing to do for a boat this size after about thirty years. Eventually the number 14 screws will disintegrate from the salt water and the effects of electrolysis. A bigger boat, fastened with number 22 screws, might go twice that long or even longer before needing refastening.
Bruce says, “This plank’s got a hole in it.”
Bob examines it. “Do you want to point it out to Ross?”
“Bondo.”
“How deep is it? We could put a Dutchman on it.”
“Or carve a real fancy bung.”
“Isn’t that what a Dutchman is?”
“Yeah.”
Bob shakes his head and sets about work again, fitting the garboard into the rabbet, checking it. He exhales through his nose and says, “OK, so it’s got to go up a little bit.”
“No,” Bruce says, deadpan. “It’s got to go up.”
“That’s what I said.”
After a week of planking, Ross is still having a ball. He usually grows bored at this stage of construction, but not this time. “It’s going on so smoothly,” he says.
The powerboat’s hull, with its flat sides and flat bottom, is different from a sailboat’s. The design eliminates the need for backing out in much of the planking. And many of the planks require little or no bevel. Ross sees this as part of the logic of a working powerboat—its design is one of efficiency, not only on the water but in the construction phase as well—and this enhances his admiration for such boats, something he realizes only from doing the actual work.
When Nat finishes the new teak lazarette hatch for Liberty—a fine piece of mortise-and-tenon work—he jumps in to join the planking crew. Most of the bottom planks are on by now, just before the sharp bilge turn.
“Planking’s a lot of fun,” Nat says. “With this many people you finish before you can get tired of it. You can get tired of fairing pretty quickly.”
Bob walks up behind Nat and says, “Whaddaya think of that bottom?”
“Great,” Nat says. “I think it looks beautiful.”
“I tell ya, I was glad she was upside down.”
“Oh, yeah, nothing like putting on a plank on your back.”
“Or sanding over your face.”
On a clear, springlike day, Myles Thurlow, the apprentice, arrives for work, for him high school work. Myles has a diminutive stature and a quiet presence in the shop. His hair is shaggy blond, and his complexion shows a youthful patina of fuzz and blemish as well as a bright, easy smile. He’s back from seven weeks’ sailing in the Caribbean with Vineyarder Gary Maynard and his family on Maynard’s boat Violet. Maynard rebuilt Alabama, now out in the harbor, and over the course of six thousand solitary hours of his free time, he rebuilt his own ninety-year-old Scots Zulu, a distinctive vessel with its long bowsprit and topmast, gaff rig, and hand-cranked windlass. Myles describes the numerous ports they visited during his seven weeks aboard, some filled with as many as 200 or 250 boats. Myles says they encountered two other wooden boats while he was aboard, one beautiful and well maintained, the other a shambles.
Myles spends his entire day bunging—that is, gluing ½-inch-wide wana bungs, or plugs, into all the holes in the planks, on top of the countersunk screws. Thousands of screws will fasten wana to oak and angelique frames, and a bung will be made to cover each one. When planking began, Bruce said, “I feel sorry for whoever makes these bungs.” As Jim took a break one day from planking to keep up with the bunging, he sighed and said, “We should invent screws with the bungs already attached.” (Jim stays home the day Myles arrives for work. He tore his right finger to shreds on the electric planer; it’s become infected and filled with pus. When someone asks Bob where Jim is, Bob says, “Jim, he tried to go as fast as Ross. You go just that little bit faster and that’s when it happens. Ross can do it, but mortals can’t.”) Some crews will have bunging parties, using cold beer as a lure for free labor and amusement during the tedious chore.
Myles doesn’t seem to mind the work. He performs even the most menial task with alacrity. He simply likes to be around boats. He doesn’t know why. Reading Slocum and other sailors was part of it, he says. He had a formative voyage on Violet when he was nine, and the thrill of it has stayed with him these six years. But beyond that he can’t explain his affinity for watercraft other than to say, “I like to be out on the water. So I guess if you like to be on the water, you need a boat.”
