Wooden Boats

I’d come to Maine looking for a boatyard. Maine was the country’s wooden boat center, with more wooden boat yards by far than any other state. Traditional wooden sailboats and workboats still plied these waters in significant numbers relative to the rest of the country, which had gone completely fiberglass decades ago. They were still being made here the old-fashioned way—by craftsmen at small yards. Maine, with its craggy coast and clear, cold waters, was the spiritual center of wooden boats as well. These boats were as much a part of its romance and character as the evergreen forests and granite outcrop-pings that marked its shore. It was here that Jon Wilson had founded his magazine, WoodenBoat, whose offices were set up in an old white mansion overlooking the blue waters of the Eggemoggin Reach in the tiny hamlet of Brooklin. I explained to Jon that I wanted to work at a wooden boat yard to learn about what I had reason to suspect was an unusual world, and that Maine was the place to do it, not tony Martha’s Vineyard, where these Nat and Ross fellows happened to be.

“Nat and Ross,” Wilson replied, “are doing in Vineyard Haven what everyone thinks is happening in Maine but isn’t.” Nat Benjamin, he went on, was one of the best designers and purest builders in the country, an artist, articulate and vocal about the importance of traditional wooden boats, plank-on-frame boats. Benjamin was crazy for the gaff rig, a type of sail plan that had been out of fashion since the 1930s. And finally, Wilson said, Benjamin and his partner, Ross Gannon, were real sailors; they knew firsthand the kinds of pressures the sea put on a boat and built their boats according to that, rather than current notions of contemporary design. And they had begun an extraordinary new boat, one of the most exciting constructions going on in the country, a 60-foot schooner named Rebecca.

In my quest for a boatyard, I’d asked to meet with Wilson because he was, of course, more than just the founding publisher of WoodenBoat magazine, a glossy bimonthly filled with gorgeous photographs of and stories about all forms of traditional and contemporary wooden boats. He was The Man, the central figure in the contemporary wooden boat universe, the visionary who, nearly twenty-five years earlier, had seen this universe about to be extinguished by yacht construction’s all but absolute embrace of fiberglass and plastics—and against all odds, and sense, had published a magazine devoted to the wooden boats that were no longer being built. It had succeeded beyond all logic.

Within a decade, WoodenBoat circulation had surpassed 110,000, more than ten times the number of yards and wooden boats then in existence. While this speck of an industry generated a circulation far disproportionate to its numbers, the biggest mass-market magazine, Boating, devoted to the entire yachting world—a milieu in which thousands of boatyards pumped out millions of boats in America—had a circulation of only 202,000. Somehow Wilson had captured people’s imaginations. People who didn’t even go out on the water bought his magazine. He knew all along that the subject of his focus, the wooden boat, would prove to be far more important than its dwindling numbers suggested.

By the time I arrived in Wilson’s office in the fall of 1998, the industry was no longer in danger of dying out, and Wilson was considered its savior. Crowds at wooden boat shows and launchings parted like the Red Sea when he walked toward a new boat. His words about it would be accepted as the benediction, the crowd silent and still so as not to miss a single note or nuance of the galvanizing elixir, Jon Wilson’s calm, sure voice.

Friends and associates described a more subdued version of the man. One called him the consummate salesman of ideas. Another said that no idea uttered in Wilson’s presence went unexplored: no matter how banal it might seem on the surface, Wilson had a way of getting inside other people’s ideas and pushing them out to their most provocative boundaries.

Wilson was less than imposing in person, dressed in jeans, standing about five foot eight, trim, with wavy, dark hair well this side of unruly. He appeared light and filled with energy, taking the carpeted stairs of this lush house two at a time toward his office, past Xerox machines wedged into hallways, stopping to say hello to Matt Murphy, the thirty-four-year-old editor of WoodenBoat and Wilson’s replacement four years earlier. Wilson strode into his office, a cluttered former master bedroom of the old house, and right behind him was Kim Ridley, the editor of his latest venture, Hope, a magazine attempting to offer solutions to disturbing social issues. Kim had images from El Salvador and black-and-white photographs of a bare torso, exquisite self-portraits of a woman who had undergone a double mastectomy. Downstairs in the living room—a discreet store selling a variety of books and tapes and paraphernalia pertaining to wooden boats—a steady stream of worshipers came to browse the materials on the shelves and examine the half models on the walls, to think about wooden boats, to see the place where it all happened and maybe even catch a glimpse of The Man himself.

