II
Coffee break. The boatbuilders relax in warm spring sun, seated in a row on sagging wana planks, the inviolable ten-thirty ritual. Gretchen’s maroon hatchback crunches to a halt behind the winch, and she bops out, ever cheerful, and stands in the aisle between the workbench and the sagging planks, the boatwrights seated on either side.
“Who’s been over to Mugwump?” she asks, still happy, but there’s an edge of concern in her voice. Nat shakes his head, as do the others. Rebecca has been dormant for nearly two months now, with no sign of being revived, its owner still beset by financial troubles.
Gretchen looks amazed. She says, “What’s the Travelift doing there?” All here are familiar with Travelifts, of course; Travelifts are used to move large boats.
Ross says, “Oh, do they have a Travelift at Maciel Marine already?”
Gretchen says, “No, it’s right in front of Mugwump.”
Nat says, “A Travelift or a . . . ,” and he’s shaking his head as though he didn’t understand.
“No,” Gretchen says, “a, a, a thing for lifting . . .” And then she loses her gumption to carry on with her flagging April Fool’s joke. She’s mad about not pulling it off and sends an oh well laugh to the sky.
David Stimson, now fully employed at this yard, says, “You should have said something less believable.”
Gretchen then walks the line of boatbuilders, placing a gummy fish on each boatwright’s shoulder, explaining that it’s a French custom. Jim nods and says, “Poisson d’Avril,” but he has no idea how the custom originated.
The smells of spring are in the air. Ross notes how delightful dawn’s birdsong is, and the boatyard is moving inexorably toward its busiest season. Gretchen’s getting busy, too, with customers’ needing their seat cushions and new sails, and so she slides around on her varnished loft floor with increased urgency. She heads up today to work on the mainsail for the Bella that Duane is completing. She’ll spread the 267 square feet of sail across her floor, pinning the edges down with yellow-handled picks, her glossy floor mottled with black spots from these tools. Gretchen has shaped the gaff sail so that it will fill with wind in a gentle ellipse that will mirror the curves of the boat’s hull and sheer. Nat provides her with all the measurements, and she does the rest by eye.
“Math’s never been my thing,” she explains.
She does most stitching by machine—for all the long seams and big sail work (and other work, such as cushion covers for Elisa’s interior) she employs her trusted Singers, notably the Singer 107 W1, affectionately known as Frankie—but the corner and reef cringles, the metal rings at the corners of the sail, she stitches by hand. Gretchen says that such things are too easily mass-produced for her to charge a lot of money for the handwork: today’s sailmakers have hydraulic presses that pop the rings into the sails in less than a second. Gretchen nonetheless prefers her method, which requires not high-tech machinery but rather a needle, some wax thread, a cold beer, and a portable telephone.
Gretchen’s stairway ends right at Elisa’s bow. The powerboat has been planked up—you could crawl all over her now, you could even stroll back aft, the hull is so wide and flat there. Ross has also put some shape into the stem, first hacking off the edges with a broadax, then refining it with power and hand planes till it’s got some shapely curves in it. The rest of the crew sand the hull, and sand it and sand it, and sand it some more. “Smooth as a baby’s bottom,” Ross requests.
The following Monday, April 5, Jim and Bruce have begun the morning sweep-up with brooms and dustpans in the outer shop, Bruce scooping up big piles of sawdust and ribbons of wana. The outer shop has changed. Elisa Lee is now not only planked but painted. Ross and Jim did it yesterday, Easter Sunday. Jim had struggled out of bed and come to toil on his own boat. As he sweeps up Friday’s debris, he says with a grin, “We paint za boat for Easter! Ross came in here all sad because he was alone on Easter. He expected no one to be here. But I was here. ‘Hey, Jim, you want to paint the waterline?’ ‘Oh yah, sure.’ ” Jim grins widely—it was the last thing he wanted to do, but he always says yes. Then he adds, “But I couldn’t because I was so hung over.”
He, Ted, and Chris Mullen had toured the Oak Bluffs bars the night before, and painting a straight, crisp waterline was next to impossible, so he asked if Ross would paint the waterline, and offered to take over the big paint roller instead. White primer above the waterline, red lead below.
