Rain

We have rain in Novato, my yes.

Perhaps you’ll remember, however, that Novato is only one of the micro-climates of the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a desert micro-climate and features the polite rain Arthur sings about in Camelot:
…The rain may never fall ‘til after sundown,
By eight, the morning fog must disappear …

Our rain appears in November, after announcing itself with some mildly gray clouds for a few days. It departs in April, and if we get rain after Mayday there is much anxiety and talk of sacrifice to the gods.

Folks characterize San Francisco as the land of fruits and nuts. Not really. In it’s own way San Francisco is more button-down than Yale in the 50’s.

First, we don’t say “fruits.” Humor regarding our gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender brothers and sisters and whatevah is socially forbidden. Unless, of course, they’re Republicans.

We all love animals and rejoice when our friends show up at our homes with their dogs or wallabies or Komodo dragons. “Isn’t that long tongue just darling?” This is predictable behavior and any inkling that you don’t want any domestic creatures is close to an admission of sociopathy.

It’s predictable that San Franciscans accept any new idea that comes careening down the pike – Tibetan chanting medicine, American Native herbal sweat lodges, yoga coaches in the state assembly chamber. Being unkind to a new idea, no matter how illogical, will not be entertained. One idea is just as good as another; they all come from the heart, right?

The Bay Area is comfortingly predictable. Everyone loves children – so honest, so creative – and everyone consistently votes down property taxes that supports local education. Everyone advocates solar, wind and tidal power. True, the per-capita use of energy is enormous. The mighty and pious Prius electric is the People’s Choice for San Franciscan transportation. Even though the People dismiss energy audits that suggest the global manufacturing process and the shipping of Priuses (“Priae”?) to our shores via auto carriers that burn bunker oil all the way across the Pacific Ocean is not sound energy conservation.

Logic be hanged, it’s the heart that counts, and San Francisco social attitudes, seasons, politicians, traffic patterns, mating habits, and – yes – weather, are reliably fixed. The Wild West was tamed not by the Colt Peacemaker but by whorehouse madams and cheap railfares. San Francisco was tamed by the immigration of eastern yuppies with enough money to drive prices up. They sprayed the upscale, post-hippie, better-hygiene, young-professional ‘Frisco Culture with firm-hold hairspray and it’s holding firm.

I’m discovering that Florida is a more spontaneous and unpredictable place than San Francisco. Every Floridian is encouraged by the hothouse sub-tropical climate to go rogue at intervals and Shake Things Up, rant in the street in the front of the house. There’s no special disapprobation if you Bullit-drive after the floozy who, during the post-game party, looked moon-eyed at your man, screeching after her through the suburban streets and throwing high-heeled shoes at the hussy’s car from your own convertible. You tell her, girl!

Small churches are tucked into little country or city nooks, with their particular versions of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses that would not merely irritate the Vatican, but confuse billy-hell out of the cardinals. Snake-handling, gay-bashing, Koran-burning, abortionist assassinating and full-gospel massed bagpipes are unusual but not, here in  what’s-next extemporaneous Florida, surprising.

I’m discovering that Floridians expect to be surprised, and it doesn’t bother them that much. Last month, here is Gainesville, a large black bear was seen walking across  4th Avenue SE, about half a mile from the Gator Swamp stadium (it’s expected of me to add “Go Gators!” when it’s mentioned) at the heart of the city. Was there a hue and cry? Villagers with torches and double express rifles? Nope. “A bear? Humph. How ‘bout that?”

Weather is a tipoff. Yes, Novato has rain, but there is rain and then there is Rain.

Rain arrives here like a meteorite ploughing into your toolshed, whammo. Big rain. The kind of rain I’d forgotten about, coming down seriously so that the far side of 12th Avenue, NW, might have been washed away because we can’t see it. Rain crashing down in solid masses, raindrops as big as quail eggs. Rain that makes side streets tributaries to the sudden river of 12th Avenue, swelling a hefty current so that the big splashes appear to be hurrying west, down to the Gulf of Mexico, sweeping leaves and twigs rapidly past our porch. It roars, a soft monotone. It insists, then relaxes, reasserts. It can taper off across a day. It can stop now, a sun of enormous heat sliding out from behind the retreating clouds as if to say, “There! Good job of it!”

This is the sub-tropics (or as near as damnit), with heat and moisture pushing blooms, developing fungi and giant bugs, proliferating a riot of plant and animal life. Micro-climate? Hell, no. Florida is a big-assed macro-cooker for weather and unusual biota, including genuinely surprising characters. Hell, I’m becoming more unpredictable, myself.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself is savoring new territory. He hyperbolizes, but he always does. I'm not about to attempt behavior modification at this late date, and it's what he does best. He generalizes about San Francisco, which I know he loves, and he misses some of the adventurous factors in California life. But he's quite right about it being a more rigid social atmosphere than many other venues. Liberal, yes, but not malleable.  

RAINY WEATHER POEM

Lay Day

Gray low skies drop
Weekend rain, warmer
Than workday rain for
Construction trades,
Colder for desk trades.
It clings on the fall
To standing rigging,
Stainless cable tautly
Faithful, then rills
Down and down – what
Miniscule, complex
Currents hum in the
Descent along the
Spirals? – to spill
Across adamantine
Bronze and stainless
Fittings, flood the deck,
And exit scuppers,
Homecoming to the
Bay.

Abraxas fidgets at her
Docklines, nudges her
Pig-snout tough
Bumpers, pulls and
Relaxes forgiving
Nylon fibers, doing
Nothing more than
Enduring. Until
Her skipper arrives,
Unable to stay away
Too long, and clambers
Aboard, unbuttons her
Tenderly, enters.
Untouched rain-beaded
Sailcovers, untouched
Shroud still mourning the
Holy wheel and binnacle.
A lay day.

Nautical term: day
Without necessity to
Nose out through chop,
No gray heroics,
Weather-cancelled.
“It’s not dangerous
To sail,” the Prudent
Mariner insists,
“It’s dangerous to
Sail no matter what.”
So the skipper reminds
Himself that he could
Sail. He could. But
Prudence trumps
Possibility. And he
Lights the bulkhead
Stove to hiss and flame
Merrily behind its
Oven-glass firebox
Port, yellow dancing
Of diesel combustion
At a low order of
Utility but filling
The familiar saloon
With grateful warmth.
For projects, chores,
Repetitive, comforting
Checks, new catalogue
Schemes of stowage,
The dream of even
More miraculous
Software. Radar, GPS,
Sounder, chart display
Unawakened.

No sane, no bright,
Will grant kindness
To objects. Only
Romantics observe
That fidgeting has
Become rocking,
Enduring became
Protection, and
Abraxas could. It
Could. If the warmed
And occupied skipper
Breathed, thought,
Deemed an order.

Jan Adkins
6 March 2011
Novato, CA

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself is grateful to Chris Northcutt for buying a splendid 37' cutter and encouraging him to crew often. It's not the Bay he knows but it's sailing, and Chris is a skillful skipper who questions everything. This questioning fascinates and nourishes an adventure side for Himself. He needs that adventure quotient in his life or he gets stale and cranky.

