Do you hear that?

The word I hear most frequently is my name. I have a job where at any given time there are 22 people clamoring for my attention, right now. I have a family where at any given time someone demands 22 things of me, right now. I like to do things for people and I never learned how to pronounce “no”, so I try to accommodate people. But now and then my head starts to explode and I need to unplug. For the past few years my chance to tune out has been a trip to North Ontario to open camp. There are no phones, no electricity, rudimentary plumbing, and no people. To get there involves a 12-hour drive, a 4-wheel-drive trek on a hidden trail, then a mile-long boat ride across an isolated lake to the camp, the only camp on the lake.


This level of seclusion isn’t for everybody. And that is a good thing. Otherwise, it might get crowded, which would defeat the point. Solitude is the point. For a few days at least there isn’t a single reason to utter a single word. I might curse out loud because the water pump won’t take a goddamn prime. But there is no real rush. I can have a cup of coffee and think about the problem. And up there the problems are always straightforward and always get solved. Better to keep my mouth shut and not injure the quietude with blasphemy.

Ok, it’s not perfectly silent. I use a generator to run the pump. The outboard engine takes me across the lake. An mp3 plays tunes while I eat. The hiss of the gas stove boils water for coffee. But the only mechanical sound I hear not coming from me is the distant drone of the occasional de Havilland Beaver carrying fisherman to distant lakes.
Opening camp is work, but it is done in time. Plenty of time to do things that people with time and solitude do: like go fishing.

After a day of doing, it is nice to lie in bed and listen to the uninterrupted night. But the peace is so complete that I am soon listening to my dreams. Several days in a row of this rigor and I am ready for anything and anyone.

The first words when I came out of the bush were at Tim Horton’s: “coffee, black.”

Tick Tock

I grow old. I see it I feel it. I am somewhat concerned with it. In the past three years I went from being a young man to being middle aged. I like a lot of what has happened. I tell you, I know how to get shit done. Some balls drop, but for the most part I get tons done. The pleasure of accomplishment has displaced the anxiety of insecurity. But time is passing. This commentary - Culture That Makes You Feel Old - got me thinking:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/culture-that-makes-you-feel-old,39572/
Me, I check my age every morning when I look at Wikipedia’s This Day in History (I do this because I teach social studies and I want the kids to see how history is a series of connections and consequences.) The part I notice in the long list of birthdays is the number of people older than me but still alive who have accomplished something significant like writing a book or doing public service worthy of note. Then I look at how many people worthy of a notation on the “Born on this day” list are younger than me are and there because they are celebrities.
I have discovered that I am on the tipping point. More frequently I see the names of people I admire, born after April 27, 1964.

Being There

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.” Henry David Thoreau

This is what it is all about: going there and being. Someone tipped me off to this blog by a young family cruising the Bahamas in a boat much like Haiku.

http://blog.mailasail.com/seafever

Our lives become so busy, filled with so many essential and critical deadlines, that sometimes it is hard to image how to live life doing something as basic as waking up, eating, playing, sleeping. How can a simple life be fulfilling?

I have learned that when I am able to put aside the societal expectations to live in contact with my environment, that I become engrossed in something deeply satisfying: living. I become aware that although I am just a very small part, I am indeed a part of all that I have met.

Stay tuned: soon I hope to post pictures of my footprints in the sand.

Infected

I know when I was infected with the disease. It was in my sleep when I was a very small child. My father came into my room and put this talisman over my bed. This was the last thing I saw before falling asleep and the first thing when I woke up.

The painting hung in my father’s room when he was a child. Today it hangs in my son’s bedroom.
These things can be tough to identify. But it sure looks like Shamrock V, the only remaining wooden J boat.

In hope that someone reading this can corroborate the ID, my grandfather received the painting as a gift from the widow of Marshall Sheppey, a tycoon from Toledo, Ohio who briefly owned the boat pictured and kept it in Miami. He hired Warren Sheppard to paint this portrait

Water in the veins

This is the earliest picture I have of me on the water. I’m the towhead sitting in my mother’s lap. The guy reaching for a match is my father’s best friend. Can’t ID the rest, although I can say there are a lot of them because we used to cram ourselves into these slab-sided pine skiffs from the Cutler Lake Lodge in North Ontario to get to the far end of the lake to spend the summer at my Grandpa Dirk’s fish camp.

