III
Ross said on that first day of caulking, “This is when it really pays off to plank the boat upside down.” Instead of lying on their backs and hammering straight up, they could chink and thunk away upright at eye level, either standing on staging or on their hands and knees in the flat aft section. Planking the boat right side up would likewise have been difficult, as would sanding the hull, which would in addition have been extraordinarily uncomfortable. Every step so far has been made immeasurably easier for having planked the boat upside down. The only drawback is that, having created a 10,000-pound object very close to the length and width of the shop, they now have to roll it back over.
“And that’s fun!” Ross says, grinning. He might well have built the boat upside down even if there hadn’t been any benefits to it at all, simply for the pleasure of rolling her back over.
A week and a half pass—during which time the seams are painted and then puttied, and then the hull is sanded once again and painted with enamel—before the day of the roll arrives. This gives Ross time to think it through. “Easing it over in your mind takes a long time,” he says. On the day of the roll he stops by Bargain Acres to pick up some tools and pulls into the shop at eight-thirty. He walks to the outer shop and stares at the hull, silent for half a minute. Then he says, “That’s a heavy object to roll over in a small space.” He’s still figuring out in his head how it’s going to happen. The object is 32 feet long, only a few feet shorter than the outer shop; it’s 11 feet wide at its sheer, which is now near the floor, and about 8 feet tall at the bow. On one side is a workbench built into the western wall of the building, and on the other, a beautiful wooden sailboat nearing completion.
Nat is already at the yard. “Most people,” he says, “to roll that boat, would wait for a crane. It’s amazing what you can do with a few simple tools.”
Planks, rope, pulleys, a small hydraulic jack, and three warm bodies are what’s needed. Typically, rollers—they lie around in the sand here, big round wooden posts, half the width of telephone poles and 3 to 5 feet long—would be included on that list of tools for moving heavy objects. Something that rolls is critical to the equation: you move a big object vertically with jacks and pulleys, laterally on rollers. Boats, whole houses, are easily pushed or pulled along if they’re on rollers—yet another curve G&B relies on. But this boat isn’t going anywhere; she’s staying right where she is. So a different kind of roller is required, and Ross, after turning it over in his mind for a while, has decided to build the roller, the circular curve, onto the boat herself, like a frame. He will build two 90-degree curves—two separate quarter circles—out of sturdy planks and bolt them to the keel and sheer so they’ll sweep over the boat’s port side. He figures the radius of this circle, 6 feet 7 inches, by taking some measurements straight off the lofting-floor drawing. He and Nat and others build the circle fast, just as they would construct double-sawn frames, first making patterns, then sawing the pieces out of fresh white 2-by-10 planks and fastening them together using drywall screws and battery-powered screw guns. A half hour later they’ve constructed more than 20 feet of curve.
As Ross and Nat begin bolting the circles into the keel, Bernie Holzer, a purser on one of the Steamship ferries, a friend of the boatyard, and a close friend of Ross’s, arrives. Bernie has worked on the water his whole life and visited most of the world’s deepwater ports. He’s got an unforgettably high-pitched, scratchy voice that sounds out in the shop: “Are you sure this is the way primitive man did it?” Bernie has come to watch, and to help if need be. “Well, I got twelve hundred and fifty Egyptians comin’ over on the next boat!”
“Great,” says Ross. “Let’s stop for coffee.”
Ross steps off the boat and resumes his staring and figuring—he’s all concentration now—wondering if they can get by with just the one jack to lift the boat off her blocks and inch her toward the Bella, so she’ll have room to roll. “What about the hydraulic jack at your house?” Bernie asks.
“Unfortunately, it’s holding up my house,” Ross says. (He lifted it last weekend to put a foundation in.)
Ross is planning to roll the boat toward the workbench. He looks over at the Bella and explains, “If we roll it this way, we’ll destroy two new boats.” He knows that when the keel passes the 45-degree mark, Elisa—all 10,000 pounds of her—is going to want to right herself, and the bench will act as a stop if she gets out of control. But in order to give her enough room to roll—she’s right up against the bench now—they must first move her closer to the Bella by about five feet.
Nat is on top of the boat, continuing to bolt the wheels to the keel, and Ross asks, “You mind if I start moving this over?” Nat shakes his head, and Ross and Bernie crawl under the boat. Ross begins the slow process by positioning the jack so that it’s tilted away from the Bella; when the boat gets high enough, the tilted jack becomes unstable and rights itself, tipping back up straight and shifting Elisa several inches with it. In this manner they creep her across the lofting floor, Duane helping to move the supporting blocking as the boat moves, Bernie placing a steel plate beneath the jack to keep it from popping through the lofting floor from the weight of the boat.
With one lift and tip, the boat shifts more than Ross is expecting, and the entire building trembles. He says, “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
The boat’s owner, Jonathan Edwards, arrives and sees Elisa Lee for the first time. He grins, standing in the doorway, tall and lanky, balding, with close-cropped hair turning gray, cool blue eyes, dressed in a warm-up suit and running shoes. Nat sees him and says, “Heeeey!” and they shake. Ross calls out greetings from underneath the boat. Jonathan has returned for the spring and summer to help work on the boat in between concert dates. “It’s beautiful,” he says.
When the boat is in place—Ross just eyeballs it—and Nat has gotten the two wheels securely fastened to the port side, the process of rolling her can begin. The idea is to lift her up using chain falls, ratcheted metal pulleys with several purchases, which are attached to the rafters overhead and also to the fabricated boat wheels where they’re attached to the keel. Nat will also run fat white rope from where these chain falls are, over the center of the boat, through the eaves, and down over the Bella, then fix it to one of the rails in the sand via a come-along, a kind of portable winch; this rope will be attached to the keel and will keep the boat from rolling too fast. If they lose control of her, all that weight now with wheels bolted on, someone could be seriously hurt, and the boat could be damaged, too.