MARCHING BEHIND THE SAINTS, WITH PARASOL

I DON'T GET INTO THE CITY, MUCH. True, I often scuttle in on Tuesday nights to cook for the Dolphin Club but that’s boats, an obsession that overrides my obsession with staying put. But last Sunday afternoon I took a special excursion.

I play tennis with a friend, Neal Vahle, a writer. Neal is 76 and still wallops me on the court. He’s also a deep old file, a thinker and a theologian who lived for several years in a Wisconsin monastery. I know, I didn’t think they bothered with monasteries there but took stark Lutheran doom straight, by the book, because simply keeping warm in the winter occupied so much effort. Jesuitical contemplation on alternate theory might have slowed them down long enough to freeze to death.

Neal and I were talking about raising children with spiritual values in a secular age. Saturday morning at temple or Sunday morning at church is as rare as rolling hoops and knickerbockers, nowadays. How should my grandsons Max and Lucas be raised to have spiritual values? more importantly, how can they become part of the six millennium heritage that carries so much of our core culture? They might wander away from the powerful river of Judeo-Greek, Christian-Roman, Renaissance-Protestant stories, values, fables, metaphors and history that floats us today, makes us who we are. In tossing away the shallowness and frequent hypocrisy of contemporary churches, liberal parents are almost literally tossing the baby out with the bathwater.

I think about this often. Neal and I talk about it sitting on the bench when serves change. So Neal suggested that I attend a “fellowship service” at the Unitarian Church in San Francisco to hear Doug Fitch speak. Doug is a small, wiry black man with enormous and expressive hands, long-famous as a spell-binding orator, and for many years the minister at Grace Church in the City. Fitch left Grace because there is a mandatory retirement age of 70. After he left, a band of a hundred or so folks began using the Unitarian Church as a Sunday-afternoon venue for a non-denominational spiritual gathering. That's as close to religion as they choose to describe it. So now the gentle spellbinder, born into fundamentalist evangelical faith, now calling on his involvement in Eastern meditation and traditions, holds forth at this odd gathering of Unitarians, Jews, Buddhists, lapsed Catholics, loose Lutherans, and even (so I’m told) some Muslims.

It was a wonderful experience. There was a stunning choir, theatrically skillful, with a young, electric choirmaster. They were backed by a band (puh-lease) of keyboard, drums, trumpet and electric bass. The mix was remarkably black for a San Francisco gathering, almost half. The choir reflected this proportion, which was fortunate because the three black basses were sonorous and emphatic, especially when the choir sang some African chants in Swahili – or some dark continent langridge – from the surprisingly strong Christian tradition in large parts of Africa. Amazing.

We sang one hymn but it didn’t count as a Sunday church song since it was “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Loud and lusty, it was no more go-to-meeting than the second-liners returning from the graveyard, twirling parasols behind a New Orleans funeral. A lot of clapping. Some hands waving in the air, a joyous noise. We didn’t have that at the Thoburn Memorial Methodist Church in St. Clairsville, Ohio. Nothing close to it. Sigh.

I can’t call Fitch’s talk a lecture or a discourse. No. It was a sermon. No talk about religion, no mention of Jesus. These folks are anti-Trinitarian, viewing Father, Son and Holy Ghost as a philosophic mischief perpetrated by Constantine in the 5th C. That is, they approach God through the intellectual side door. Of course the sermon had no Bible verse. But, crikey, the rolling rhythms of great religious oratory swept everyone along. We heard the unmistakable notes of Martin Luther King’s Pentecostal heritage – repetition, rhythm, sudden changes of pitch and volume, calling out and asking response, loud exhortation and quiet reflection, shifting from the intimately personal to the abstract whole.

And how could any speech from a pulpit be a lecture if it had (mirabile dictu) an Amen Corner. Yes. No shit. A running basso continuo from a few male members of the choir sitting on the aisle: “Yes. Yes! Tell it. Oh no! Amen. Amen. Yes, brother. Speak the word. Mm-MM! [This last an admonitory expression of anger and disappointment at injustice, obviously the work of the anti-Trinitarian, Satan-less, abstract devil.] DO tell! We hear it. We feel it. We know it. With you now. Yes, brother.” It’s appropriate that the choir members constituted the Amen Corner because it became obvious to me that good Amen-ing is closely akin to scat-singing, a skill that sounds casual and easy to any singer who hasn’t tried it. I was forced to admit that I didn’t have the experience or skill to become a competent or even an unembarrassing Amen-er. Sorry.

Fitch. The little man filled up the vast space under the Gothic hammer beams and inside the colorful, geometric, unreligious but inescapably religious stained-glass, above the unnoticed hard wooden pews. Oh, yes. Tell it. Mm-MM! His body language had expression, authority, and a mime’s wit. He plied the skillfully subdued but operatic magic of his dancing arms and hands. His flashing palms were pinkish orange in contrast to his weathered tobacco complexion. His modest, light suit suggested a boardroom but Fitch revealed a lion chewing on the horse-haunch of a premise. And we listened. We hear it. We feel it. With you now.

It wasn’t empty oratory but a logical, well-built discourse on the importance of continual learning, a constant opening of viewpoint through education in any form in life. “More learning, more life” was the theme but it twined around the critical role of tragedy and defeat in human learning, the regrettable but indispensable tutor of grief, the place of frustration and anger, the path with many thorns leading to the loveliest views. There were many “Amens” from Fitch as affirmations: “This I believe.” There was confession and humility, the little man vaulting above us but remaining one of us – ignorant as we were, blindsided as many times as we have been. He was, he assured us, determined not only to learn all his life but to live a long life (“I intend to reach ninety-nine years. Oh, yes,” to applause) and to savor every glittering drop of it.

This was no Happy Meal Sunday treat with fries. Indeed, it was strenuous in a way. I can’t imagine anyone who could remain a spectator, there. The pulse of spiritual stirring was so involving and strong that we ran to keep up with it. We sorted through old fears and freed pent-up desires. We centered ourselves in silence but we did so as a body of humans together. It was intellectual work.

This community of striving for quiet clarity may be something we lack in a secular life. It’s easy to grow narcissistic when you live with your own echoes. Quiet meditation – which could be called “centering” or “prayer” or even more casual reflection – is not the same experience as solitary meditation. Somehow it draws more amperage from you.

There was one familiar church artifact: the collection. These folks pay the band, support the choir, rent the hall, subsidize Doug Fitch’s enormous labor of preparing his “sermon.” They’re also politically and socially active, righteous San Francisco liberals supporting all the initiatives of justice, peace and diversity that damn near save the Californian Spirit from triviality. So the collection, counted and notated by my painstaking friend Neal, is honest and painless. We got a band, after all. The bass guitarist looked profoundly bored and was doubtless looking toward some livelier gig with more women in less, so he should be paid for his time. And, hell, it probably touched a part of him. After all, California’s mission system was based on paid converts.

Afterward there was the familiar milling crowd noshing on potluck brownies, cakes, nibblies and (Fitch's favorite, we were warned to save some for him) lemon bars. Very nice people. I placed them in the same drawer as my real, kind, jolly Dolphin Club friends.

It was altogether nourishing, refreshing, fertilizing, joyful. I’m ignoble enough to state that I managed to fall in love with every female member of the choir. Oh, yes. Tell it. And no one at my college bar would believe that I could someday moon from actual church pews over a speckled-pup cute woman who would in a more ecclesiastical setting be called a “deaconess.” Oh yes, brother. Speak it. In my defense this certainly had much to do with reawakening spiritual banks dormant in me for years. Amen. Or I may be merely a dirty old man whose shame has eroded sufficiently that I can admit these things. Mm-MM!