Down the road on this estate was a redbrick barn that had been turned into a school, founded by Wilson, where wooden boat building was taught, advancing the knowledge of wooden boat construction and increasing the numbers of those who could actually practice the craft. At the shore, a big, comfortable boathouse overlooked a harbor filled with wooden boats, the center of the school’s summer sailing lessons, designed to further knowledge of basic sailing and general seamanship. All of it was the result of Wilson and the success of his magazine.

In the world of wooden boats, Jon Wilson was the spiritual leader, the holy man. He was also a big part of the reason each new big boat and the one before it and the one after it were able to be built. The magazine had created a collective voice of boatbuilders and boat lovers and sailors and designers and buyers who before had been scattered and largely cut off from one another in the new world of fiberglass and hulls popped out of molds. It was Wilson who had given a dying industry a clear and beautiful song, sung by a newly unified chorus.

Such was the aura that surrounded Jon Wilson. Hear him! He would announce it not with fear or embarrassment but as fact: “Wooden boats . . . are alive,” he said. “Wooden boats . . . have a soul.”

All wooden boats were beautiful, he proclaimed, “as if the grace of the forest trees were bequeathed in abundance to every plank sawn.”

He basked in the maintenance a wooden boat demanded: “The care of living things requires deeper commitment and responsibility.”

And he declared, “I truly believe that wooden boats have a lot to teach us about our purpose on the planet.”

Our purpose on the planet! Jon Wilson dwelled in this order of magnitude.

Wilson denigrated his own story. All it amounted to, he said, was “how a little nobody got to be editor of WoodenBoat.” But when he said that anyone looking to write about wooden boats had to at least talk to Nat Benjamin and Ross Gannon, you listened.

Having traveled with my family from Cleveland, our home, to Maine only to be told that I needed instead to be somewhere off Cape Cod was disheartening until Wilson’s brow knitted, and he paused. “Ya know,” he said, “I think When and If is going to be here this week. Nat and Ross might be here.”

Divine coincidence? No, a boat launching down in Rockport, an hour south of Brooklin, the reason I happened to be here this particular week as well. A 76-foot racing sloop was to be lowered into Rockport Harbor in a few days, and people came out for such an event. It was like a birth in the community, a champagne christening and the celebration of new life.

This was all new to me. I was not a sailor or a boatbuilder, I had no particular affinity for boats generally, and I had no carpentry skills. I had only recently begun to read about wooden boats after a colleague suggested that I write about them. This colleague, a wooden boat owner himself, had done more than just suggest wooden boats as a possible subject, however. He had during an inspired half hour painted an amazing picture of wooden vessels, which were nearly as old as mankind itself and still vital today. Wooden boats combined extraordinary craftsmanship with centuries of wisdom about how to keep pieces of wood together at sea—pieces of wood, planks bent over frames and fastened with bronze. The most basic questions were intriguing. How did they work, how did you keep the water out? Science, the physics of it, was involved in a way that was artful. These boats were almost invariably beautiful to behold. The science and beauty were inextricably linked, were perhaps the same thing. They were instruments, this colleague claimed, as finely rendered as a Stradivarius but strong enough to withstand gale winds and crashing waves over decades, and they cruised through a culture that was filling up with homely plastic objects that didn’t last. This was what Wilson had tapped into; this was why his magazine had become disproportionately successful. The wooden boat was a metaphor for all the things that mattered in our cheap, disposable culture.

My colleague hooked me ultimately when he moved on to a description of the people, these artisan builders. Rarely was a working class so enmeshed with an upper class, the wealthy and well heeled who paid for their product, as in the world of wooden boats. In few places anywhere did the rich and successful and famous revere the working class more than in this world. At classic regattas, the virile billionaire vied for the boatwright’s attention. Here the wooden boat builder was the Brahmin. Moreover, this was a world filled with sailors of all stripes—I knew there were great stories to be told here.

And so this wooden boat lover convinced me to focus my land-bound gaze and spirit on the wooden boat and its builder. I found the idea of it immediately appealing. I knew he was right while he spoke, I needed no reflection: the veracity of what he said, the reason for his personal love of wooden boats, were self-evident and only deepened as I pursued them.

And so I set out to find a wooden boat yard and go to work there, the only way to understand an unfamiliar culture, a new world: through its work. Through their work are people known; through work a new language is learned. The world of wooden boats was well known to itself, of course, like any insular fraternity, but it was not widely written about or understood. I wanted to paint this world, and there wasn’t a blanker canvas than my own.

