A Human Pace

A day in a boatyard is a lesson in the joy of work. I spent much of my life from age eleven through age twenty - what are generally called the “formative years” - in and around boats and working boatyards, when I wasn’t in school at least. So more than almost any other place for me, a traditional working boatyard feels like home. There is a sameness to them, whether in Washington, Florida, Maryland, or Maine - or anywhere else I imagine. The same characters dressed in ancient, paint-covered, Carhartt jeans, the same smells of grinding fiberglass, solvents, and paint, the same sounds of sanders and shop vacs telling of progress toward launch day. 

Tell people you own a boat - people who don’t have boats that is - and without fail the response will be some variation on “boats are so much work, I could never own one”, usually accompanied by a look that combines equal parts envy and pity. And they are not wrong. After the fourth or fifth hour of sanding, with the dust adhering to the sweat on my arms, fine particles irritating my eyes and a sharp pain torturing the muscles of my neck and upper back, I am quite inclined to agree that boats are a lot of work.

Without a doubt, sanding is hell. But sanding is also meditation and absolution. If we can achieve remission of sins through good works then perhaps we may attain grace through the vigorous application of a random orbital sander to flaking paint, weathered wood, and dull varnish. I can only hope so, since I will not reach that state through more traditional methods. But if not, I can at least be comforted by the earthly satisfaction of seeing a gray, salt-stained section of rub rail revealed as a buttery, golden piece of fir through my efforts.

Working on boats provides much time for musing, pondering and reflection. A few years ago, as I was perched on a section of scaffolding along the side of the boat, high above the concrete, moving with slow care to keep from tumbling off, it occurred to me that boatyards are one of the last places where the work is conducted at a completely human pace. 

At least in what we like to call “developed countries”, the great majority of labor is done at a rate which is dictated by a machine. While we may have moved on from the industrial-age mechanization that was protested by the Luddites and satirized by Charlie Chaplin, we have done so only to replace the steam engine with the computer, an even more precise and demanding task master. Now we work at the pace of email, of spreadsheets, of daily standup meetings, of the not-at-all-ironically-named “burn down chart”.

But in a boatyard the professional painters, and varnishers, and shipwrights move deliberately; efficient but never hurried. One can only paint or varnish so fast. Rush the work and it will be ruined. Shaping and offering up a plank is hard work. Take your time, do each step with care, do it once. Then stop for a moment. Look at the boat. Take a drink of water. Allow your muscles to settle and relax. Then start on the next one.

Swinging a caulking mallet is rhythmic, human, unmechanical, a task fit for John Henry. The caulker twists the cotton around the caulking iron and pushes it into the seam with sure, rapid movements, and then taps it home, feeling for the right point; not too hard, not too loose, until, seam by seam, the hull is made tight, the water kept out, the boat safe from foundering.

Boatyards are the setting for the labor by which we earn our time on the water. For every day spent at anchor, watching the stars or lounging in the sun, for the privilege of exploring our pelagic natures upon the sea, for the joy of seeing a new harbor or returning to a familiar one, we expend a certain measure of time in caring for our vessel. Thus we do not devolve into mere idleness. Thus is a balance maintained. Thus we slow our rhythms to that of the tides, of seasons, of the hours of the day - lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline, matins. Thus we are returned to ourselves.