III
I knew Bob was right—I could feel it, just looking at the boat in the water—but I would understand, eventually, after my family and I packed up and left the Vineyard, that Bob was even more right than he meant at the time. His statement was a worthy comment on the plank-on-frame boat generally—there wasn’t anything like it. When you sailed one, it felt substantial, solid, satisfying. And for me it was more than just the fact that sailing a wooden vessel pleased the senses, which it did. What was satisfying to me about moving through water in a planked vessel was the sense of how right it felt. Right in the sense of its being part of a natural order: This is the way things should work. The material, wood, and many of its attributes—notably its ability to absorb water and to bend in specific, limited ways—were perfect for creating the shape of a vessel, a shape that happened to move through water in a particularly pleasing way. The pleasure was tactile, like wearing favorite old clothes that had learned the fit of your body. Also, these boats were so damned pretty to look at. Sailing in a fiberglass boat could be pleasurable, too, if you were whipping through the windward leg in a nice light racing vessel, say, or goofing around in a Sunfish; fiberglass did what you wanted it to do, became what you asked, whether fast or cheap. But its pleasures, as far as I had ever known them, had no depth and disappeared shortly after they were experienced.
Before I went to Maine in search of a boatyard, I wrote about food and cooking, and the difference between the two pleasures that I’m trying to convey is to me the difference between eating processed food and food made from scratch. Like eating a Pringles potato chip versus eating a chip that you’ve sliced off a big russet, fried in hot fat, and sprinkled with coarse salt. I love Pringles; sometimes they’re just what I want. This odd creation, chips in a can, stacked—uniform, every one exactly alike, the workmanship of certainty! They’re crispy and salty and have almost no flavor. I’ll eat them compulsively until they’re gone and then feel full, feel nothing for them. I’ve made some chips for myself that I think I will always remember because they were so satisfying and delicious. But what’s important to me is not that one is better than the other; rather, it’s that they’re completely different things, even though they’re both called potato chips. They shouldn’t be compared.
Fiberglass boat, cold-molded boat, plank-on-frame boat—they’re all different creatures. A plank-on-frame boat is a more complex object, and things that have complexity and also a simplicity of design—as Nat’s boats invariably do—are just more pleasing to some people’s minds and spirits. Some prefer Lichtenstein; others are transported by Vermeer.
It was this complexity of construction that made the wooden boat so satisfying. Ross had told me he liked wooden boats because you could see all the pieces. The sight of them both engaged the mind and pleased the eye—what more could you want from an object, from a work of art? The wooden boat was a work of art. But it wasn’t just some objet d’art—you could sail away on it. Its beauty was secondary. You could sail to Tortola or France or the Galápagos on it. You could do it right now. You could step onto, say, Liberty—tugging at her mooring just off the end of the G&B dock—and if you wanted to and had the skill and navigational wherewithal, you could go to Singapore, wouldn’t even need much cash. A sturdy boat was freedom. That the beauty of it was so intermingled with its function gave it a depth of pleasure that to me felt bottomless—wooden boats were “forever interesting,” as Ross would say.
What was inseparably bound up in my reverence for good wooden boats was my respect for the people who made them. They lived their work. There was an economy and immediacy to their lives. They lived on little, they wasted little, and they had an almost total disregard for the material possessions that increasingly define American culture. They needed wood and they needed boats—after those they could get by on next to nothing.
I’d never before seen a group of people whose ethics were so bound up in what they created. They were their boats. There was extraordinary integrity to these vessels—meaning, for instance, that the joints didn’t come apart, they were tight and properly made according to the grain of the wood, and the material was the best there was; and meaning also that there was a rightness to bending wood this way and fastening it together and sailing it. So just as there was integrity to these boats, there was a parallel integrity in these boatwrights’ lives. For Nat and Ross and Brad, and the G&B crew, their lives were the same as their work, and their work was the same as their lives, the same as the boats. You couldn’t say where the life stopped and where the boat began.