Duane climbs on top of the hull and begins pulling the chains, lifting the boat by fractions with each long pull, the chain falling with a rattle against the planks, and the boat quivers first and the floor shudders as she just budges.
A spectator who has been watching this process whispers, “This is insane.”
There are spectators! People have begun to gather to watch Nat and Ross and the crew roll this big fat boat inside a small shop. Gretchen has appeared at the top landing of her loft to observe; Simmy, Bernie’s wife, has joined her. All sorts of friends and strangers have somehow materialized. Photographers from both island newspapers are here.
Listening to directives from Ross, who’s on the ground watching and looking, stroking his beard, focusing hard, Duane pulls on the chain. The boat lurches forward, and the spectators take an involuntary quick breath. Ross, right in front of the boat, doesn’t flinch—too focused. He tells Duane to keep going. And Duane does, but too aggressively this time, and the boat skids suddenly a foot toward the bench, and Ross shouts, “Duane! Duane! God—gosh darnit!” Duane manages to steady the boat by reversing the chain fall. Ross says, “You know you just took away about half what we did with the jacks?” A half hour spent shifting inch by inch, lost in a moment.
What makes the spectators’ hearts pound as they watch this is not the fact that this creature moves fast; it’s that they can tell from the rumble of the shop that it’s going to move, but they don’t know where or how much. And, too, it’s that once it starts, it can’t be stopped. No one can really see where the forces and the weight are. Everyone trusts Ross, though, and he seems literally to see the critical vectors that hold this whale still or press it to move.
And as Elisa moves, as he guides her up onto one edge, off her blocks, attached by rope to the building, her shape changes before your eyes. She begins to roll, inch by inch, and as she does, those elusive curves wave at you, undulate; her belly seems to swell like a squeezed water balloon. This optical illusion, combined with the breathless fact of the boat’s potential to suddenly roll and crush someone or take down a wall, transfix the crowd.
The chain falls soon lift the boat off the blocks, and her heavier port side, where the wheels are attached, drops while the starboard rises. The boat is now irrevocably tilted, and Ross says, “It’s started its journey.” She looks, in a way, like a capsized boat, washed up on rocks, and Nat says to Jonathan, “You don’t want to see it in this position again.”
Jim says, “Eet looks like an elephant trap. We should get some peanuts.” And he laughs.
Nat climbs up on the boat to work the chain falls, lifting the boat higher. It feels as if the entire building—and the ground, everything—were working to hold her up; the strain is like a hum in the air. The spectators are silent, the only noise the chain rattling on the hull, until the boat groans and shifts, sending another tremor through the boatshop.
Slowly Ross begins to pay out the fat white rope attached to the come-along attached to the rail, letting the keel turn gradually. He lets out a little more as Nat works the chain falls.
Ginny, taking pictures from her open office window, answers a ringing phone and calls out, “Ross?”
Nat says, “Ginny, no phone calls for a while.”
“It’s your niece calling from Cuba.”
“Tell her to call back in one hour,” Ross says, tending the come-along. “Explain what’s happening and apologize.”
The keel drops, and Ross shouts, “Whoa whoa whoa! Nat, you got it. I can see it wants to go.”
She’s crossed the line—she wants to be a boat.
Ross retrieves a long metal post that serves as a lever. The sheer doesn’t touch the ground; the weight is all on the two wheels, the entire hull secured by various lines. Ross puts the lever under the sheer and lifts, and the boat scoots toward him with a rumble, and he says, “Whoa, whoa.” Down to his purple long-johns shirt as the day has warmed, in his work pants and ratty tennis shoes, Ross appears tiny against the big, wide boat. It seems as if the boat could shoot out into him, right herself, and launch him into the rafters.
Jim, standing and watching from a distance, says, “I wouldn’t want to play there.”
Ross tries to figure where all the pressure points are and then says, “It’s just going to scoot. It’s never going to be out of control.”
Nat climbs up into the rafters now, and the boat continues to roll until she’s on her side, a quarter turned and completely vertical, resting against the bench. Nat climbs out of the rafters onto Gretchen’s landing and descends the stairs, grinning. This is exciting. He knows exactly what to do. They’ll wedge planks beneath the wheels, attach bar clamps to the planks and a come-along to the clamps and to the rail, and then simply pull the planks, and the boat will come with them. He instructs David Stimson to slather the bench with marine grease so the wheels will slide easily over it, and says, “I’ll go get some ball bearings”—sand, that is, to throw under the planks to encourage some slide.
The planks are inserted using a lever and a sledgehammer; then they’re attached to rope and come-along, and sand is scattered beneath them. Ross works the come-along, Nat and Bob Osleeb help to guide the boat, and inch by shop-rumbling inch, she turns, and turns, with increasing ease as the weight of the keel nears the ground, until Ross yells, “Yippee, there she is!” and the keel comes around completely and the boat is righted. Ross strides over to see where she’s ended up and says, “She’s almost at that center line where she began life.”
Everyone is smiling. The entire process has taken more than eight hours. They’ve never performed such a maneuver before, and it’s been a success.
Before they secure Elisa, get blocks under her, and make her perfectly level, Nat and Ross will take a moment to relax and revel in the sight of this new boat, in what is a transformed shop. Suddenly there’s all sorts of room, and they can now see what she really looks like. They both walk back to the bench to lean on it and regard their work. In an unlikely bit of chance, each chooses one of the points on the wall-length workbench where the wheels ran their course, each rests against it at the exact same moment, and both shout “Ah!” simultaneously, as if the bench were electrified—mirror images, each having gotten the surprise of marine grease on hands and clothes. They look at each other and laugh. Different as they are, they are perfectly in sync.