A headline from “developing” Africa, “Sierra Leone Drafts a Development Plan for the Next Fifty Years.”

A forum loosely organized around traditional craft has a discussion about sailing cargo vessels. There are links to proposals for container ships sporting lofty, computerized, automated sail plans, “working” counterparts to the latest sailing cruise ships, themselves intended as fantasy havens for fantasy seekers.

What do these have in common? Besides the fact that Freetown looks the way it does because this is what drove development in the first world – someplace has to be exploited to “generate” all that “wealth” – they are both examples of the way futurism, one of the sects of the worship of Progress, can only see the future as an absurd continuation of the present.

Except the near certainty that in fifty years whatever has been so assiduously planned and discussed in conferences in “developed oases” scattered around the remnant of the yet to be fully trashed world won’t be even a distant memory to whoever and in whatever circumstances they may be living in what is now called Sierra Leone; no one has the slightest idea what life will be like, there or anywhere, in fifty years. But of course that’s not the point of Fifty Year Plans – and they used to make fun of the Soviets for their Five Year Plans…. It’s a ritual, meant to appease the gods of high finance and rack up some perks for the participants along the way.

The sailing container ship idea is that also, but it’s also something else. We see, and smile knowingly as we do, looking at any illustrated magazine story from the mid Nineteenth through the late Twentieth Centuries when a futurist would be let loose to describe the marvels of the coming age. Skyscrapers lining urban canyons stacked up with lanes of traffic vertically as well as horizontally, as dirigibles and velocicopters pass above triple-decker buses and Hansom Cabs. Even Blade Runner carries this same trope forward just a little bit, using it as an ironical signifier of futurity. What happened, and continues to happen, as these sailing container ships evidence, is that the same narrow concerns and expectations and assumptions that give us the present at any given moment are just pushed ahead in one flashy, but essentially misapplied form, to carry us forward into a “New Age!” No one stops to think that if there’s not enough bunker fuel to power behemoth container ships the conventional way there might not be enough other petroleum fuels to power the rest of the container cult’s operations, from sweatshop to shopping mall to waste “management?” How is this any different from a dirigible powered by “the forces of the atom,” or the “Starship” Enterprise, for that matter?

Is this the only way? Are we somehow fated to always reflect the most ridiculous minor twists on our present when we chose to affect how we will meet our future?

I don’t think so, though it requires a deep change in how we perceive the present and the future. The attitudes that bring us the slums of Freetown with one hand and the scintillating lights of a sail “powered” cruise ship with the other – unaware of their tight correlation – assume that the present is a set of problems, inherited problems, resulting from the past’s inability to present us with the lives we are entitled to, and that the future is something we create.

Each of us can, and probably does, on scanning our world, see countless errors and misunderstandings that lie behind the problematic nature of our present. It’s more or less a popular sport, one I’ve indulged in here in this post and in much of my writing. We are fraught with problems and their roots go back, and those roots are more or less traceable, giving us a series of “what if” moments to gaze back at with poignant regret. “What if only they had done this…”

From this we easily jump to our responsibility, to “get it right this time!” In our zeal, we fall into our double trap, seeing the past as the result of past decisions and seeing the future as something we can make.

The trouble is, both these are mistaken. The present, ultimately, just is. It’s causes and roots are so entwined and the proportion of what can be known about it is so tiny in relation to the unknown* that we have no idea what led to where we are, not in any true sense. We are trapped within our umwelt, our narrow view, and seeking comfort in the illusions of certainty.

*Here’s the math: the universe is infinite. What we know is finite. What is the proportion of all that is that is knowable? A vanishingly small amount. If this doesn’t compute, that’s a sign of impatience, not a countering argument.

As to the future, we don’t make it, it arrives.

This is where fifty year plans and sailing container-ships meet on the plane of false ideas. The future is never the result of plans or intended actions meeting their intended results. The future will be what happens when the few things we are aware of and the multitude we have no way of predicting come together within a matrix of profound uncertainty punctuated by unimaginable details that catalyze responses that cascade through being to create an assemblage of factors out of which we, or whoever is here to observe them, will imperfectly perceive and certainly miscomprehend what is happening – just as we do now, and as has always been the case.

“Well if that’s true, I give up!” This petulance underlies most of our responses whenever we begin to get a glimmer that this might truly be the case. Again, this doesn’t change the facts, just announces our willingness to hold onto deadly illusions instead of risking the loss of our precious sense of certainty.

What else can we do? If all this was about was bouncing the rubble, pointing out yet again how we fail to engage with reality in a meaningful way, there wouldn’t be much point. Those who are aware of these predicaments must be tired of going over old ground, and anyone still in thrall of Progress, or its flip-side, reptilian greed, are not going to be convinced by anything I might have to say.

There are some hints at how we could approach this differently, and they are, for the most part, attitudinal changes. This frustrates those who want to “get on with it!” What they fail to see is that our attitudes, how we attend upon what we can see and possibly understand – as well as our relationship with all the rest that is beyond understanding within the realm of mystery – is the one area in life where we are truly “in control.” Our attention, our attitudes, while not easily modified are mutable and we are the only ones who can truly alter them. What others do to us is manipulation, but we can actually evolve our attitudes and change our relationship with the world.

It’s so much easier to get mad, or to feel responsible for everything else, to “change the world.” It can be truly frightening to recognize our proprioception, that what we force upon ourselves as the effects of Ego toss us about on emotional and ideological roller-coasters; are not what they seem, “Look how they made me feel!” But our own doing. While we can’t create the future, we can modify our attention and this does give us a point of leverage upon our reality that is much more steady than the cycles of solutions and unintended consequences that plague us as we flail about “improving” things.

Is life worth living outside of some “dream?” We each must answer this for ourselves, but we need to recognize that there is a choice. This is the one arena where we do have a relatively untrammeled range of choices. If we chose to do otherwise, we find ourselves at the same time constrained, and freed, by the connections we begin to make with what actually is.

Contrary to the popular misconception, an artist is not looking for freedom. Art is not a chance to have unlimited choice. It is the opportunity to find a foundation upon which we can recognize how we are truly linked to what is and that in any given circumstance the right route appears inevitable and it is in the sorting out of perception and possible actions that we discover where those inevitabilities lie and we focus our creativity upon how we then act to fulfill them.

I expect that in some years significant traffic – whatever that will end up meaning – upon the sea will be under sail. We won’t be engaging with this necessity by spinning out fantasies of how to extend the current insanity using “greener” means. We will need to confront these questions with the humility that appreciates how little our actions actually result as intended, or that we can even comprehend to any significant level the factors we will confront.

For myself, I see in the constraints and closed off doors of bankrupt and irrelevant choices a chance to be clear of futility. We, in our chasing after fantasies of control, tend to underestimate the power of futility to shape our quality of life. Clearing out the enticements leading us to make the same mistakes again, in the same ways again, is the one benefit we have from this moment of clarity we find ourselves in.

So, let’s draw our attention to the uses and contexts that sailing will inevitably come to. There’s much to be done, and a lot of it will in time be of a “practical” nature. But before we get to that, we have plenty to do to change the one thing we do have a say in, our attitudes, our attention, and how we approach life. When we break free of seeing it all as a series of problems we must strive to “solve,” we begin to recognize how precious life is for itself, and that we can only live it as it comes and within each moment as we are experiencing it. It’s no loss to be finally free of all that planning, striving, pushing after what is no more than a twisted fantasy.

Filed under: Boats, Boats & Utility ]]> http://boats4difficulttimes.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/when-futurism-collides-with-sailing-cargo/feed/ 0 antoniodias Aerodrome http://boats4difficulttimes.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/schools-museums/ http://boats4difficulttimes.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/schools-museums/#comments Sun, 08 Jan 2012 20:56:58 +0000 Antonio Dias http://boats4difficulttimes.wordpress.com/?p=916 ]]>

For me, both as an artist and as someone involved with traditional boats, schools and museums have gone hand in hand and they have both been vitally important to me over the years.