And he was, apparently, born with an affinity for wooden boats. He likes “old technology, old designs,” he says, and is inclined “against the flow of technology.”
“Wooden boats have an almost universal aesthetic appeal,” the fifteen-year-old says, adding, “I haven’t seen many beautiful fiberglass boats.” This was evident to him in virtually every harbor they anchored in. Violet was a magnet; just about everyone in every harbor had to have a look, ask questions. Myles left the boat shortly before Violet headed for Panama and the locks that would raise her above the Atlantic Ocean and shoot her down and out onto the Pacific, on the other side of the continent.
So Myles is back and bunging at G&B, and he always feels grateful, if not a little disbelieving, that he is even allowed to be here. “These guys are amazing,” he says softly. “I don’t think there’s anyone like them.” When he runs out of bungs, he finds another scrap of wana left over from the planking stock and lowers the drill press with the plug cutter a hundred more times, then takes this board to the band saw in the outer shop, stands it on edge, and pushes it through the blade, bungs dropping out of it as he cuts.
Ginny raps on her window, lowers the top half, and leans out to shout, “Myles, watch your fingers!” Ginny, fretful den mother, can’t stand the sight of blood or, for that matter, loose digits lying on the band saw.
As row after row of planks is fastened onto the boat, the boat changes her shape and her presence in the shop. Bruce walks up the portable wooden stairs leaning against the staging around Liberty, looks down at the half-planked hull, and says, “The boat’s getting bigger every minute.” And as more planks go up, and more of the boat’s lines become visible, Ross is not without concerns about the quality of the fairing. He can see the imperfection best when he takes a call in the office and looks out into the shop at Elisa Lee through Ginny’s window—the slight waviness to one of the central starboard planks. The eye has to be trained to see such a wave. The imperfection is elusive. You can stare right at it and only after several minutes of your looking will it materialize, the way a trompe l’oeil picture can turn on you. If you change your angle of sight, it can disappear altogether. If you stand too close, it’s gone. To Ross, though, this one plank is glaringly out of fair.
He addresses the issue with Bob, and Bob says, “It looked like a fair line on the bench.”
“It looked like a fair line on the bench,” Ross returns, “but if it doesn’t look like a fair line on the boat, it’s no damn good.”
The reason for the discrepancy is often the bevel. Putting a bevel in can change ever so slightly the width of the plank, meaning that you can cut the plank out exactly as you’ve marked it on the frames, and make it fair and square, but when you plane the bevel and clamp it to the frames to check its fit, it may be
inch off, and that
inch, at that particular spot, gets magnified as each successive plank is fitted and you correct for the error. This results in a wave or a hump in the lines of the plank.
“They think if they can rest it flush against the plank, it’s fine,” Ross says. “But you have to look at the big picture.”
Nat meanwhile works on one of the longest planks on the boat, measuring nearly 28 feet. “It’s got a lot of sweep to it,” he says. “I don’t know if she’s going to make it.” Nat unclamps it with Jim’s help and carries it on his shoulder to the long workbench outside the shop to plane it. He then walks it back and clamps it in place. He puts wedges between the ribband and the planks and hammers the wedges that drive the plank tight against the preceding plank. It’s tighter this time, but still not perfectly flush. Nat stares at it. He draws the pencil from behind his ear and marks the plank where it needs work. “Lot of reverse bevel here,” he says, marking it again. To Jim he says, “We should check the backing out.”
Jim drops to his belly and slides beneath the lowest ribband to go inside the cage. “Eet’s beautiful from under here,” he says.
Nat takes the plank down, carries it to the workbench, and planes it at his pencil marks. He carries the board back, clamps it again, hammers the wedges in to push it up tight to the plank above it, and steps back to have another look. He looks some more. Walks its length. Then looks still more. He says, “I wonder if I should take a little more bevel off this to close her up just a little more.”
