Gumption (23 page)

Robin Lee added, “A healthy manufacturing base is the foundation of a solid economy. It keeps much of the value generated and the resulting employment at home. If your friends and neighbors are out of work, you have no one to sell product to!” In a world where so many commercial strings are being pulled in curtained chambers beyond our control, one place we
can
exert our power is in the open market, namely, where our money goes. I can think of no better place to spend my American dollars than on the tools, and the people, of Lie-Nielsen Toolworks.

NAT BENJAMIN

O
ne theme that has repeatedly bobbed to the surface in this book is boatbuilding. From Theodore Roosevelt to Frederick Douglass to Thomas Lie-Nielsen, everyone seems to have taken a swing at building wooden boats. Even your author is not exempt—should one choose to pursue the craft of woodworking, it’s only a matter of time before your matriculation runs squarely into the prospect of either boatbuilding or lutherie (making stringed musical instruments such as guitars and ukuleles), if you’re the right kind of goofy. You’ve conquered all the ways to join wooden components at every combination of angles, with or without fasteners, with a mastery of square, level, and plumb. You have spent Gladwell’s ten thousand hours on sanding alone. Your fancy now begins to ponder the daunting undertaking of objects that contain no straight lines whatsoever. Impossible? Definitely.

Still, you subscribe to
WoodenBoat
magazine and drift through the pages, finding yourself growing half erect (ladies too) at the merest advertisements for spar varnish. Although you’ve been using it your
entire life, you only just now realize that the “spar” in that nomenclature refers to the horizontal wooden poles on the mast of a sailing rig. When you begin listening to Stan Rogers’s “Barrett’s Privateers” on repeat, it’s over. Notify your significant other that he or she should stock up on good reading material because you’ll be building a wooden boat.

When I was overcome by this particular spell in 2001 or so, I was at the airport, and I realized I needed a book for my flight. As luck would have it, I happily happened upon a paperback in the doorway of the bookstore entitled, simply,
Wooden Boats.
Fantastic! I devoured it on the plane and learned about a pair of wooden-boat builders named Nat Benjamin and Ross Gannon on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts. Their story was as fanciful as any fairy tale to this aspiring woodworker who grew up in the very landlocked region of Illinois.

Unless this riveting book by Michael Ruhlman was a fabrication, there were actually men and women living in this great land of ours, building boats out of wood, using tools, know-how, and of course, gumption. With this hard proof that the construction of a seaworthy wooden hull was not beyond the realm of possibility, I sallied forth in my own small endeavors, which have to date produced a watertight four-foot cradle/tender and two eighteen-foot canoes. I have mentioned it elsewhere, but it bears repeating: Traveling across the water in a boat that one has fabricated oneself holds an eldritch magic that cannot be described. There is wizardry embroidered into the whole of the act.

As the years went by, I saw successively greater triumphant achievements from Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway (the name
of Ross and Nat’s company) in
WoodenBoat
magazine, as well as in a beautiful coffee-table book entitled, simply,
Schooner
, by Tom Dunlop, which details the construction of
Rebecca
, a magnificent sixty-foot craft, and then my favorite piece on them, the documentary
Charlotte
, from Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte. Highly recommended, if you enjoy things like life and beauty. Basically, by that point, Nat and Ross had become, to me at least, the rock stars of American wooden-boat builders.

I have traditionally found that the greater the craftsperson, the stronger the self-deprecation, and Nat was no exception. His response to my e-mailed request for an interview included, “You’re really scraping the bottom to consider the reprobates at Gannon & Benjamin.” I took my two talented “maker” friends, Jimmy DiResta and Taylor Forrest, with me to Martha’s Vineyard to meet reprobate number one. Even a couple of days after Christmas, Vineyard Haven Harbor had several beautiful antique wooden yachts bobbing in evidence, as we came in on the ferry.

We met Nat at the shop, aka the railway, named thus for the actual steel rails that run fifty yards into the water, upon which a boat of a weight up to dozens of tons can be rolled into and out of the harbor’s water. It was amazing to see in person the old barn in which I had remotely viewed and read of so much mastery. As in all my favorite shops, the tools and machines were ancient and brown and heavy, thickly squatting upon their cast-iron bases. Our foursome immediately launched into the classic shop-geek rap, admiring exceptional examples of band saw and planer and lathe (pre–World War II!).