Today, I keep coming back to a hunch that schools and museums need to change. They need to change and they need to change for the same reasons and in ways that might end up making them indistinguishable. This is true of all schools and all museums, though here let’s focus on the institutions within and around the community of boats.

I’ve had some old-fashioned notions about schools and museums. I’ve expected that schools were a place to learn how much we don’t know and come to terms with that, and that museums were places where we could find connections to the way people in other times and places dealt with the questions of living. This, when for most people school has been reduced to where we go to get credit for what we are spoon-fed and museums are theme-parks for the quaint and obsolete.

We are in the midst of a catabolic collapse. A catabolic collapse is what happens when a system, no longer able to find what it needs outside itself, begins to eat itself from the inside out so as to prolong its function. In the end, it doesn’t succumb directly to outside forces, it consumes itself. It’s a nasty business! There are plateaus of apparent stability that last for a while until another shock arrives, and the whole, or at least significant and ever larger parts, fall to the next level of comparative stasis. From the inside, this passes for stability long after a wake-up call would be helpful. We tend to blame ourselves for failures that are more or less fated by our circumstances. The system gathers defensive energies around the status-quo, and turns the naturally conservative among us into reactionaries and nihilistic revolutionaries. All of us are guilty of standing by in paralyzed silence as the unbelievable keeps happening and everything settles around us.

What does this have to do with schools and museums?

Schools and museums are institutionalized responses to fundamental needs. We need to pass on what we know, and we need to preserve enough of what came before to provide lessons for those who follow. As institutions, these entities become codified. Expectations, and the procedures they embody, become fossilized. Institutions, and the patterns codified in them, are in a race towards irrelevancy. The assumptions behind these patterns have carried dissonances with them that stretch back hundreds, and even thousands, of years. These have a life of their own and become parasitic on the very impulses we have to nurture and conserve.

We turn sentimentality against our schools and museums. We trivialize them as we expose ourselves to the dangers of brutality barely concealed in sentimentality. We keep schools “for the children!” We keep museums to remember the “good old days!” We show our contempt for everything we say we love in this way, and in the end, our contempt comes back around to destroy us.

How else can we think of schools and museums? How can we combine them into viable and vital organisms?

How we relate to these questions, and which adaptations we make surrounding their implications, will have a significant impact in how we go forward.

As the present has become increasingly stupid, as our systems continue to hollow themselves out in catabolic collapse, learning/teaching and our relationship to what remains of past legacies, whether remnants of the natural world, or artifacts from the past; are increasingly valuable and increasingly at risk.

Schools can be – in my experience this has mostly been in spite of themselves! – vital places where we carry out a questioning search for meaning and value. Museums are repositories of artifacts and the skills and attitudes maintained by their caretakers and curators. These were all of use to people in various times and under conditions that differ significantly from our own. We can begin to use these potentials directly by combining our schools and museums. We can use these opportunities to revitalize our approaches to art and craft in light of what we now know about the failing choices around us and the treasure trove of alternatives housed in our collections. We can disabuse ourselves of the idiotic notion that the “latest innovation” is all that matters and rediscover what has always been true. Most of life is taken up by activities and the interaction with objects that have been honed over countless generations. If we look at any moment in the past, the most transient and fleeting aspects of that time were its innovations, its fads, and styles of being different. This will require a tremendous readjustment for those of us who have bought into innovation hook line and sinker. For most of us here who care about boats this will at least feel familiar. It will resonate with what we know from our own experiences around boats.

Within the lifetime of many alive today an iPod or an automobile are likely to be much more obsolete than an oarlock or a gaff cutter. Not because we’ve gone off into a Jetson’s like future of technological singularity or a dreadful zombie-pocalypse, but because the fuels and the culture that made them and used them will have disappeared from daily life. The same will go for attitudes towards technology and our conceptions of what makes up an economy. Unless we have access and begin saving and training for the almost lost practices around arts and crafts we will be left helpless in such a transition.

An approaching catabolic collapse can appear to be a rewinding of history. It’s important to recognize that this is an illusion. One that can be as dangerous as any of the other illusions we suffer under today. If we lose computers we don’t simply go back to slide rules. If we lose airplanes and cars we don’t just go back to steam railroads. Eighteen-eighty will never come again. What we need to learn from the past is not how to live in the past, but how to provide ourselves with a range of perspectives we might be able to combine into a viable future.

A viable future will never be utopian, just as our collapse will probably not result in any single dystopian apocalypse. These are the flip sides of an attitude that will always insist that fantasy is more important than what is real. A catabolic collapse is a drawn-out process. There are no convenient escapes into absolute perfection or complete annihilation.

Our schools and museums are currently, and increasingly, obsolete. Not for what they could be doing, but because of our insistence that they continue as they have been. They are increasingly unfund-able by traditional means as the “surplus” and the attitudes of philanthropy they supported atrophy. Schools and museums are caught in a trap, being held to a set of tasks they are increasingly unable to undertake and that would be increasingly irrelevant even if we did them. Our schools are preparing young people for conditions that will not exist when their students complete their training. They are reinforcing the wrong lessons and corrupted by the dishonesty behind such programs. What is being taught is that we have no choice but to embrace futility, force ourselves to accept it, and then go on to spread hypocrisy in the hopes of gaining an advantage as we watch everyone descend into poverty.

Our museums are in lock-step. To maintain their collections, and to maintain their core staffs and abilities, they are forced to accept schemes that put them at greater risk while only tying them closer and closer to obsolete forms. Instead they could become places where teachers, students, anyone choosing to share knowledge and values can have access to the tools and the arts and the crafts of the past. Fundamentally this is a change in attitudes not a change in brick and mortar.

Every case will be different. At some point many will come to see the value in something like this, but by then what now still exists will probably have been disbanded and scattered, if not destroyed in the process of catabolic collapse. This transition is one that falls to us as the generations alive at this point of transition. If we do not show foresight to change the course of an increasing marginalization and trivialization of schools and museums who will? This is an attitudinal change around our relationship to sincerity. We are conditioned to mock sincerity or see it as a lie or a refuge for the naive, or for scoundrels. Acting from out of genuine conviction – and learning to accept confusion and delay when we are in doubt – is a powerful force. The example we can exert by simply standing up and facing the lies around us, even if the steps we then take are halting and tenuous, will have a tremendous impact. Such a process doesn’t have to “succeed” to be of value. It begins to have value once the word gets around that we are facing up to what confronts us and not bending to the pressure to continue denying it.

This process begins with a declaration that we are no longer going through the motions, pretending our current conditions are just a blip on some fantasy narrative of unending progress. This should be right up our alley! We wouldn’t focus attention on the old and the “obsolete” the way we do if we really believed in that kind of future!

As this year we cycle through another series of gatherings of the tribe it is time to end the way this has increasingly felt like a series of missed opportunities. We gather, we celebrate our love of boats, and we dedicate ourselves to the continuation of whatever aspect of the boat we feel most capable of serving, yet we do this under an increasingly false premise. The same holds true for our schools and museums in their day-to-day activities. We continue to pretend, more or less sheepishly and in the manner of sleep-walkers, that the general cultural narrative that continues to see what we are about as marginal and trivial is not what has become irrelevant, as this system eats itself and all of us from the inside. We are sitting on a set of attitudes and skills – and a number of collections of artifacts – that we know are more valuable than the crap that is shoving them aside.

The enormity of our predicament is enough to make it clear why we are reticent. It can seem that the worst thing to do is to admit how bad things have gotten. We each may secretly wish for a deliverance through miraculous good news or a dramatic ending. This feeling is a trap. Most of us know those sorts of traps. Boats provide lessons in dealing with such traps, to those who survive their use! We know better than to go on pretending. We have access to, and we have within us, so much of what we need to do something really worthwhile. We are at this crossroads watching whatever is left that was good of the past rot away into oblivion while we stand by as the young are “trained” for lives no one wants and no one actually believes will be available to them.

This seems an impossible task, but so does any emergency approaching on the cusp of our awareness. Once we dig in we can find our way step-by-step and we will find some way forward.

