Wooden Boats

Springtime comes late to this island, and everyone grumbles about it. Foliage opens up down-island while up-island trees remain bare—the effects of the wind on the differing landscapes are that marked. But the sun shines more brightly now, and later into the evening after daylight saving time comes, and the freezing sleet of late March ends, the earth begins to warm, and the island’s fragrant lilacs begin to bud.

Ross and Nat direct work over Elisa Lee, which is now looking very much like a big old lobsterboat. The next order of business is to saw out angelique sheer clamps—long planks that will run the lengths of the upper and lower sheers, attached to the insides of the sawn frames—and bilge stringers, which will likewise run the length of the boat down in the bilge. Once the boat has been rolled upright and these long interior pieces running fore and aft have been cut, planed, and fastened, work on the pieces running athwartship becomes the focus. Deck beams—three of them are still bolted to the landing outside the shop, bent over a jig—will be sawn out and will rest on the sheer clamps. The engine bed must be bolted in, as must the final floor timbers that will support the cabin and cockpit soles, and the bulkheads—thick, heavy pieces of marine-grade plywood that will form the walls of the boat, separating cockpit from cabin—have to be fashioned and fastened. Ross thinks of bulkheads as big knees—they join everything together and make the boat stiff and sound.

Nat constructs some of Bella’s spars, building them hollow, out of spruce. Painting and varnishing and general readying of the G&B fleet begins over at Packer Park, where James Taylor’s Sally May, John Evans’s Swallows and Amazons Forever, David McCullough’s Rosalee, and a dozen other G&B-built boats have sat on jackstands beneath tarps all winter. Buckaroo Robert will be at work here daily through spring, till the boats go back in the water. And so will Kerry Elkin, the former cranberry farmer, who has found he enjoys this work and intends to pursue it. David Stimson will join them in the sanding and painting of hulls.

The poles they’re using are old pilings that once supported a retaining wall; they’re saturated with creosote, encrusted with barnacles. They were given to Ross by the friend who took the bulwark down. These pilings are now in the ground and rise 14 feet. In a day or two the trusses from the old Ag Hall sheds will go up. The only materials they’ll need to buy for this 28-by-56-foot barn are the fastenings and the corrugated roof. Brad has cut notches in the pilings to connect them with beams. Ross has built staging right onto the back of the G&B pickup truck so they can drive it around to where they need to work high up—it’s a sort of movable ladder. Beams are fitted into the notches and bolted in along the entire rectangular perimeter. Brad is up on these poles, his feet dangling, taking measurements to determine how much adjusting they’ll have to do to make all the corners square. The trusses are 28 feet at their base, rising gently to a peak, and weigh about 200 pounds apiece. Twenty of them, in all, must be raised 15 feet in the air, maneuvered onto the top of this growing structure, and bolted in. Ross rigs a pulley system over the poles to hoist the trusses on a block and tackle that’s attached to a pulley; he’ll roll the trusses, one after the other, along the cable across the front of the building to their final position.

Brad is an integral part of Gannon & Benjamin, but at the same time he skirts its periphery. Sometimes he’s working for G&B, and then you look up and he’s gone. If he’s ever in a group (and this is not a common occurrence), his height and hollow, angular features make him the focal point; his quiet, certain voice commands attention. His is a spiritual presence, at least among the builders here—he’s the primitive sorcerer/magician first identified by Ted Okie. True, Brad Ives on the surface appears to be an unremarkable middle-aged man: upper-middle-class boy of the 1950s, recent home owner with his fiancée, April, soy-food-products salesperson, and the only G&B boatwright with a cell phone, a laptop, and a business of his own, Deep Water Ventures. But it’s also true that while he was born into conventional Eisenhower America, he’s spent most of his adult life on the shifting, lawless-but-for-nature, fluid surface of earth.

Springtime for Brad means another trip to South America. Then again, so does fall. And sometimes summer. He tries to avoid May through August and early winter, when the rain prevents the cutters from getting logs out of the forest, but for him, Martha’s Vineyard to Suriname, a Third World country almost completely devoid of the influence of American mass culture, is becoming an ordinary commute. He is so comfortable in Suriname that his life there, as he recounts it, seems almost American-suburban. Last August, returning to his business and restoring old contacts in his efforts to buy timbers for Rebecca, he wrote Ginny a leisurely e-mail that began:

I have already been to one of the mills today to mark logs for cutting to length as they came off the barge, but all was in an uproar as the two brother owners had been called by the watchman at 0630 that some guys were stealing wood. They went down and followed the wood just up the road. Radjen waited outside while Lloyd went to get the cops, but they wouldn’t come. Too lazy or disinterested as thieving goes on all the time in that part of town. I worked most of yesterday as well, painting ends and measuring. The work is going OK, better than last time. Now I think they take me a little more seriously as I keep coming back. Maybe the next time they will even store some logs for me. The silverballi logs are smaller this time, but with some shape, so I try and match up the tree to the boat. Better use of the tree and more satisfying to me.

