“ ‘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.’”
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.