These boats were amazing. Sixteen feet long and five feet wide, they were cross-planked on the bottom with the sides coming up at right angles. (They could easily have been Phil Bolger’s inspiration.) Billy McKnight, an old-time woodsman, logged the trees, milled them into thick boards and nailed them together with 10-penny nails. Painted grey and red, they were pushed by six-horse Johnsons. Despite constant use and abuse, they held up well. The last one found a permanent mud berth about 10 years after this picture was taken. Thirty years later I still find the bones of Billy’s old boats on the bottoms of quiet bays.

In those lodge skiffs I learned that pounding through the waves to a far shore in a sturdy wooden boat is just about the best way for a boy to discover adventure.

There’s lots of maths in a boat.

Specs for the Haiku by Iain Oughtred:
LOA: 9.15 m - 30' 0" Beam: 2.36 m - 7' 8" Draft: 0.40 m - 1' 3" Sail Area: 31.32 sq m - 337.00 sqf Weight: 1590.90 kg - 3500 lbs Displacement: 772.73 kg - 1700 lbs

People build boats by eye and experience all the time. One day, I might. But right now I follow the plans. That means I take a series of measurements and turn them into 3-D shapes. This is when I wish I was metric. But I do love how my brain feels after struggling with turning numbers into a spatial reality. And there are some interesting things to learn. For example, the numbers above mean the boat will only go 7.34 knots (or more than 8 miles an hour!)

The formula:
v = 1.34 x √LWL
where:
"LWL" is the length of the waterline in feet, and"v" is the speed of the vessel in knots (1kn=1.15mph)

I don’t understand the formula well enough to explain it, but I think it says a boat creates a hole in the water that it cannot climb out of. But it can push it forward at a speed that is defined by the length of the boat, or the distance between between the bow wave and the stern wave.

Other interestingly named numbers that affect speed are prismatic coefficient (explains how sharp-ended a boat is, knife versus brick going through the water) and wetted surface (how much of the hull’s surface comes in contact with the water creating drag.)

When I try to wrap my head around this stuff, I can’t think of anything else. And that is a good thing, at times.

First, you build a little boat.

In life you don’t get a lot of do-overs. But you do get plenty of chance to practice. The first step in building a big boat is to build a little boat, a model precise to the plans in scale and detail. Except for being able to use balsa and a hot glue gun, the model is built using the same techniques used in the big boat. You learn a lot and you are left with a very cool toy.
Iain built one:

This is where I am going to build one. Someone taught me to make sure my work space was good. Sometimes I forget and I am always happier when I remember and clean up before I start a project.

Why?

This blog is about building a boat. But, because a boat is such a great metaphor for many of life’s issues, it will also be about stuff.
Why build this boat? I thought long and worked hard to face myself and make such a big decision. Ultimately, I thought about where I want to go and what I want to do with my life. Building this boat, Iain Oughtred’s version of Commodore Munroe’s Egret, is the best thing I can do to get there.

This boat can handle a variety of conditions because its hull shape responds well to many different conditions. And I want to sail in a variety of places. I don’t see myself happy with a big boat moored in one spot for long periods of time. I want to explore the nooks and crannies of Lake Huron. I want to wander north along the coast of Maine. I want to circumnavigate Martha’s Vineyard. I want to jump the Gulf Stream and laze around the Bahamas for weeks. This boat will live on a trailer and go 70 miles an hour toward the water. It is also a stunningly beautiful boat. This boat improves any view. We shouldn’t waste time doing ugly things.

I know I can get the same amount of boat for a lot less money if I buy a well-loved fiberglass boat from the 70s. But aside from breaking the rule about not doing anything ugly, it isn’t doing much. Building a large boat is a significant endeavor.
Journeys, struggles, choices, beauty, doing something with life: that might be worth chronicling.