Penguin Books 2002
“Boatstruck”
Here is a book written so well that you just want to carry it with you all the time – an instant passport to the world of wooden boatbuilding where a centuries-old style is used. Author Michael Ruhlman vividly writes about the craftsmanship and mystique of wooden boats and their renaissance while delving into the lives of guru boat designer-builders Ross Gannon and Nat Benjamin and fellow boatbuilders at Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway. The author tackles why they live, eat, and sleep wooden boatbuilding and how the bumpiness of their lives brings them to this unique boatyard in Vineyard Haven that builds top-quality plank-on-frame boats.
The author isn’t a sailor (nor is this reviewer) yet Ruhlman has a way of beautifully detailing the assembly of Gannon and Benjamin’s boats, plank by plank, while he weaves in sailing stories that make your hair stand on end, each told by the quirky itinerant shipwrights who work on G & B’s noteworthy recent commissions – a grand scale schooner and deep ocean yacht called REBECCA, crafted in a way not seen since before World War II, and a 1930s style workboat, ELISA LEE.
For readers who want a linear chronology of events, Ruhlman’s style may frustrate them. He goes back in time with the boatyard (aptly called a “temple” at one point) and the boatbuilders, then forward, then back again in a patchwork-quilt timeline. The author has a knack for getting his arrow-like pen directly into the bullseye, creating vivid mini-biographies of maverick boatwrights who have sailing wanderlust, occasional brushes with the law, and are skilled beyond belief with wood, often learning the craft only because their own rigs need repair.
Here’s a vignette that captures the author’s gift for distilled writing as well and passion of his key boatbuilder subject, Ross Gannon. Prior to writing this book Ruhlman has his first meeting with the intense Gannon (advised by Wooden Boat magazine’s Jon Wilson to do so) at Rockport Marine aboard WHEN AND IF, the restored schooner built for General George Patton. While Ruhlman’s three-year-old daughter frolics below on this magnificent vessel, he asks Ross Gannon why wooden boats are important to him. The author writes:
“Why had he devoted his life to them? Ross seemed surprised by my apparent ignorance regarding to him what was plain and his blazing eyes burned right through me.
” ‘Do you want to teach your daughter that what you do, what you care about is disposable?” he asked. “That you can throw your work away. It doesn’t matter ?’ ”
The heart of Wooden Boats is that it’s all about non-disposability, about carefully crafting something that lasts hundreds of years and that can’t be popped out of a mold. Purists in the wooden boat world say plank-on-frame construction is a real wooden boat; cold-molded wood and glue vessels are not. And so the debate goes. It’s not about snootiness or elitism, Ruhlman’s subjects say. It’s about safety on the high seas and integrity, or to describe it simply, “Pieces of wood held together by bronze that stay together in dynamic conditions at sea.” Taking a cultural overview he also writes, “Wooden boats moved contrary to our high-speed synthetic culture.”
While getting at the soul of wooden boatbuilding, the author’s eloquence comes across:
“The wooden boat, big or small, after all, embodied and gave extended meaning to the natural world, trees harvested one by one, sawn, planed, bent, and faired with small tools into an exquisite shape that could be both home and vessel, that you could sail away on.”
This is a book you won’t want to have end, like summer itself, and will, like its boatbuilders and sailors, have you thoroughly “boatstruck.”