Ginny emerges from her office at a stroll, just poking around. She says, “I got a call from Andy. He’s at Fernandina Beach.”
“Oh?” Jim says with interest.
“He says he was bored of motoring through the waterway. He’s going to go out and catch the Gulf Stream up to Beaufort.”
Andy Lyon, one of the yard’s best boatwrights, has been gone since last October, cruising in his 35-foot Crocker sloop, Harmony, and the bosses are eager to have him back.
Ross arrives in the “Pepe’s” truck, and Jim and Ted follow him into the shop, to the bench, where he tears open paper bundles of untreated cotton. “This is called a skein, just like yarn,” he says. “I want you to roll each one into half a dozen balls. Find a good container.”
Ross has had a hand in caulking every boat that’s rolled down the G&B rails into the harbor, and it’s time to caulk Elisa Lee. Ted and Jim will learn Ross’s method of caulking.
Tools are gathered, wooden mallets and irons. A proper caulking mallet is shaped not unlike a polo mallet, with a long, narrow head. Ross says, “I didn’t have an actual caulking mallet till about four years ago. You need them. On a big boat they make sense. You want all that mass directed right on the iron. But for a smaller boat I like a bigger surface area—you don’t have to look as much when you’re hammering.” For Elisa, the old wooden mallets that Ted, Jim, and Bruce will use will be fine.
Ross sets a stiff canvas bundle on the bench and unfolds its flaps. Inside are his irons. “For this little boat,” he says to Ted and Jim, “you only need one size iron. The smallest one.” The irons have a wide, flat edge for driving the cotton into the seam, rising into a cylindrical stem and a big, flat head at the top. The edges vary. Some are 2 inches wide, others ½ inch. Their thickness varies as well; some are thick and square, some taper into what approaches a dull blade. And some edges are convex, so that a lot of pressure can be applied to an exact point. The best irons, the old irons, are especially pleasing to look at because of their nearly black, smooth finish.
“The finish on the new ones is just terrible,” Ross notes. “This one,” he says, holding up an old one to prove his point, then hesitates—“well, this is not a good example because somebody left it out in the rain and it rusted and is all pockmarked.” But even this ill-cared-for iron seems to carry its own sepia backdrop, appears to have been transported here straight out of the pre-World War II Machine Age.
Ross strides to the outer shop with his tools, and Jim and Ted follow carrying cotton and mallets. They climb on top of Elisa Lee, and Ross continues his instructions. He likes to caulk a boat. It’s what keeps the water out, what makes these pieces of wood a boat. Caulking creates the ultimate dynamic in the hull. Up to this day, Elisa’s hull has been a loose basket; the caulking will turn it into a drum, watertight and rigid. And this takes skill. In the golden days of ship building, there were groups of itinerant caulkers who did nothing but caulk, traveling to whichever boatyards needed it done. You must develop a caulking sense, because you can put too much or too little cotton in, and you can pop the caulk through the inside, driving the planks apart. You learn how to listen to the iron; there’s a particular sound when you’ve placed it just right and you drive the proper amount of cotton into the seam the proper distance, striking the iron perfectly—a solid sound, as when you hit a nail sweetly. The sound of a wooden mallet against iron is pleasing.
There are specific ways of holding an iron: you hold it not like a spike but like a scoop, the heel of your hand facing upward in a graceful posture. The method is more or less to scoop the cotton in overlapping tucks and chink it lightly into place, then drive it into the seam.
Ross demonstrates and talks. “Make sure, when you drive the iron, you’re hitting the seam,” he says. It’s easy to lose concentration and put a big gash in the edge of a plank. “See how I keep the corner of the iron in the seam?” He’s begun with the first three seams in the back of the boat, one away from the seam where the garboard connects with the keel. “Always set the smallest seam first, because it’s going to push the others forward slightly. And caulk the garboard last.”
“Is that because it’s the biggest?” Ted asks.
“Yeah, it would just make that seam bigger.” He thunks away, the hull echoing slightly. “With a wider seam, you put the tucks closer together.”