Home life is kind of disastrous again. Jan, my Dutch roommate, is all busted up from a bad bike fall, and Rosita has been sick with a kidney infection. I am nursing them and doing the cooking and cleaning up. Also there is a lot of gardening work that needs to be done as our yard is a jungle. I kind of like it, as the weeds are like small trees, some with pretty flowers. The yard is full of overgrown leggy impatiens as well.

In the evening I biked home to my Hindustani village, found the house filled with women from Miti Switi, the internet dating service run by my housemate, Jan, and then biked a few kilometers to a sleepy little Javanese village where Bongo Charlie lives. We had a great dinner and short jam session on the many homemade percussion instruments Charlie makes, until riding home in the midnight hours enjoying a fine starry night off from the rainy season.

His trips have grown more frequent since the Rebecca project returned him to the country where he found such plentiful wood in the 1980s, before civil strife and political murders made life there unpleasant, and before a short rest of his own in federal prison, and the ensuing years of probation, kept him landlocked in the United States. Wooden vessels big enough to require his rarefied work near the equator continue to be built, and his orders are increasing. Having departed from his sister’s home in Boston, he arrives in Suriname with his biggest order ever, for 50,000 board feet of angelique, wana, and silverballi that will be trucked to yards throughout the United States and then sawn, planed, chiseled, and bent into big boats: Gazela of Philadelphia, a 170-foot barkentine being restored by the Philadelphia Ship Preservation Guild; Lynx, a new 80-foot schooner being built at Rockport Marine, the yard that launched the last W-class cold-molded racing sloop; a Malabar Sr., a 59-foot schooner, in upstate New York, and a similar schooner in Seattle; as well as future G&B boats.

The old DC-9 out of Curaçao touches down in Suriname five hours late, and Brad, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt, jeans, and old running shoes, waits in line to show his passport and visa and then stands in the dingy yellow cement-walled baggage area, where a single conveyor belt runs. It’s after one in the morning. The air conditioners struggle in the tropical humidity. He leans against a square pillar with one bag at his feet, along with a scuffed black briefcase containing his traveling papers, wood orders, boat drawings, his glasses, a Robertson Davies novel, The Fifth Business, and $9,000 in American cash. After forty-five minutes, the last of his baggage arrives.

The airport is less than an hour’s drive from the capital city of Paramaribo, along a paved two-lane road sided by fragrant tropical brush. Dense, cool air rushes through the open windows as Jan briefs Brad on the latest news. Bongo Charlie is in jail awaiting trial for possessing three grams of pot; their friend Naseer is in the hospital with back problems, unable to afford the $700 flight to Holland and free medical treatment. Teachers are striking for decent pay, so school hasn’t started (half of last year was missed, too, because the government failed to make the payroll). The building of two bridges spanning the Suriname River, though—an “improvement” that will cost $200 million and that according to many is unnecessary—remains on schedule: payroll has apparently never been a problem for President Wijdenbosch’s pet project. Meanwhile, Jan’s Internet dating service, designed to pair Surinamese women with prospective husbands from Europe and America, is not the booming success he’d hoped for, and he’ll soon be broke.

Jan pulls around a small cement divider leading to the line to drive onto the ferry. Stray dogs roam the crumbling streets of this once-prosperous Dutch colony, now composed of Africans, Amerindians, Indians, Javanese, Creoles, and Dutchmen. Jan’s is the only car here at the ferry landing on the edge of a large, deserted, unlit square in town, though a couple of shadowy figures loiter here and there, and a taxi driver fixes a tire beneath a distant streetlight. Brad and Jan must wait another forty-five minutes to cross the mud-brown Suriname River, and they get out of the car to stretch. Brad takes a drink of water from a small bottle he bought in Miami, then leans against the car. A vanful of French Guianans, having loaded their vehicle with vegetables and goods to take across the river and back to their neighboring country, pull up beside them, and everyone gets out to reorganize the packing of their goods: bundles of limp, foot-long green beans called kosse band; cassava, a root vegetable that will be grated and stuffed into a long woven tube called a matapi (which they also appear to have purchased) to allow the poison to drip out and the cassava to dry, after which it will be cooked on a hot plate into hard cakes; and various kinds of seafood and other vegetables. The oldest person from the van, a black woman wrapped in colorful cloth, her hair pulled back tightly, looks the two lanky white men up and down with amused skepticism, hands on her hips. Tilting her head back and gazing at them over high cheekbones, she speaks in Sranan Tongo, the lingua franca here. This is a creole language, not a pidgin, and it’s easy to get the hang of. A boat club down the river, for instance, is called Watramamma, or “the Mermaid.” Sranan Tongo means “Suriname Tongue” and is sometimes also called Taki Taki. Jan manages a few words in reply. The old woman cackles and saunters off.