And down the plank comes for more planing. When he’s got it back up and clamped in place, has inserted wedges along its length and hammered those in to press it flush, Nat scans the new long plank and says, “Well. That looks OK, doesn’t it?”
He drills holes using the tapered bit, three at every frame, and Jim follows with scores of bronze screws. Bungs will follow. Another plank is on.
When Ross tires of planking, he leaves the outer shop in search of a tiller. It’s contained within some piece of wood either here or at Bargain Acres, and he needs to find it. The tiller is for a boat named Aquilon, a 45-foot double-ender owned by Don and Polly Bishop of Cape Cod. Aquilon is a fine boat, but more, it stands as a genuine education in buying and owning an old wooden boat. Don and Polly used to own a 38-foot Sabre, a fiberglass boat, which they liked well enough but which Polly says “didn’t have those nice lines that I was used to when I was growing up—I grew up with the Vineyard Haven Fifteens. That boat didn’t have any soul, any character.”
Don grunts at this, recalling in an instant his boatstruck affair with Aquilon, and says, “This one smacked you in the face with character.”
Aquilon was commissioned in 1951 by a man who smuggled diamonds for a living, but he was arrested before he could take possession of the boat—or get away on her, as the case may be—and two owners and forty-five years later, Don and Polly saw her while on vacation in Trellis Bay, Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands and the home of an English couple who were looking to sell her.
Don was smote. A flurry of faxes was dispatched over the following weeks. Don and Polly sold their fiberglass boat and bought Aquilon for $37,000. Without a proper marine survey—they were boatstruck.
“What we did was not very smart,” Don says, wiser now. “Nat did the survey, and we found out it needed a lot done,” he adds—in fact, more than anyone realized even at the time of the survey. Don was just retiring from real estate, so cost was a factor, but Nat said he was welcome to help work on the boat himself to defray some of the costs, and he worked all winter. Nevertheless, once Aquilon was hauled on the G&B railway and Nat and Ross got in there with their dental probes, spot repair transformed into a virtual rebuild.
Don seems to remain in a kind of permanent shock over the cost. He asks me not to say how much the rebuild cost, allowing only “substantially more than we paid for the boat.” You can see him wringing his forehead as he says those words.
It was a happy day in June of 1997, then, when Aquilon was re-launched with champagne, a blessing from the minister of the West Tisbury Congregational Church, and, for Don, a glimpse of a side of Ross that he’d never seen before but that sticks with him to this day.
As the boat being lowered into the water jiggled and rocked in her cradle, Don saw that the plow anchor, which hung just over the edge on the starboard side of the bow, was knocking against the trailboard, marking and denting it. Don pointed this out to Ross. Ross stopped the winch and ran into the shop. It seemed to Don that he was gone only a moment, just long enough to retrieve something. In another moment Ross had climbed up to the bow and was fastening in a bronze plate to protect the wood from the knocking metal anchor. When Ross descended, Don saw that the plate took the form of a beautiful bronze porpoise, the outline of its shapely, curved back and fins and snout an elegant addition to the lines of the boat. When Don asked where it had come from, Ross told him he’d made it real quick out of some scrap. Don remarks on this small event not because of the fact that Ross fixed a problem promptly with the materials at hand, but because Ross—whose chief characteristics always seemed to be force-plus-speed—apparently with no forethought, and quickly, rendered a porpoise with such artful refinement. Don feels that the porpoise itself is a beautiful object regardless of its function.
It was the crowning touch in the noble effort of bringing a wooden boat back to life. She was beautiful. Ginny, from the cozy confines of her office, notes that all of Aquilon’s original lines were preserved, and says, “She’s a really pretty boat with a lovely sheer.” No small praise from The Madam.
Two years later, in March 1999, Don Bishop begins preparing Aquilon for spring. She’s in seaworthy condition, and he intends to sail her down to Grenada. He will leave her there until the fall, when he and Polly will fly back down and begin eight full months of cruising. Don is nearly sixty-eight years old, and it’s time for an adventure.
