Doldrums
There’s a time to work and raise the dust. With your head down, ass up. A time to paint, sand, clean, replace, repair, dig, root, and haul. A time to bulldoze through a project and get things done.
But, not today.
The reason I got into this funky lassitude was because, yesterday, I attempted to install the floorboards made of brand new lumber. One after another, like making a jigsaw puzzle. I had measured, cut, sanded, placed pieces of hardwood side by side. Then I took the finished wood and stored it on the back deck under a tarp of dark blue canvas.
When I went to re-install them where they should have gone, they didn’t fit. They weren’t even close. After several days of brutal sun and humidity beating down on the tarp, they looked like a knee-high pile of very large brown potato chips. They were scrap. A whole week of work. Days wasted.
The wood will only be good for repairing and filling any holes that were left in the deck. The only way I could get the true fit that I needed, was to go back and pressure wash the old smelly floorboards. Then seal them up by painting them several coats of thick white paint.
As Ernie said: “One thing about fixing a boat, the highs are higher, and the lows are lower.”
Boat building is so personal, so sensitive, that the experience is like being a sculptor. All the mistakes are hung out there for all the world to see. You know your boat isn’t going to be as finished as those plastic soap dishes at the yacht club. You know it’s going to be judged against an array of flashy boats that are designed and built by experts with nothing else to do but design and build flashy boats.
I’d like the people that designed my boat to be a little rough around the edges; grizzled even. It would be nice to have some boating scars. Maybe even have crinkles around their eyes from searching horizons. And wear a yellow slicker.
I’ve never made a mistake in my life; but there have been a few anomalies, re-alignments, aberrations, irregularities and deviations. As Captain Smith of Her Majesties Ship Titanic might have said; “No need for alarm. We are simply adjusting course.” The cabin’s floorboards would need a slight course adjustment.
But, not today.
Today, after a month of non-stop work, I was just going to sit and watch. There’s a reason why the bible says to take one day off in seven. I came here to repair something, anything. I knew now that fixing this old boat was more than fixing this old boat.
It was interesting that what my body craved took me about a year to finally put it into words. Fixing something, just felt good at the time.
The equipment required for sitting and watching was very simple. A white patio chair, a Styrofoam coffee cup, and a view of the best side of the boat. After supper, the cold coffee would change to a more traditional Caribbean beverage.
You knew you were doing a good job watching your boat when the next gulp of your drink was flat, and there was a bug in it. Watching and dreaming is a much-misunderstood art. Massaging the wood with your eyes allows you to dream about how the work will look once its finished; without actually working up a sweat, or even getting out of your chair.
To my increasingly bleary eyes, the varnish was always perfect, the stain made the audience catch their breath, the brass always gleamed, the paint shone. The crowd cheered…”I’d like to thank the academy…”
“Hey, Rick! It’s Garbage Day! Bring out your dead! You’re just sitting there anyway.”
If repairing the boat was a journey, this must be the doldrums. The money had dried up, even though I was still spending it. One day my credit card company would send me a letter saying ‘Congratulations, you paid for an entire boatyard at 16.5% interest.’
I got a big royalty cheque last week, and all I did was pay off debts. There’s another payment coming in a couple of months. All it’s going to do is pay off more bills. I got this feeling that I’m a flat rock skipping over a pond. If I ever stop moving I’ll sink.
On some level, I knew I was making progress but really? Really, every day was exactly like the day before. The days all melded one into other and there never seemed to be a finish.
To try to get rid of this funk I decided to offload it to somebody else. I vented my frustrations to Shelly at the office.
“My day consists of getting up, leaning into the work, all day, every day. I know I’m making progress, but it doesn’t feel like anything is happening. Then I go back to bed, not feeling I have accomplished anything at all.”
Shelly smiled.
“Now you know what it’s like to be pregnant.”
Well, that shut me up. But I went back to Someday a bit happier.
Some extraordinary people slavishly follow an agenda. They follow their single-minded plan day after boring day. These driven people never seem to get distracted. We mere mortals putter and dabble, pick away at the boat-building project with all the organization of a pillow-fight. We disorganized and confused fiddlers watch these part man, part machines in complete awe. These people are saints. Secretly, we humans can take grim satisfaction in the usual fate of saints.
‘Crucify the bastard! Nice boat, though.’
I climbed back into Someday to refresh, re-arm, recharge my ambition and my rum. As I climbed the ladder, my eyes came level with the deck just as the last afternoon sun highlighted all the anomalies on the just painted deck. The sander was so handy. The boat’s deck so near. The bottle of rum was pretty much empty anyway.
I started by sanding just one paint lump. But it was like popping those plastic bubble blankets, they use in packaging. One spot, just one little tiny spot of lumpy paint, which led to another, and another, and another, and another. Then I looked up to find that I haven’t shifted position in an hour, my foot was asleep, it was dark, and I had to pee.
Bobby, in a golf cart, quietly burbled down the lane towards the derelict boats at the back of the yard. He smiled and gave me the thumbs up. I smiled, and gave him the-warm-sander-up-salute.
Looking over the newly smooth deck, I was immediately overcome with a renewed sense of purpose.
And, really sore knees.
Rick Ranson 