What was this wooden boat, really? Who were the people who built it, and who had they become because of this work? Why did it have such a hold on so many people’s imaginations? How did you shape those planks? How did you keep the water out?

And ultimately, was Jon Wilson right about his grandest claim? He was no idiot, that was for sure, but it was entirely possible that he was simply a deluded romantic who had happened to convince a hundred thousand or so people of his vision—the Reverend Moon of wooden boats. But that wasn’t likely, either. What if he was right, what if he was even half right, in his preposterous but deeply held conviction that wooden boats had something to teach us about our place on the planet? If that was true, I wanted to know.

That night, Wilson called me at the house up the road in Blue Hill where my family and I were staying. He told me that Nat and Ross, presumably two of the country’s best builders of these objects, were in fact expected in Rockport Harbor on the schooner When and If for the new boat’s launching, and that he’d be willing to introduce me if I wished.

The crowd appearing for the launch at Rockport Marine that clear, cold September morning numbered in the hundreds, but I suspected immediately that the man in the blue work pants and un-tucked flannel shirt was either Nat Benjamin or Ross Gannon. Hoped, rather—if he was, then I sensed that everything Wilson had told me would prove correct. This man had thick, wavy, sun-blond hair and a brown, graying beard, and against a crowd decked out in the colors of Hilfiger and Patagonia, he seemed to have stepped straight out of the Maine woods. I watched him nod, vaguely skeptical, as Donald Tofias, a Massachusetts real estate developer who had commissioned the 76-footer that was now suspended in the Travelift and about to be christened White Wings, made a speech. Jon Wilson, in faded jeans and shades, watched from the crowd, but central, as always. White Wings was lowered into the high tide, and when the fanfare subsided, Wilson introduced me to Ross Gannon. Ross smiled from within that hair and beard—his eyes a shocking blue, as if they still carried the reflection of the water—and said he’d be happy to talk to me about wooden boats.

We walked back to When and If, a husky, black-hulled schooner, and sat below deck. One of the main ideas Gannon talked about was how durable wooden boats were compared with fiberglass and plastic, how you could always fix them—they could last forever if you took care of them, and unlike with fiberglass boats, you wanted them to last forever. When and If, originally built for General George S. Patton in 1939, had smashed on rocks during a storm in 1990; Ross and his crew at Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway had rebuilt her port side and reconfigured the cabins below deck, and here she sat, at rest in the harbor, gawkers loitering on the dock just staring at the creature. I quickly saw an intensity that belied Gannon’s laconic, easy manner. My three-year-old daughter was up and down the companionway, frolicking through the spacious quarters of the 63-foot boat, enchanted as children invariably are to be down below in a boat. And she was in view in the main salon when I asked Gannon why wooden boats were important to him—why had he devoted his life to them? Ross seemed surprised by my apparent ignorance regarding what to him was plain, and his blazing eyes burned right through me.

“Do you want to teach your daughter that what you do, what you care about, is disposable?” he asked. “That you can throw your work away? It doesn’t matter?”

Gannon’s partner, Nat Benjamin, had arrived on the dock with his wife, Pam, and was encircled by a bevy of friends as I stepped off. Nat was laughing. He wore a snappy vest and chinos and had a short beard and long, reddish hair that curled almost to his shoulders. He was fifty-one, like his partner. I spoke with Benjamin for a few minutes, but I already knew what I wanted, having by that time visited several shops in Maine. I told Nat Benjamin I’d like to visit him and his shop. He said he’d be sailing back to Martha’s Vineyard in a few days and that I was welcome anytime.

I thanked Ross Gannon, too, and said I hoped to see their shop soon. He grinned and said, “I’ll meet you at the ferry.”

I doubt that either Nat or Ross thought much about me till I really did show up, to watch the construction of this great schooner Rebecca and a second boat, a 32-foot powerboat modeled after a 1930s workboat, and to meet and know the people who did this work, here, on what I would discover was an unusual spot of beach, the waterfront of Vineyard Haven. Gannon didn’t meet me at the ferry (when I arrived, a month later, he was back in Maine, picking up a load of wood and tomcatting a lithe fisherman named Kirsten whom he’d become re-acquainted with that day back in Rockport), but both he and Nat Benjamin were as good as their word. They welcomed me in the best possible way: they put me to work.