The ferry, an old metal barge with a rail around it and a large passenger cabin, arrives late for this last leg of Brad’s journey. By then a line of cars and trucks has formed behind Jan and the French Guianans. The ride itself lasts less than ten minutes, at the end of which time Jan restarts the engine, waits to disembark, accelerates off the ferry ramp, and speeds down the four miles of paved roads to his termite-infested, wood-and-cement, two-story dwelling. Jan and Brad remove their shoes before entering the kitchen. Brad turns on the kitchen faucet, but there’s no water at this hour. The roosters in the farmer’s yard across the street begin their incessant crowing as Brad hooks mosquito netting to the ceiling above his bed in a bare upstairs room. Soon the noisy minibuses filled with people headed for the ferry will begin their routes, followed by motorbikes, engines buzzing at 6,000 rpm. More than twenty-four hours after waking in Boston, Brad sleeps—but only for a few hours. He’s eager to get to the mill to see what raw logs await him.

Lloyd Baldew greets him in an air-conditioned back office of the Toeval Mill. Lloyd, whom Brad describes as “the bull,” is a manic, aggressive businessman of Indian descent, forty-one years old, with short, dark hair, dark eyes, and boundless energy. Lloyd directs Brad’s attention to the new unfinished flooring after greetings have been exchanged. Much of Toeval’s wood winds up as hardwood floors; when Ross lays the floor of his house, it will be with wood from this mill.

Brad’s first and most difficult order of business is a rush for Gazela: the waterways, a section of the boat similar to a covering board that runs the length of the sheer between the frames and deck. They’ll need some sweep, if he can find it. The pieces that Brad will saw will be nearly 1 foot square and 20 feet or longer, wood that must be nearly perfect, with straight, clear grain and no major faults. Put end to end, these fat pieces would run well beyond the length of a football field.

Brad strides into the 90-degree tropical heat to see what the Baldew brothers have for him. The partially enclosed section of the mill is about 300 feet long, with one wall and a corrugated metal roof supported by I-beams. Some wood is finished and neatly stacked. Brad walks between mountains of scraps, the ground a spongy mixture of sawdust and dirt. Beside and beyond the mill, strewn about in the grass, are the enormous raw logs of angelique and silverballi, each 3 or 4 feet thick and cut in half to a length of between 30 and 40 feet.

Brad never moves quickly; he is slow and steady throughout his twelve-hour days here, as if to conserve energy in the sultry air. What he sees concerns him. The angelique pieces are not as big as they might be. He climbs over the piles of enormous logs—a giant’s Lincoln Logs—measuring as he goes, scrutinizing the shape and the quality of the ends, trying to imagine the interiors. In order to yield a good piece of wood 1 foot square, a tree must be well over 30 inches in diameter, to allow for an inch or two of sapwood on either side and exclude the heart, which typically contains faults and drying cracks. But Brad finds few logs that large.

“John, I’m down in Suriname, and I’ve got some questions for you,” Brad says. “Those twelve-by-nine-and-a-halfs, can those be boxed heart? . . . Is that all right? . . . Can you see the ends of them? . . . Well, we can, but it will take a long time. . . . It’ll be better, in fact, because you won’t be getting into the heart crack at all. . . . And the samson posts? . . . You want me to saw out to twelve? . . . You got it. . . . Yeah, I got a sore throat. I’m all right. I got in at five in the morning. Took twenty-four hours to get here. . . . All right.”

Brad turns to Rageomar. “OK,” he says, “that’s no problem with the heart.” Brad will take the enormous pieces straight from the center of the log. “But we’re going to change a little bit how you’re sawing. Do you have your list?” Rudy nods and removes a sheet of notebook paper from his shirt pocket. “We’re going to make that nine and a half,” Brad says, and he continues through the order with Rageomar, who will preside over all the sawing. The finished pieces in the boat are to measure 9 by 9 inches, and because the heart crack will be in the center of each piece, not on the surface, he can cut the logs more precisely: he’ll leave the 12-inch width so that the Gazela crew can cut some sweep in as needed.

“You see,” Brad says softly to himself, exhausted from the journey and sick with a cold, “this is why you’ve got to be here.” Each tree, each piece of wood, is unique and therefore requires its own strategy for cutting. Moreover, he often has the exact designs and drawings for a boat with him, so he can say, as he did a year ago, This log, cut this way, will give us the keel for Elisa Lee as Nat has drawn it here, or, This piece will give us a possible garboard for Lynx. This method is extremely time-consuming for Brad, but it reduces waste and expense once the wood arrives at a boatyard.

“It’s amazing how complicated cutting wood is,” he says, heading back out into the heat, which by eleven feels like an actual weight. “It’s an art.” By the time the order is done, he will have graded, inventoried, bundled, and loaded hundreds of pieces of wood into Fort Lauderdale-bound containers, each piece cut for a specific part of a specific boat, predestined at this mill to be a plank, a keel, a deck beam, a waterways, a sheerstrake.

“It’s often frustrating and heartbreaking to see how much of a tree is wasted,” he once explained to Ginny in an e-mail, his main form of communication with America when he’s here. “The outside sapwood is not durable, and the heart is almost always full of cracks and soft spots, and there are other defects running throughout the tree. But we do our best and sometimes the planks are beautiful one after another. From the tree to the ship is a wonderful puzzle, and every piece is different. I am still learning plenty about the different subspecies and how they grow and how best to saw them.”