Among the first orders of business for Don is a new tiller. The old tiller, besides being old, did not swing up out of the cockpit. This meant that you could steer the boat only if you were seated, and you always had five feet of tiller taking up the middle of the cockpit. If they were going to live aboard this boat for eight months and maybe more, Don and Polly wanted a tiller they could swing up out of the cockpit so they might, say, enjoy lunch there without having a fence between them. And sometimes you wanted to stand up and steer from that position, for a better view as you approached your mooring, or simply to stretch your legs.
And so Ross examined the iron pieces of the current tiller—the rudder shaft and the tiller head, which fitted onto the shaft at its tapered end. Ross called Whit Hanschka, the Bishops’ nephew, who once worked at the G&B boatyard and has since opened up a forge in Vineyard Haven, up State Road. Whit fabricates just about anything out of iron, from purely functional hardware to ornamental ironwork for fireplaces to beds and even the handrail leading up the steps of the up-island co-op bank. Ross and Whit had a chat about what was required in fabricating a new head, with two long, flat pieces between which the wooden tiller would be fastened, and the hinge that would allow the tiller to rise to a vertical position.
Whit finishes the piece in March, and when Don is on the island, he stops by G&B. Ross shows him the new tiller head, a substantial piece of iron a couple of feet long and weighing five to ten pounds.
Ross asks Don if he wants the tiller head galvanized, plated with zinc to prevent rust, increase the life of the tiller, and enhance its looks. As with many of Ross’s questions—Do you think we should replace this garboard, this timber that steps the mast, this stem?—it isn’t a question at all, it’s a command. The question mark at the end of the sentence is a nicety, purely for appearance’ sake, a cosmetic intonation of the voice.
Don doesn’t recognize this, though; he only squints and shakes his head. “I don’t think we need to have it galvanized.” Why spend the money—does it really matter? Don thinks. Ross always seems to be finding new ways for me to spend.
Ross says, “It’s gonna rust on you like crazy. You’ll always be after it.”
Again, Don says no, don’t galvanize it.
To expedite the process of educating Don, Ross uses more overt force, though in quiet tones. Don, he says, all but placing his knotty hand on Don’s shoulder, get this tiller head galvanized and we’ll help you to take care of it. Don’t galvanize it, let it rust, and we’ll fix it—but it’s not going to be priority work.
Jim sees the piece a week later sitting on the jointer and examines it curiously. “What is this made of, stainless steel?” he asks.
Ross grins and says, “It’s been galvanized. The bright silver is zinc.”
With Whit’s metal piece in hand, Ross can now fashion a tiller, a 5-foot piece of wood that will be thick and rectangular at its base, where it attaches to the galvanized tiller head, and start out straight but then curve up about 3 or 4 inches and then down slightly, ending with a lip of a handle and changing gradually from a rectangle to an elliptical shape in cross section and moving from thick to thinner.
Ross has a pattern for it on a scroll of paper Don sent comprising several sheets held together with duct tape, a profile view of the tiller. He unrolls it on top of a scrap of ¼-inch plywood, traces the pattern onto the plywood, and cuts out the shape on the ship’s saw. He then takes the pattern outside, and there, at the bottom of the steps, is a log of black locust more than 5 feet long, a foot in diameter, with just the slight sweep the tiller needs.
“I didn’t have to look far,” he says.
He crouches and lifts the log, grunting as he does. Ross can sound like a series of various animals when he’s heavy-lifting, but the most frequent noise issues when he exhales hard through tight lips, resulting in gopher cheeks and an elephant’s trumpet. He walks the massive log up the stairs and into the shop and sets it with a thud on the ship’s saw. It looks like a clean piece.
“Black locust is a real contradiction,” he tells me. “It’s incredibly rot-resistant, but it’s almost always got a rotten heart.” Typically there are many inches of black rot running right up the middle of it, he continues; it grows as fast as a weed, and he’s seen it swarming with carpenter ants, and yet the exterior wood is clear and so hard that screws break off in it. It is, like silverballi, classified as a legume, and in the spring, when its sweet, fragrant blossoms emerge, it begins to develop seed pods as long as snow peas. Ross wants locust for the tiller, though, mainly because it’s so strong.