It won’t be ideal, thank heaven!

It will be real.

Craft, like Art, has been in exile for a long time, put in a ghetto where it’s been held at the mercy of wealth. In a way I suppose we should be grateful, they might have disappeared entirely without patronage; but on the other hand, if it hadn’t been for the creation of poverty and its spread due to the predations of “wealth generation,” Art and Craft might have remained vibrant, integrated aspects of life.

One of the most dispiriting concerns I have – in a time of plenty in this regard! – has been the way so many who should know better continue to confound Craft and Technology. The epitome of this might just be the halleluiahs surrounding the advent of the 3-d printer. I don’t share in this enthusiasm.

The Link to Fine Lines:

Craft is Technique with Context

Let’s dive right in. This is a heavy displacement thirty-footer. Construction is sawn double-futtock frames and carvel planking. The decks are laid and sealed with pitch. There is no engine. A pram, or even a small dory, can be towed or carried on deck. Accommodations are for two, or three using the hot-bunk method. A hold aft of the mainmast runs under a small cockpit well. Rigging is simple; galvanized wire, dead-eyes and lanyards, and simple bronze castings. A small woodstove is to Port. Headroom is about 5′-8″. The boat is rigged as a schooner with double headsails and an overlapping loose footed fors’l. No topmasts are carried. The sails are cotton canvas cut vertically without battens. A light genoa and a storm tri’sail would complete the inventory.

At first glance these choices might seem odd, the result appears to be no more than a small replica of a nineteenth century work-boat. I think it’s illuminating to go over how this design came together as it has.

I began with the idea of a smaller beach boat, either half-decked or open. I was looking at boats like the Crotch Island Pinky or the Hampton Boat – both familiar to any devotee of Howard Chapelle’s “American Sailing Craft.” This past summer I witnessed a beautifully built replica of a Crotch Island Pinky sailed at the Small Reach Regatta. It’s a substantial boat with a solid sprit-rigged cat-ketch rig. With rollers and a turnstile or hauled behind an oxen it could be worked off a beach.

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I hope to follow that and similar leads, but for now my thinking pushed me towards a boat with more endurance and shelter for its crew. A twenty-five or twenty-six footer with a small cuddy proved still too small to provide a work-space/payload beyond just the accommodations. It was also difficult to work around the rig choices I was considering. This sketch shows such a boat with a cat-ketch rig.

I was focusing on two masted rigs, either cat-ketch, yawl, or schooner. This was for a few reasons. First, the versatility and range of sail options of these rigs seem fitting. Most working boats before engines did have two masts. This enhanced their versatility and robustness. Having two of anything makes it more likely that you’ll have something that works even after a catastrophic failure. Two shorter masts are stronger, rely less on rigging to keep them standing, and are more easily sourced than one taller spar. The ability to maneuver with a divided sail plan is also a plus when we’re not relying on an engine to get around in tighter quarters. With a two masted rig mast placement needs to coordinate with the rest of the structure. While many boats have been built with masts through their deck houses, there is nothing stronger than a mast keel stepped and run through partners at deck level. This thirty-footer shows how a schooner rig can fit in with an arrangement with a cuddy between the masts.

This is as small as we can go with a schooner without it becoming a toy. For a heavy displacement craft like this it gives us plenty of sail area spread low to mirror the under-body which is long and not too deep. Its draft is four feet. In a small schooner a loose-footed lapping fors’l keeps that sail from getting too tall and narrow and from simply becoming too small to pull its weight. This is the last sail to be brought in and reefed, the boat will heave-to under fors’l sitting out just about any conditions. There are two gaffs and a boom, to shift loads, act as gantries, bring a small boat aboard, whatever we might need them for. This arrangement leaves the after half of the boat clear. Sawn frames make a strong structure that will maintain sufficient strength even after rot may have set-in. It is almost an armored hull with close to four inches of thickness over fifty percent of its surface. The frames are closely spaced. A long keel makes the boat easy to bring up to a shelving foreshore and let her dry out between tides, or to tie to a shoal wharf and touch bottom at low tide without problems even for an extended period. These were common techniques once, and increase a boat’s versatility by simplifying maintenance and permitting a longer term “squat,” as a visit might extend beyond the time when remaining at anchor or at a mooring is practical.

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This hull form, with powerful sections, tumblehome amidships, and rising floors gives us a boat that can deal with heavy weather, have a good turn of speed, and have a strong and simple structure. My inspiration, as was true for the original sloop and schooner boats, came from looking at one of the crack schooners built in Essex Massachusetts for the Grand Banks Fisheries. The Harry L. Belden built in 1889, was designed by D. J. Lawlor. The Belden gained renown by winning the “Fisherman’s Race that Blew” in 1892. I’m drawn to this design, not only for this schooner’s reputation as one of the fastest and most weatherly of her age, but because this moment in the offshore schooners’ development represented a departure from an earlier fad for “clipper” schooners with enormous rigs and hulls that relied on a wide shoal form to keep them upright. These were superseded by more wholesome boats like the Belden. Unlike most later designs, its form retains the simplicity of a rather plumb stem, a long keel with moderate rake, and a flat heart-shaped transom without a long counter. The Belden was a small boat writ large, and thus well-suited to influence a design for a small boat intended to have superior power and capacity.

I haven’t worked out displacement yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s over twenty thousand pounds! Ballast will be either mostly or all internal. A long lead shoe, or better yet, a bar of cast iron could be incorporated into the keel. L. Francis Herreshoff used the following rhetorical question to make his case for external ballast, “Would you rather pound a hammer-head against a rock with your hand cupped above or below it?” It’s clear that an external ballast casting absorbs shock before it gets into the structure. Cast iron is best. Its hardness bounces off a reef, unlike lead which can conform to its shape and stick a boat where it strikes. Still, this boat will have proportionally little ballast. Its heavy structure will use up most of the displacement, and we want to reserve capacity for cargo or payload, so a certain amount of internal and shift-able ballast will be needed. In the bilges the bays between the frames could be filled with scraps of lead, or iron, cast in concrete. This was done in the fishing schooners, and if done well, is long lasting – see William Atkin’s take on this in his “Of Yachts and Men” page 156. Trim ballast could be carried aft, and under the bunks amidships just aft of the foremast.

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This type of hull was abandoned long ago for use in yachts. Atkin’s heavy displacement cutters and sloops were among the last to follow the rationale that displacement aids in comfort in rough weather and that a large and easily reducible sail plan can make up for the additional wetted surface. We contemplate a boat for conditions that don’t suit the contemporary notion of a yacht as a boat to carry its crew for enjoyment only, and that relies on elaborate external support networks to keep it going. What seem easy trade-offs with cheap and accessible fuel and no need to carry more than a few days’ or weeks’ provisions can be seen as foolhardy frivolity from the perspective we’re adopting here.

This seems to be the smallest craft that can have some autonomy in operations and still have enough volume to carry a significant proportion of workspace/cargo-hold. As you can see, from the mainmast aft the hull is an open hold reached by a good-sized hatch. If need-be, we could do without the foot-well, giving us an unobstructed space clear to the transom. This could include a live-well, or be divided into pens. As a traveling boatbuilder’s shop, it could be lined in shelves and bins holding tools and materials. The same might be true for an itinerant doctor… or shoemaker. The key is to have this space set aside from the beginning and not just carved out as an afterthought. Its blank-slate versatility best suits us as we go forward.

The accommodations are spartan, but workable. We’ve grown accustomed to nearly seven foot headroom in boats of this size. I don’t think this makes them more comfortable. It’s a marketing ploy for boat-shows and convenient when sitting tied up to a floating dock sucking on shore power. As soon as we go to sea, these large, high cabins become launch pads for serious falls and injury – or simply a scare that then ensures the boat will spend most of its time tied to a floating dock on shore power. I’m just over six feet. In this cabin I can slouch and move about – there’s not far to go! With the hatch open, there’s unlimited headroom at the companionway. But in a sea-way, I can brace myself with my head and both hands against the overhead and the cabin sides. There’s not far to fall.