“Ross?” Robert Bennett interrupts. He’s standing below Ross, holding out his paycheck.
Without a word Ross takes it, finds a pen, and signs it against the hull, and Robert departs to begin work on Liberty.
Bruce has plugged a radio into an extension cord and set it atop the keel. As Ross teaches—“That seam’s too small; it needs to be reefed out before you caulk it. . . . Be careful where there’s a lot of caulking bevel; there’s not a lot here, where it’s flat, but around the bilge, remember it’s always the lower edge that’s square. . . . You just have to be a judge of what’s right. It takes a long time to learn how to develop that motion, to be able to do it, and do it all day long. . . . I want you to develop good habits and a good way of thinking . . .”—the voice of James Taylor, the man who sparked Gannon & Benjamin into being when he commissioned Sally May, sings from the radio, “Don’t let me be lonely tonight,” and slowly Jim and Ted and Bruce begin to work on various seams, first slowly, then more rhythmically. The thunk, thunkthunk thunk, thunk thunk, thunkthunkthunk begins to ring out through the shop and out onto Beach Road. The funky rhythm will sound out for three days before all the seams are tight with cotton and you can rap any plank and it will not vibrate and sound hollow but only thud solidly. The boat will be sealed.
Robert Bennett, signed paycheck in pocket, has climbed up onto Liberty, where he’s lately been Dyneling the deck with Chris Mullen. Occasionally you can find him out on the dock painting a little skiff or sanding a spar, and soon he’ll be over at Packer Park, sanding and varnishing the boats G&B hauled for the winter. But for the past few months he’s mostly been aboard Doug Cabral’s 40-foot sloop, dismantling sections of the interior and repairing or revarnishing the wood. He wears knee pads over Carhartt canvas pants, and a long-johns shirt; he stands about five foot six. His hair is thick and dark blond and falls nearly to his shoulders. He covers his round head with a bandanna or a ball cap most days. He keeps his full beard cut short. He is forty-two and chose a life of sailing and wooden boats and boatyards four years ago. At the time he didn’t even know how to swim.
Here is a measure of Robert. Having spent twenty years as a cowboy, covering millions of hot, dusty acres on horseback from West Texas as far down as the Red River and on up to Montana and into British Columbia, lighting sagebrush fires to brand cattle, birthing them, leading them to water, and watching after their lives, eating most meals of his life from a chuck wagon, living a largely solitary existence in the awesome expanses of the western United States as a buckaroo, as such men are called, he decided to “sell the ranch” and buy a boat. He’d spent the first half of his working life in desert and on arid plain; he determined he would spend the second half on the water. The only problem was that nagging inability to swim. So: he became a lifeguard. A primary qualification for that job, of course, is knowing how to swim, and this is apparently how Robert makes transitions or learns things—in drastic, effective ways.
At the age of thirty-eight, Robert had seen the life of the buckaroo changing for the worse. The half-million-acre ranches he and his fellow buckaroos covered on horseback had begun to hire helicopters to do the work. Fences began to go up where there had been none before. The old ways of doing things disappeared. Robert trained cutting horses, some of the best-bred horses in the world; he loved working with these animals, training them to manage cattle, but he didn’t get on well with wealthy owners who wanted to use them only in competitions, nor did he feel comfortable in that cliquey, glitzy world. He found many of the people crass, rude, and arrogant, and so working with horses purely for the purposes of show ultimately depressed him. It was time to move on. After a summer and winter as a lifeguard at the Eureka County pool in Nevada, he bought a ticket to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and, carrying a backpack containing a pair of shorts, a pair of dress pants, a couple of T-shirts, and a pair of sneakers, made his way to a port that his guidebook described as being populated by transient sailors. He met one such couple his first day there, and they showed him around the harbor, and then he met an elderly sailor who couldn’t quite handle a boat on his own and invited Robert to sail with him. In this way, Robert learned how to get around on a boat.
