Headhunters
A Texas headhunting firm automatically rejects any job seeker who owns a boat. After years of matching employees to employers, they have concluded that a boat becomes an obsession, eliminating all other interests. The headhunters want applicants to concentrate on the job, not on some wood and plastic boat. Wood and plastic boats were the last thing on my mind all that summer because my next welding project back in Canada was for a company exactly like that.
Someday was far to the south in the Keys while I spent the short northern summer welding in a refinery. I had retraced my drive north, stopped long enough to visit my daughters, gather up my welding work clothing, and headed out to the construction site.
One day, in the middle of the summer, I needed to weld a valve in a pipe. It was a simple five-pound stainless steel machined regulator. All I wanted was a simple valve. The foreman directed me with a piece of paper to the supply department high up above the welding shop in a part of the building where us unwashed, uncouth, hard-hatted welders were never allowed.
The secretary’s arched finger directed me to a line of similar bodies hunched over their computers, each in their own dark cubicle like so many drab pupae waiting in some claustrophobic cell for the highlight of the day. A daily droplet of bee’s honey.
Company policy was to limit personal pictures and mementos in the employees’ work cubicles to one picture. The official corporate reason was to prevent clutter. The real reason was control; naked, we own your ass, control. His tiny cubical office was bare. Three of his gray walls were empty. Where the fourth wall should have been, was the aisle way.
I waited in a very hard chair for my meeting with that poor dominated schmuck to be over.
‘All I need is a valve’, I thought. ‘Properly sized, matched with the materials flowing through it, serial numbers needed to be compatible, but just give me the bloody valve’.
I smiled at the clerk.
He typed in my request on his terminal. The terminal in the main office a thousand miles away pounded back. That was his job. Typing, pleading for some computer a half a continent away to release a five-pound valve from stores department, a few steps away downstairs.
When I had visited the stores department where everything is kept, I could stand at the counter and see the bin the valve was stored in. But a computer had to give the ‘okay’ that the stores-man would be allowed to reach over, pick up the valve, hand it to me, and I would sign for it.
“This is your job?” I almost sneered.
“Three times a day they let me out of here.”
“Why don’t they just put bar codes on everything?”
“They do. I’m being laid off the end of this project.”
“Sorry.”
“They’ll keep one of us around for special orders, like yours.”
Behind the computer where no one else could see was one small picture. That one permitted picture, was of a fully dressed Harley Davidson motorcycle.
Is that your bike?” I asked, surprise in my voice, as I was gathering up my papers to escape that gray cubical sweatshop.
“No, it’s the motorbike I’m going to buy.”
I went to shake his hand good-bye and he said in a small still voice.
“If my wife lets me.”
I forget the name of the company. But I remember the clerk wore a red thick sweater, had full head of grey hair, and grey, pressed pants. Most of all, I remember the look in his eyes and the wistful tone in his voice.
“If my wife lets me.”
“If your wife lets you.” I laughed.
At first, I told that story at the lunch shack with the other welders. with scorn. But, with a slow growing unease, I came to realize that his life wasn’t very much different from mine. It took a painful divorce for me to start on my dream, so who was I to judge another man’s dream?
For the rest of the welding project, every time I passed the square building, I would look up at the office window and think of the man in the cubicle who had handed me the yellow work-order. In that clerk’s one lonely wistful picture, I saw where I once was. I had sneered at him out of fear. Sometimes, I’m not very nice.
I was glad when the welding project was finished and I could go back to Florida for another winter. Or maybe I was a little ashamed of scoffing at another man’s fantasy. A bit of both.
When I first got back to the Keys, I walked around Someday, staring. All I could see were the mistakes and lack of progress. Nobody but me wanted to work on this boat. Roger went off to work at that stripper bar and, to get anyone else to work with me, I’d have to pay them a lot more than I paid him. I felt like a swimmer with a plastic bucket tied to one leg. I’d been flailing around for a complete season on this boat and it seems like we were not going anywhere.
When Someday arrived in the yard the locals gave me disbelieving looks. Many were skeptical that I could restore her. They had seen project boats many times before. The harshest critics were always the ones whose boats never left the dock.
The supportive ones were invariably the circumnavigators. The long-distance sailors didn’t care. One circumnavigator described sailing around the world as; ‘Fixing your boat in exotic ports.’ Besides, the circumnavigators weren’t going to be around long enough to worry about the appearance of somebody else’s boat.
I looked up. It was starting to rain. That was okay, because I’d be able to blame my mood on the weather. Rain, rain, weeks of rain. I started to be a regular at the laundromat. A dollar to dry a clammy sleeping bag was really worth it.
The weather in the Keys comes across the ocean from Africa. On its two-week journey, it picks up humidity from the warm Atlantic like a burr picks up lint. When that water-laden air finally wobbles over the Keys it’s not so much wind, as invisible mushroom soup.