That could be the watch-word for a boat like this. Everything is intended to aid in increasing general robustness and in creating a boat that is long-lived while made from locally sourced and artisanal materials. It relies on a series of local trades. Lumber would be cut and seasoned nearby. This does limit where such a boat could be built. The Maritimes, Maine, the Pacific Northwest all come to mind. These also tend to be places where blacksmiths, small forges, rope-walks, etc. either still exist, or could be brought back relatively easily. These skills, these adjutant Crafts to boatbuilding, have not been totally lost in these areas. A significant aspect of building boats such as this, boats with this ethos and this sense of purpose, is in exercising these other crafts and generating a demand for them if they are now dormant. This is the kind of preparatory work that could be essential later and can only be done now, while there is still some space between us and dire necessity. Existing traditional boatbuilding programs, such as the Apprenticeshop, the Shipyard at Mystic Seaport, and a few private shops scattered around New England – and elsewhere, though these may not be as familiar to me personally – are a foundation upon which to build. They’ve kept boatbuilding alive, but they could use a shift in perspective concerning their value. I’d like to see them treated not just as depositories of old, “dead” skills, but as a vanguard in bringing back essential skills, modes of working, attitudes towards life; that will be of increasing importance to us going forward.

You might ask, where is any innovation in this design? We expect innovation to be the main thrust of a designer’s efforts, that without innovation we contribute nothing of value. This attitude is one of the ideas this thought experiment is intended to confront. We have caricatured “traditionalism,” conservatism of any real sort, as a straw-man no one believes has any redeeming features. Progress and appetite lead us to ever greater convenience and novelty. Neither of these need to defend themselves. They are taken for granted as positive.

One innovation in this design is its more effective rudder shape compared to the rudders of the nineteenth century, before aero- and hydro-dynamics had brought us an understanding of the flow over a foil. This rudder will provide more steering force with less drag than a larger rudder with a curving trailing edge and rounded bottom. Still, I’m not sure if even this small innovation is really for the best. This rudder is more prone to damage – even if it is many times more robust than a contemporary spade rudder. This could prove too big a risk. A schooner, any two-masted boat, can be sailed by adjusting sail-trim combined with judicious helm, instead of simply overpowering the boat’s weather-helm by hauling harder on the tiller.

These are the kinds of assessments that have repeatedly led me back to a set of arrangements that would be immediately recognizable to a working sailor of 1890. It is intended to point out that a designer’s role is to connect someone with the craft that will meet their needs, not to lure them into a lark.

The main value of this exercise is in laying down a different perspective on which boats we consider building, and how best to wrap our minds about conditions that are closer to those of a century ago than to those that have been predominant over the last seventy-five years. No matter how much we might think of boats as “escape pods,” as we get into contemplating how they might be built, and how we might justify their use, we come back to our needs to forge and revitalize communities of Crafts and their practitioners. Integrating ourselves into such a process is not simply “disaster preparedness,” but a substantial way in which we can improve our lives by any standard. This process entails giving up and letting go of failed assumptions of how things will stay the same forever. It leads us to live each day to the fullest as we make connections, and act on fulfilling our responsibilities, within revitalized webs of interrelatedness. Boats are the result of a culture. If we are unsatisfied by the boats our culture pushes on us, we need to forge a different culture to get the boats we think will better meet our changing circumstances. There’s much more to this than simply dreaming of sailing away…

Building such a boat, especially without reliance on “labor-saving” strategies and “economies of scale,” will be difficult and expensive, – if we simply look at the costs and efforts involved as something we take from others to aid in our stealing time from our “regular” lives. It is only possible as part of a greater overall commitment to a life in-and-with boats undertaken as THE way we live our lives. Only then do the costs begin to line up with the rewards. Only then are we reintegrated with the potential of Craft, and Craft of Transformation like boats, and what they can offer us. We need to make a series of choices that bring us to a common purpose and that generate a sense of community based on inter-related self-sufficiency instead of seeing ourselves in a battle of atomized desires competing for the scraps of what’s left of our world. Such a boat can’t be imagined as a consumer item or the result of an individual’s solo efforts. Contemplating such a craft, and what it might do, throws us back to acknowledging our need to be part of some ongoing and evolving community structure in which we participate, and not where we merely subjugate others or are compelled to provide disjointed coerced labor. This boat might seem a period piece. The community required to build and use it is not. This is where we need to apply our innovations. This is where we need to unpack our assumptions about how we ascertain the value of things new and old, and come to new ways of moving forward.

Boats help us envision how this process might unfold. Our experiences on the water also show us that we arrive where we are headed, not through grand proclamations of intention and elaborately specific schemes, but by aligning our intentions with the vagaries of contingency, and recognizing a destination when it comes into sight. This is the process this design is intended to assist in its own little way. This is what this realm of the pleasure boat can give us. It is a place where we can imagine another way of life. Where, by taking care of how we use the scraps of time and bits of surplus we might still have, we can find a way into a world where there is no greater luxury than to have forged a satisfying way of life amongst those we care for and who care for us in return.

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There are different kinds of thinking. I’ve been focusing on the forms of thought involved in Craft recently, beginning with an insight that we are motivated to Craft out of an awe for the abundance of quality that surrounds us in what used to be called the Natural World. Technique is about getting something. Craft involves us in immersing ourselves in a relationship with our physical surroundings and then responding in kind to the quality of what we find there. Looked at in this way, Craft is a practice, or more precisely, a series of practices that engage us with our reality and help keep us from wandering off into realms of wish-fulfillment. Technique claims to be neutral; but it fails to mediate between our desires and reality. Adding more powerful technologies overwhelms our capacity to see our deviation in time, leading to overshoot. Practicing Craft exercises our capabilities and hones our judgement; making us fit; physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Boats give us an important and ambitious point of contact with Craft. Boats can be at the pinnacle of what Craft can accomplish. In their making, their crafting. And also in their lives as craft, as vessels, as actual physical vessels, and also as vessels of our transformation, as individuals, and within our societies.

Boat design; since it claims to direct the outcome of boat building, and through that of the ways in which we use boats; has a tremendous responsibility. It’s not enough to enter “the market-place” with attractive looking boats, or to just accept an agglomeration of half-remembered traditions, fads, and ill-considered enthusiasms to be catered to by pandering to “the customer.” If we fail to consider how boats – and our conception of their qualities, their utility, even their aesthetics – effect, and are affected by, the crises and challenges sweeping away the world as we’ve known it; we are not only letting down the potential of what our boats can be, we are letting ourselves down, abdicating our responsibility to ourselves and to us all. Instead of careening along on a dangerous course oblivious to what is within our power to effect while we ignore or discount all the destruction taking place around us; we can meet our responsibilities, to carve out meaning and to live lives that affirm what we value.

The driving force behind my involvement in boat design, as originally laid out in Designer & Client, has been to explore how we may use the privileged position pleasure boats have in the grander scheme of things to guide the evolution of our search for meaning. Our boats, whether we admit it or not, are vessels of transformation first and foremost. There is no other reason for their existence other than as an embodiment of our dreams and aspirations. We act on these yearnings within a realm carved out of the day-to-day world of necessity and contingency. No one forces us to have a pleasure boat. We go through significant expenditure and even sacrifice to have one, and the chain of experiences they involve us in changes us in particular and fundamental ways.

Our dealings with the whole notion of pleasure craft has been entangled in our attitudes about class and notions of social and economic superiority. We are either resisting, ignoring, or accepting a series of presuppositions related to class when we confront any pleasure craft. The terms Art, Craft, privilege, quality – the entire vocabulary of judgement – has been immersed and subsumed by the social construct of class. So much is lost if we leave it at that! We are left either defending the indefensible, or we attempt to wash away any and all distinctions to deflect the judgments of others. This is a prime example of our tendency to put social “reality” above all else, a tendency with dangerous results apparent all around us today.

