Considering that my last entry, “Deadline,” strictly kept to
business, I mean to meander for a few paragraphs here. In past entries, time-traveling to 1979-80-81,
I’ve relied on old journals, financial records, photos and present-day consultations
with The Boss for details of the boat’s construction. I’ve presented my thirty-year-old self as a devoted
partner, right next to Richard in building the new boat. May I adjust that
presentation? There were a lot of YES,
BUT ALSOs for me.
I sanded and varnished finish pieces, swept the shop floor, and
cut plugs to cover the endless fastenings.
Yes, but I also sought the writer’s life, the reporter’s life, spending
hours absorbed with writing local news of Whatcom County and the Port of
Bellingham. The confrontations were
huge: Chicago Bridge and Iron was a
multi-national corporation that wanted to spoil herring-spawning grounds and sacrifice
the Dungeness crab fishery at Cherry Point for the sake of building off-shore
oil-drilling rigs that would be sent to Alaska to ruin salmon fisheries there.
Building Abrazo commanded time and energy. Stopping Chicago Bridge and Iron was ALSO
important, not least because Richard’s shipwrighting business depended on the
fishing industry.
Progress in writing fiction also loomed important for
me. Short stories erupted from the life
I’d lived before Richard, before this boat; The Great American Novel tempted …
whatever the hell it might be about. Notes
and fragments accumulated on my desk, while long letters to loved ones carried
my literary energies away into the distance, and existential anxiety over
decision-making taxed my brain. Right
now, with this hour, should I help with the boat or ‘Do my own work’?
Meanwhile,
Richard devoted every fiber of his dynamic being to the construction of Abrazo …
tolerating interruptions as best he could.
When his ailing father needed attention, Richard provided some. When his wife had to stay up late
writing whatever she wrote, he slept until dawn and got up to start his day
alone.
My
daily habit included journaling, often focused on the specifics of progress on
the new boat. ALSO, plenty of Incidents
provoked me to write about my confoundment with this man, my spouse.
For
instance in my last blog entry, “Deadline,” I mentioned July 24, 1981 when “Our
favorite photographer, Peter Fromm” stopped by the boat yard to check out our
progress. Peter arrived mid-morning,
while Richard was focused on stretching canvas to cover the new boat’s cabin
top. Richard took a little time off to
chat.
7-24-81 Friday Fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies
& coffee made the social hour calm & nice. Fromm talked of making connection with the
Island Historical Society; he could be working for them one of these days. An environmental battle on Lopez revealed
much wealth.
“I’ll see about coming back this afternoon to catch a
picture of the deck,” Peter said. “Is it
possible to get up on the roof?”
I enthusiastically nodded yes, grinning with pleasure in
hopes of another Fromm photo for my collection, while Richard, who had by now climbed
back up to Abrazo’s deck, said “NO.”
Peter squinted up at Richard with a big grin, then turned
back to me & asked again, “Is it possible to get up on that roof?”
I might have said, revealing my consternation with The
Boss, “I don’t know.” It’s possible I
never did say anything.
After Peter grinned goodbye, I stood looking up at Richard,
who ranted on for a few sentences. “And
why are you looking so dumbfounded?”
“What’s that look you’re giving me?”
“Don’t stand there giving me that look like you’re thinking of a way to
get over on me….”
I calmly said that I’m always dumbfounded when he comes
out with these fiercely negative pronouncements. I told him I was not going to bow & say,
“Yes master whatever you say master.”
He said I should at least get the landlord’s permission. As I climbed up the ladder to continue my
work, I said I could do that.
We got back to work – I sanded the boomkin & Richard
went back to Slade’s boom in the shop.
Soon his head popped over the bulwarks at the ladder with further
comments on the Fromm photo possibility.
Business, he said, was vital; and Fromm had never given
him a good business deal. “Business is
my life.” Then, admitting an iota of
paranoia, he said his instincts were to refuse & he believed in following
his instincts. Finally, he described the
stealing of ideas and details that would occur if Fromm’s deck photos got
around. Jay Benford, an island man, had
already stolen ideas, etc. etc.
“Yes, but if you constipate the flow of ideas & info?”
I said, still puzzled by his fears.
“I don’t want to constipate … but I will snip out the
suckers that want to sap away my energies & ideas.”
That made me laugh, thinking of his assiduous attention
to pruning excess sprouts out of his tomato plants. “Okay, Jose.
In the battle of the metaphor, you win.”
[We were both great fans of John Nichols’ novel, The
Milagro Beanfield War, in which Jose Mondragon is a quirky, defiant rebel
with artistic sensibilities.]