Altogether a wonderful time. It couldn’t be better, even with fireworks. First and third Sundays of the month. With you now, brother.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Anything that gets himself out of the studio can't be all bad. And this was a therapeutic event. It had a high mensch-ratio and a low piety score. Not bad for Sunday in a church of any kind. About education, I can't fear for himself. He's compulsive about learning damn near anything, and he tries mightily, with his limited tools, to string everything together in a logical way. Given the reports of low senility rates for scholarly nuns, we hope this constant, bubbling mental activity will fight off Alzheimer's. This would be an especially serious malady in my already odd friend because we couldn't see the symptoms for years.

MARKET STREET 1905

My editor-in-chief at National Geographic, Bill Garrett, send me this wonderful cinema clip. I replied with my recollections of it and my reactions to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfZX-4iQOgQ&feature=related

Thank you for sending this film clip! I’ve seen it before under unusual circumstances but haven’t been able to locate it.

This simple, brief trip down Market Street toward the ever-looming Terminal Building is magical in the way some Civil War photos can reach out of their glass plates to seize your whole attention. Perhaps the long exposure time accounts for the power of those Brady-era photos., Their subjects were staring, unmoving, at the uncovered lens for up to two minutes, enough time to focus on the camera as it focused on them, so that they seem to be consciously murmuring over time, “We were here at this frozen moment – intensely, minutely, hopefully, humanly. Look at us, alive in this slice of time, look at us. We passionately need your collusion, your acknowledgment of our living in your own focus. If you truly see us, we live.”

And in this sense, the film is more than a oddity. The people who looked up at the camera in 1905, a year before most of the city was destroyed by the great earthquake, were almost, almost aware that we would be seeing them now. They didn’t care particularly because they had their own lives – see them rush to appointments, lunches, tasks – but a few seem aware or even amused that ghosts of the future are passing on the front platform of the Market Street Car.

A good number of the folks on the street are aware that the ride is being filmed. They wave, caper dangerously in front of the car, boys hitch rides on car bumpers and carriages to wave. Perhaps they're aware that this film is a bit of boosterism staged to make the city look modern and prosperous. Some careful researcher has noted that the many passing automobiles are really a few autos, circling the route of our car. They pass, turn, pass on the other side, and repass on the right.

The primary impression busy Market Street in 1905 offers us is casual chaos. The number of people wandering on and across the street is remarkable. Many stand in the street, looking about them, apparently thinking of something far from Market Street. Most others seem to be in a hurry; it’s Market Street, after all, and business is booming. Something foreign and even disturbing to us that there is so little demarcation between pedestrian and street traffic. Folks continually bolt from one side to the other or stop to talk directly in the traffic flow. The progress of our time vehicle down Market Street is ponderous to us but of little concern to men and women stepping directly in its path, confident that our car or that carriage or even the nimble internal combustion automobiles will make way for them. It’s faintly amazing; no one is knocked down or run over. There aren’t groups pulsing across walkways, timed by signals; that lock-step rigidity is absent.

The phrase “free-for-all” comes to mind, both in the hurly-burly meaning, and in the assured ownership of common space. The hood-banging, automobile-offended New York pedestrian’s shout is poignantly unnecessary on Market Street 1905: “Hey! Hey! I’m walkin’ heah!”

Women pedestrians are relatively rare. What does this tell us about women in San Francisco before suffrage? They are dressed in dark clothes, probably an artifact of horse dung. Dark fabrics hide dirt and stains We would take Market Street to be a filthy place in 1905. Voluminous, long skirts swept near the surface and picked up a rime of powdered horse dung and dust on a rainy day; on a dry day the entire skirt gathered the blowing, ubiquitous product of horse-transport lodged in the cusps between paving stones.

Everyone wears a hat. It’s a breezy day; we occasionally see men clutching their derbies and slouches with both hands.

There is a significant police presence on Market Street. We tend to mistake cops of this era as ridiculous figures because they wear the dark blue solar-topi helmet familiar to us from Mack Sennet’s Keystone Cops, a burlesque of bumbling and incompetent police officers spilling out of a station house in pall-mall pursuit of nothing more dangerous than a scofflaw. But the police on Market are beefy, serious men who look competent and even formidable. They’re men of quick, practical and experienced judgment; Miranda Rights and civil liberties might be science fiction. These are beat-cops assigned to a specific area, with saps and revolvers on their hips, carrying lead-weighted billies. In 1905 San Francisco was still an exotic port ruffled by tong wars, a hustling Tenderloin District, waterfront brawls, and the usual difficulties with alcohol. Cocaine, heroin and opium were sold over the counter so there is no “drug crime” yet. The Indian Wars and the frontier were recent memories, less than twenty years before, but statistics report that riverine or ocean port cities (San Francisco is both) had much more violent crime than the wooliest frontier towns, including the cattle-droving destinations of Dodge City and her sisters in Kansas and Missouri.

There is a vast fleet of street cars. Our straight-line journey encounters dozens of cars on the Market Street line headed in the other direction, and more crossing Market. One crossing car is an electric trolley, powered by overhead wires. Most are unpowered cars; they move as the grip-man hauls on five-foot handles to seize moving, singing cables beneath centerline steel slots on the street, no more than two inches wide, and they brake by releasing the cable and levering-on blocks of elm against tracks and wheels. A grip man must have had prodigious physical strength and endurance.

We see a lot of bicycles on 1905 Market Street, part of the second wave of “wheelmen.” Bicycles were sensible transportation and a political force in the country, perhaps because they freed great numbers of middle-class citizens from the schedules of trains, the expense and responsibility of horse-transport, and the minor but cumulative expense of metropolitan and intercity light rail. Favored politicians visiting cities were accompanied by bicycle parades, large societies of Wheelmen who were something like the League of Women Voters in their pragmatic, progressive views expressed at the polls. Wheelmen were known as technically apt, educated, liberal groups. On our trip we see one cyclist crossing and recrossing the cable car slot only a few yards ahead of our car. Perhaps there was less danger of sinking his front wheel in the slot than it appears.

The day is fine, the mood is buoyant, the city is teeming and fascinating. Young people can watch this fragment of 1905 as a quaint gleam, inconsequential. As we grow older, however, the life and intensity of experience throughout this journey is almost cruel, a memento mori, reminding us that the twinkling moments that are so real in our memories and so full of dedicated life, are evanescent, shadow-play. It requires age to question the real fabric of time, to ask how a moment in this patently false, transparently-manufactured reality-TV opera we inhabit is more real than the sharply realized moments of our past. It seems impossible that those moments don’t still exist, as temporal stair treads to which we might leap if we held tightly to the banister, or if we somehow seized the opposing cable of a Market Street cars going in the opposite direction with a five-foot iron handle and a grip-man’s tenacity.

It helps, of course to be a little crazy. I benefit from this looseness of logic. There is a sandbar on the Chesapeake I inhabited with a woman I loved on the Glorious Fourth of July in the mid-eighties when I was as happy as I can remember being. Our sailboat was drawn up on the beach. The fireworks were reflected in the water and in that exquisite woman’s eyes. We danced on the sand and needed no music but us. We drank sweet Mt. Gay Eclipse rum. She said she loved me, in French. Life seemed as bright and spectacular and blooming as those bursts of light in the sky.