He bought himself a boat, a wooden boat, a 30-foot Atkin cutter. He worked at boatyards and sailed around the islands. He met a Brazilian woman named Laura who was married to a man named Bruce Davies. They became friends, sailed together. Bruce found work for Robert in Haulover, on neighboring St. Thomas. And Bruce told Robert about a great wooden boat yard up in Massachusetts, on Martha’s Vineyard, where he’d worked. In July 1996 Hurricane Bertha blew through the islands and wrecked Robert’s boat. The island was desperate for salvage divers after the blow, so Robert one night read a book on how to scuba dive and became a salvage diver the next day.
Soon, though, he realized he was off course, and needed to return to boats in a drastic way. “If I was going to learn about wooden boats,” he says, “I had to be where there were a lot of wooden boats.”
And so he figured he’d give that boatyard Bruce had mentioned a try.
There was never a question about what kind of boats he wanted to work on and be around. Robert had always been the old-fashioned, traditional type; he’d chosen to be an old-fashioned, traditional cowboy, and so it would be with boats, because that was his way. It wasn’t that they were the only kind he could afford, it wasn’t that he could fix a wooden boat by himself if he needed to, and it wasn’t that he thought that they were prettier—it was simply something he knew. For him he knew right and he knew wrong, and wooden boats were right.
“The thing about wooden boats for me,” Robert says, began “when I started reading about boats, I started reading Slocum, and everybody since Slocum who went to sea in small boats, before fiberglass came out and all these synthetic materials. Men who built their own boats and went out and had an adventure. They didn’t just have the money and go out and buy a fancy yacht; they lived it. They were men who loved life, and they lived it by building their own boats and going to sea. And I think that’s the way it should be done. For me. Same as buckarooing. You depend on yourself. You don’t depend on other people.”
So Robert headed north, got a job at G&B, and bought a 21-foot double-ended sloop for eight hundred bucks. It’s now under tarps in front of the woodshed. When Robert removes the tarps, he can look down into the hull and see the ground through all the missing planks. “She’s going to be the sweetest boat in the harbor,” he says dreamily.
Last October he got the opportunity to go on his first blue-water sail. His colleague Andy Lyon was planning a trip south for half a year or so. Did Robert want to come along?
Andy, thirty-four years old, had been living on his boat since he bought her, thirteen years earlier. He knew pretty much every fastener in that 35-foot vessel, which had been built around 1940. It had a laid teak deck, and every night he threw a couple of buckets of salt water on it; it would stay wet till morning. The moisture kept the teak decking fat and Andy’s bunk dry, while the salt preserved the wood, much the same way brine preserves pickles. Andy referred to this task as pickling the deck.
Andy is about Nat’s size, with short, dark hair and a high forehead over tiny blue eyes, a long nose and a long chin, between which he wears a dark mustache. Andy doesn’t say much. He has the laconic, dry manner of a genuine Mainer, though he grew up in Connecticut, where his family sailed a wooden boat on Long Island Sound.
“I like wood because I’m a boatbuilder,” he will tell you, “and fiberglass is a lousy thing to work with.” End of discussion.
Andy likes to drink beer and talk and laugh, but the image that lingers in your mind is of Andy walking off alone, or Andy staring out, alone in his thoughts.
He enjoys his work and is a talented boatbuilder, which is why Ross and Nat like it when he happens to be anchored in Vineyard Haven Harbor. Andy is likely the most efficient builder in the shop, perhaps simply by virtue of the fact that he doesn’t talk to anyone. Sometimes you will see him working in the outer shop wearing the ear guards that normally hang on the planer crank inside, even though no one has been using the planer or intends to. When he wears them, he can be alone in this busy shop. He gets more done that way, he says.
“I don’t like being called a live-aboard,” Andy says. “I don’t live aboard. This is my life. I live on something I am.
“Some people live in cabins in the mountains. Some people live in cities. It’s where I live, what I do for a living. I never thought much about it. Some people live on farms. I live on the ocean.