There is a way to talk about judgement and its offshoots that, while not ignoring class, gives us a wider perspective on how pleasure boats might fit into our lives. If we posit that fundamentally all we have is our attention, and that our lives matter to us, then the ways in which we attend – and to what, and in what manner we attend to them – is the ultimate arbiter of value. This leads directly to another assertion, that the same is true of everyone and every “thing” else. Together these realizations give us a framework upon which to ascertain and define value, and make judgements that connect these values to the totality of our reality, instead of merely squabbling over purely social differences. Most importantly, it frees up a language-of-judgement, of quality and distinction; removing it from a narrow social sphere where it becomes primarily an object of what John Berger identifies as glamor, “codified envy. …the commodification of abhorrent behavior.”

Setting aside reactions to the entire notion of pleasure craft as seen only from within the confines of glamor, we can begin to talk about ways in which to grapple with finding and producing meaning within our lives with the help of a reinvigorated vocabulary and with a secure foundation upon which to build. We discern, we make judgements, we choose to attend to this over that, because this is ultimately all we have! If we choose to belittle ourselves by attending solely or primarily to issues of glamor, then we have made a choice that diminishes us, that effects us predominantly, not just our supposed foes. None of this denies that class, and social distinctions around power and money, are significant issues. Our ability to make these distinctions, and free-up our vocabulary, can give us new ways into dialogue surrounding these matters as well. This conversation is never far from what we discuss here, although it is not the focus of what’s at hand.

The Schooner Boat referred to in the title is an example of this other kind of thought. Writing, painting, carving, sculpting are all ways to access and manipulate thought. Each has its way in and each brings a different set of critical faculties to bear. Drafting a boat design involves aspects of all of these realms and combines them into a particular practice. To begin, it firmly establishes that we are not making Art, but working in Craft. Not only are we developing an object that must be Crafted, that must hold together and have a function; but we are creating a Craft, one that will transport and transform those it encounters during its construction and throughout its existence, we might even say, its life.

This design, still in a preliminary state, has been a way to begin to confront some of the implications swirling about here at Boats for difficult times. It begins with the belief that boats need to meet a new, and as yet unfamiliar, set of conditions. Not only are these conditions unfamiliar, but in many ways they are unknowable. We can’t predict where we’ll be in five years time, or what we might be asking of our boats then. So we begin by carving out a different set of assumptions:

The first is that our boats need to be modest. We cannot, will not, be able to afford boats that are wasteful or ostentatious. There are other aspects to this kind of modesty. It is modesty opposed to hubris, not just show. It is modesty as a form of humility.

It’s a stretch for us today to consider the implications of what it might mean for a boat to be humble. This is so foreign from our current expectations. To begin, it must be able to look out for itself and its people. It cannot count on deus ex machina, like towboats or helicopters at the other end of a cell phone call. We need to recognize, and take seriously, that we go to sea under our own care and responsibility. That what we do is dangerous, in that we cannot eliminate risks entirely. We work to minimize these risks while accepting that in a moment of extremis we don’t expect someone else to go into danger to save us. Nor are we putting our comfort and convenience above anyone else’s. Saving others isn’t just a “profession.” It is a mutual series of obligations we all share in. Not something we “pay for,” and therefore expect as the reward for a quid pro quo.

Our need for a boat that is self-reliant is combined with an assertion that our boat rely solely on wind and muscle power for propulsion. It’s a sailboat. It must be able to meet a wide variety of conditions ably and surely – not just under “racing” conditions, but for extended periods. It must have a robust redundancy, not a narrow and fragile efficiency. Its use will require seamanship and piloting without a “time-out switch.” This is related to changing our conception of “free time.” Our time on the water will need to be part and parcel of our lives, not seen as some interlude of prepaid leisure – or leisure put on the credit card! Our notions of free time, of “time to kill,” of “saving time,” are undergoing transformations. When we are not caught-up in trying to “make time” for life in the odd corners of our days then the rest of the rationale for calling on an engine to whisk us away becomes irrelevant, even as our reliance on their availability begins to come into question.

Our boat must be durable and repairable. It represents a considerable investment of effort and material, and that generates a responsibility that we put that effort and material to good use, and that the resulting craft last. This cannot be met by making a fossil-in-a-boat’s-shape out of some material that cannot ultimately find its way back into circulation. When our boat has reached its end, it should die and decay, not become one of the undead, continuing to impede the cycles of life to which it does not contribute.

Our boat must also be adaptable to fit into some foreseeable and many unforeseeable forms of utility within its life-span. While its first purpose is to focus our attention on how to carry boats on with us through the coming transitions, and to help us find ourselves along the way; it should also, as we enter even more constrained circumstances, help us find and accomplish some useful task or object. This requires that the boat not be solely dedicated to carrying its crew and meeting their comforts, but that it have the space and versatility to do something else.

It’s easy to jump to conclusions of what that might be. Fishing! Or smuggling! Piracy! All these might come to mind. They may or may not be what we actually come to. Let’s not forget the value of the simple act of traveling and connecting with other people in other places, or carrying out some form of inquiry at sea without dedicating enormous resources. We do need to remain open to this uncertainty to avoid falling into a trap of simple wish-fulfillment.

We call work like this a project. This is interesting because as we envision and delineate a new design we are dealing in acts of projection. We are imagining something and attempting to put that vision down, to project it onto the page or block of wood. What can make this different from a psychological projection, projecting our interior states onto others and then reacting to them as though they were external and not internal conditions, is that in this process we are continually assessing whether the vision we project meets external criteria. We remain aware of these traps and watch out for our tendency to simply project an intention and simply accept it as having fulfilled its conditions just because we wish it so. In Art this trap leads to formulaic work that lacks resonance, a form of self-indulgence bordering on some form of pornography, as it fails to rise above the limitations of mere projection. In Craft work this failure leads to the creation of objects that either fail to meet their expectations or make obvious the limitations implicit in the assumptions that led to their creation. They leave us facing the ridiculous result of where our intentions have led us – just watch someone cutting doughnuts in a jet-ski! This is the crucible of design. This is what what opens design as a path to effect changes in how we we look at the world we inhabit and how we choose to live.

It shouldn’t be too surprising that beginning with these particular assumptions has led to a boat that harkens back to nineteenth century craft. While we need to be wary of merely adopting the trappings of the old out of nostalgia, we are talking about returning to a set of conditions that predate the last century, and its excursions into an unsustainable reliance on cheap and abundant petroleum and all that has led to. In backwaters of the nineteenth century, like the fishing villages of New England and countless other places around the world, we see the last flowering of traditions that go back into prehistory. These boats took particular forms for a variety of reasons, some still pertinent, others arbitrary results of fashion; but they do make wonderful starting places – if we look to them and their builders not with condescension but with a new-found appreciation for the conditions of their use, and the lives they were a part of. Seen in this way, we can begin to realize how so many of their attributes are a function of the fundamental realities we are looking to reintroduce ourselves to – before they simply come crashing down upon us!

In the next part we’ll get into the particulars. I promise!

Recently I’ve been following a thread of insights into the meaning and origin of Craft. I began with this definition of the term,

It means making. It also means a vessel that transports us. It denotes a variety of disciplines and an attitude towards making. It hovers around technique and technology, but I’d say that in most cases –perhaps every case? – these references are misplaced. Craft and technique may sail along parallel courses at times, but their relationship is not as direct as it might seem.

I’ve kept in the back of my mind the need to reflect on Craft from within our perspective here at Boats for difficult times. My preoccupation with boats, boatbuilding, and design has been my main engagement with issues of Craft. When I think of Craft as a noun, I see a boat.

Walking past a building site this morning I was struck once again by the linearity and imposed “rectitude” of our land-based structures. Years ago I often joked that I learned boatbuilding because I couldn’t deal with straight edges and right angles. I’ve made a life around justifying that handicap.