A motorized block and tackle lifts the sawn pieces to an upper level and the gang saw, a big, muscular construction of iron, originally built in Germany, that would feel right at home in the woods outside Ross’s house. Numerous vertical blades can be fitted into this saw, so that a big timber 2 feet square can be driven through to become seven or eight 2½-inch planks—“like a pasta maker,” Brad says. Today and tomorrow, for the waterways, two central blades will be set up 9½ inches apart, and additional blades will be set on either side of them at a distance of 2½ inches. A 24-by-24-inch piece 20 feet long will thus result in one waterways for Gazela and several planks for Lynx. Brad will inspect each piece for cracks, knots, and imperfections that might weaken it; note its dimensions; and number it for his inventory.

The kind of wood Brad imports—cut individually to these specified lengths and these dimensions, and of this quality—is difficult to find in America (Brad charges between $2.80 and $3.50 a board foot for it, a reasonable price). Moreover, he has created this business at a time when diminishing supplies of Honduran mahogany and Burma teak are growing increasingly expensive, and the erosion of wood resources worldwide is evoking serious concern in terms of its effect on the environment; thus his work of measuring and cutting each individual piece sawn from handpicked trees raises important ecological issues that extend beyond the work of the boatbuilder—issues he’s very much aware of.

Since Brad first arrived here, in the early 1980s, several groups have formed to promote proper management of the earth’s forests. Perhaps the most respected is the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), headquartered in Oaxaca, Mexico. Established in 1993, this nonprofit group certifies forests throughout the world as being properly managed, and labels products originating therein to assure buyers that the wood comes from forests managed under internationally recognized standards of infinite sustainability. Britain is the most active market in this sector; about a quarter of all the wood sold there is certified. In all, some forty million acres are certified, in thirty-one countries, numbers that double yearly. Home Depot, the largest buyer and seller of forest products in the world, announced in 1999 that it would begin giving preference to certified wood.

Suriname, a little smaller than Missouri in total area, is composed mainly of forest, one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world, and until recently suffered little deforestation. Lately, though, the Suriname forest has been threatened by the sale of large tracts to foreign concerns—concerns that last year, according to one official (who has requested anonymity for fear of losing his job), exported 20,000 cubic meters of raw logs, not only thinning the forest but denying the citizens of Suriname potential income. “The rain forest is big,” the official tells me, “but if they do this for years, it will be dangerous.”

The mill employs about a dozen Bush Negroes, descendants of Africans enslaved by the Dutch in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who now live throughout the rain forest. Toeval employees occupy small camps in rain-forest clearings and locate the dozen species milled by Toeval by hiking through the forest, wearing little more than towel-like garments wrapped around their waists, chain saws in hand. They take each tree down and drag it out of the forest with a backhoesized truck called a skidder. Log loaders then lift the trees onto an ancient Mack truck rig that transports them to the riverside landing at Moengo, beside an abandoned American village, a kind of presidio of barracks, stores, a school, all built by Alcoa for the families of employees who once worked here mining bauxite. At Moengo the logs are loaded onto a barge, 200 tons at a time, and a little homemade tug with a 90-horsepower engine pushes the barge down the Cottica River to the Commewijne River and up the Suriname River to the mill—a twenty-five-hour journey if nothing breaks down and all goes perfectly—where the logs are off-loaded and strewn about in the grass and dirt until they’re needed.

When Lloyd and Brad arrive at the first camp, they find Willem, Djanie, and Ahmed beneath their shelter, a large blue plastic tarp, with dirty pans stacked on a log, a fire smoldering, the youngest holding a toothbrush heaped with toothpaste. Today was unproductive, the lead cutter explains to Lloyd, speaking in Sranan Tongo, because the skidder got stuck in the mud and it took them all day to get it out.

Lloyd is angry that his cutters haven’t found bigger logs, and he says, “I told you last week Brad was coming. He only buys big logs. If he doesn’t buy them from us, he’ll buy them from someone else. Where are the logs?” He threatens the most senior of the cutters: “If you don’t get the big logs, I’ll take the skidder and put it somewhere else.” (This would leave them with three chain saws and immovable logs for which they wouldn’t make money. Lloyd has to put some pressure on them, he feels, or they won’t find Brad’s logs.)

Brad stands behind Lloyd as Lloyd speaks. A large fern reaches up at his leg. He stares at it for a time, then strokes its leaves. The leaves clench instantly around their stem—a visual reminder of how alive this place is, how sensitive. After more discussion (Brad holds his hands far apart to show how wide he needs the logs to be), he and Lloyd leave for another camp, along rutted roads, narrow alleys through the forest, stopping where logs have been dragged out to examine them.

