On the first week

The new year started at IYRS with some remarks from the president, the academic director, and the coordinator of student services. A hundred or so students—both new and returning—were seated around tables in Restoration Hall, drinking coffee and eating little pastries from the coffee shop across the street. We filled out paperwork and chatted among ourselves and listened to the speakers as they occupied the podium. The room was crowded but not stuffy, and eventually we were split into three orientation groups for campus tours and more talks from the job and internship placement coordinator and our respective teaching faculties.

We went through two or three days of talks and OSHA lectures and a respirator fitting—all important stuff, to be sure, but I was anxious to get started doing something. 

Finally, after lunch on the third day, we started sharpening tools, honing and hollow grinding chisels and plane irons on sandpaper, diamond stones, and fine grinder wheels.  I worked my way through eight chisels and my block plane iron that afternoon and the next morning, and soon we started on bench joint practice.

Were currently progressing through a series of lap, mortise and tenon, and dovetail joints on small blocks of soft Spanish cedar that smells like your grandmother's coat closet and tears out of you simply look at it from the wrong angle. My joints are serviceable but far from perfect, and I plan to stay late practicing as much as possible over the next few weeks, even as we move on to other projects during the day. 

Coupled with the joinery practice, we're rotating through safety training on the big stationary power tools in the machine room. This kind of thing can of course be a bit dull, but I'm glad to get the training—especially on the big planers and bandsaws I've never used before. By the end of the week I hope to have passed the safety tests and as such will be able to use the power tools in the shop after hours, allowing me to get started on some of my own projects.

It is continually apparent to me how much I have yet to learn, but I'm starting to feel comfortable in the shop and get to know some of the other students and the instructors, and I'm getting there an hour early every morning so as to have some time to practice before everyone else comes in.  

This year, in addition to the Beetle Cat and the small bench projects, they're adding a tool chest to the curriculum, which means I'll have even more chances to practice traditional joinery techniques on a piece that I'll get to keep when this is all done. I'm glad to have this extra practice, and am looking forward to having a relatively intricate piece of woodworking to keep and put to use even after the program ends.

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 going

“ 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.”

— Herman Melville, "Loomings," Moby Dick

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.