On starting

I arrived in Newport on Sunday, driving the last short stretch down from Leicester, MA, that morning. The route took me from Massachusetts into Rhode Island and then back into Massachusetts and back into Rhode Island. It rained the whole way and was cloudy and chilly all day. I pulled into the driveway of my Thames Street rental and spoke briefly with the landlord before taking off on foot toward IYRS. I walked around the campus once, anxiously avoiding speaking to anybody, and then walked back home, stopping for a quart of motor oil and a six-pack of Narragansett Bay Lager. I unloaded my pickup in the spattering rain and met my roommate and our downstairs neighbor. We are all incoming IYRS students in different programs and we ended up hanging out on our porch until almost one in the morning.

Tomorrow—later today, technically—is the first day of class at IYRS. I have been trying to get to sleep for a couple hours now to no avail. My head is racing through all the things I do not know, all of the mistakes I will make. And yet despite the nervous pit in my stomach I am almost deliriously happy. More than two years ago I learned about this place and fell in love with the idea of it, but I never thought I would actually be able to do it. But, at 8:30am tomorrow morning, orientation will start, and my name will somehow be on a list of first-year students in the Boatbuilding and Restoration program.

In the afternoon, after the morning of paperwork and introductions is complete, I'll unload my tools into my bench in Restoration Hall, and from then on I'll be a wooden boat builder. A neophyte, to be sure, but less so every day.

No matter what time I eventually fall asleep tonight, tomorrow I will rise early, have coffee and nerves for breakfast, and then head down the street into a new world. 

On the road and the way there

“ ‘Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have spoiled it.’

’Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee? Thou seem’st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it.’”

— Herman Melville, "The Log and Line," Moby Dick

When I was in college, and even in grad school, I could drive sixteen or eighteen hours at a stretch. I would drink endless coffee and smoke endless cigarettes and set the cruise at four miles over the speed limit and go for hundreds of miles without so much as a bathroom break. On my trips to and from Missoula, I’d try to leave early—by 4:00am or at least by 6:00. It was a long drive and I reasoned that I’d prefer to do my driving in the dark while I was fresh and having my first cup of coffee rather than my twenty-first. I remember one time, driving home to Missoula after a visit to Vermillion, lighting one cigarette off another for the last two hours just to keep my eyes open—to keep me focused on something. But I could do it. Now, at 29, I am too old and gray and tired to go more than a couple hours without feeling my eyelids droop. I’m glad I’m breaking this trip up into bite-size pieces, and I’m enormously grateful for the friends who are hosting me as I pass through. Stops in Winona, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Leicester make this trip a whole lot more fun and much easier to manage.

Today, in Chicago, I walked from Jim and Lore’s house down to the waterfront near Navy Pier. I stood and watched the sailboats bob in the current, wondering how it will be to work on them, to learn to take them apart and put them back together, to learn to make something beautiful and useful. In less than a week I’ll start. It will be dovetails on the bench at first, small projects designed to give us a baseline from which to work. I think we make a toolbox and a mallet for chisels in the first couple weeks. But soon I’ll be taking planks off of a Beetle Cat and learning to loft its lines. Soon I’ll be building a pond boat for myself. Soon I’ll be building furniture—a map cabinet for Hava, a record cabinet for Dave, an oak rocker for my mother, a writing desk and more bookshelves for myself. It’s going to happen fast from here on in. Another two thousand miles or so is all that’s left.