Brad can’t yet practice certified forestry management by himself. Nor is he obliged to: his entire operation is legal according to both the laws of Suriname and import laws enforced by the United States. Furthermore, the amount of wood he takes out of the forest—this year about 500 cubic meters, on two hundred trees—has a negligible impact on the rain forest: “What Brad is doing is nothing,” says the publicity-shy Surinamese official, who’s familiar with Brad’s business. In any event, Brad wouldn’t sell any more certified wood than he does uncertified wood now, so insisting on forest management doesn’t benefit him or his business in the least; on the contrary, it’s a lot of work for which he won’t make any money, and he may even lose business because of it if he has to raise prices higher than builders are willing to pay. That’s not his first concern, however.

Richard Jagels, a professor of forest biology at the University of Maine and the wood columnist for WoodenBoat, is skeptical of any importer who brokers wood from forests that have not been certified by the FSC. The Toeval Mill uses what’s called selective cutting, but Jagels maintains that the term doesn’t mean anything. “They’re ‘selectively cutting’ the most valuable trees,” he says. “They’re mining the forest, not managing it.” But he adds, “The one thing you can say for boatbuilders is that they use such a small quantity of wood, it’s almost irrelevant.”

Scott Landis, a writer and editor active in forest-management issues who edits Understory, the journal of the Certified Forest Products Council, for which Brad has written an article on the Suriname lumber industry, says of him, “I believe he’s trying to do a good thing. But the larger issue is that it’s just impossible to know what an independent claim [of stewardship] means, if anything at all. It’s hard enough for the FSC.” But even the least effort can raise a country’s consciousness, he emphasizes, regarding the value of universal standards in forestry management. If Brad can be one force leading the small country of Suriname in that direction, then, the impact of his business will extend beyond the boatbuilders to whom he is devoted, back to the source of their work, to the wood itself.

“We’re not going to go right away for a stamp,” Brad says of FSC certification, “because we don’t want the government involved. . . . We will develop, and bear the cost of, our own pilot program with our suppliers, drawing from international research and documenting it well for our customers, who will pay for it with a surcharge on the timbers once the system is in place.” (By the spring of the following year the Baldews will decide to seek FSC certification.)

Lloyd drops Brad off at Jan’s after eight, darkness having fallen while they were still out hunting logs. Jan, two Miti Switi women, and two children in their charge are finishing dinner at the kitchen table—stewed chicken, kosse band, rice—and Brad sits down to join them after his long day milling logs, grading cut pieces, and bouncing around the unpaved rutted roads of the Baldew rain-forest concession in Lloyd’s SUV. The girls offer to do the washing up. There is no running water after dark, but someone has filled a large bucket by the sink for cleaning and drinking, and there’s not too much junk in it. Earlier the electricity went out for twenty minutes, and no one said anything other than “Where are the candles?” After dinner Brad has a shower. There’s a large bathroom area that holds a partially working refrigerator, a sink, a tile floor with a drain, and two other, smaller rooms. One of these contains the toilet, which was built to accommodate running water, but tank and pipes are not included here, so you flush by pouring a bucket of water into the bowl, which purges it, sort of. Beside this room is another, identical one featuring a spigot above a large plastic washtub filled with water in which floats a smaller bucket for dousing yourself. Brad will bathe, then check his mail on Jan’s computer.

He’ll be in bed early, in his bare room beneath the mosquito netting, thinking about tomorrow, when he’ll have to visit a couple of other mills to see what they might have for him. He’s got to hunt and hunt. In a few days, biking around in the Chinese yard, he’ll spot a big angelique log, 40 inches in diameter and 32 feet long—a real keel log, large enough perhaps for a major part of the backbone of Lynx, an exciting find.

During his long days, he’ll often take a break to walk down the dusty street to a small restaurant for rotis, crepelike flatbread filled with a chicken or lamb or vegetable curry. No utensils are provided; the rotis are eaten by hand, with a sink against the back wall available for washing before and after the meal. He’s partial also to the cassava soup, the heri-heri (plantain, cassava, and vegetable stew), and soto, an Indonesian chicken noodle soup. He likes the unusual mix of Indonesian and Indian culinary traditions. Down the street from the mill is a sprawling market that offers all the cultural bounty of a country composed of six different peoples, where racial animosity is rare and racial violence is unheard-of. The people are friendly—gentle, even.

Brad is enormously comfortable in the Third World. At any moment of any day he can marvel at his surroundings and enjoy the drastic contrast between them and his own, overstuffed culture, happy to be away from the malls and the highways and the relentless pursuit of material comfort. “It feels good,” he says. “I’ve lived a long time at sea and in Third World countries. You develop an appreciation for the immediacy and the economy of life.”

I’ve accompanied Brad on this trip, and what I find most striking about Suriname is the absence of all things American. The government is so badly organized that it has created no tourism infrastructure. For instance, it has set aside 3.75 million acres of its rain forest in the belief that ecotourism is a growing business, but there are no roads leading to this extraordinary patch of the interior, or through it, for that matter, so you can’t get there except by plane, and once you do, you’re on your own. A New York Times article about the Suriname rain forest described it as “one of the least traveled places in the world”—a blessing that the government has been too inefficient to squander.