“I live on it,” he continues, referring to Harmony, “because it takes me places. Some people live on a boat, they tie it to a mooring and they never leave it. I don’t know why you would put yourself through that and not use it as a boat. It’s like living in a trailer park. Why do you live in that aluminum box if you’re not moving? So I live on a boat because it takes me places. I take my home with me. It’s a good way to travel. It’s a good way to get somewhere you haven’t been. It’s always an adventure. And every night, you come home. When I stop moving, that’s when I’ll move off. When I’m tired of being wet and salty, I’ll buy a house in the mountains. And then somebody will ask me, ‘Why do you live in the mountains?’ ”
Andy had been to Bermuda a dozen and a half times, and it was to be the first stop on his winter cruise. Robert was eager for the trip. So was a third crew member, Ginna Campbell, wife of Daniel, the young ocean crosser who was then over at Mugwump, pounding giant bronze bolts into the deck beams.
It was getting to be late in the fall, when weather and sea tend to be unpredictable. Andy knew they had better get going. He figured from satellite and weather reports that they had a small but perfect window to push out over the Gulf Stream and cruise into Bermuda comfortably. Friends had thrown a party for them the night before. Robert was thoroughly hung over and so was miserable from the start.
But things got worse as soon as they rounded Gay Head. The wind started blowing, and Robert didn’t think about his hangover anymore. The blow seemed a good thing at first. A good wind was what they’d expected would get them all the way to the Gulf Stream and across in good time. But the wind kept getting stronger. For the first couple of days it blew hard off and on. Ginna got sick immediately, so it was just Robert and Andy doing the sailing. Because Andy’s automatic steering device wasn’t reliable in rough weather, one of them had to be on the tiller at all times.
Robert would sleep when he could, maybe thirty minutes at a stretch, but whenever he was feeling awake, he’d be at the tiller so Andy could rest. They couldn’t lose Andy. “I was expendable,” Robert says.
The weather got bad when they entered the Gulf Stream. Robert saw the water change suddenly, turning black. They’d been riding swells, but the Gulf Stream was choppy and mixed. The sky was black, too. It was like hitting a wall. Robert’s only thought was that he wanted to get across this thing as fast as possible. They were completely reefed down, and they ran the engine some, Andy telling Robert that as soon as they got across the stream they’d have a nice sail on down. Robert repeated the words in his head and aloud till they became nearly a mantra.
When they made it across, at the end of Robert’s six-hour watch, the seas were still 15 feet—he could see the horizon only when the boat rode to the crest of a wave—the wind was blowing 30 or 40 knots, and Robert felt the sky was pressing down right on top of him, that scary black sky at noon.
It was then that Andy decided to put out a storm anchor, a big conical dragging device called a drogue, and hove to till the storm went away. They sat down in the cockpit and talked. They had no idea where this weather was coming from, how long it might last, or how bad it would get. They just had to sit tight and hang on, let the waves toss them but keep the boat from turning beam to, a situation in which they could be knocked down.
The wind picked up to 60 knots, and the seas rose to 25 feet—getting to be the kind of weather that isn’t good at all to be in in a small boat. The three crew, strapped into harnesses, pumped as fast as they could. One of them was always above deck, on watch; the other two would try to rest then, maybe eat a peanut butter sandwich if they had the energy to try to get the stuff on bread. Water was crashing over the stern so hard it squirted through the closed companionway hatch. Robert stood on the ladder to try to seal it, first opening it all the way—and a wave came down so hard it put him on his back, staring up at deck beams. That wave knocked out the radio as well, so they were without communication.
Below deck, Andy’s boat is traditional, spare but warm and comfortable, the mahogany woodwork varnished but not to a high gloss. All very practical. The cushions on the settee are forest green. Andy installed a coal-burning stove in the forward end of this main cabin, and there are lamps and an oil lantern in the galley. An old nautical clock is fastened to the bulkhead above a settee. Books are strapped into bookshelves. It’s a cozy little home when it isn’t filled up with salt water and being shaken like a paint can, as it was during that storm.
Andy got the radio working, and they learned that the storm had come out of Nova Scotia and would continue to blow hard from the northwest. They heard other vessels in distress; one, still in the Gulf Stream, sent out a Mayday. The crew on Harmony could only hang on and pray that their boat would stay afloat.