It all went to hell. The exquisite, rare woman changed her mind, in English, and set a lugubrious and devastating chain of events in motion that tore me out of Eden and away from what I most loved. Life was never that hopeful again. But that sandbar evening is so focused in my mind, like a crystal or a hologram of time, that I can’t believe it doesn’t exist at this moment, somewhere.

I watched this Market Street clip a few years ago, during a piano concert at a church in Noe Valley, in San Francisco. About eight pianists were playing, several of them famous stride piano stylists. My friend Jim Purcell was giving his lecture on the evolution of jazz style at the piano. A remarkable man stage-named Hokum Jeeves also played. He and his partner were trying to restart vaudeville and owned a small theater called Hokum Hall in Portland or Seattle. A few of my friends had acts there. Hokum played a cakewalk in ragtime, and then announced that he would demonstrate a lost skill by playing to a silent film as “professors” had in the early part of the last century. They sat at their keyboards – piano or organ – and played extemporaneously, reacting to the mood and action of the film. I remember Mr. Jeeves blending into “A Bicycle Built For Two” as one of the bicycles wobbled across the screen, and fashioning a clanging bell chord as a pedestrian nimbly stepped out of a streetcar’s way. It was enchanting, and it fit this film beautifully.


Braxinoso Speaks

Himself counts his looseness of mind and his past/present confusion of time as virtues. Perhaps they helped him continue an unremunerative profession past logical limits, but they also inflict enormous pain. I've been with him in the dark times when flashes of hope from the past exact a terrible, ironic toll. Trying to look on the bright side, a real virtue of being able to project oneself into another time is the ability to notice small mechanical or social things hindsight often hides.

HOPSCOTCH REMEMBERED

THE SUN CAME OUT this morning, so Laura and Hannah were out in the driveway. Hannah was drawing on the concrete with big chalk. I walked down and was drawn into the chalk drawing. Hannah lay down so I could trace her outline. This was so fine that Laura lay down and had hers done. I laid down but rather than flat-on-back, arms-outspread, I tried a lying-on-side profile. When I drew a cross for my eyes, the driveway became a crime scene. Naturally Laura insisted on her own crime-scene profile, which she got. I did two cross-eyes for this but it disturbed Laura considerably and she tried to wash out the "dead eyes" because, she said, "this is beginning to look sick."

She took the kabosh off our crime scene by drawing a familiar figure farther out in the driveway: a hopscotch matrix – one, two, three, double, six, double, nine, heaven. We showed Hannah how it was done. She refused to get into the racket but demanded that we continue.

I returned to my studio (proclaiming my intention to "use the potty," since Hannah is in the midst of intense potty training, big girl pants, &c) and looked down at the hopscotch matrix. What a familiar figure and how evocative! It was probably a game played when Gilgamesh was king. Of course it was a girls' game. I can't remember the play or the scoring and refused myself the time for Googling "hopscotch." It made me consider the flow of time, yet again this week.

When I began seriously fooling around with computers the industrial design studio with which I worked in Providence, RI, had a memory hard drive with a 2 GB capacity, a larger drive than I'd ever seen. We thought this amount of 0's and 1's was extraordinary, amazing, who could use so much? Sitting next to my keyboard presently is a SanDisk thumb-drive as big as a French fry with a memory storage capacity of 4 GB. I bought a pack of three at CostCo for under $30. Things change.

My first commercial flight was aboard a DC-4. The service of the “stewardess” was attentive and pleasant. We walked out onto the tarmac to board via a rolling set of steps. Our friends came to see us off (we were flying from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Tampa, Florida, by way of Atlanta, because Wheeling had no commercial airport). A 5’ chain-link fence separated the onlookers from the runway. In the air I got ear-popping gum as a matter of course. Later a meal was served handsomely with airline-monogrammed silverware. Each diner had tiny salt and pepper shakers. I was invited to look at the cockpit. It was more impressive than contemporary cockpits because radial engines need more complex monitoring than jets, require a "flight engineer" and have close to a hundred dials. The cockpit door was open most of the time. No one had highjacked an airplane. What a crazy idea. They'd know where you were going, right? You couldn't get away with it. What kind of a nut would highjack an airplane?

I'm proud to say that I received Flying Wings as a bona fide flight passenger when we reached Tampa.

I flew the week after 9-11 (I had lost a friend, Anne Judge, in the Pentagon crash that day) but haven’t flown since exploding underwear came into vogue, so I don’t know the drill of not covering one’s lap, drinking liquids or humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” during the last half hour of flight. One crazed Islamicist attempts to light his sneakers and millions of Americans take off their shoes. One supposes that next year we’ll be flying naked with a mood probe up our ass.

I’m one of those people who remembers early-childhood experiences, like the texture of the cast-iron crib at my grandparent’s summer place in the West Virginia mountains, or the sound of cars passing on the dirt road directly in front of that cottage, or the smell of the green, slightly translucent wallpaper cleaning dough my mother used at our house on Wheeling Island, or the smell of the pineapple-flavored rum my gramma and grampa brought back from Cuba. I remember the gritty feel and stony smell of Lava soap, always beside the sink because my grandfather, father and uncles worked in the shop. I liked the smell of Jergen’s Lotion, Lifebuoy soap, and my father’s green Mennen’s Aftershave. That was his smell. I loved spaghetti, partly because (in our Wonder Bread world) it was so exotic.

We sometimes took road trips with my Uncle Charlie and Aunt Mary. One of the trips brought us to Washington, DC. The Smithsonian was wonderful. I put my nose into the tiny porthole of the Explorer II high altitude gondola, a black and white sphere sent manned into the actual stratosphere by the National Geographic Society. The old, uncirculated air smelled musty and dry. There were two sets of drinking fountains; it was disappointing that the fountains under the “COLORED” sign offered plain, uncolored water. At the National Zoo the keeper at the primate house showed us that the monkeys ate well, breaking off a dense, sweet cornbread made with honey, bran, seeds and vitamins, fed to the chimps. When he took a bite my mother, who was definitely a delicate creature, almost fainted. When I took a bite from the keeper before she could stop me, she was forced to sit down and recover. It was delicious. I wish I had a piece right now.

Things change. My G-4 Mac computer is now, ahem, "old." The notion of air travel as an elegant way to go is antique. Presently it's a feedlot experience. I’m an old guy now. Thank God for stents, Zoloft and Viagra. And also, thank God for the beautiful sun that burned through the rain and fog at last. Maybe I'll Google "hopscotch" tomorrow.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Childhood memories are odd artifacts. One wonders if they're honest. Things Adkins' grandson Max has said seem to reflect the long labor of his birth as a memory of his mother "trying and trying to get me out." Still, I must be aware that Himself can grow morose with too many memories. Looking back too earnestly ensures a stumble in the present.

GREEN BOATING

A discussion in today's "Marina, Boatingbuilding and Dealer Professionals" forum asked if "Green Marinas" were viable. This is a charged debate because the "professionals" depend on big boats for their profits, and the big powerboats get about half a mile to the gallon, if that.