America’s is a consumer culture, so the consumer determines how things run in the United States. Planes, for example, are pretty much on time, and anyone in the least inconvenienced by a delay screams bloody murder or stews with disgust and fury (witness the class-action suit recently filed against a major airline for an eight-hour runway delay). When a plane has to sit on a runway even for an hour, the flight crew announces its takeoff position like a Dow Jones update, and the attendants pass out earphones and show movies. When a flight is canceled, diligent workers at the ticket desk click away on their keypads to find all the customers other flights, often ones that leave earlier than the flight they were scheduled to take.

Friends sometimes tag along with Brad to Suriname because they’re curious; it’s a place they would never otherwise go if they didn’t know him. Mark LaPlume, an artist and boat worker who was part of the Rebecca crew, flew down to stay with him once, and just before he was to fly back to America, the whole country went on strike and no planes flew. He could’ve waited it out if he wanted to, but who knew how long it would last? Mark had to travel to a neighboring country and fly out of there.

The day I am to depart on an 11:00 A.M. flight, I arrive to find the airport deserted but for someone pushing a broom across the cement floor and two young men leaning back, drinking tea, and smoking behind a ticket desk. “No plane today, come back tomorrow at four A.M.,” they tell me. I’ll have to cross the river at two-thirty in the morning, locate a taxi, drive through the darkness, and, well, hope I see a plane. As it happens, I will, but you never know. And either way it doesn’t matter, because that’s not the operative fact, plane or no plane. The operative fact, I realize only after my incredulity at the deserted airport passes, is that I’m in Suriname and not in America, and that’s a good thing.

The haphazard nature of travel in a Third World country is a chief asset for Americans. Sometimes things run, sometimes they don’t, and because you never know which it will be, you have no expectations. This may be why Brad is so relaxed when he travels to Suriname. He brightens here. He laughs and smiles more easily. A weight seems to lift off of him. He becomes a part of the place, even adopting a slight Sranan Tongo accent despite the fact that he doesn’t speak Dutch (though he will speak in Spanish with a ticket agent in Miami and in French when he runs into a French mechanic at Toeval, and he’s equally conversant in Portuguese).

When you have no expectations—nor the distractions of museums, ruins, and restaurants, T-shirts and postcards—then the sights and smells and nuances of the daily life of a place grow vivid. And for all its otherworldliness, its remoteness from an America where pretty subdivisions and malls roll out across the land like smothering Astroturf, Suriname feels humane and distinctive. You begin to sense, as Brad puts it, “the economy of life and the immediacy of life” lived here.

Brad Ives was born in 1949 in Providence, Rhode Island, the son of a lawyer who would eventually move to Washington to work in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations while young Brad remained at an East Coast boarding school. He was an independent boy, the “cooler older cousin” to other progeny within the family. Brad left Harvard not long after he arrived in 1968, but at the urging of his father, he later returned, though remaining restless. When a friend had the idea of buying a big boat and creating a floating commune to sail around the world, Brad was interested. So he and a small group of hippies, draft dodgers, and other disillusioned college students met in Vancouver to discuss the plan, find a suitable boat for sale, and pool their money. Brad went back to Harvard only long enough to persuade an instructor to teach him celestial navigation, a course the school had once offered. In 1969 the group traveled to Sweden to meet their ship.

The ship sailed throughout the Mediterranean—Sicily, Malta, Tunisia—during its rebuild period. In November 1971, Sofia returned to Spain and tied up in Santa Pola, where a boat named Sorcerer was hauled out (Sorcerer’s swashbuckling captain, Nat Benjamin, once walked below decks through Sofia’s many smoky rooms, admiring the fine vessel, though he was not inclined to retain many memories afterward). When her rebuild was complete, Sofia headed to the Canary Islands off the western coast of Africa, and from there crossed the Atlantic to the West Indies, where Brad and his crew spent the better part of a year delivering cargo between Trinidad and St. Lucia, mainly construction material. They then moved on to Curaçao, then to Aruba, and sold a charter to some of their parents for $15 a day before heading through the Panama Canal and over to the Galápagos Islands, about 600 miles west of Ecuador. The Galápagos then, in the early 1970s, were untouched, unrestricted, and to Brad the most beautiful spot on earth.

Sofia set sail again, north toward Fiji, then west to New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands east of New Guinea, up through Micronesia, across the South China Sea through Indonesia, past Borneo, Vietnam, and Thailand, and up to Singapore, then through the Strait of Malacca, which separates Sumatra from the Malay Peninsula, then into the Indian Ocean, to Sri Lanka, the Maldives, the Seychelles, and Aldabra Island, then to Tanzania, Kenya, and Madagascar, then over to South Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope and up to St. Helena, 1,200 miles west of Angola in the South Atlantic. She then crossed to Brazil, headed up to Barbados, Bequia, and Martinique, bombed through the Virgin Islands, and then sailed from Tortola on up to North Carolina and New York, at last anchoring in New Bedford.