I once saw an exhibition of Roman household items taken from Pompeii and Herculaneum. I was struck by the similarities, as well as the differences, in relation to their modern counterparts. One object, a floor lamp, stood out. It was a tripod of twisted forged iron, something we see replicated all over today. Except we don’t really. Granted it had been through a major disaster and buried for two thousand years; but you could still tell that, to its maker, the square and straightedge were guides not “rulers.” It expressed an attitude to irregularity that is foreign to our expectations fostered and bolstered as they are by the requirements of mass-production. I could see that its makers hadn’t seen its variations from exactitude as “faults.” They hadn’t seen them as “valued signs of the hand-made” either. They just were the way they were. This made them of-a-piece with their surroundings in a world that only knew natural forms and handmade objects. Their makers had a dream of geometric perfection existing somewhere “out there” in a Platonic, heavenly sphere. – Though not Saint Augustine’s, with his single domineering God at the top, but as part of an all-too-human Olympic realm filled with larger than life versions of themselves, Heaven as Soap Opera where perfection was never raised to the level of commandment.

We tend to see this, if we give it any thought at all, as a “primitive,” simple time. I’m beginning to see the attitude we’ve taken up to replace it as blinkered and simplistic. To be able to make judgements of quality by holding up a straightedge removes us from the need to have a broader give-and-take, a deeper relationship, to and with our objects. The kind of relationship I am beginning to see as derived from re-joining the broader family of life and taking seriously our responsibility to honor and reciprocate the quality the World engulfs us in.

Boats have, I was going to say have always had, a closer relationship with this deeper view of craft. Not always, walking around the Newport Boat Show yesterday showed how rare it is today. But intrinsic in boats is a requirement that they be vessels, contained and resilient, and responsive to a dynamic environment. This means they can hardly be made without some concern for these factors. Unless, that is, there’s plenty of petroleum and hubris to throw at the “problem!” Again, witness Newport on this end-of summer weekend backdropped by a monstrous cruise ship filling the harbor and fleets of excreted petroleum that exist to feed Egos and display status.

In such times of triviality it is no surprise that everything has become diluted in this race for the lowest common denominator. Central to our concerns at Boats for difficult times is that when the root causes and influences that have made “Easy!” our watchword recede into memory, we will need once again to be able to replace it with an ethos that grounds, or, should I say, floats, our craft in all senses of the word, upon something more substantial, something integrated into the World we are rejoining. We need reasons for our boats. We need ways to judge their worth, to measure their value to us across a wide spectrum of what they do for us. At a time when the short-cuts of efficiency have been finally set aside as false promises, we need to reestablish a better compass than easy or efficient.

Having a relationship with quality that isn’t mediated by strictly social concerns, but that address our wider responsibilities to all creation, require us to hone our ability to judge in ways that have grown foreign to us. This brings us to the other side of Craft. As makers, we exercise judgement and hone our abilities to make more and more nuanced and finer judgements about quality. This is a process that is integrated deeply within the practices of Craft. They can’t be picked out of that context and taught by themselves. To attempt to do so unmoors judgement from its intrinsic context. This opens the door for all sorts of nonsense from all sides of the social spectrum that insist that what we say is all that matters, and that there is no standard, or that some arbitrary and imposed standard must be held. The result is to reduce our confrontation with reality to a supposed negotiation between ourselves and the limits of our own gullibility. “I can claim this ridiculous standard, because I have the audacity to do so – and so far I’ve gotten away with it!”

This is a deep source of bankruptcy. It leads not only to what many of the negociants in this struggle would call “moral decrepitude” because to do so seems to help their side; but it leads to our present situation in which so very few have any notion of what quality might actually entail. If quality has gone the way of the distinction between few and less, then we have entered a world in which there is only one standard, more.

Quality is tied to the sensibility of enough. Quality is an attribute by which we judge what to value. Value, ultimately, is the measure of what we give our attention. Attention is all we have to give.

This delineation of relationships shows us how close quality lies to the very heart of being. Without an ability to make judgements about quality that engage with our reality we are in serious trouble. We can have no traction, we are in the realm of futility and despair.

Connecting quality with a fundamental attribute of our perceptions of the World, that whenever we apprehend any aspect of our un-built reality we are flooded with its quality either in awe or wonder, respect or gratitude – usually a jumble of all of these deep responses – gives us a clear signal that this can be a touchstone we can’t misplace. That this is a guide to developing judgements that won’t evaporate into some social delusion.

There is only one essential requirement to be able to tap into this guide to judgement. We have to be makers ourselves. If we unmoor ourselves from the disciplines of making – not producing, or manufacturing, or facilitating; but actually making within the circle of what it means to Craft, we cannot engage with this practice.

It’s been through the closing off of avenues of making, through the enormous push towards turning us all into useful cogs in some machine, that we have lost our connection. This massive onslaught of hubris and acquisition, that has made us all into consumers and exploiters, is running out of gas. That’s the good news! Everything and everyone else in the World has always had to maintain a connection with reality through making and sharing to the best of their abilities. We will be returning to that necessity. We can either see this as a Fall – as it necessarily seems when seen from the perspective of the most successful consumers/exploiters – or we can see it for what it is, a chance to reconnect with quality and through a practice of making to create the conditions which might allow us to find ourselves as Beings in the World.

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This is probably much more convoluted and theoretical sounding than most people interested, even deeply in love, with boats will find palatable. It is both too much and too little of a preparation for what this is ultimately about! The important bit to take from all of this is that we should learn to trust where our love of boats comes from. That we can, through following the disciplines inherit in the practice of Craft, develop our capacity and ability to make judgements that are not mere poses, or adopted stances, but that come out of the depths of our interaction with our reality. That with this comes the possibility, not for “freedom” or “ease” or “escape,” but for integrity and worth and connection. That while most people dread and refuse to face the changes emerging around us, we can find in these same conditions a great possibility, a chance to turn our own course from one of being swept along by the currents of insanity, and instead, taking – not control – but responsibility for our own course. These all connect with the same instincts we’ve always fed in relation to boats, that have led us to a life with boats, and kept us focused on them as worthy of our attention. When the costs of our attention are no longer masked by a culture unmoored from its foundations in reality we can accept paying those costs with a fuller understanding of the qualities and the worth of what we are giving our attention.

The people at WoodenBoat Magazine were kind enough to give me press credentials for this year’s show at the end of June. This, combined with my relative proximity to the venue, Mystic Seaport, made it possible for me to attend over the three days.

Mystic and WoodenBoat have been important presences in my life since the mid 1970′s. I first visited the Seaport in 1974, on a field trip from “Boat School.” In 1975-79 I lived in Brooklin Maine, and was there when WoodenBoat moved down the road from Brooksville to Naskeag Point. Over the years I’ve re-encountered them in recurrent cycles. These contacts have always been significant for me. The people in these organizations, and those I’ve met through them, have populated my life with friends, teachers, mentors, and peers.

photo: Katherine Mehls

John Michael Greer writes about developments of the 1970′s that hung fire. The way these currents are being renewed by those responding to the precarious state of our times. I felt, and lived through, those glimmers of finding a new way, putting flesh on the desire to leave behind business-as-usual, and then, went through the national – and personal – derailment of those impulses as the 1980′s took off in a jag of ever more all-consuming greed and denial. Through it all these two institutions coped better than most. They worked to maintain contact with those desires, impulses, ideals. Together they provided venues for those of us who looked back with regret and forward with foreboding, places to gather, and news of each others continuing efforts.

Today the difficult times many of us feared have arrived. That first shock at witnessing the fragility of so much that seemed it would go on for ever, though we knew it was brittle and unsustainable, has passed. The sense of surprise at each new development has worn off too. The details and the time frame of their unraveling are unknown and unknowable, but their effects, their overall trends, are harder and harder to ignore.

I’ve written about Queequeg’s Coffin, the idea of unintended lifesavers. These two places; one a passing event put on by a gathering place of the mind; the other a very-much-real, physical place, the repository of our most significant maritime artifacts, and a place where the skills of their construction and maintenance have been kept alive; have always struck me as prime examples. While each might say their mission is more tied to fitting their treasures of thought and artifact into the modern world, I think their greatest worth might be the legacy they leave us as that world crumbles.

