Closing his shop conjures up decades of memories
Issue 57 : Nov/Dec 2007
Why am I crying? It’s my husband’s shop that we’re dismantling after 21 years, and he’s the one with the white-knuckled grip on the clamps, decrepit chisels, and other boatbuilding detritus that I’m attempting to liberate from his grasp. Still, I feel like we’re both under-going a radical life-ectomy as we prepare to relinquish this place. For us, this is hallowed ground. This is where our beloved ketch, Equinox, was born.
The boat was launched six years ago. We left our jobs and went cruising last year. If we can’t fi t our possessions into a 4- by 8-foot storage unit, then something’s very wrong with our life.
On this we absolutely agree. Right? Sweetie?
“I think I’m going to go through your galley and start throwing stuff away,” my husband mutters darkly.
Clyde, the saintly man who rented us this place at the back of his tile business 21 years ago for the boatbuilding project that was going to take two years, encouraged my husband to stay on, post-launch. “A man’s got to have his own shop,” he explained.
But Clyde has retired and turned the business over to his son. We are now on our second generation of landlords. The son has raised the rent and covets the space so he can expand over the remains of my husband’s shop. I’m guessing archaeologists will someday marvel at the little bronze bits of hardware, the hunks of caulking, and the thousands of scraps of sandpaper they discover under the Florida sand that is slowly burying all the evidence of his time here. They will discover the absolutely level concrete pad he poured to set the keel upon before the hull took shape. And when they do, the date he wrote in the wet concrete — 10 Jan. 1986 — may help them put it all in perspective. “As late as the 20th century,” those archaeologists might intone, “some boats were still built of wood.”
Time to move on
It’s time. We really do need to move on. Right? Sweetie?
“Don’t pull those off there,” Bob bristles as he re-nails our late dog’s old tags to a wall. “My dog’s heart and soul are here.” At that, my eyes fi ll with tears, as I remember the day he found his old boatbuilding companion, Salty, dead in a corner of the yard, where she’d limped off to die, alone, after he left for the night.
“I know this is really hard,” I offer, despite the fact I know nothing of the sort. “So much of your life is here.”
As in 21 years of greeting cards: every card my husband has ever received has been stapled to the shop doors over the years. Birthday cards, anniversary cards, retirement cards, Father’s Day cards from our sons. Our sons, now 33 and 35. The sons who were going to go cruising with us when we finished the boat in two years. Limp, faded from the sun, and partially shredded, the cards and the sentiments they convey fall away with the slightest encouragement, unsalvageable.
In hour seven of the Great Purge, the dismantling of the wood-storage rack begins. The different types of wood are all starting to look like one dull gray, somewhat termite-ridden, mass. The yellow pine that became our boat’s frames is hard to distinguish from the cypress that became the planks or the teak that became a lot of other things. It all must be cut down to a size that will fit in the now-overflowing dumpster.
My husband fires up the radial-arm saw that entered our life when our older son was a 1-year-old. The switch breaks, the first time the saw has ever failed him. This is clearly a sign of something, although I think it best not to point it out.
No electrical parts
There is more muttering about how he’s already thrown out his bucket of spare electrical parts. Five minutes later, repair accomplished despite the obstacles, he makes a cut, stops, sniffs. Teak. We put it aside to be taken to the storage unit. You never know. And so it goes until there’s no wood left but that one precious piece of teak. Best not to be tempted to begin another boatbuilding project.
We separate piles of stainless from bronze and brass in preparation for a trip to the metal salvager, every piece setting off memories like little explosions in our brains. A short length of keel bolt. Oh, yeah, that was the day I urged Bob to vigorously apply a large reciprocating saw to an area of rot near the keel. In an instant, he’d sliced through two bolts that held the keel to the rest of the hull. I cringe at these reminders of the Saw-Through-Keel-Bolt Disaster or the Replace-the-Rotten-Rib Incident and the ensuing foul, weeklong depressions they provoked. They made us think we’d never finish building the boat, but it seemed even more insane to give up.
My own memories are almost beside the point. It was his place, filled with his stuff, arranged according to his particular organizational scheme, a place where everything was under his control in an uncontrollable and chaotic world. It was his place to be alone, to ponder, plan, rage, despair, and exult, usually accompanied by a few beers kept cold in his little, decidedly unhygienic refrigerator. Some important part of his being will be left behind here, in this dusty, hot, sandy corner of his world, surrounded by junkyards and barbed wire. I don’t think there will be another place like it ever again in his life.
But it’ll be great when this is over with. Right? Honey?
Kitty Bennett and her husband, Bob, spent nearly 20 years in Florida building and outfitting Equinox, their 36-foot wooden ketch, designed by L. Francis Herreshoff. They retired in early 2005 and have since cruised the East Coast from Florida to Massachusetts, including Chesapeake Bay.
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