He’d flown to Sweden in 1970 (Vietnam at a boil, Nixon triumphant in the White House) intending to return two years later to finish college. It was now 1978 (the war in Vietnam over, Jimmy Carter president), and America was a different country altogether from the one he’d left. Linda, soon to be his wife, was about to bear her second child and their first together, Willow, and Brad by now knew one thing for certain: he wanted to remain a part of the sea. It was only a matter of months before he was in Denmark to buy another boat—a bigger one, with a steel hull, 100 feet on deck, 130 feet overall, 21 feet wide. She drew 9 feet unless she was filled with cargo, in which case her keel dipped 2½ more feet.

Edna had been built in 1916 to fish for herring in the North Sea, a drift netter, and she did so until 1935, when she was converted to a motor-sailing cargo vessel. She’d been laid up for five years when Brad bought her. He took her back down to Portugal, where he rerigged her once again as a sailing vessel, a ketch with a fixed bowsprit, a large mizzen, and topsails, and added a yard to carry square sails. He put on a new deck, built a new cabin, and rebuilt the hull.

In 1980 he set sail for the West Indies with his wife, their two children, five crew, and 35 tons of cobblestones, to begin a new life moving cargo under sail. From the West Indies, where Brad incorporated the business as Deep Water Ventures, they sailed for New England, loaded the boat with secondhand clothing and empty drums, and embarked for Africa by way of the Azores. It was late November by the time they left, bad-weather season in the North Atlantic, and they endured two weeks of storms. Winds blew more than 50 knots continuously for three days, and the seas got up to 40 feet—great big long seas. Brad ran with the storm, staying below the low pressure to avoid head-winds, moving at 6 knots under bare poles. The rerigged Edna proved a worthy vessel in her first rough weather.

In 1982 they sailed Edna from Bermuda to Brazil but were unable to enter that country without a visa. Stymied, they discovered Suriname via an encyclopedia they carried aboard ship for the children, the younger of whom was now four years old. The country’s range of cultures sounded intriguing; that it didn’t require a visa made it inviting. Suriname would prove from the very beginning the source of their most lucrative cargo. On their second trip out, the wood was so plentiful that they filled not only the hold with it, but all the decks up to the rail as well. After a day at sea, however, at two in the morning, Edna began taking on water, and the crew had to hustle to take down the topsails and the flying jib and then start throwing valuable wood overboard.

Brad headed to Nova Scotia to overhaul his boat, loaded it with bricks, and returned to Suriname via the Virgin Islands for more runs, but these proved so profitable that they caused their own end: Brad had been wanting to return to the Pacific for years—he smiles gently now and says, “You don’t need a reason to sail in the Pacific”—and the Suriname cargo gave him and Linda enough savings to trip over the Panama Canal into the big blue expanse with its miraculous speckling of islands and archipelagos.

The sailing itself was never without serious risks. Once, in the Pacific, Brad picked up reports of a typhoon south of their position. They were midway between the island of Ponape, in Micronesia, and Hawaii, and he was relieved to hear that the storm was headed west. But each day its position showed it moving north. Predictions continued to hold that it would move west, but it didn’t. This was a scary situation: here he was with his wife and young children on a sailing ship hundreds of miles from land, and a typhoon with 170-knot winds was defying predictions and seeming to follow them, to be drawn to them. Each day he’d locate its position, and it kept moving north. Straight for them. This thing was far too big to outrun. He’d listen to the radio predicting a westerly course, and yet the position given, day after day for five maddening, stressful days, was north north north. Brad knew that if this typhoon decided to follow them and run them down, they’d die. It was far more dangerous than anything he’d ever seen. Eventually the radio reports amended their predictions: the typhoon was indeed heading north. It would, in fact, pass directly over Edna.

At that point you do what you can. You tie everything down, secure every spot on deck that can let water in, so that you’ll float no matter what. The danger spots are the cabins and companionways, all the right angles imposed on the boat—they’re the weakest points on the vessel, and you do what you can to secure them. What happens in extreme weather is that green and white water more or less swallows the boat, taking with it everything it can—the entire boat, if possible.

In 1985, with the rest of the family safe in Hawaii, Brad loaded Edna’s hold with hardwoods from various countries—ebony, teak, rosewood, nyatoh, merbau, and paduak—and set sail from Kuching, Borneo, heading for San Francisco, about 5,000 miles east. The crew was an international one and included Mark Witteveen, a Dutchman who cared for and repaired sails; Jack Risser, Brad’s longtime first mate; Kevin Campbell, a South African and a veteran of his country’s war with Angola; and a West German named Paul Kuhn. A few days and about 100 miles off the coast of Vietnam, in the middle of the South China Sea, at dusk, Brad was below in the engine room and suddenly stopped working. Something wasn’t right; he could feel it. He went on deck. Others had noticed them already: two 35-foot launches, old fishing boats, that had appeared on the horizon on their port bow, not using their running lights. Then they noticed a third launch on their stern. One of the forward two began to make a move toward Edna’s starboard bow, an attempt to surround her.

