“ Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”
At the beginning of Moby Dick, Ishmael explains to the reader his reasons for going to sea. While my reasons for going into boatbuilding are perhaps not so dire, they are not entirely dissimilar. I was in Washington just more than two and a half years ago, staying with my girlfriend's family after cutting short a long-planned trip to Peru. We were living in Chile then, teaching English at a private bilingual school in the expensive suburbs of Santiago. Our summer was nearly over, and the February drear of Western Washington nicely reflected how we felt about returning for yet another year to the deeply dysfunctional institution where we worked. If there were still coffin warehouses rather than display rooms in carefully appointed funeral homes, I would have involuntarily paused and gazed longingly at them. (I didn't know then that I would to have the best teaching year of my career in the year to come. Instead I could think only of the lunatic brother-and-sister team that ran the school and having to smile at colleagues and give them hello and goodbye kisses.)
I was looking for a way out then, something else to do, some other thing that would allow me to pay my bills and maybe start writing again and, most importantly, decrease my growing desire to smash my head repeatedly against a brick wall. I was reading Moby, maybe 300 pages into it, when my sister sent me a text message with a link to a video. I clicked it and rotated my phone to fullscreen, watching as the camera panned over an enormous shop floor in a high-ceilinged brick building, the hulls of upturned boats painted in faded greens and reds. Young men and women were pushing planes over new unpainted hulls and pulling frames out of a steam box. The garage-style doors were open on one end of the shop, and I could almost smell the sea and the wood shavings. This was IYRS, where people went to spend two years studying the construction of wooden boats, and then somehow got jobs building them afterward. I was instantly hooked. The next day I went out and bought a copy of WoodenBoat and a few carpentry magazines. I even left Ishmael behind for a while, focusing instead on finding out more about this school and this industry and what it might mean to point myself in that direction.
Between that moment and today I could have enrolled in and completed the Boatbuilding and Restoration program, but I couldn't allow myself to get in a hurry, as much as I may have wanted. Instead, I left Chile, spent a few months working on the farm, and went to Spain for a one-year, renewable ESL teaching gig. I waited even to apply to IYRS for two full years, rolling the notion around in my head against a PhD in Northern Europe, a couple years of adjunct teaching in either the Midwest or the Mississipi Delta, and staying in Spain indefinitely. I was in Barcelona when I finally decided I was ready to apply, and on the bus ride back to Madrid I completed the application.
Over the next couple months I was admitted, went through the process of applying for scholarships, and eventually decided to attend. At first I didn't announce it; like Ishmael, I wanted to "quietly take to the ship." But eventually I decided I might get a kick out of people's faces when I told them what I was going to do. I was right. Then I scrambled to get enough work together that I could fit in around the full-time IYRS schedule and still be able to pay my bills. I've been acquiring tools for the last several weeks, and I have today reached the eve of my departure. The pickup is loaded with tools and clothes and books and a bicycle. Tomorrow morning I will set out in the rough direction of Rhode Island, shooting off the path at the end of each day to stay with friends from graduate school, from Chile (now living in the US), and from high school. I'll spend five days on the road, arriving in Newport the day before Labor Day, with classes to start the following Tuesday.
The narrative makes sense to me, writer to teacher to boatbuilder. I don't exactly know why, but it feels like a natural progression. I hope to make more sense of it here.