THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE CAN BE VERY LOUD

Dean Torges sent me an e-mail that I skimmed too quickly. He was telling me about salvaging a boat trailer and designing a new chicken house around it. [See Dean's wonderful blog at http://www.bowyersedge.com/]

This is nice enough, I suppose. But I somehow read that he was making a wonderful chicken house out of a houseboat, one of those fiberglass monstrosities 12' X 24' with a flying bridge, upper deck, and sliding glass doors to the spacious, dumb cabins.

Whatinhell got into my head? Where did the houseboat come from? It seemed like such a logical idea at the time, a pre-built structure to be pillaged, pierced and repurposed. I figured his high-voltage ingenuity dictated clever ways of dragging it about, perhaps just skidding its hull through the wet grass (it worked for the Stonehenge builders). I saw him saber-sawing through the bulkheads in fantastic high-rise patterns to make nesting boxes. I envisioned a chicken yacht.

This is a little like my deafness: I hear far more interesting things than people actually say. They're talking about "Ford mini-vans" and I'm hearing "Nordic blini fans." Anyone who knows me recognizes that it doesn't take much to set me off on a stirring fantasy of turbines from Denmark or Norway hurling potato and applesauce blini into vast solar-powered ovens by the hundredweight. Then I'm curtly corrected, brought back to pedestrian reality, "We said VANS, and where did you get this 'blini' notion?" I'm always disappointed. I'll think about those mighty pancake mills for days. I'll be almost able to smell the richness of the blini and hear the chunka-chunka-wheet sound of wholesome food a-making. Rats.

I'm sure the chicken trailer is nice and all. I'm sorry to have expected so much more. Wow. That would have been sweet, though.

This quickness to leap at folly has something to do with spring, no doubt.

I love my naps. But this was the first day I could comfortably open the window by my bed and sleep transported by warm breeze curling fragrant around me. The earth opened its heart and the leaves released volatiles of newness, buds and tender leaves. I slept like a four-year-old, and when my timer went off, telling me to get up and do some paying work, I told it to bugger off.

Spring has also subverted my attention in an old, familiar way. I was examining the March/April issue of WoodenBoat, in which I have an article and illustrations. I had a bit of a gloat about the illustrations and leafed through the balance of the magazine happily. Then I left it open beside my computer at the "classified" pages. Oh, dread temptation, oh, encouragement to covetousness.

The little B&W pictures of the boats seize me, tug me into their worlds helpless, and I am sighing over a Herreshoff H-55 Marco Polo Schooner – perhaps the only ugly boat L. Francis Herreshoff ever designed but, glorioski, what a performer and what a liveaboard! Slim and long, with three masts and three marconi sails, a jib, and provisions for staysails in the tradewinds. 6000 mile diesel range, capable of 14 knots with a modest quartering breeze, a blue-water cruiser. Be still my heart.

And here is a 27' gaff yawl, a Tern adapted from my favorite vessel, the Rozinante, another L. Francis Herreshoff design but this was perhaps his masterpiece of grace and cunning and sleekness. The Tern was retro-designed and built by my friend Nat Benjamin in Vineyard Haven. Only 27' but achingly beautiful, like a young Katherine Hepburn in a French-cut tank suit.

There's a 20' pilot-house motor launch on page 132, built for the owners of the Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, to survey the waterfront activity in 1929. Rebuilt, restored, the winner of many gold-plater shows, as jaunty as she is salty.

Yes, and a piss-elegant 28' sharpie, an Egret, modeled after a British gunkholing camp-cruising design of the 1890's, rigged as a cat-ketch with a big damn centerboard and a shallow-water balanced rudder to steer without cares into the thin, thin waters where other sailors would be forced to wade.

Here is Cyclone, a rare 36' Van Dam Limousine. She's a varnished wonder with a howling inboard motor under exquisite alternating light-and-dark planked deck plates, a bow like a switchblade and a tucked-in, tumble-home flat stern that should always have a flag fluttering on a turned cedar standard. Her sisters were designed in the 1920's to take swells and dudes . . . well, wherever wet they wanted to go, probably with a professional boatman in a discreetly bullion-free pilot's cap.

And, stone the crows, this 46' flat-top, plumb-bowed Elco laid down in 1929, twelve years before Elco started churning out the most stirring boats ever employed in the service of our country, the immortal Elco PT boats. But this flat-top is a gent's yacht with a big damn saloon, teak decks . . .

There, you see my difficulty. Spring churns up the lees of things. I hear not only the voice of the turtle but the lap of little waves against the dock, and I smell copper bottom paint and fresh-sanded cedar. Oh, I will not leave this world with any grace at all. I love it all so much.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself is much less sane than he assumes. That he can dress himself and wave bye-bye is not enough to qualify him as a solid citizen. He views the surrounding world through a coruscating scrim of mental fireworks that seem to spring spontaneously from his uncivilized brain. It is difficult for a pragmatic soul like me to countenance such license but we've been together for so long that I have come to admire his skill at decorating a dull landscape with fantastic projections. One hopes he doesn't need reality as much as the rest of us and, of course, he has me to fend it off.