Sparks
| The pace quickens to a frenzy as Labor Day approaches. The mackerel
are schooling, lobster catchers are coming in freighted, web worms
are festooning the trees, gardeners are trying to give away tomatoes,
and the Summer Complaint grows feverish. When I was a Summer Person
at Owls Head this was the saddest week of the year. The thought
of going back to school in the burbs was enough to make you cry.
Even the dog drooped. |
Web Worms
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Beginning Side Decks
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This year I'm chasing my tail in the dooryard, trying to inch
this barge closer to the water. Even visitors get dragooned. Yesterday
Susan, my cousin from England, put a second coat of deck paint
on the beast. Now it's down to frigging with the rigging. And
I've got tunnel vision. There's a time in each creative process
when everything else disappears. You are riveted on the one task,
and any distraction makes you fume. I've stopped drawing, painting,
writing, reading, musing, mowing the lawn. |
| Not that the final product is envisioned in detail. All the postponed
decisions are now knocking. The shape of the leeboards, and where
to hang them. The final dimensions of the spars, and how to hoist
them. Rudder hinges and a steering hub. I've raided all the hardware
stores, marine and otherwise, from Portland to Rockland, for fittings
and foofraws. I can report that just in time inventory keeping
has captured the marine supply business. Try and get mast hoops
in August. Hah. They're back ordered until March. |
After Coamings
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But I'm marching under orders. Guess I'll lace that sail to the
mast and use parrels (wooden beads on the loops). Keep it simple.
Use the materials at hand. After juggling all the possibilities,
it comes around to the down and dirty. And I've had some just
in time advisors help resolve my conundra.
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| Lee Huston breezed into the boat yard a few weeks back, just when
I was despairing about gaff rigs, centers of resistance, and the
details of lee boards. Lee has built upwards of 40 traditional
wooden boats, and followed rumors of a scow abuilding to Brooklyn
Heights. He not only answered all my questions, he returned the
next day with a stack of texts all indexed with post-its, covering
the topics in detail. He also preached the simple solutions, and
cooled my broth. |
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David's design for rudder hinges required four massive bearings,
bored and chamfered by a machinist, so I rooted into another layer
of the local landscape, looking for a lathe man. We used to brag
that more patents had been issued to Mainers than to anyone else,
the result of long winters and a large bump of Yankee ingenuity.
Scratch a local and your fingernails were full of filings. Now
it seems that all the little job shops in this tinkerer's paradise
have gone south. Or west. Or somewhere else. So-and-so used to,
but he sold his milling machine. |
| I went to Art Boulay for advice. He does small engine repair and
is a trove of mechanical info. Of course he wanted to know what
I was cogitating, and maybe it could be done this way, and I could
get the steel at T.W.Dick, and when I asked who might do the turning,
Art said, "Guess I could." And he collared and fitted a shaft
on my steering wheel, too. And filled my head with lore. When
you consider the vast accumulation of technical knowledge an artisan
stores away in a lifetime, the death of a craftsman seems like
a bad joke. The demise of the local job shop marks another passage
on the road away from individual understanding and tangible mastery. |
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Rudder bearings
Ouch
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No shortage of that at Liberty Salvage, though. McLaughlin got
hooked on steel early and has kept honed ever since. He's the
only person to graduate from Yale with a degree in welding and
a minor in stagecraft. Did a hitch in the Signal Corps where his
speciality was standing up towers, and spudded down at the old
cannery in Liberty in 1971. His passions are steel fabrication
and moving heavy things.. and beautiful young women. A very romantic
guy, who used to cruise the coast in a handmade road warrior vehicle,
David 's most recent love wagon was a hot little Miata, until
he got distracted by a lady companion, and pranged it. Now he's
back to flatbeds and crane trucks. |
| One Monday morning I scored some steel at T.W.Dick, swung by Whitefield
to pick up Torbert, and climbed the country to Liberty. David's
been renovating the cannery and adding to his collections for
28 years, and his whole compound is a grand work in progress.
David says that one characteristic of pack rats is they constantly
reorganize their troves, and he's presently dragging all the iron
piles out of the courtyard, into his back lot. Canning tanks and
metal wheels. International trucks and assorted ironmongery. And
granite, of course. He's framing everything with massive hunks
of ledge. |
Tanks
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Liberty Salvage
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And the buildings soar up like Italian street scenes. Whenever
David needs more space he cuts a room off at the floorline with
a chainsaw, and jacks it up a story. His "studio" building, about
the size of your average factory, has just such a breezeway gaping,
and David dreams about an artist in residence who would help close
in and fill the space with creativity. |
The inside of his workshop is all gloom and rust and concrete
and racks of tools. The jet roar of acetylene, the rasp of grinders,
streams of sparks, the clamor of hammered iron. Jim and I admired
David's jigs and fittings while he made bar stock red hot, and
bent it round the rudder bearings. Fabricating the hardware for
the ark took all day, and I drove Jim home in the noontime, then
went back to grinding and drilling and reaming and watching the
arcing flash.
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Wheels
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McLaughlin is an artist with a torch and arc, and he wasn't about
to half do it. The bowsprit end, rudder hinges, and tabernacle
shaped up to be bold statements of rugged utility, in perfect
harmony with the traditional workboat lines of this scow. And
David kept up a running commentary on the nature of the work.
Teaching me about steel and cutting and welding, and the process.
Each step hinged on an aphorism. |
Tabernacle up
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"When you make a mistake, redo it at half speed."
"Perfect it with a chisel and file." |
Tabernacle Down
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| He shared a craftsman's mutterings, as the day burned away black-handed
and sooty-faced. We didn't finish until 9:30 in the PM, and fumbled
up his unlit stairs to an exhausted feed of pilot crackers and
kippers in hot sauce, with black tea. Might have figured us for
a pair of Scotsmen. I rolled home in Ebba, a load of splendid
ironwork clanking in the bed. Thinking about the nature of art. |
Chains
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Hanging
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Our painter friends turn themselves inside out onto canvas, then
hold it up for the world to see. The work is about the doing,
but the world only talks about the showing. The art business and
the artist's life are wrenched apart. Small wonder the "fine"
arts in America are so alienated. David has done his share of
gallery sculpture, but that abstracted universe can't scratch
his itch for massive metallurgy. Merely contemplative objects
don't carry enough load, but pure utility can ring hollow, too.
McLaughlin fuses his esthetic sensibility with practicality, and
makes necessary things of profound beauty. His informed esthetic,
once commonplace, has melted in a plastic age. |
Spending a day with a fellow artisan who isn't too proud to weld
a tabernacle, and who cites Giacometti while laying down a bead,
refreshes my joy in the work. Isn't it our responsibility to bring
beauty into a practical world? To recognize the abstract qualities
in every object. To launch scows among the Clorox bottles?
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Masks
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Oilers
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And we are thinking about launching. All the details may not be
done by a given deadline, but it grows time to make a splash.
My ambition is to have all the fittings on the hull by next weekend,
and slide her down the ramp on Sunday the 19th. You are all welcome
for the event. Around 2PM. |
| The matter of naming has amused us, but it was resolved by the
beast herself. As soon as I fastened the last foredeck plank,
set the vent scoops into it, and stood back, it was obvious. TOAD,
indeed. Come join us break a bottle on the Millennium Toad. |
Toad!
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