He starts the ship’s saw and pushes the log—a small tree, really—through the blade as straight as he’s able. This surface, though a little wavy, is flat enough that by lying it on this fresh cut, he can make a flat surface with successive cuts and see what’s going on inside this thing. He finds knots—grainy whorls where branches have begun, weak spots—as well as some drying checks that he wants to avoid. He lays the plywood pattern on one clean surface, stares at it, shifts the pattern. He pulls his folding rule from a narrow pocket at his thigh and measures the wood. “I need two and nine sixteenths, and I gotta stay away from the heart, so it’s gotta come from that,” he says, pointing. He’s cut this log to between 3 and 4 inches thick. He talks aloud to himself throughout the day—sometimes in complete sentences, sometimes not. “Like that,” he says, holding the pattern one way, then shifting it. “Don’t like that.” He removes the pattern and says, “I’m going to put that through the planer and see what we’ve got.”
He sends it through the planer four times, reducing its width a little more than a half inch in all. He stares at it. He flips it. He holds the pattern over it to see if he can avoid the knots. He draws his pencil from behind his ear and pokes it into a small hole in one knot. He holds the pattern down, fingers spread wide on it, marks a few edges of the pattern on the log, then makes those cuts. He stares. “I don’t think it’s going to work,” Ross says. “Throw it in the woodshed and use it for a smaller boat.”
Ross heads out to the “Pepe’s” truck, opens the hood, raps the starter with a long pole, gets in, flips the light switch that dangles beside the steering wheel, and fires up the engine. He backs it out of the parking lot and heads up State Road toward Bargain Acres. All kinds of stumps and logs are piled up in this lot of overgrown brush, along with various boatbuilder debris—chunks of lead, an old bathtub to melt the lead in, cinder blocks, a small mountain of sawdust five years old, stacks of lumber, the trusses from the old Ag Hall livestock shelter.
Ross parks the truck and begins to poke around in the brush for logs. He finds one he likes. I’ve come with him and now help him lift the big log, Ross grunting and huffing like various animals and then, as we lift it onto the back of the truck, his cheeks puffing out and the elephant trumpet sounding. He takes just this one log, a little more than 6 feet of locust, and drives back to the yard. He removes 1 foot off the log with a chain saw before carrying it to the ship’s saw. A thick branch sticks out of it, so he retrieves a broadax from the wall, grinds a fresh edge on it, and whacks the branch off.
He’s now ready to start the whole process over again, first making flat surfaces and examining the interior of the log, then holding the pattern against it and slowly diminishing the log in just the right way so as to avoid sapwood and knots but not remove anything the tiller might need. Again there are odd, deep curves of sapwood and central knots, making it difficult to see a long, narrow, but curved tiller in this huge log. Finally, after many cuts and many passes through the planer, he has the general shape of the tiller. He stares at it for half a minute.
He says, “I don’t want to give him that.” He continues to look at it. “That was a futile effort.” He sets it next to his first effort on the jointer, saying, “Maybe Jim needs a tiller.”
Nat presently is at the metal band saw just beyond the ship’s saw, welding together a bronze frame for one of Liberty’s skylights. “What are you working on?” he asks his partner.
Ross says, “Tiller for Aquilon. Nothing. A lot of firewood.” Locust makes excellent firewood.
Avoiding knots in the tiller and finding long, continuous grain are not aesthetic concerns. On a boat the size of Aquilon, the tiller must move a big rudder through a lot of water. The iron and the wood must be able to withstand an extraordinary amount of torque. Tillers break, and when they break, they do so in rough conditions and strong currents, when you’re putting the maximum force on them; in other words, when they break, they do so precisely when having a broken tiller and no steering is most hazardous. Ross doesn’t take the tiller lightly. Don and Polly may never need a tiller as strong as the one Ross intends to build them through his choices and artful cutting, but if they ever do, Ross wants that strength available. You never know.