A good boat shop will have a gargantuan band saw known as a
ship’s saw, upon which one can cut a curve on an enormously long and massive timber, like for the keel of a boat, while simultaneously slanting the piece through the saw on what’s called a rolling bevel. Considering the modern cost of the tropical hardwoods preferred for such a task, such as angelique, it’s a cut that must be undertaken with a lot of care and no small amount of gumption. Jimmy and Taylor and I admired the ship’s saw in Nat’s shop as he apologized for Ross’s absence. “He doesn’t come out on weekends,” he explained. Sounds like a smart family man. Nat said, “You should most definitely include him in your assessment. He has been my business partner, cofounder, and friend for forty-plus years and is equally blameworthy for the relative success and accomplishments of our boatyard.”

The pair felt very fortunate to have secured the somewhat ramshackle (read: charming) shop, not only because it sits right on the water, in the perfect location to execute their watery railway transactions, but also because the site very nearly became a fast-food restaurant instead. When Gannon and Benjamin met in the early seventies, as fellow wooden-boat geeks, and gradually determined that they would like to establish a “groovy, casual shop” where wooden-boat enthusiasts like themselves could repair and maintain their charismatic vessels, they set their sights upon the idyllic location where the shop now resides. Unfortunately, a little hamburger concern known as McDonald’s had also just plied their troth to the landowner, to build a restaurant complete with a drive-through.

Eventually, the discerning residents of Vineyard Haven, who counted among their number some luminaries of literature, entertainment, and politics, came to the rescue and crushed the burger
chain’s dreams, leaving the property available to house the Marine Railway. If only all communities could be so sensible. Wooden boat shop or McDonald’s? Think carefully, America.

According to Nat, people had always told them they were crazy to specialize in wooden boats, when fiberglass hulls were all the rage, not to mention cheaper to mold and maintain than wooden watercraft. Fortunately, Nat and Ross knew, intrinsically, that despite the superficial advantages of a plastic boat, it just didn’t feel as good as wood. It’s like swinging a plastic baseball bat or, in my opinion, reading a book on a tablet versus holding the real thing in one’s hands. Sure, the newer model has its selling points, but the convenience can’t outweigh the solidity and presence of reading off the page for me.

I asked Nat himself why one should choose wood over any synthetic hull, and his answer was most satisfying: “Sailing a wooden boat is a symphony of sound above and below deck as the sea rushes by. She also talks to you—a creak here, maybe a groan or two when driven hard. The glow of varnish, salted-down wooden decks, bronze patina, and the structural timbers and fine joinery—all the lovely details give us a visual feast of grace and beauty. And a wooden boat smells so good.”

There’s an important distinction to be made here: The people who inspire me never seem to be looking to maximize profits. They have an understanding that life’s rewards are to be found much more in the difference between sanding, say, white oak and sanding fiberglass and epoxy. Interestingly, these artisans and freethinkers still manage to lead a life of richness and sometimes even prosperity. I must admit that the more my woodshop relegates itself to solid-wood
craftsmanship versus fabricating cookie-cutter items out of man-made “wood” products like medium-density fiberboard, the better we seem to feel.

Of course, in Nat’s case, he happens to carry onboard a surplus of immense artistic talent to back up his skills on the spokeshave. While the boat shop houses an ever-shifting roster of craftspeople—joiners, caulkers, sailmakers and riggers, welders and carvers, there is an arcane skill that must come into play before any of these other talents can be employed: that of lofting. “Lofting” is the term to describe how a hull’s shape is described by means of its “lines.” If you can imagine the lines of latitude and longitude on a globe and then apply similar lines of sectioning to the shape of a boat, these are the lines with which lofting concerns itself. Enjoyably, the corresponding lines on the curving, slanted stern, or rear, of the vessel are known as buttock lines, which goes a long way toward explaining why your average wooden boat is rocking such a sweet caboose.