But being on the water is so important, so precious. Watching from shore just isn't a substitute. You see the ocean and its life only beyond the surf. My contribution to the subject was:

The Green Marina is a goal. Even faltering steps toward energy savings and zero-added-pollution should be encouraged. Should Green Marinas harbor sailing craft only? Not necessarily; some motor yachts designed for modest speeds are fuel-efficient. And some small, economically disenfranchised boaters are zero-polluters. How many marinas welcome small scale sailors – kayaks, pulling boats and daysailers?

It's surprising to most wind-sailors how much fuel fast-moving demands. It's a guilty fact that we motor through calms, light winds and even headwinds. We might return to the slip after a trip out to the Farralones and back, motoring for a good part of the day, and use, perhaps, 7 gallons of diesel. The sport-fisherman across the dock has made the same trip at a higher speed, has admittedly covered more bottom by setting and pulling crab pots and trolling for stripers, but has burned more than ten times the fuel. Things change. Oil is no longer a negligible component of boating's future.

Being on the water is a rare privilege most landlocked souls aren't offered. The prime benefit of access to the water life is witnessing and being part of its powerful but delicate ecology. A responsibility comes with the privilege: we're obligated to do as little harm to the water we love as possible.

A Green Marina, even one with some contradictions and drawbacks, is a good start and a good example. Any Green Marina would remind its skippers to think more clearly about how they affect the water. If we saw more Green Marinas, the industry would inevitably push technology (still grounded in its high-ticket, twin-Chrysler, go-fast stage) toward efficiency and sensible conservation. It may not be too early to accept the logical expression of our privileged closeness to the world ocean: reducing fuel consumption at LEAST in proportion to reduction in automobile standards.

We don't want to lose marinas! They're critical portals to the water world, and they're a happy, colorful component of shore life. Marinas can't survive if they can't make money. Big boats make big profits. Fuel markups aren't what they were but they're part of the profit margin. What's the responsible, proactive, progressive, foresighted path? Green Marinas are one part of the answer: they're an institutional commitment to positive change.

The sensible path surely depends on reading the future as wisely as we check the weather forecasts: can go-fast powerboating continue as a highly visible symbol of boating's lack of concern for conservation? Will every big, creamy wake, so visible scarring the Bay, encourage legislators to make the boating industry a sop to Cerberus? Will legislation crack down on boating as a smoke screen for allowing trucking and auto manufacturers to ignore fuel reduction guidelines?

You know that I'm merely a gadfly in this discussion. My dog in this fight is a Chihuahua. But from a journalist's perspective, the boating industry might serve itself best by getting on the Green Barge and making its own changes.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself can offer himself to ridicule pitifully eagerly. One speculates that marine businessmen, boat manufacturers and even small-boat builders would prefer that amateurs simply shut up. But ridicule can be an honorable state for journalists, whose business demands that they step out onto the balcony of palaces and observe aloud that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Ridicule doesn't do journalists much lasting harm, and we suppose they must accustom themselves to the sting of cold water in their faces in order to say the critically important thing when it is, by common consent, ridiculous.

CLOTHESLINE

HOMEOWNERS ASSOCIATIONS are fierce guardians of design morality, yard upkeep, and homogeneous property values. They've politely mentioned to a friend that her clothesline is not an approved landscaping feature. Of course they're polite. Bigotry and reminding folks that they have stepped outside accepted standards is always begun politely.

Her homeowners association is cowering before the persistence of image. When they see her clothes fluttering in the breeze, they don’t see a farm wife in the prairie wind but the stigma of the tenements, all those clotheslines hung between buildings, in air shafts, on tar roofs.

As a journalist, I should greet the association’s wet-jammie jitters as a compliment, since it stems in some part from one of the earliest and most powerful landmarks of photojournalism, Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements In New York, 1890. This photo essay made an indelible impression on middle and upper class consciousness and persists to this day. It revealed the “shame of the squalid tenements.” A few efforts were made toward improving conditions but it was clear that the shame resided with the tenement dwellers, and there was obvious pique that the poor had embarrassed the rich.

But there’s something odd in the tenement clothesline prejudice. The period in which we welcomed so many immigrants and enriched our national gene pool with so much genius and drive was one of America's golden times. Yet our central icon of America, also from that time, is the cowboy. In reality the cattle drover we celebrate as the Marlboro Man was another indigent, socially abhorrent member on the lowest rung of society. The literacy rate in the tenements was sky-high compared to the readin’ and writin’ of the cattlemen. The cowboy’s heyday was brief: the “Texas cattle for Yankee dollars” era of driving big herds from the Southwest to the railheads in Kansas and Missouri spanned only about fifteen years. In that heyday the drover was seen by most of society as a pariah, filthy and uncivilized, ignorant and rowdy. To be fair, this perception was probably spot-on.

But out of our tenements in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnatti, Pittsburgh, Albany, Hartford and other urban centers we saw invention, enterprise, social reform, striving, artistic expression, and a new national spirit of diversity and respect. Granted, it took a hundred years for that spirit to gather power and legitimacy, but our national conscience began in the tenements with all those fluttering, clean clothes strung between buildings.

What social upheavals did the cowboys offer? The spirit of independence and self-reliance? No historic evidence of that. Most cowboys were hired on as part of a local cattlemen’s associations or a big-business rancher’s outfit, often with eastern or British money behind them. They were mounted troops at the beginning of the undeclared "War of Western Consolidation" that squeezed out "small-holders" and established big-money agribusiness.

That war saw a prairie suspension of habeus corpus, death squad "regulators," lynchings and corporate terrorism. But it's not a war you found in your textbooks. Billy the Kid was one champion of the small-holders in the Lincoln County War. The Mussel Shoals War was a bloodier conflict waged in California, involving Leland Stanford and his robber baron colleagues. Mussel Shoals was followed with obsessive interest in the class struggle it represented by a writer and theorist in London, Karl Marx.

So why the cowboy and not the immigrant striver? It was probably the hat. Even today a good Stetson attracts attention. It surely wasn't the horse. In that pre-automobile era everyone knew horses, every streetcorner layabout presented himself as an expert on horseflesh. But the hat, now there was the key to romance.

So why isn’t our national romance grounded in the tenements? Bad hats? Mebbe. In large part the influx of intelligence and talent the United States received between the beginning of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War is what made this country great. Immigrants, a sound and balanced Constitution, size and fortunate geography. There you have America.

The homeowners association should bugger off and read their history books a little more closely, damnit.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself exhibits a dash of unaccustomed passion in this rant, but he makes sense. Surely we could afford more diversity in our heroes. We recall the Pecos Bill archetype in our pantheon but we seem to have largely dismissed Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink, Davy Crockett and Joe Magarak. Dirty Harry should be turned away as a national model, of course, but he's the obvious product of Duke Wayne's legacy.

CLINKER-BUILT

Every Tuesday evening at the Dolphin Club we give the pulling boats some care – repairing, sanding, varnishing, rebuilding. After we work three hours or so, we all eat together in the boat house at long tables.

A big crowd tonight, but not because it's Fat Tuesday and one of the members has made jambalaya. Big doings in the shop. Word has gone out that the Club's boatwright, Jon Belinski, is installing five new ribs in one of the older pulling boats. This is a rare demonstration of antique skills and methods, requiring teamwork, timing, speed and finesse. It's more than woodworking.