Discovering this was urgently important to me because this work and this kind of person were vanishing from our midst. We liked to say we valued those things we called virtues—no matter how old-fashioned and ultraconservative the word might sound—qualities such as self-reliance and resourcefulness. We liked the idea of them, but we didn’t do much to foster them in ourselves, nor did we reward others who had them. Self-reliance and resourcefulness, we had none. We were increasingly dependent on electronics, even though we couldn’t fix them and didn’t understand how they worked in the first place. If our vehicle broke down, few of us knew how to repair it. Call AAA on the cell phone. We wanted services and goods, and lots of them. We were soft. It wasn’t long ago that people knew how to do everything as a matter of course. They knew how to build houses. They knew how to grow food crops. How to make cheese, or a bucket or a shirt. They were tough, and they valued the aforementioned virtues because those virtues, like all the other pre-Industrial Age skills, helped them to stay alive and helped them to prosper. We didn’t need those qualities anymore in order to thrive. We had to be smart and savvy and cunning today, and we had to work long hours and make our own right-place-at-the-right-time luck, but honesty, self-reliance, and resourcefulness were no longer the assets they’d once been.
And yet these virtues very much helped the wooden boat builders to thrive, and in their work these men reminded us, as McCullough, the historian, said, “how much we’re losing in this homogenized, marketing-ethic, throwaway culture.”
David Pye and his notions concerning the workmanship of risk—handmade things—illuminated especially the builder of wooden boats, while also pointing to what we stood to lose if we didn’t pay attention. It wasn’t the plank-on-frame boat, the hand-knitted sweater, the hand-carved dining table, or the Shaker box. There would always be a few who were compelled to create such things, and a few who would buy them. (Or give the worker grants to keep him going: Ralph Stanley, a respected boatbuilder in Maine, received a $10,000 folk art fellowship from the NEA in 1999, as did a basket weaver, a horsehair hitcher, and a tabla player, among others. Wooden boat building was now considered a folk art.) The danger was not that they would cease to be built, but rather that they would cease to be built well, and that we would therefore lose our understanding of what was good and what was inferior. That inferior standard would then become accepted as the norm. And once inferior workmanship became the norm, the value of the thing itself would diminish beyond usefulness, and then beyond anyone’s memory.
We would enter, or were perhaps entering, a Dark Ages of material things at a time when we increasingly defined ourselves by them. We mass-produced our stuff and made it cheap so we could afford lots of it, and thus the quality had diminished to the point that we needed even more stuff, because cheap things break or go bad or get old fast. Things that grow more valuable with age are typically things of superior quality. Even now we might be unable to recognize things of superlative quality, and if so, it was already too late—we’d have to wait four hundred years for a second Renaissance to flood the culture with light.
You could dismiss this as fancy-pants posturing, pious and insufferable agonizing on behalf of the Truth of the Wooden Boat. I wouldn’t say a word. Maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about. But I felt pretty certain that, as McCullough had suggested, Nat and Ross did know. This fact was underscored for me in mid-October 1999, shortly before Elisa Lee headed south toward her home, when I joined Ross, Lyle, their friend Simmy, and Betty, a hyperactive mutt (a stray Ross had taken in), to deliver to G&B an old wooden boat currently tied up in Greenport, Long Island.
Boat deliveries are, as we’ve seen, invariably dicey, especially when the boat is an old wooden one, as this was: Jane Dore IV, a 45-foot sloop. But we knew the form of the diceyness at the outset—the current owner had not had time to fix the steering, so we would use the emergency tiller. The engine had been taken out and was now lashed into the cockpit. But she would be fine on the short sail from the eastern tip of Long Island past Block Island and over to the Vineyard.