As the storm wore on for the entire day and then all night long, Robert felt fear in a way he’d never known it before. It rose up like something hard inside him, something solid. It was astonishing to him how physical and tangible fear was. After two days of this weather, he was exhausted. Every time a wave crashed into the boat, he wondered how much more she could take—would the next wave take her down, break her apart? They’d already had one near knockdown; another could end them. Fear rose in his throat, and he had to swallow it down. He had been in life-threatening situations before, but never for this long. One day and night, then two, then three. Scarcely eating or sleeping, losing all sense of time—losing much of his senses, period. It required a kind of miracle of acrobatics even to use the head or get peanut butter on bread, let alone eat it. And it was in such situations, he knew, that accidents were most likely to happen—when people got sick, didn’t eat, couldn’t sleep for days as a boat was tossed and slammed on waves. Robert couldn’t believe it. He’d never been so wet and tired for so long. He had plenty of time to think about his choices, though; there was nothing else to do but listen to the boat crashing about on those waves. By then he was seriously wishing to God he was back on a ranch. That was good work, making sure the animals found enough food and found their way to water, caring for them—between ten and fifteen thousand of them on any given ranch. Being on a horse all day long seven days a week, sleeping at night in the tent you carried with you. Same as buckaroos had been doing for a hundred years. They made all their tools, the spurs, the bridles, the saddles. When a cow died—as cows did sometimes in winter from the stress of the weather—you skinned it and cut the hide into a big circle. Then you’d use a razor blade to cut this circle into a single long strip about 2 inches wide, then cut that in half down its entire length and braid the pieces into rope. From this rawhide rope, Robert would then fashion a 100-foot reata, a traditional Spanish lariat for roping bulls and horses. He’d made his reins and blankets out of horsehair.
Robert had loved Nevada best—that was truly the big country. Horses ran loose in the desert. You could be in another century; you could be in any century at all. He’d loved the rhythm of living off this land. He and the others at his camp would wake at four in the morning. They’d pulled their own chuck wagon with them, and the cook would have breakfast ready: sourdough pancakes, biscuits, sometimes steak and eggs. Along with the cook, there’d been a horse jingler who took care of all the horses. The jingler would bring the horses in by four-thirty—“jingling the caveata,” it was called—anywhere between sixty and a hundred head for five or ten buckaroos, and the buckaroos would catch a couple of horses, saddle up, and ride off. They’d ride the horses hard, for twenty to forty miles, and Robert would sometimes go through three horses in a day.
He’d loved the desert and its solitude. He’d loved the traditional values and self-reliance of the life of a buckaroo. He’d loved making things by hand and living immediately, on the surface of the earth.
Andy remained calm throughout the storm, tending the boat, taking care of himself, looking out for the others, making good decisions about what needed to be done. He was concerned but steady. No one was going to say they were sure to make it through this storm, and his calmness in the face of that uncertainty was a kind of gift. If they made it, it would be Andy’s intelligence and experience that Robert would thank for it.
On the third day the wind decreased. The water remained rough, but the wind let up enough that they could haul in the sea anchor and put up a scrap of sail and move. On the following day they sighted Bermuda, and Ginna was able to make pancakes for everyone, the first actual meal they’d had since leaving. They were able to set their clothes on deck to dry. Landfall in St. George Harbor that night was exhilarating. It was dark, the passage into the harbor was narrow, and exhaustion made the work tricky. They set the anchor, made all lines fast. Their friend Phil had given them some big jugs of beer from a good microbrewery on the Vineyard, and they sat out and drank them on the now-still boat. And it seemed then that there were no greater gifts available to mankind than a jug of Off-Shore Ale in St. George Harbor, Bermuda, and being safe and secure and dry in this blessed boat.
When Andy returned from his half year at sea, cruising, he would remember that first leg of the journey well enough to comment on it: “It got a little lumpy for a while,” he says.
In either case—whether it was a lesson in exhaustion and wetness and the physical impact of fear, or simply “a little lumpy for a while”—this journey might also be described as workmanship of risk.