Thai pirates were known in these waters. They preyed mainly on boat people fleeing Cambodia and Vietnam and were notoriously violent. It was said that they’d rip out your gold-filled teeth, then shoot you; they raped women before cutting their throats. They never left anyone alive. (Posted on Ginny’s door in the G&B shop is a card, in memoriam, with a picture of a young woman at the wheel of a boat, her name, Melanie Jones—no relation to Ginny—and the dates November 30, 1953-November ?, 1994. The card, from the woman’s parents, explains that their daughter flew to Palau to crew and cook on a 57-foot Swan sloop, Aphandra. Melanie wrote in a postcard that they’d set out from Borneo on July 31. Nothing more was ever heard from her, the rest of the crew, or the boat.) In the middle of the South China Sea, Brad considered three fishing boats’ moving to surround his boat to be an urgent and potentially life-threatening situation.

Edna was cruising at 5.6 knots, the wind about 20 or 30 degrees on her quarter, not a fast sailing position. Brad ordered first mate Jack Risser to alter their course, putting the wind on their beam for more speed, and to start the engine and rev it to 400 rpm. With their course altered and the engine cranked, the launch that was trying to move to their starboard side could not quite pass them, but all boats maintained steady pursuit. Soon they heard bullets in the air: they were being shot at with small firearms. Then explosions sounded from the boats, followed by splashes at their stern: the pirates were using cannon in an effort to disable the big sailing vessel. Brad ordered Kevin Campbell, the South African former soldier, to retaliate. Kevin ran below and returned with a .306 semiautomatic long-range rifle. One of the boats remained parallel with Edna; the others pursued from behind, now nearing 100 yards away.

The tension did not fully abate, however, because on this sail, unusually, they carried additional cargo: 12,000 pounds of marijuana. The sail proved uneventful otherwise, and they rendezvoused with a fishing boat, as arranged, 700 miles off the West Coast. They lowered Edna’s sails and off-loaded the 6 tons of dried produce, raised the sails again, and headed for California, while the fishing boat motored toward Oregon. Brad’s part of the dope smuggle was complete.

Brad would captain Edna for another two years, but off and on, occasionally turning the boat over to another captain while he returned to Hawaii and his family. By 1987 the demands of the boat were running contrary to the demands of the family, and Brad decided to sell her. Edna was then the oldest steel-hulled ship carrying cargo under sail in the world. A licensed captain, one of the few women who held that title, bought her to charter and carry cargo. Brad was without a ship. He worked as a carpenter, he worked in boatshops, he worked as a fisherman. And he continued to import wood.

In 1987, the man who owned the fishing boat to which Brad had smuggled marijuana was caught. He gradually began to rat out all of his associates, anyone and everyone ever connected with him. Brad was in Singapore, a few years later, when he got word that he would be indicted on four counts of smuggling and distribution five years after the event. He first flew to the East Coast and contacted lawyers, then headed to San Francisco to turn himself in. He had good lawyers and a capable and lenient judge. By law, he could have been sent to jail for two years; instead he was fined $15,000 and sentenced to six months in the federal prison in Stafford, Arizona, to be followed by 2,000 hours of community service. The timing of his smuggling was significant: under new, stiffer drug laws, the crime Brad was convicted of, had it been committed after November 1987, would have carried a mandatory sentence of twenty years.

The year Brad went to jail, 1990, Edna was lost forever. In late February she was anchored off Atiu, one of the Cook Islands in French Polynesia, when a freak storm blew through the early-morning darkness, carrying her onto a reef at a severe dropoff near the lee shore of the island. She tore a 30-foot gash in her hull, and waves enraged by Cyclone Sina broke her to pieces against the rocks. By daybreak a barge was able to approach the sinking ship and carry her uninjured captain and crew to safety. Edna’s bow would eventually wash ashore, the last anyone ever saw of her.

By the end of three weeks Brad has cut all the waterways for Gazela, as well as the planking and sternpost timbers for Lynx, the schooner at Rockport Marine, and the big timbers he’s promised Mystic Seaport, which is finishing up Amistad. Cutting the boxed heart made that order possible and also resulted in 2,000 board feet of planking. He’s shipped two containers, more than 15,000 board feet in all, to Fort Lauderdale. But the Gazela project has been put on hold, meaning that he won’t be paid for this wood for up to a year.

Brad still has 30,000 more board feet to saw, but he needs to return home for a couple of weeks. Well aware of the haphazard nature of travel here, he confirms his flight the day before, but when he arrives at the airport, the place is deserted. The plane has left five hours early. No reason is given, and no other planes are scheduled for days. Brad must ride for nine straight hours in taxis and minivans and cross another river to reach the Georgetown Airport in Guyana to catch a flight. At the ticket counter he finds that the airline doesn’t take Visa and he’s $20 short of the airfare. The ticket agent loans him the money, and soon he’s on his way to New York. He will arrive home fifty-six hours after leaving Paramaribo. In two weeks he’ll be on his way back down again, thinking about wood and boats, forever engaged in, and by, the workmanship of risk in its various forms.