We arrived in Greenport after dark, slept on the boat, and woke at dawn the next day, a warm, gray morning. After coffee and some fruit we readied the boat for what would be an all-day sail if the winds were good. Ross maneuvered the boat out of the tricky harbor, set just outside a breakwater. Once we were out of the harbor, the wind picked up quickly, the seas developed a healthy chop, and signs were excellent that it would be a quick, if wet, sail home; we might even arrive before midnight. Ross spotted a man motoring toward us in a rubber skiff—the seller, David Karamidjian, wanting to see us off. David, who had a long blond ponytail, approached the boat, grabbed hold, tied the skiff to Jane Dore’s stern, and hopped aboard. Ross and he talked. I took the tiller, and Ross told me to point her closer on the wind, a solid wind at this point. I pulled on the short metal tiller, but the rudder was very hard to move this way; it didn’t feel right—it felt like something would give. When Ross saw that I wasn’t taking the boat where he wanted it to go, he reached down to help me pull the tiller. I let go, Ross pulled hard, and the tiller broke clean off.
Ross looked at the tiller in his hand for a moment, halted by the surprise of it. The boat was now without steering and had already begun to fly with the current, which led straight into the rocky breakwater. In moments Ross assessed where we were, noted the approaching breakwater, and turned to the seller. “Do you know how to get the anchor down?!” he shouted. “Get it down!” David ran for the anchor at the bow and threw it over, taking the chain off the windlass drum. Ross hustled to get down the jib, which was pushing the boat off the wind and toward the breakwater. The breakwater seemed to be cruising straight at us. Ross stood over the anchor chain as it rattled like machine-gun fire out of the boat because we were moving so rapidly toward the rocks. He began to step on the chain, trying to slow it. He had no idea how it was tied off at the bitter end, or whether it was tied off at all. The way the anchor was flying, it could rip right out of the boat, and we’d smash into the breakwater in moments. He hammered his foot down onto the speeding chain, then stepped on it with both feet. The chain kept flying out of the boat. He couldn’t risk it, had to try: he grabbed for the chain with his big, knotty hands. It ripped right through them until, slowed by Ross’s efforts, it reached the bitter end. The boat stopped 150 feet from the breakwater. Another sixty seconds and the boat would have been on the rocks.
We were quiet for a minute. Ross sat in the cockpit. His hands were burned and torn. They quavered involuntarily as he stared at them—not copious blood, but plenty of newly exposed flesh and flaps of skin. The only first aid Simmy could find was an old roll of electrical tape. Ross taped together and covered what he could with that. Then he looked at the “emergency” tiller.
“Aluminum,” he said. Its center was rotted to powder. “I just assumed it was steel.” He shook his head in disbelief—an aluminum emergency tiller, several coats of paint obscuring the actual material. Hard to believe, but there it was.
A huge waste of time for Ross (hours more, an entire day, would be spent on buses and ferries with Betty the mutt), burned, cut hands, and a wooden boat that nearly smashed on a breakwater—all because of a bad tiller. Ross could have told you that a tiller was something you wanted to be able to depend on.
The following week Elisa Lee was ready to depart the G&B dock for her trip south to the Virgin Islands. Jonathan Edwards was performing in New York and so Ross, still needing to deliver Jane Dore from Greenport to the Vineyard, decided to drive Elisa to Greenport and sail back, and let Jonathan pick up his boat in Greenport and carry on south from there. The day before he was to leave, Ross had lunch with Nat. They remained unlikely but close friends who laughed a lot together. (Ross: “I tried to get on the Internet for forty-five minutes the other night. Never got on.” Nat: “You were low on kerosene—you needed to add some kerosene.” Ross: “It’s a peat burner!”) Ross, looking for company, asked Nat if he wanted to come along to Greenport. Nat said that sounded like a fine idea. So Nat Benjamin and Ross Gannon, alone on a bright, flat-calm morning, would be the ones to steer Elisa Lee out of Vineyard Haven Harbor on the first leg of her first big journey, Ross having made sure Jane Dore had a good strong emergency tiller waiting for them.
