Introducing myself to the IYRS community

We've been measuring the boats and lofting their lines for the last week and a half or so. The jig here is set to measure the curve of the stem. Next week I'll dive into the lofting process more fully with a new post.

Things have been quiet on the blog for a couple of weeks while we’ve been sorting out the details on a recent development: starting this week I’ll be writing for the official IYRS blog and then cross-posting here.

My first post over at IYRS is below:

Read the rest by clicking the picture or following this link.

On the foghorn and the green light

Newport Harbor in the fog

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The foghorn has been blowing nights lately here in Newport. It is rhythmic, consistent, and faint when heard from behind and some city blocks away. But it's there, alerting passing ships of a busy harbor and a jagged coastline; both a warning and a welcome, I imagine, on a night wrapped in a pale shroud.

As I sit on the porch of my house on Thames Street (pronounced THAY-MS, as if you've never heard of the river that cuts across London) in Newport, just five minutes walking to the waterfront, I listen to the foghorn and wonder why it still blows. Between GPS systems, Doppler radar, easy synchronous communication with harbormasters, weather app push notifications, and all the millions of other high-tech methods of communicating information to ships at sea, why do we still go to the trouble of blowing a foghorn or lighting a lighthouse? Surely those other methods must be in use, so why do we cling to these outmoded techniques as well?

Foghorns and lighthouses are just a single step removed from bonfires and yelling from the beach, and yet we stick with them. We keep just enough of them maintained to back up our new digital warning and communication networks, and we sell the rest of them off to become passion projects, museums, or Airbnb rentals. But they still dot our coasts and the coasts of the rest of the world, and we hear the horns blowing on foggy nights and are reminded that our contemporary systems have antecedents in a pre-digital history, a history in which the brightness of a lighthouse lamp or the volume of a foghorn could change the fates of those living their lives on the water and the people waiting for them on shore.

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The foghorn blows, and the fog changes light. I walked down to a deserted corner of the harbor earlier and stood on the edge of the island. Across the water a few hundred yards in front of me, a finger of land cut into the sea, with docks and cedar-sided buildings long since converted from their original industrial purpose into cafes and bars. Refracting through the water in the air, the bluish mercury vapor pole lights came to me tinted green, and I thought of Gatsby staring out over the water, seeing Daisy in that green light over the dock.

That light, turned green likely by the fog, is something to strive for, but it's unclear whether he desires the chance to build a glorious future or relive a beautiful past. As Nick Carraway reflects on Gatsby's death, he engages this circular desire. The boat sails against the current, but for every thrust forward it moves backward as well. The future recedes beyond our grasp, but perhaps if we lean forward just a bit farther we'll be able to catch its edge and pull ourselves into it. But of course, as Gatsby learns, this is a lie we tell ourselves to explain the sore muscles from all that reaching. We cannot live in any time but the present, no matter how much money or how many friends and party guests we have.

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I do sometimes wonder if that's why I'm here, learning traditional methods to build sailing vessels from wood. I wonder if I'm chasing a past in the guise of a future. In my case the past is not my own, but a shared one, and in pursuing it I wonder if I'm running forward in an attempt to chase down something that is actually behind me.

If that's the case, however, it does seem like I'll be running alongside a lot of other people in pursuit of the same thing. I'm not a Luddite smashing the machines in the factory, but I am in search of some way to make a living and a life that has been touched and shaped and created by human hands. It's possible, however, that this life is a figment of my imagination.

My previous career brought me to many far-flung corners of the world, and I'm enormously grateful for the opportunities it afforded me, But now I'm ready for something different, something more material, something more vertically organized than horizontal. I don't want to spread myself out to cover as much of the world (or the ministry-mandated curriculum) as I can. Instead, I want to dive into things, I want to peer inside and beneath and to set myself in the ground and learn how they work and how to make them myself.

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.