The ribs begin as tough locust staves. To bend this adamant wood into the fair curve of a rib, it must be cut to its cross-section and steamed in a long, closed, hissing iron pipe for half an hour. The locust ribs emerge at 200°F+ as limp as noodles. Limp for only moments. We will pluck ribs out one at a time with thick gloves and push them into the boat's inner shape, working feverishly before the inner heat dissipates and the locust stubbornness revives.

Contemporary sport boats are, in the old Massachusetts boatyard phrase, "built by the mile and cut off to suit." They're mass produced. You won't see ribs being steamed unless you haunt a cranky New England shipwright's shop peopled with wood-heads devoted to traditional (read "lavishly expensive") wooden boats built more carefully than a Hermann Miller coffee table.

We walk through the steps we will take in dumb-show first, noting where our feet will go, what will be in the way, who must step back, who must come forward. Everyone must work fast and in close concert, because the locust will be flexible from the steam box for less than a minute.

We take special care of these exquisite craft but they endure. Some are older than any of the people who work on them. And because why, mate? Because these 'ere boats is clinker-built, as light as eggshells but tough as pigs' noses. They are San Francisco variations on the Whitehall model. This means that they are rowing boats with a distinct and delicately cupped shaped, a "wineglass" transom (aft end), and that they're very light for their size, built in the ancient "clinker" construction.

"Clinker" is an Old English cognate of "clencher," which indicates that the boat is constructed of thin, overlapping planks of a light, flexible wood (in this case, white cedar) "clenched" to thin ribs with copper rivets. This fastening mode is a very old usage that binds more tightly than nails and more securely than screws. Indeed, nails and screws wouldn't have much to "grab" because the stock is so thin. The soft-as-cheese cedar is milled thin, not much thicker than 1/4" and about three inches wide. The ribs are only 5/8" wide and about 1/2" thick. While they're still whippy and hot, we will drill through and secure a rib, the lower part of an overlapping cedar strake (one of the curving horizontal planks) and the upper part of the next strake.

Now. A rib is whisked out of the steam pipe, slammed into the boat, bent against the soft interior curve of the strakes and forced under some of the boat's inner structure. Held hard, holes are immediately drilled, time management and tool quickness.

As soon as the holes are made a copper riveting nail is tapped through them. The "nail" is square in section to grip the wood more tightly. A round copper washer – called a "burr" – is forced over the square nail with a special riveting tool; it's like a chisel with a flat, blunt end drilled with a hole for the nail to occuply, so that whacking the burr down onto the nail forces the rib and strakes together. When the riveting tool is taken away, the nail is snipped off just above the burr and, while one partner "bucks" (holds a heavy iron on the nailhead end to prevent it from being driven away), the other shapes the soft copper with a small ball-peen hammer. This is the hammer with one flat head and one round head, made specifically for work like this – shaping the "mushroom" with the round head is called "peening". The copper is so malleable that it mushrooms over the burr and each stroke of the shaping ball-peen tightens the assembly.

It seems like intolerably fussy and unnecessary complication but it's the only thing that will bind these whisper-thin planks and light ribs into a remarkably rigid, nearly monocoque hull. It's historic, it's ancient methodology, very cool to watch and do.

Jay and I work as a team. Half the time I'm above the boat, tapping the rivets home, shaping the mushroomed-over heads in the soft copper. Half the time I'm under the boat, lying on the shop floor, holding the heavy bucking iron against the nail head. The shaping is a more focused task, it requires more care, but holding the bucking iron is heavier work.

There are compensations for that heavy work. Lying beneath the boat's lyric curves I see each strake describing a separate curved plane with a strake-thickness separating it from the next plane – graceful lines paralleling and harmonizing, the color of the varnished white cedar glowing golden and varying with the glare from every work light, shading from dark umber in the shadows to chrome yellow in the light. Beautiful.

The locust wood ribs emerging from the steam box smell bitter and damp. The drilled cedar smells like incense. The tapping and the calling between three or four sets of partners – two sets riveting, two sets placing new ribs – has a discernible rhythm and order.

The work had a sensible urgency and a splendid, strong outcome. What do we do in our lives that gives us much of that?

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself needs more physical work and more contact with working people. The abstract life of a writer and illustrator can be barren, like a room decorated with B&W print-outs of reports. A room and a life need color and a bit of mayhem.

MINE CANARIES

CREATIVE PEOPLE have always lived in the thin ends of the bell curve, out on the fringe, scuttling about and picking at the table scraps of big money. The exhibits I've had a hand in designing, the books I've created, the articles I've written, the films with which I've worked – they've all been secondary fruits of "loose money" freed up for social projects by embarrassingly large profits. When profits dip, artists are the mine canaries of capital flow: we fall dead off our perches before the big guys can feel the pinch. Looking around me I see a lot of empty perches. And there's a bit of a rasp in my throat, as well.

What follows is part of a reply to the director of the Bay Area Discovery Museum, a lovely place for little guys. I proposed we collaborate on some exhibits and he, graciously and reluctantly, confessed that the BADM didn't have the funding to pursue anything new in this crunch. I replied:

Yes, the economy is harsh, but I can’t imagine any other result from our global adventuring. As Shackleton said, “Adventure is a sign of incompetence.” We don’t seem to manufacture anything in the hardware store, now. Many of our best young men and women are scattered across the world fighting and dying for folks who don’t want us there. We’re fouling our nest but can’t seem to stop. The rolling juggernaut of corporate America more or less ignores all our objections and cries. Yet we DO live in a favored land, and our culture IS strong, has a work ethic, and has good roots. The problem could be that our leaders don’t demand much of us, or much more than merely spending. The children you and I try to encourage will reap the whirlwind, and that right soon.


My current book project is Black Bonfire, about the end of cheap oil. It’s inevitable, calamitous, and much, much closer than I imagined when I began the book. The book is directed at young adults, giving them an overview of energy as they enter adulthood, as they become citizens. When you want to do an exhibit on just how deeply oil has become the warp and woof of life, give a shout. If you’re sitting inside, everything you see – from wood paneling to steel shelves to plastic pens – is or was put together by oil. Oil that we won’t have.


So how do we, as creative workers, survive the present economy? Dunno. We’ve always been on the fringe, depending on an upstream flow from the largesse of wealthy patrons, not too far removed from Cosimo de Medici. I suppose we can hope that the wealthy will always be wealthy. I’m not sure that will be borne out in the cultural upheaval. I don’t want to sound apocalyptic but major institutions will change. The hoary dictum, “What good for USSteel is good for the country” isn’t quite so true.


Perhaps we’ll survive like that marvelous soul William Kamkwamba, who built a windmill in his yard from junk and electrified his African village. What do we need with the Incredible Hulk and Batman when we have Kamkwamba? Perhaps we’ll build our exhibits out of local junk, building from the midden pile of Marin society. Our work could come to resemble the ancient trade of the storytellers who traveled from village to village, sitting under trees and eaves to spin out tales that amazed and informed.


[Jon Steward interviews Kamkwamba at http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-7-2009/william-kamkwamba]

Artists. We're all canaries trying to survive this oppressive atmosphere, clinging to our wobbly little perches with our feeble claws, and still singing brightly. How many friends do you have who are paralyzed by dread and frustration? On the other side, how many artists do you know who are doing jes' fine? If it weren't for Zoloft, we'd have a mass suicide of artists (something like M. Night Shyamalian's The Happening) and the balance of the population would say, "Whatinhell have they got to complain about? All they do is sing and swing."