I could spend an entire chapter describing the process, and you would be asleep by the first sentence, so let me try and nutshell it for you. First of all, Nat has to bring his historical knowledge of boat shapes to bear upon his imagination. This is the culmination of centuries of design, making improvements incrementally, builder by builder, across different cultures and different types of sea, river, or lake, until by now the craft has achieved a relative ideal. Nat understands how the shape and the weight of the hull relate directly to its performance and durability. Bear in mind that there are zero straight lines on this complex shape, and every piece will be made of wood in a way that it will keep the water on the outside, with any luck. As he
says, “A boat is a piece of furniture you take out on the ocean and throw around.”

Once he has conceived the general design, he sketches it out, and if it is a commission, he then discusses it with his client until everyone is happy with the concept. At this point, the lofting begins. Determining a series of those segmenting “globe” lines, using math and, apparently, sorcery, Nat then transfers those lines, full-size, onto an open floor, from which the shape and dimensions of each individual part of the ship can then be determined. Despite Nat’s humility in this area, he is truly considered one of the greatest living wooden-boat designers. To say that his craft involves an element of sorcery is actually an understatement. Combine that nuanced ability with the manner in which he and Ross Gannon seem equipped to solve any problem whatsoever that can be solved by tools, elbow grease, a hunk of mahogany, and an inbred understanding of simple machines, and you have the makings of the finest wooden boats that money can buy.

Mr. Nat Benjamin grew up in the small Hudson River town of Garrison, New York, and vacationed at the Pleasant Bay Camp on Cape Cod, where he fell in love with sailing the eighteen-foot Baybird, designed by W. Starling Burgess. He was destined for a life on the open water, and his passion eventually found him crewing boats up and down the Atlantic Seaboard, until at age twenty, an offshore delivery took him to the Virgin Islands. It was there, at Saint Thomas, that his eyes feasted upon a fleet of old wooden masterpieces from the drawing boards of Alden and Herreshoff, Sparkman & Stephens, Fife, Camper & Nicholsons, and Rhodes, noted virtuosos from the golden age of yacht design. Beyond the hypnotizing lines of their boats, Nat
was also taken in by the people who owned and sailed them. “They were crazy, but in a good way. They knew how to get the most out of life.”

Called upon to skipper the delivery of such fine wooden yachts across the open Atlantic and back, between the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the American East Coast, a young Nat Benjamin grew to thrive on such adventure. Returning in a ship from Malta on one such voyage, Nat found his boat in bad shape (“It was what they called a sinking feeling”), so he pulled ashore in North Africa for repairs, “and these guys were good. We ripped off some planks and replaced them, and that’s when I first became fascinated by the work of the shipwrights.”

Jimmy, Taylor, and I understand, as we were then flatly astonished when we cruised across the road to the larger build shed, in the yard of which were several boats being stored for the winter (including sloop
Sally May
, Nat’s first design, built for James Taylor in 1980). Inside, there was a Herreshoff yacht from 1905, undergoing pretty intensive repairs, which I would normally have considered a massive job, had it not been dwarfed next to an enormous Hong Kong schooner built in 1957 to a Sparkman & Stephens design.

The vessel was stripped down to the frames and planks of the hull, and it was mind-boggling as Nat walked us through each piece of the puzzle and how it would fit back together. That’s always an important key for me when I consider any project “impossible”; I first consider the fact that, “well, somebody has done this already, so it
can
be done.” Then I remember the advice of Ted Moores, my teacher in canoe craft—you don’t have to build the whole boat at once; you just have to
make the first piece, and then you make the second piece, and so on. Still and all, this stem-to-stern overhaul that Nat was undertaking would make a grown man weep. Even, perhaps, a grown woman.

We asked Nat what price an overhaul like this would run a person, to which he replied, “About a million.” As we stood, blinking and nodding with false understanding, as though we hadn’t just shit ourselves, he continued. “That’s considerably cheaper than building new.” Okay, so wooden boats aren’t the cheapest investment out there, but then when I stack it up against a wooden-slab dining table from my shop that goes for ten thousand dollars, it seems rather a bargain. The table has maybe ten parts, and most of that price is the labor and the cost of a large slab of tree (usually around two or three thousand dollars). A boat certainly has more than a hundred times as many parts, all of them curved. In boatbuilding, fine-furniture making, and home building, if anybody’s getting rich, it’s generally not the men and women swinging the mallets. So what is it that drives these goofy boatbuilders, if not the almighty dollar?