Nat says his most discouraging moments at sea have been when boats failed him. You can’t expect any breaks from the weather or the water, but you ought to be able to depend on your boat. In an Essex boatyard Nat once saw a sign for the workers that he’s thought of re-creating to hang at G&B: “Upon your decisions rest the lives and property of men.”
On the way back from spending a couple of hours in Lyle’s classroom, Ross stops by the sawmill and finds yet another log to heft back to the shop and up onto the band saw. Again he repeats the process of trying to find an apt tiller inside a huge log. Again he’s confounded by knots. After half an hour of sawing, planing, measuring, and staring, he sets the third useless tiller on the floor and says, “Well. Let’s go see what the next plank looks like.” And he heads to the Elisa Lee, which is getting bigger every day.
Often visitors to the boatyard will see Nat or Ross making a pattern out of wood for a piece eventually to be cast in bronze. In addition to planking and searching for a tiller, Ross is now constructing parts for Liberty’s boom gallows—a stand for the boom when the boat is at rest. The boom gallows comprises two posts that rise out of the deck and have curved, forked ends to hold a 2-inch slab of teak that supports the weight of the boom. The base, where the posts will attach to Liberty’s deck, the posts, and the curved, forked pieces that will connect the posts to the teak slab are to be of bronze. The forked piece has no right angles, is all rounded. If you took a baseball bat and sawed a U shape out of the fat end so you had what looked like a giant, old-fashioned clothespin, then bent the bat just above the base at about an 80-degree angle, you’d have something similar in shape to what Ross is fabricating out of various scraps of cedar and pine. He will sand this model smooth as soapstone, and it will appear, in his hands, to be in itself a beautiful sculpture.
This work is relaxing and meditative for Ross; he is silent, solitary, and focused as he toils, and he looks forward to the alchemy that will occur when this piece is transformed to solid bronze at the Edson Foundry in Taunton, Massachusetts.
Most bronze pieces on G&B boats are created this way; almost nothing is ordered out of a catalog. Nat doesn’t design his boats so that, for instance, the sheer can contain a chock found in this or that marine supply store. The bow chock, a long slot through which the anchor line feeds, is built into the Bella’s toerail and is unique to that specific sheer, and so it must be individually fashioned. Even some of the blocks, those most common of pulleys—for the Bella, one particular block must contain two wheels or sheaves—are fashioned out of wood, sanded, and sent to the foundry.
Almost nowhere in America anymore can you find a place where people put together large objects made out of natural materials, each piece of which is fashioned by hand. All of G&B’s work—the patterns to be cast, the lazarette hatch, the planks, the sawn frames and massive keel timbers of Elisa Lee, the rebuild of Aquilon and, one day, perhaps, its new tiller—can usefully be called workmanship of risk, according to the definition suggested by the late David Pye, a British professor and craftsman, in his book The Nature and Art of Workmanship.
Workmanship of risk is, generally, the making of anything individually by hand, the creation of a product that is never exactly the same twice. Its opposite is what Pye called workmanship of certainty—broadly defined as anything made by machine, each item the same every time. Pye distinguished the two types of work using an easy example: Writing with a pen is workmanship of risk; modern printing is workmanship of certainty. A plank-on-frame hull is workmanship of risk, a fiberglass hull workmanship of certainty. Creating the pattern for a boom gallows is work of risk; transforming that pattern into bronze is work of certainty. Because the outcome of workmanship of risk is never certain, the quality of it is determined by the care, dexterity, and judgment of the worker, qualities that are unnecessary in workmanship of certainty.