Returning to Mystic that first morning of the show filled me with memories of all my past visits, my previous contacts with the people I expected to find there, with the arc of close to forty years of interaction this moment represented. I felt a subtle difference from the past few years. What had been a dislocating shock as the “boating market” shrank away now looks more like a surge of resilience among many of the people involved.

photo: Katherine Mehls

This world of traditional boats has had a curious and strange relationship with wealth. Most of the boats in this world have been built for and are owned by the wealthy. Yet most of the people involved in their making have chosen a life that precludes the attainment of wealth for themselves. Some have escaped a life in that world and funded their passage with scraps of what they left behind. Others just chose, more likely, they kept leaning towards it until they fell into a way of life that gave them more satisfaction than money. Wealth has been a means towards their own ends, not an end in itself. As the circles of wealth tighten these people have found ways to adjust. Their way of life over all these years has primed them for times like these like few others.

None of this is a program, or even for most, a condition they would describe as the result of some conscious decision. These people make up a Bohemia, one of the last in the true sense of the term as a refuge and cradle for discovering ways of life outside the standard expectations of their day, now that other Bohemias are mere paths to fantasies of stardom and fame. They’ve long been self-conscious of having made what a hedge fund manager might call “bad choices.” They have bristled inwardly at charges that they’ve chosen an “impractical,” even silly life when they could have gotten on with things. Many do feel a sense of the rightness of their choices as they get up each day and have experiences outside what’s available to most people. They continue to see envy in the eyes of many of the same people who have looked down on them as deluded. They live lives others spend fortunes trying to buy their way into. But to say there is a conscious, verbalized consensus amongst them concerning any of this is, I think, taking it too far. This is a mood, an undercurrent, but one that’s there to see if you know where to look.

I’m not going to report on what was at the show. That’s covered elsewhere. Here’s a great place to start. The reason I’ve begun this forum was as a place to discuss aspects of our relation to boats in this particular time that aren’t covered elsewhere.

photo: Katherine Mehls

At Mystic, the schooner Brilliant is a lasting reminder of what a boatbuilding culture can accomplish in difficult times. Built in 1932, at the depth of the Great Depression, Brilliant is one of the finest vessels in existence, far surpassing most of what’s been built in the last thirty years, and she will probably outlast them as well! The same collaboration between an owner with real standards – not just a penchant for demanding an empty “excellence!” – along with some of the best practitioners in their fields, restored Nathanael Herreshoff’s New York 50, Spartan of 1913 featured at the WoodenBoat Show last year.

photo: Katherine Mehls

Without the orbital pulls exerted by WoodenBoat and Mystic Seaport this project could never have happened. Money would have been spent, but lessons about quality and the fortuitous diversion of resources from a failing juggernaut towards enabling the subsistence of these varied and talented practitioners would not have come to be.

There’s no telling what will happen to these two institutions in the coming years. They’ve both felt the contraction of the economy, the growing scarcity of materials, and of interest in what they have to offer. Like any of us they may fail to find a way forward. Visiting the show in June, meeting with many who make up this world – old and young – I see they have a strong legacy that will go forward. They have been, and continue to provide, points of focus for the gathering and sustenance of some of the most resourceful and clear-eyed people out there. Whatever the future brings we will be better prepared because of their efforts, and the work that goes on within their embrace.

I’ve spent my adult life in the shadow of the Banks Schooners. Growing up looking out across one of their greatest harbors as the dwindling number and growing decrepitude of their bastard descendants, the Diesel powered draggers followed by the ungainly modern trawlers, left the sea as bare above as they had the waters below.

The following is an excerpt from Something for Nothing. A reluctant rum-runner contemplates the schooner he loves and feels he’s betrayed.

He felt his schooner a burden. He was ashamed by his infatuation. How could he have put so much stock in a thing? Thinking this way made him more angry at himself. It wasn’t the schooner’s fault. She was a beauty. She was more than a simple thing, more than a tool or a toy. Most of these schooners, especially this one, embodied something. They were mere man-made things, sure; but they came from such a lineage. They were so well fitted to their environment, to what they’d been built to do. They carried a spirit beyond their humble, physical natures. They were more than rough amalgams of hewn lumber, rope and canvas.

He’d never been to Europe, never saw one in person; but he imagined standing in front of a great cathedral might give you a similar feeling. Being in the presence of something so well made, that so captured the spirit, the striving, and the effort of all those who’d been involved in its making. Something that put you face-to-face with a presence. The comparison made him think even more highly of the schooners. Cathedrals were built as important civic and spiritual centers. They had ongoing and significant effort lavished on them by an entire culture deeply invested in their creation. They were stone and glass, monumental and permanent.

The fishing schooners had a long development, three hundred years or more of building vessels to wrest a living from the banks off the Northeast coast of North America; but they had been marginal in the grander scheme. No Pope or King had ever given their form any thought. They’d been ignored for the most part, just another tool built by humble craftsmen for an industry that took place well out of the sight of most people. They’d been used hard, worn out, wrecked and abandoned or burned for their iron. Fisherman had a homey affection for them at best.

With all these points against their achieving any consequence, they were something special. He knew it. He could see it. He felt it in his body as Actæon moved under him. She moved, something no cathedral could do. Not only an object imbued with spirit; but one that moved, that lived. As much as he wanted to simplify his life, ignore the truth of the schooner’s worth; as much as he felt a fool giving it any thought at all in his desperate state, when no one else seemed to give a damn, no one else shared his reverence; he couldn’t deny its truth.

The fishermen didn’t care. The crew he’d taken her from had been excited at the prospect of getting onto a dragger, leaving the hassles of sailing and tending trawl from a dory behind them. A warm focs’le and nets full of fish, the steady drone of a Diesel engine below the wheelhouse pushing them along effortlessly in any direction at any time at a constant speed without concern for calms or squalls; that’s what they wanted. Back coves all up and down the coast held derelict schooners rotting away with the tide running up and down inside their pierced carcasses twice a day. No one cared. Why should he?

Phillips had cared, seemed to anyway, but he’d been relieved to pass Actæon along to him for all his fine appreciation. He had his model and his mythology, maybe that was enough for him. Why did MacFarlane insist on all this hassle and danger to keep the real thing going when the result might take his life? Even if he didn’t die doing this, he was wasting his life. Caught in this racket, seduced by something-for-nothing. He was keeping the schooner alive; but he was doing it by giving up on the slow accumulation of effort-for-value that had lead to its creation, its very reason for being. He was looking for the “angle,” the “scheme,” a “quick and easy path.” That attitude was contaminating everything around him he saw as the more he thought about it. He was embracing an absence of the qualities he most valued in Actæon, qualities he saw were missing from the rest of life around him.

He’d get to this point in his thinking and then flip again into anger and resentment, first at the schooner for touching him so, helping to lead him deeper into this mess of a life; then at himself again.

He found his only respite in danger, when trouble stared him in the face and self-preservation rose up so he couldn’t ignore it. At such times, adrenaline, the focus and clarity of action within a limited tactical sphere was a blessing. Anger, fear, frustration all had a legitimate outlet. He was like a baboon sighting a leopard. Was the leopard the cause of all the baboon’s suffering? No, but it was impossible to ignore and just the sight of it brought all it’s primate and deeper instincts for self-preservation into play. There was a fundamental satisfaction in embracing the immediate situation, jumping into the flow of instinct, action and release. This combination of a heightened state with the loss of any need to deliberate, modulate, adjust, to take responsibility; predominated in the rush of the will-to-survive the next instant, and then, the next.

He found himself courting danger. He’d always been careful. Not shy or fearful, but confident in his ability to stay within the boredom of tragedy-averted, having taken prophylactic steps to diffuse situations before they got out of hand. Now he felt a secret thrill letting the warning signs build up inside him, playing with how long he could let it go, let them build to ever more critical levels before taking steps. He found that often he was still able to diffuse things and, as far as anyone else watching might think, nothing of any note had happened. This only made him bolder. It raised the stakes in this game he played with himself.