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS


What Himself neglects to acknowledge is that living on the fringes is a choice, not a profession. I could be demonizing the victim by bracing him thusly, but living on the fringes is inherently dangerous and unstable. The deep, strong current is where the action is, not the back eddies in the reeds. It's artistic hubris to assume the world will pull you triumphant from the edges and proclaim you its darling. Himself has a task: get into the mainstream or perish. This is harsh advice but so is the economy.

MORE SMALL BOAT TALK

I REMEMBER a daysail with the Traditional Small Craft Association up in the Sacramento Delta. I had an idyllic morning and afternoon aboard a Redwing 18, a home-built plywood skiff with a big cockpit and a cuddy. WoodenBoat sells the plans for about $100, and I'm wondering how many Redwings there are, carrying couples and families over small waters.

I'm accustomed to big, powerful sloops and ketches in the 36' to 65' range – OPB's, other people's boats – but that odd little outboard in the complex little sloughs of the Delta offered a scaled-down, wholly delightful adventure.

The four-stroke, ten horsepower engine was quiet at the pokey rate of travel the slough mandated, perhaps 5.5 knots. Conversation was easy, the banks were lovely and the birds were plentiful and varied – egrets, green herons, great blue herons, redwing blackbirds, crows (my favorites), wrens, robins, mockingbirds . . . Some spoke of seeing otters in less-traveled sloughs. The cooler with sodas and lunch was in the shade of the cuddy cabin. The day was fine though I could see that a canvas Bimini cockpit cover would be a blessing in the depth of summer.

An oddly pleasing part of the voyage was the wheel, itself. It was a small galvanized workboat wheel, with its six teak hand-spokes extending the cast galvanized spokes, mounted on the starboard face of the coach house. The little engine swung to it, and the engine controls were mounted to the right of the wheel. Perhaps the comfortingly elderly wheel made it feel more like a sea boat. We're all suggestible, subject to delusions, me more than most. I remember it as one of my favorite little passages.

I love big boats, long may they wave, but I'm speculating that the marine industry must expand the base of small boaters. Small experiences may lead to big-boat purchases in time. Even an 18-footer consumes an appreciable amount of marine equipment, year by year.

I could be way wrong about this. If I were a businessperson I wouldn't be a writer. For boatbuilders already set up to produce grand vessels the only course is to winkle out high-ticket owners from the Fortune 500. One thinks of steep oil price increases, however, and wonders what big breweries were thinking just before Prohibition. Some actually went into the root beer business.

Welcoming a wider public to life on the water is good sense and good seed. By and by most dinghy sailors want a bigger boat for longer voyages, and for learning new things. Young people who play on the water with their families are more likely to invest in a big boat when they have families of their own. Should boatbuilders and chandleries be thinking about what Stewart Brand calls "the Long Now?"

I find such peace and a settling of the soul on the water. I can't imagine not getting onto the water – on a big boat, a Redwing 18, or an innertube. Water is the only magic I know. So I'm an advocate, and were I the Pied Piper the trail of my tiny-footed band would lead to the shore. I want kids to see the grace of the water, and to see the shore from the ocean perspective – both useful visions.

Adkins

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

It's true that Himself is calmer and more lucid, less flighty and anxious, when he returns from a trip around the Bay. Perhaps other men center themselves in the woodshop or on their bicycles or hunting moose. Himself is a Water Healer; get him off the shore for a few hours and he's nearly tolerable. He says that the problems of the land diminish in proportion to the height of the trees as he sails away from the dock. Is it merely one form of temporary nepenthe, or is it like the old Norton Utilities program that rearranged your hard drive storage into logical, faster segments? Either way it's better than vodka.



Adkins

ARTICLE FROM SOUNDINGS by William Sisson

OK, I admit it. I’m a sucker for good-looking small boats. Always have been.

The latest one to catch my eye is the Whiticar 21, which is both gorgeous and one of a kind. It’s the only outboard boat ever built by Whiticar Boat Works, the noted Stuart, Fla., builder of quality cold-molded offshore sportfishermen.

This little gem was built in 1966 for T.R. Garlington of custom boatbuilder Garlington Yachts, who used to run her a mile or two out into the Gulf Stream on fair days to fish for sailfish. She was completely restored in 2009 by Paul Scopinich, who owns Scopinich Boat Works in Stuart, which is known for its quality fighting chairs and custom boats.

Scopinich bought the 21-footer about eight years ago from a local captain and stored it in a garage until last year, when business slowed and it seemed like a good time to tackle a refit.

“I pulled it out of the garage in June, and we all went at it,” Scopinich says. The cold-molded mahogany-planked hull was in surprisingly good shape. There were a few soft spots on the deck, on one of the frames and around the aluminum windshield, but otherwise the structure was sound.
Scopinich was impressed by how well the little Whiticar had weathered its 43 years. “The hull was perfect,” he says. “They go overboard when they build stuff. They don’t forget the epoxy.”

The only structural changes Scopinich had to make during the restoration were replacing a few planks and frames. In breathing new life into the Whiticar, he and his team completely rewired the boat, put a teak deck over the original cold-molded plywood one, added a teak helm pod and two new helm chairs, and rechromed all the original hardware.

He replaced the aluminum windshield with a lovely wooden one that Whiticar founder Curt Whiticar sketched for him on the back of a nautical chart. “Curt, who is 94, is the one who built that boat,” says Scopinich, who enjoyed consulting with the spry nonagenarian during the restoration of the former Ju Ann.

At one time, the boat was powered by a Mercury Black Max outboard. Scopinich hung a new 90-hp Suzuki 4-stroke on the transom and replaced the Suzuki stickers with new specially made Mercury ones from the Black Max period. Nice touch. He painted the hull “fighting lady yellow,” with a “snow white” deck.

In all, he figures he has about 850 hours into the project, which wrapped up in November. Scopinich has put a price tag north of $80,000 on her, although he says he may wind up using the boat himself. For photos or to contact Scopinich, go to www.scopinich.com, (772) 288-3111.

She is a lovely little dayboat with a strong pedigree. Makes you wish boats like this were the rule in our world today, rather than such an exception.

ADKINS COMMENTS to the Marine Industry Forum

What a sweetheart of a boat, and what a reassuring story about trustworthy construction, respect for the vintage form, and the care that our older boats deserve. The icing on the cake was the collusion of her original, 90+ builder.

I'm wondering if we in the marine sector are reading our compass correctly. A lot of us are surely following the rest of American business by scrapping over the disposable income of the very wealthy. That's the common wisdom. Granted, she was rebuilt as a gold-plater with a gold pricetag, and one hopes the builder is rewarded with a good price. But when I see a sweet little boat like this I wonder if we shouldn't be selling the water-life to a more modest demographic of families and young people. Perhaps boating can once again be an ideal of egalitarian sport. It wasn't so long ago that New England yacht clubs were places you could meet folks with very different net worths – a senator, a young middle-class family, or a retired bass-fishing guide. Perhaps we're seeing an era of small boat exploration again.

