Abandoned Dreams
There’s a time to work and raise the dust. With your head down, ass up, painting, sanding, cleaning, replacing, repairing, dig, root and haul. Bulldozing through the project.
I came here to repair something, anything. I was replacing the hole in my heart with that $2,100 boat. And, by God, I was going to do it. Right now this repair job was my ultimate purpose. It’s a time to get off my ass and start working on the boat’s repairs.
But, not today.
Today, after weeks and months of non-stop work, I was going to sit and watch. There’s a reason why the bible says to take one day off in seven. Other than begetting all the time, every once in a while, those Do-gooders come up with a good plan or two.
The equipment for sitting and watching is real simple. A white patio chair, a half-filled Styrofoam coffee cup, and a view of the best side of the boat. After supper, the cold coffee changes to a more traditional Caribbean beverage endorsed by better pirates everywhere. That’s all the boat watching equipment you’ll ever need.
You know you are doing a good job watching your boat when the next gulp of the drink is flat and there’s a bug in it. Watching and dreaming is a much misunderstood art. Massaging the wood with your eyes lets you finish the work without actually working up a sweat, or even getting out of your chair.
To my increasingly bleary eyes the varnish is always perfect, the stain makes the audience catch their breath, the brass always gleams, the paint shines. The crowd cheers…”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 is a journey, this must be the doldrums. The money has dried up. Even though I still spend it. One day, my credit card company will send me a letter saying ‘Congratulations, you paid for an entire boatyard. And you paid for it at 16.5% interest.’
I can’t see the end to it. On some intellectual level, I know I’m making progress but, really? Really, every day is exactly like the day before. The days all meld one into other and there never seems to be a finish. 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 had accomplished anything at all.”
Shelly smiled.
“Now you know what it’s like to be pregnant.”
Well, that shut me up.
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 seem to putter and dabble, pick away at the boat-building project with all the organization of a baby chasing soap bubbles. We watch these part man, part machines in complete and utter awe. These people are saints. We, mere dabblers, can take grim satisfaction in the usual fate of saints.
‘Crucify the bastard! Nice boat though.’
When we, of the Boat Yard Yacht Club or BYYC, as we call ourselves, get together and brag about our plans, it’s like a group dream. I love this crowd. We have our feet firmly planted in those fluffy clouds floating high above. I enjoy their every flaky comment. I was with my own people. Dangers at sea? It doesn’t happen. Storms? Strictly for the unlucky. There’s the Hollywood ocean, and then there’s the real ocean. Our real ocean doesn’t have waves, it has gentle swells, very gentle swells. Pirates? Myth. We’d all be dead men the moment we are out of sight of land but reality? Reality is for accountants.
I think the reason I got into this funk is because today I installed the floorboards made of brand new lumber. One after another like a self-made jigsaw puzzle I cut, sanded, placed one piece of hardwood side by side with the others. Then I took the finished wood and stored them under the canvas. After several days, when I placed them back where they should have gone, they didn’t fit. They weren’t even close. The hot sun and humidity coming from under the trap had warped them. They looked like a pile of brown stained hardwood potato chips. They’re scrap. A whole week’s worth gone. Days wasted. The scrap wood will only be good for repairing and filling the stanchion holes left in the deck. Looks like the only way to get the true fit needed is to pressure wash the old smelly floorboards and seal them up by painting them a couple of coats of white.
Vern once said: “One thing about trying to fix up a boat, is that the highs are higher and the lows are lower.”
I’ve never made a mistake in my life; but there’s been a few anomalies, re-alignments, aberrations, irregularities and deviations. My adjustments are like Captain Smith of Her Majesties Ship Titanic saying; “No need for alarm! We are simply adjusting course.” Just like Captain Smith’s Titanic, the cabin’s floorboards will need to have a slight adjustment.
Yesterday I started to scrape the boat’s deck. Scraping paint is like popping those plastic bubble blankets they use in cardboard-box packing. You start to scrape one spot, just one little tiny spot of old white leathery paint. Which leads to another, and another, and another, and finally another. Then you look up to find that you haven’t shifted position in an hour, your foot is asleep, and you have to pee.
A tradesman working on the restoration of Windsor Castle, after a fire, remarked that ‘It’s the sum of all the little details that added together decide whether a room (boat) works or not.’
So, taking what that Windsor Castle tradesman said to heart I decided to stop looking at all the boat’s faults and pick one thing to fix. Just one little thing. Something that I can do a very good job on within a day. Maybe by finishing a project a day, repeated every day; I’ll get the work back on track.
Deep down I knew that fixing this old boat was more than fixing this old boat. Even a small portion of the job, if it looks good, it will add to the effect of the surrounding equipment. When the newly polished brass clock was installed beside a recently varnished hand-rail, the shine and play of light from the brass and the varnished rail boosted each other’s shine.
Instead of being a hundred percent, it will be 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. So, restoring a boat, is the art of breaking things down to small parts, fixing the separate parts very, very well, and then re-forming the whole.
I chose to paint Someday’s deck a tan colour. It would be in line with the Clipper Ship motif. It was a small enough job I could complete it pretty much all in one day. 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 its deck’s blood red so that sailors would feel less of a shock when they had to wash off their mates’ blood splattered all over the decks.
I spent a day carefully spreading masking tape all over the boat’s deck and preparing the paint and the brushes. The next day I painted the first coat. To get my fat fingers into all the nooks and crannies, it took me a second full day. The third day, I re-painted. Repainting went fast because I didn’t have to be as accurate. I took off the rest of that afternoon. The fourth day I re-painted. Let the last coat of paint dry and then stripped off the masking tape.
By deciding to take it one day at a time, one doable eight hour project at a time, I had completed one full job. I held the paint brush in my hand and sat against the main mast to contemplate what I accomplished. Looking over the boat, I was immediately overcome with a renewed sense of purpose, and really sore knees.
A powerboat quietly burbled down the canal. The captain gave me the ‘thumbs up.’ I smiled, and gave him ‘the paint-brush-up’ salute.
Now, back to watching.
So, where did I put that flat drink with the dead bug in it?
Rick Ranson 