Later in the day, I was back on deck, sanding the cockpit
again after getting it wrong earlier.
I saw Peter on his bicycle just the other side of the blackberries. With hand signals he asked if he could go up
on the roof to take a picture. I shook
my head NO, looking grim. He
hand-signaled what looked to me like he was going up to the sidewalk to get a
view, and I smiled, nodding yes.
Then I turned assiduously back to my second sanding &
didn’t see any more of Peter.
My own paranoia tinges my recall of the morning’s
episode; this time aimed at Peter. He had
flattered me, praising my varnishing, when all he really wanted was to wangle a
photo or two thru me, knowing that Richard would balk.
Oh, well. It’s Friday
night … Richard and I are beat tired, but finally showered clean. Maybe
the fear of failure is striking again? But
Emmy Lou Harris is singin’ on the radio, & the cabin top canvas has been
laid. We just might give each other some love tonight.
Whatever photos Peter Fromm might have taken from the
sidewalk that day had to have been practice shots. He returned in late August, the morning of
Launch Day, and captured this view of the foredeck above the blackberries, with
Georgia Pacific’s pulp mill steaming beyond.
Searching
old journals to feed facts into a blog inspires time travel: provocative, disturbing, triggering back into
memory, turning up details sharp and clear from the murk of the past. Moving backwards, moving forwards in
history.
Trauma
to the rudder
Before posting that last blog entry, “Deadline,” with photos of mounting
Abrazo’s rudder, I grilled Richard for what he remembered, asking specifically
about the pintels and gudgeons that form the two upper hinges where rudder meets
stern. He’d carved patterns and had those
pieces cast in manganese bronze. The
pintel’s design includes a pin that fit into the gudgeon’s hole. He explained that the lowest hinge on Abrazo’s
rudder, below the propeller, used a stainless steel shaft as the pin between two
pieces of hardware.
Describing these hardware bits flashed him forward in time from Abrazo’s
construction, to the boat’s traumatic experience when she was moored at Marina
El Manzano in Talcahuano, Chile. The 8.8
earthquake on February 27, 2010 centered just offshore a little north of
Talcahuano, caused a tsunami. People
believe that three giant waves, one of which left a water mark thirty feet
above normal, scoured through the marina, carrying dozens of sailboats into the
trees above the shoreline. Abrazo, tied
to a massive floating pontoon, probably rode those waves inland and back out
toward the mangled breakwater where the pontoon’s anchor settled again. She was one of five boats to survive the waves;
and that’s another story. Her rudder suffered
a crack during the strain caused by those great waves, and the boat’s shape
changed enough so that the rudder rubbed against the sternpost. Richard had to remove the pintels and
gudgeons in order to take the rudder down.
He shaved a bit off the stern post to make a new fit.
He
eventually filled the crack with a wedge of yellow cedar, but he didn’t make that
repair right away. It wasn’t till after
he’d sailed Abrazo south through Patagonian fjords and the Straits of Magellan
to the Beagle Channel, and back again to Puerto Montt before the cracked rudder
really needed attention.
Ah,
the stories yet to come!
--------------------------
Back
to 1981. We were so close to launching this boat, but
our nerves were strained to their limits.
August
18, 1981 - Tuesday: Late in the day, while
rolling copper paint onto the new boat’s bottom, we fling resentments and
recriminations at each other, shouting “I’m only doing this for you.” “What are you talking about? I thought this was all for YOU!”
Aye, matey, you have to survive some irrational moments in the
voyage of a marriage.
August 19: After hours
of sanding interior bulkheads, and another hour of rolling on more copper bottom
paint, I wrote a letter to my father to brag about the marine surveyor’s
verdict that had just come in: Market
Value is $125K, replacement value $150K, and the surveyor duly impressed with
the quality of workmanship and materials.
Sunday, August 23. Richard’s
hammer rings out at 9 a.m. He assured me
this morning he would have the interior finished within a couple months. My work today includes painting bulkheads,
oiling caps and guards, rolling on more bottom paint.
8-24: Teflon packing
for the stuffing box on the shaft. Richard
ordered a case of champagne for our Launch Day festivities. Bill Modrell told us we had to hire a
bagpiper to play the “Skye Boat Song” to launch this boat, I made many phone calls
trying to find a piper.
8-25 Sid Hammond,
principal of one of our local elementary schools, returned my call. A member of The Bellingham Pipe Band, he owns
a set of bagpipes, and is willing to pipe the boat into the water. Tomorrow!
No comments:
Post a Comment