WoodenBoat is running a series on "Getting Started In Boats" (I've written two of them, but they're all quite good). Young men and women are making impressive kayak trips, camp-cruising along the coast and even out into the big sounds, very like the dreamy, iconic voyages of the Rob Roy in 1866, or some of the pre-1900 voyages down the coast in decked canoes and kayaks.

The only thing we know about oil is that it will become more and more expensive. If the house of Saud falls, which seems more probable than possible, the price of oil will spike immediately. Folks who now motor out of San Francisco Bay for good fishing around the Farallones simply won't be traveling that far, if at all (80 gallons @ $4/gal for a day of fishing?). A contemporary problem is abandoned vessels, often sound and well-fitted, abandoned by owners who simply can't afford the continuing costs of fuel, insurance, slips and maintenance. Perhaps some of the gracious, big twin-screw behemoths will survive but the bottom will drop out of marina service and marine sales. Unless we cultivate a new market in family boating aboard small, home-maintainable vessels, kit-boats, small adventurers.

My meetings with the Traditional Small Craft Association show a lively interest in both old forms and in small adventures on a budget. Are we doing enough to encourage a new market? Are we emulating that sterling character, that admirable waterman found in all Coast Pilots, the Prudent Mariner? Who's watching the compass?

Adkins

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS


IT'S ABOUT TIME himself paid attention to his blog. He's been reliably informed that the only way to raise his creative profile is to put himself out into the current, to float his work in the channel. Direct selling does creatives very little good. Most of his "big mailings" have netted nothing, nada, goose egg, while his major commissions seem to drop out of nowhere. Nothing drops from nowhere. He's needed a bit of prodding but Adkins is at last beginning to use his blabby facility and send it out again. "Watch this space," as they say. He needs a crotchety dwarf like me to nudge him into action.

Braxinoso

Boat Night

Tuesday is boat night at the Dolphin Club. The Dolphin is a large frame building rambling along the shoreline below the Ghirardelli Chocolate factory, next to the public beach and it's art deco building, across the cove from the San Francisco Maritime Museum. It's a little outpost of New England on the Bay, woody, genteely distressed and (for San Francisco) old. The first floor shelters the weight room, the kitchen, the boatshop, and a collection of pulling boats [lubber's note: rowboats]. Most are for a single oarsperson but there are longboats for two, four and more rowers. Locker rooms, showers, steam rooms and a spartan but easygoing lounge with a spectacular view occupy the upper floor.

The basic Dolphin Activity is quite mad: swimming in the Bay. There is an annual swim to Alcatraz and back. Ahem. I doubt that I will join them. But every Tuesday John Bielinski, the Dolphin's boatbuilder, organizes the 10 or 15 volunteers that show up to maintain the exquisite smaller boats. Like all wooden boats thoughtlessly dunked in water, they need obsessive attention. Add to this, they are bright-finished – varnished. This requires yearly scraping, sanding, and reapplication. The methods, approaches, brands, brushes and application of varnishes can be a religious observance for waterfolk and has created angry sects. The Dolphin is interdenominational in the canon of marine finishes, so even varnish nights are relatively peaceful.

After the volunteers work three hours or so, we all eat together in the boat house at long tables. Since tonight was Fat Tuesday, one of the members had made jambalaya. The kitchen was already fragrant with sausage and filé when a big crowd of about 20 assembled. Word had gone out that one of the older pulling boats needed five new ribs, an operation requiring teamwork, timing, speed and finesse. This was not merely woodworking but time management and tool quickness. And because why, mate? Because these 'ere boats is clinker-built and as light as eggshells, but tough as a pig's nose.

The pulling boats are Whitehalls. This means that they're rowing boats with a distinct and delicately cupped shaped, a "wineglass" transom [back end]. They're very light for their size, built in the ancient "clinker" construction. "Clinker" is an Old English cognate of "clencher," which indicates that the boat is made up of thin, overlapping planks of a light, flexible wood (in this case, white cedar) "clenched" to tough ribs with copper rivets. Rivets are very old usage that binds more tightly than nails and more securely than screws. To fit the locust wood ribs to the inside of the boat's pronounced curves, they must be milled thin (a little thicker than 1/4" and about 5/8" wide) and softened in a steam box for about half an hour. They're taken out with heavy gloves and pressed immediately into the boat. While the ribs are still whippy and hot they're clamped into place and immediately drilled through. The drilled hole passes through a rib, the lower part of an overlapping strake [long hull plank] and the upper part of the next strake below it.

As soon as the holes are drilled a copper riveting nail is hammered through them. The "nail" is square in section to grip the wood more tightly. A round copper washer – called a "burr" – is forced over the square nail with a special riveting tool. The tool is like a chisel with a flat end and a hole for the nail, so that whacking the burr down onto the nail forces the rib and strakes together. The nail is then snipped off just above the burr and, while one partner "bucks" (holds a heavy iron on the nailhead end to prevent it from being driven away), the other shapes the soft copper over the burr with a small ball-peen hammer (the kind with one flat head and one round head, made especially for work like this). The copper is so malleable that it mushrooms easily and each stroke of the shaping ball-peen hammer tightens the assembly.

Is this is more than you want to know? But it's historic stuff, ancient methodology, very cool to watch and do.

The trick is that everyone must work fast and in close concert, because the wood stays flexible from the steam box only a few minutes. Whisked out of the pressure and heat, slammed into the boat against the inside of the strakes and under some of the longitudinal structure, immediately drilled, nails hammered home, burrs forced down against the inside of the rib, the nails cut off at just the right length above the burr, and tap, tap, tap, tap until the rivet is shaped.

Jay and I worked as a team. Half the time I was above the boat, tapping the rivets home, shaping the mushroomed-over heads in the soft copper. Half the time I was under the boat, lying on the shop floor, holding the heavy bucking iron against the nail head. The peening (shaping] was a more focused task. Holding the bucking iron was heavier work. The compensation for that heavy work was lying beneath the boat's lyric curves, each strake describing a separate curved plane with a step separating it from the next plane, the graceful strake lines paralleling and harmonizing, the color of the varnished white cedar glowing golden and varying with the glare from every work light, shading from dark umber in the shadows to chrome yellow in the light. Beautiful. The locust wood ribs emerging from the steam box smelled bitter and damp. The drilled cedar smelled like incense. The tapping and the calling between three sets of partners – two sets riveting, one set placing new ribs – was a cacophony with a subtly discernible rhythm and order.

The work had a sensible urgency and a splendid, strong outcome. What do we do in our lives that gives us much of that? These boats are old fashioned, outmoded in everything but their intrinsic utility: one person using oars to skim the water quickly and with assurance. Some of the boats themselves are old, relics, cockleshells rowed by the oldest members when they were young. We make them live over and over, replacing ribs, strakes, fittings, finish. We have a stake in the heritage. Boats like this are lent to us by dead oarsmen to keep for unborn oarsmen. It's a privilege we share.

Jan Adkins

Braxinoso speaks:
My attention is usually wasted on reminding Himself of tradition and continuity. Occasionally, however, he gets the bit between his teeth and waxes eloquent about the oldness of things. He's quite right to underscore our maritime heritage, of course, but he leaves out the real reason he attends boat night: it's just fun fooling around with boats. As the rat said, there's nothing like it.
Braxinoso