Pye’s book is a clever discussion of the two types of work. The distinction itself has long been obvious and may be said to have inspired an entire intellectual and design movement, the arts and crafts movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which began in response to the awesome—and, to many, ominous—forces of the Industrial Revolution and mass production. Pye’s language and observations, however, brought to the distinction new power and meaning in the age of plastics and so-called high technology (the book was written in the 1960s), and they have only gathered force as humankind has begun to dwell increasingly in the ether world of the Internet, where workmanship of certainty is removed even from itself, reduced to representations on a screen.
The subject is important because, as Pye argued, “all the works of men which have been most admired since the beginning of history have been made by the workmanship of risk.”
All workmanship of risk is only an approximation of a worker’s intent, Pye said, carried out with whatever skill that worker may possess. We can imagine a perfect result, a designer can create the perfect design, but its execution can only approach that perfection, like a line approaching zero into infinity. The quality of the result, according to Pye, is judged by how near to or far from the intended design it is. Such work is defined by two criteria, soundness and comeliness—it’s got to work, and it’s got to look good, and the longer it does both, the more durable it is, the better it is deemed to be. Good workmanship carries out or even improves upon a design; bad workmanship fails to do so and “thwarts the design.”
Pye championed the workmanship of risk—what we tend now to call craftsmanship, all those rare, handmade things like furniture and Shaker boxes—but he did not at the same time condemn mass-produced goods or mechanical regulation. For him, industrial automation was a good thing. Mass production was a good thing. Imagine, he said, having to build every automobile by hand, fashioning each piece as you needed it. There’s not a soul at G&B who wants to make every bolt and screw by hand—they all make enough of their own as it is. All those thousands of identical 1½-inch screws that are fastening planks to the frames of Elisa Lee are each one of them a gift of mass production.
Pye’s book also reminds us that the machines that make the screws, that perform work of certainty, were themselves originally created by workmanship of risk, could not exist without it.
“In the Science Museum in London,” Pye wrote, “can be seen the first of all lead screws, which Maudslay chased for the first screw-cutting lathe, and one of the first planers, whose bed Roberts chiseled and filed flat. How many generations of screws and plane surfaces can those two machines have bred?” (The Maudslay Pye refers to here is Henry Maudslay, 1771-1831, the father of the machine-tool industry. He invented the metal lathe, perfected a measuring machine accurate to a millionth of an inch, and fabricated other precision tools, most of which his firm needed in its work building engines for the British Navy.)
These facts are important to reiterate because so much time has passed since the early days of mass production and the Industrial Age that we tend to take boxes of screws and buckets of nails for granted, as if they grew like almonds and we needed only to shake the tree for more.
Pye seems to have been moved to write not simply in order to lay down a stern paternal reminder to appreciate whence we came (“When I was a lad . . . ,” the wheezy voice admonishes), but to voice his practical, even urgent, concern that because the quantity of workmanship of risk—individually handmade things—is diminishing for obvious commercial and practical reasons, we are as a culture losing not only our capacity to perform such work of risk but also our capacity to distinguish good from bad workmanship, and thus stand to lose potentially good workmanship forever. The danger is not that such workmanship will die out—some people will always be moved to make things by hand and to own things made by hand—but rather that, for lack of standards, “its possibilities will be neglected and inferior forms of it will be taken for granted and accepted.”
This certainty was once a real fear in the construction of traditional boats, one that was in the forefront of Jon Wilson’s mind when he started his magazine. It was all too conceivable to him that traditional boats—not small craft, the rowboats and dories that a suburban guy clever with wood could fashion in his backyard, but rather bigger boats, requiring more advanced knowledge and heavier timbers—would cease to be made for, say, thirty or forty years, a generation. Conceivable also, then, was the scenario that when those thirty years were up, the value and sense of traditional construction would be reconsidered, people would change their minds, want wooden boats back, but there would be no one around who knew how to build good ones, and we’d have to learn it all over again, or more likely accept and take for granted poorly constructed wooden boats.