It’s easy to imagine the world, the sea, the people and the vegetation as one interconnected system. Up north, the cold forces you to feel you are an individual, separate from anything else. You are your own system generating your own heat, your own possibilities, your own destiny. Living in the Keys you know better.
Waiting for the rain to stop reminded me of the time when my daughter Jessica was young. We had promised her a camping trip on the weekend. All week long, she had her four-year-old heart set on it. On Friday, a downpour of biblical proportions dashed her dreams of any camping trip. At the dinner table, with her chin quivering with all the pent-up disappointment that her four-year-old broken heart could hold, she said;
“I’m telling… I’m telling… I’m telling on… God.”
Days passed, still it rained. The boatyard left the radio on 24/7 in the machine shop and garage. In the Caribbean, you should learn to love Jimmy Buffet and Gloria Esteban. Lots.My days were punctuated by drying clothes and bedding at the laundromat, shopping for overpriced food, and sitting under a doubled-up blue tarp that was thrown over the boom to make a tent, and watching the rain.
The next morning, I left the hatch open while I went into Marathon. One crumby cloud. One cloud. I dug out the pail and rags and bleach and sponges and started to wipe Someday all over again. One cloud.
I planned to work on the rudder, then the boom, then the cabinet lids, and then? The list grew. If I couldn’t work on a project, I planned it. Tom walked passed Someday as I emptied a pail of water onto the gravel.
“Everybody’s boat leaks. Deal with it.”
“Thanks, Tom. Any other words of encouragement?”
Tom looked at me. I was being judged. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.
“That yellow to-do list you’re always carrying around?”
I fingered the bulge in my breast pocket.
“Cut the list down to three things you can finish in a day.” Tom looked at me pityingly. “Momentum! Momentum! More than three and your list is just wishes.”
Tom turned and walked away. His parting words were flung over his shoulder back at me.
“Well you asked.”
Tom had sailed all over the Caribbean. He had lived on his boat for twenty years. He watched me work for a while, then walked over and gave me a great piece of advice.
“Do the easy parts first. Makes you feel like you’ve done something. Starting is the easy part, everybody starts. What you want to do is to build up momentum. Momentum gets you over the dogs.”
“Dogs?” I asked.
“I call them dogs. Those boring jobs that you put off. They always come back to bite you.”
I glanced over to the yellow pad that was my to-do list.
“A lot of people start on the hard parts first because they figure once they are out of the way, they’ll be able to coast. It doesn’t work like that. The hard ones tire you out, and they always take twice as long as you think. You never seem to get to the easy parts.”
“You worked construction, didn’t you.” I laughed.
Tom smiled. “Among other things.”
People say that the reason they would never buy a boat is because of the constant upkeep. These people will never understand that we boat owners don’t so much complain about the projects, we brag about them. We like fixing our boats. The rain was stopping me from doing what I liked doing; fixing my boat and complaining about it.
One October morning the rain stopped. I didn’t trust that strange blue sky so I left the tarps up. I knew that the rain was just waiting, watching me from over the horizon. I knew that the instant I took the tarps down the rain would start up all over again. If I didn’t look up maybe the rain wouldn’t catch me.
For most of a day I boiled under those blue tarps. Next morning, nothing. Joyously, I flung the blue plastic back off the boat. Under its cover, Someday had grown a fine layer of coral dust that now had to be washed off. The dust accentuated the bumps and hollows that I had missed when sanding the deck. I went back to fairing out lumps and hollows.
I tried putting the deck’s hatch on the boat for the first time. Even in the rain, or maybe because of the wet, it looked cool. It usually took an hour to do these quarter-hour jobs. Fifteen minutes to install the item, and 45 minutes to sit back and admire it. That’s one of the reasons why I hated the rain; rain cut down on admire time.
Now that the rain had stopped and the boat was properly dry, I sanded down the cabin’s roof. I stained the new cabin door. Dust, epoxy, and paint chips flew everywhere. The sun was out after weeks of rain. The reflection from the white cabin roof made my eyes water. I was bringing that old boat back to life.
“Nineteen sixty-seven, the year you were made.” I said to Someday. “To me you’d be still ‘young-stuff.’”
With the bright sun I became more optimistic about finishing Someday. The repairs were starting to become more straightforward. My attention turned towards the smaller places, the corners, the edges. I caulked a bead of silicone around a cabin’s porthole and four feet away, a leak stopped inside.
I waxed the newly painted cabin hatch and like some Archbishop crowning the Queen, I slowly lowered the hatch back on the cabin roof’s railings. Even in the fading tropical sunlight, the shine from the yard lights made the first coat of white paint on the hatch sparkle. Taking a small brush, I varnished the mahogany edges of the doorway.
With a paintbrush still in my hand, I sat back in Someday’s cockpit and squinted at all the new paint, the new varnish, the new pride. Tom was right. Do the easy parts first.
I spoke to my boat.
“Screw those headhunters. Those people have the soul of a bar code anyway.”
That’s another thing I learned. It’s okay to talk to your boat. It’s just that with Ernie, my boat talks back.
Rick Ranson 