This was the thing about wooden boats. They taught you what was important. Maybe Jon Wilson—now entrenched in a magazine called Hope—was right in his grand claim that wooden boats could teach us about our purpose on the planet.
A fiberglass boat can be great or pitiful, but it cannot reach the sorry depths that a neglected wooden boat can. It’s only fiberglass, after all; if it’s falling apart on its mooring, just throw it away and make a better one—no great loss. An abandoned wooden boat, in contrast, can be an emblem of shame and sorrow and waste—of trees, of lives. It tells us what matters: trees, our lives. And conversely, a wooden boat can come close to glory itself, a practical monument to the natural world, a work of art that bespeaks man’s joy in his labor, a functional emblem of self-reliance and adventure. The natural world, art, work, self-reliance, adventure—these things matter.
Ultimately, wooden boats make sense, and have for most of human civilization. They encourage their owners to be the opposite of boatstruck: boat smart. Wooden boats are instructive, each one in its own way. And the wooden boat collectively, as Jon and Nat and Ross all knew at their core, is an important part of our culture, our world, one that should not be lost, especially now, at what may be a critical time in our history. The writer James Salter may have best identified a certain cultural climate of our day, a climate in which wooden boats happen to have begun their small renaissance: “If civilizations reach a new zenith or if they founder is a concern only to us,” he wrote, “and not really much of a concern since individually we can do so little about it.
“At the same time, it is frightening to think of a glib, soulless, pop culture world. There is the urge toward things that are not meaningless, that will not vanish completely without leaving the slightest ripple. The corollary to this is the desire to be connected to the life that has gone before, to stand in the ancient places . . . to die in the presence of great things.”
I’m not afraid to claim that the wooden boat is both ancient and great, that it connects us to the life that has gone before, and that it’s fully worthy of a life engaged in its construction. But Nat and Ross typically stayed away from such talk. They were boatbuilders and sailors—practical men. And so as Nat took Elisa out into Vineyard Sound, around West Chop toward New York, on a perfect calm morning, he noted how the shape he had drawn at his board performed, how this hull—which he and his partner, Ross, and Jim Bresson, and Bob Osleeb, and Bruce Davies, and Ted Okie, and Myles Thurlow had all set their hands to, cutting and fastening and fairing and bunging and caulking and sanding—moved through coastal Atlantic waters. He was pleased by her speed and handling. He considered how she steered, how she moved, was she the best possible weight, did that raised deck result in the dry ride he’d predicted? Ross and he talked easily, laughed a lot, enjoyed the ride on a sparkling day, all the while being carried across the water on a vessel that was in fact a series of decisions and woodworking skills, the cumulative effort of a boatyard. The whole G&B crew had had a hand in Elisa Lee—Duane and Chris and David Shay and David Stimson and Robert, and Ginny, scavenging parts for the boat and watching her come together before her eyes. Hard-nosed Ginny, wooden boat angel—she owned some of the choicest land on the island, worth millions, but she preferred the work of a wooden boat bookkeeper and pristine, fallow land. And Gretchen, and Kirsten and Simmy, they, too, were in this boat, and Kerry, who arrived from a life of farming to become a wooden boat builder and found that the work suited him. More than a dozen lives, and now the boat was off—this was the end of her beginning. Jonathan Edwards would find her safely tied up in Greenport, and he and Cece would take Elisa carefully south from Long Island, Jonathan running her aground only once—no surprise to Nat, you know how those musicians are—outside Savannah, Georgia, where she halted harmlessly on sand for all to see; an embarrassed Jonathan stayed below until the tide came in to carry them beyond that single mistake, down to West Palm Beach and then across to St. Croix, where Elisa Lee now floats at a dock at the Green Cay Marina, happily soaking up the preserving salt water, bearing the Caribbean sun, a magnet for all who enter that harbor. A new wooden boat has entered the world.