Scissors
I was to learn that when planning a work project, the proper tools beats enthusiasm, always.
Grasping scissors that were too small and a piece of cardboard that was too thick I started to cut out a pattern. The mahogany veneer covering the forward bulkhead needed to be refinished.
I had bought a roll of mahogany from the lumber store because I wanted the cabin to look properly nautical. When I finished cutting the template my thumb had all the makings of a good blister. Who knew looking nautical could be so painful?
Suddenly I was back in grade school making short work of reams of colored paper. All that was missing were the chewing marks on my tongue. Chewing your tongue while using scissors is a time-honored Ranson way to help the accuracy of a cut. Chewing your tongue keeps the scissors on that penciled line; more or less.
My father, a Captain in the Royal Canadian Air Force, chewed his tongue while trying to do anything mechanical. I remember the smell of hot rubber from the front wheels of his green 1953 Morris Minor while he clanked away under the hood. Being as small as I was, I couldn’t see him working but occasionally, I heard a tinkling sound of some tool falling onto the asphalt, followed by my father’s grumbling words that I didn’t understand.
Too small to see what his hands were doing, I could always gauge how the job was progressing by watching my father’s tongue. Chewing on one side of his tongue was signaling that ‘I can handle this. It might be a stretch, but I’m still in control’. Chewing on his tongue with both sides of his teeth meant ‘Oh shit, is this going to be expensive.’ But when my father’s tongue was slashing, chewed, and constantly working, it meant it was best that young boys should be on the other side of the house, in the backyard, far away.
After I sized, glued and varnished the mahogany veneer, the wood magically changed from a dusty piece of sandy colored wood to a shimmering cabinet. I sat in the boat’s cockpit and, for the first time, I contemplated the entire boat. Everywhere my eyes went was a small piece of something I had worked on. From a magnet of scorn to this beautiful artwork in a season. My eyes stayed mostly on that newly varnished mahogany.
Boat builders can take an almost physical pleasure from the sight of a freshly varnished hand grab.
The sick bastards.
I smiled because Someday had become an accumulation of small projects I could feel proud of. The feeling seemed odd, squeezing out that formless dread that something ominous was about to happen. My world had collapsed once, so why wouldn’t it continue? Because the pain only continues if you let it.
“It’s the little things that make a boat work.”
“Tom?” Tom stared at me. “You seem to have it all together. You rat.”
“It’s the small stuff that makes a boat beautiful; Or not. Fix something small and move on.”
I epoxied the final portion of the deck. True to form I screwed up a couple of glass mats and I had to re-do them. However, many adjustments to be done over the deck was largely finished. If there were a flash flood and deluge straight out of Noah, Someday would now float. Now that the never-ending rain had let up, I’ll be able to finish the final changes.
“I like a boat that floats.” Tom said, smiling. “A boat that floats has features that a sinking boat doesn’t have.” He smiled. “Like it’s dry.”
Sanding down the lumps and bumps of the deck made walking anywhere on it a slippery proposition. I added dog-shit-free beach sand to the second coat of paint and hoped that the grit would stop my constant swan dives off the deck. My worry was that if I was having a difficult time keeping my footing when the boat was in this yard, what would it be like out on the waves in the Caribbean?
Even if a small portion of the job looks good, it added to the effect of the surrounding equipment. When I installed the re-polished brass clock beside a recently varnished handrail, the shine and play of light from the brass and the mahogany rail boosted each other’s glow.
Instead of being a hundred percent, the combined gloss of the two surfaces became a hundred and twenty percent. To that small start, add another shining piece, then another and another. The cumulative effect is one of brightness, cleanliness and purpose. Restoring a boat is the art of breaking things down to small parts, fixing those separate parts very well, and then re-forming the whole.