Pye’s main concerns, though, seem to have been aesthetic. Workmanship of risk should continue, he argued, because it creates a range of aesthetic qualities that mechanical or regulated work, which is always ruled by the marketplace, can never achieve. And Pye further wanted to acknowledge and illuminate the worker.
“The judge, the pianist, and workman,” he wrote, are interpreters. “Interpreters are always necessary because instructions are always incomplete.” The workman can do with his eye what the judge does with intuition and logic, what the pianist does with intuition and ear: he or she can measure with astonishing accuracy those things that can never be specified, isolate nuances that are too subtle to be described. No law book could be complete enough to handle the specifics of every individual case; no musical score could possibly convey how long each note must hang in the air, or precisely how loudly it should sound out; no boat design could determine a single, absolute outcome of every curve. Which is why we have lawyers and judges, why some musicians are better than others and some are considered great, and why there are a pair of Malabars in Vineyard Haven Harbor, both classic 42-foot Alden schooners, of which one is powerfully built and one has exquisitely rendered lines—two very different boats from the same design.
Not coincidental, I think, is how often Pye used the “old-style shipwright” to provide examples of his ideas. “The old-style shipwright with his adze,” Pye wrote, “can get a nearly true flat surface or fair curve without any apparent guide, simply by coordination of hand and eye. . . . The shipwright with his adze does not finish off the surface by removing handfuls of wood at each stroke, but in short light strokes taking off the wood in shavings.”
And: “Many lives on many occasions must have depended on their timing in forging the iron work for sailing ships. A ‘cold shut’ weld or a weld with dirt in it could remain undetected for years and then perhaps bring down a mast, or, if in an anchor, put a ship ashore.”
Pye ultimately addressed the art of such work, looking to John Ruskin, the nineteenth-century writer, a critic of art and architecture, for a definition: “Art is the expression of man’s pleasure in labor,” asserted Ruskin. It was precisely this pleasure—and a very particular kind of pleasure it is, making things with your hands—that Ruskin isolated as what was lacking in the new society of the Industrial Revolution. He suggested that the masses were fundamentally unhappy because first, they didn’t enjoy their work, and second, they believed that they would be happier not if they found work they enjoyed, but rather if they made enough money to pursue more pleasures outside work, as soon as they could get away from their miserable jobs. “It is not that men are ill-fed,” Ruskin said, “but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread and therefore look to wealth as the only means to pleasure.”
Certainly, as Ross Gannon stands in the dark shop, alone, sanding the pattern for the boom gallows, this kind of pleasure seems very close to the surface. It is not his solitary pleasure, but rather a pleasure of a more general and independent kind, a pleasure independent of Ross, that he simply connects to. This fact becomes clear when, a week later, a black-locust tiller dangles from the overhead wood rack between table saw and planer, fastened into a galvanized tiller head, turning slightly in the air, a couple coats of varnish on it and several more to go. In the empty shop, the nearly completed piece is a compelling sight, as if blossomed from out of nowhere, grown like a seed pod from the building itself.
Nat Benjamin takes this notion of workmanship a step further, beyond the pleasure that it is: when workmanship is focused on the task of fastening planks to frames and fairing curves, it can transform and elevate the worker.
“After nearly thirty years of continuous involvement with wooden sailing craft,” he writes when asked to contribute a short essay to a picture book on classic yachts, “I am more convinced than ever that a plank-on-frame vessel is the ultimate in yacht construction. Not only does this method produce an enduring vessel with integrity, heart and soul, but it also requires a process that is so ancient and noble as to inspire the builder to work above his ability, to continue challenging himself in his expression of the rarest combination of science and art.”
Perhaps this is why ordinarily purposeful people find themselves, unaccountably, loitering in boatyards. Just hanging around. They can sense it here, this pleasure, this inspiration, this elevation. They can smell it. It smells like wood. Sawn cedar, damp, steaming oak, even angelique that stinks like where the cows are on the farm. They can touch it, this wood—it feels good in the hand. It’s actual. It’s true. They can see it bent into curves, and they can imagine sailing away on it.