Painting the deck was a small enough job that I could complete in one week. I chose to re-paint Someday’s deck a tan color. Tan decks are the traditional color of the old wind-driven Clipper ships. Tan is easier on the eyes than white. Eyes get tired and sore very quickly from the glare of the tropical sun reflecting up from a brutally white deck. The British Navy used to paint the decks of their ships deep red so that sailors would feel less shock when they had to wash off blood.
I spent the first day of the paint job carefully placing masking tape on Someday’s deck, ports, and spars. Afterwards, I prepared the paint and the brushes. The second day I painted the first coat. Getting my fat fingers into all the nooks and crannies took the second coat of paint a third full day.
It’s the edges that count.” I gave myself a pep talk.
The fourth day, I painted a third time. The final repainting went fast because I didn’t have to be as accurate. I took off the rest of that afternoon. The fifth day, I painted the ‘touch-ups’. I let the last coat of paint dry before I stripped off the masking tape and scraped off the paint drips with a razor-blade. By deciding to take one coat a day at a time, one doable eight-hour project at a time, I had completed one large project.
I held the paint brush in my hand and sat against the main mast to contemplate what I accomplished. I was getting plenty of advice from every passer-by and their dog. There was always lots of advice from people who didn’t have to actually do the work.
A boat twists, moves, shifts, has moods, and adjusts to ever-changing forces. The cabin door that was jammed for months would one day, quite suddenly, open and became loose and floppy. Lying in a cradle has forced some seam on the deck to open and just as likely a seam in a bulkhead had closed. No wonder all old boats groan in a heavy sea; they’ve got arthritis.
I now had to get some filler that would smooth out the hull’s bumps and lumps. Once that was accomplished, I’d re-paint the blue hull that Jose and I did last season.
I was looking forward to standing back and admiring the paint job, and knew that once the Florida sun got to it I’d have to start all over. I’d be chasing work on Someday for as long as I owned it.
I attached the port side rails. There was a lot of dinking around to get the rub rails lined up just right. Towards the bow, I wrapped the wood rails with hot wet towels to soak them and make them flexible. I didn’t have any steam so I decided to drown the suckers. My improvised job seemed to work well. I hadn’t heard that disheartening crack that often came with my attempts at bending wood. The most important thing was to line the rails up even with the deck. Once the strips of mahogany were attached, I secured several of the small fittings and did lots and lots of sanding.
While I was sandpapering and dripping sweat on the area I was sanding, I realized that my tongue was slashing back and forth. I froze in awareness, and then forced my body to relax. I made my breath regular. Then I sat back on my hunches, and smiled a small smile.
“Let’s get some control here. This,” Looking at the mess of the sanding job done by this total amateur. “Is important, but not that important. Manage this one small thing. This one small moment.”
I stood back from Someday. Has it been one year? One complete year?
That’s a lot of moments.
For a year, I had worked on one small thing after another on Someday. Painting, epoxying, or doing something that could be broken down into small steps. I had spent a year concentrating on one project after another that I could finish.
In the same manner, I realized that I had to work on one small thing at a time in me. My job just for today, became calming myself down so that I didn’t work frantic. Today’s project was to stop with the tongue. And to say something I had been putting off.
My hand shook as I dialed my cell phone to talk with my daughters. I had concentrated so long on my own problem I had neglected to talk to the most important people in my world. I wanted to tell them that even though they had never met my father, their grandfather, it was okay, because I had just become him.
“Do I move my tongue when I work?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, all the time Dad.” Becky said.
“Okay. I’ll just have to work on that.”
Mostly, I wanted to tell them I was sorry for running away, like I always did. But, after a lot of jokes, before I hung up, I was barely able to croak out what I wanted to say in the first place. All I ever wanted to say.
Before I hung up at the end of each of those three phone-calls, I was able to blurt out a sentence;
“I love you kiddo.”
“I love you too, Daddy.”
After those calls I sat back in the cockpit of Someday. As I rubbed the blisters on my fingers I was really glad I was wearing wrap-around sunglasses.
Rick Ranson 