This new painting, “An Old Swell from the East,” isn’t an “illustration” for this story, though it does attempt to convey something about that moment in the 1920′s when the old schooners were beginning to fade away from the scene. This is the McManus Indian Header Elizabeth Howard, on a long-board to the Southeast against a light Sou’wester on a Spring day on Stellwagen in the mid-twenties. She was still fishing, unlike MacFarlane’s fictional Actæon. A hand stands on the weather fore-spreader, on the look-out for signs of mackerel schooling on the surface. Astern, a freighter heads East out of Boston.

This article on the state and future of oyster reefs has spurred the writing of this post. At first look this might seem a stretch for a blog about boats, but boats and oysters have long been intertwined, and the continued health of one does impact the continued potential health of the other.

This article linked above is one of the few notices in the press I’ve seen concerning the importance of oyster reefs and the relative losses they have suffered in the last century. Every major estuary in the world used to have massive oyster reefs as the grand filtration system that kept them healthy. All of these are in severe trouble, most reduced to a tenth or less of their pre-development levels. We tend to see the problems in estuaries as being caused by too many nutrients/pollutants entering their systems. This is a problem, especially when we are talking about hydro-carbons and heavy-metal pollutants; but the larger problem is that without abundant, massive and gargantuan healthy oyster reefs, no estuary could handle any of the sediment and nutrient run-off expected at the mouth of a major river. What’s true for the great estuaries is equally true for all brackish environments. They are all by definition places where fresh water systems delivering sediment and nutrients meet the sea.

Reading Carter’s Coast of New England is the best way for any contemporary person to get a sense of what has been lost from our coastal marine environments. This journal of a sailing jaunt by four friends in 1858 will knock you over with the matter-of-fact tales of the abundance they encountered all along New England’s shore. Equally astounding should be the matter-of-fact senselessness of the casual death they inflicted on what to them seemed an inexhaustible cornucopia. My own memories of living on Cape Cod in the 1950′s as a child give me a sense of what has been lost since then, the last jarring fall from a hell-of-a-lot to almost nothing-at-all.

The real tragedy of the estuaries and marshes isn’t the same as what’s happened on land. There it’s not been a case of direct surplantation of agriculture to feed humans replacing an ecosystem supporting a broader biota. The problem has been more of a waste of the most productive acreage on the planet for uses that have nothing to do with biomass sustainability and are in many ways directly destructive of its capacities. An oil refinery, or a sports complex, or a sprawling container-port; these all destroy an estuary’s viability without feeding anyone else in any way. Restoring estuarine capacity doesn’t take anything away from our direct ability to feed ourselves while it will provide a tremendous boost to help support all marine life and ourselves over the long run.

I spend most of my time writing about the trouble with looking at our current predicaments as a set of problems begging solutions. Most of the challenges we face are too complex and our inputs too ambiguous. We are better off leaving the problem/solution mindset behind in most cases, but this is one case where the solution is so promising and the challenges so straight forward that it does deserve a second look.

I’ve been thinking about what we could do with the remaining power at our disposal during these difficult times and how we might best put it to use. This is a daunting question, especially if you subscribe to a “Let’s not make things worse by going off half-cocked into elaborate schemes of control!” ethic. Here again, I think the question of oyster reefs – They are reefs, not beds. Oysters don’t just sleep! They are tremendously active creatures! And they don’t just lie there on a “palette” awaiting our exploitation. They are not simply a “resource” they are a force of nature! – This is a place where we can get tremendous results with minimal invasiveness while learning to check our rapaciousness and begin once again to graciously receive bounties we can never deserve.

How does this connect with boats? Look at any of the tiniest “successes” we have in our relationship with oysters and you’ll find sailboats as the defining factor. Those few places where the fisherman’s ethos of “Take a fair catch and leave enough to maintain a bounty beyond our control and understanding.” has remained with any semblance of its earlier force, there are people oystering under sail.  These people placed their lives on the line to hold the line that there was more to life than short-term gain. They are as beleaguered as the oyster and their health and well being is as important to our having a future as is that of the oysters themselves.

This is one of those places where our attitudes towards boats has a tremendous potential impact on how we face our lives and its challenges. There is a give-and-take in such a relationship that is conducive to making good decisions and avoiding short-term cons. We learn from our relationship to our boats and our experiences with them feed how we go on to face life. The history of oystering under sail has been a great example of this, one that’s given us one of the few successes in a long sad trail of defeats.

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I’ve asked for guest contributions from the start of this site. So far, with one generous exception, I’ve not heard anyone step-up. Perhaps this topic could be a spark around which to begin a wider conversation. Some of you are professionally involved with boats, are journalists, have various reasons to feel compartmentalized out of the idea of stooping to posting on a “blog,” least of all one as crackpot as this one! I hope this subject is both far enough off your normal lines of endeavor and exciting enough in its prospects to jar you into reconsidering. This is directed at anyone reading this.

If there is to be a project around the idea of Boats for Difficult Times it will require that you not lay back as “consumers” of “content,” but that you find ways in which to engage as fellows who see something worthwhile in the premise. If you do, the easiest way to begin is to write a comment. The next step might be to consider proposing a guest post. From there the sky’s the limit!

I’ve begun this because it is something I find of crucial importance. I don’t want to see the value of boats marginalized to the point where we lose any vital connection with them and then one day decide we can’t “afford” them at all anymore. That day would be tragic in ways that are more far-reaching than it might seem if all we think is that we’re discussing some marginal “hobby.” I think this concept “has legs.” I can’t “prove it” alone. If this is just me spouting and a few people reading and nodding, or shaking their heads quietly to themselves, then this will have failed.

The more organized among you could probably make a better list than I can of the potential openings for further thought and discussion, and hopefully work; that have come up here so far. There just might be one of these that connects with something you find important. If so, let us know! A catalyst may seem a small part of a reaction, but often nothing happens without its help. See if you can’t be a catalyst here!

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Oysters are small modest creatures. They are almost invisible and not very viable all alone, but in their multitudes they have done prodigious work! Let’s follow up on how we can help them. They will repay us many-fold!

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

Carl Jung, Memories Dreams & Reflections

I collected this quote and began this post because I’ve long felt the connection between play and creation. I wrote about it in Designer & Client. It’s long been my own internal justification for putting so much effort into boats when the financial rewards have been so slight and the field flooded by excess, overcome by a squandering of resources that might be better used elsewhere. I’ve felt that, as with art, recreation is an opportunity to challenge one’s assumptions and to follow one’s desires outside the confines of necessity. This always felt important to me as a counter to the insistence from so many quarters that we be “practical.” This pursuit, while rarely taken far, is one of the few ways we have available to us to break out of habit and step out into something new. Once we begin to allow ourselves to ask simple questions like, “Would this make me happy?” we may begin to look at how reflecting on these basic human impulses might affect how we approach other aspects of our lives.

It’s a truism that when some people go sailing they end up leaving their old lives behind, that they chose to “escape.” We don’t put much thought into what this means at either end. Why does someone suddenly want to escape their previous life? And why does it take something like sailing to get people to consider these questions in the first place? This opens up another question, Why do they stop at an escape? Do they? Or is that just a convenient way for those of us left behind to characterize it, to maintain our sense that there’s nothing much in what they’ve done but the expression of a quirk?

These questions nestle together. Engaging with boats would be justified if all it did was open this line of questioning. It does more. It gives us a path towards answers.

“(We) live lives of quiet desperation!” Thoreau’s quotation is well known. Most people allow its sentiments a certain shrugging acceptance. The next step seems to be left begging. If it’s true, then why don’t we do much about it?

The answers to this challenge usually come around to a feeling that we are trapped in our lives. We would do something else, if we could; but we can’t. When pressed we admit we wouldn’t have any idea what else we could do.

Here is how play can help us break through the web of habit and external necessity we find ourselves trapped in to find what Jung describes as our “inner necessity, the object that we love.” While so much of our lives seem circumscribed; within recreation there is a crack through which we may allow ourselves to approach these questions, however briefly or safely buried within marginal categories like “hobbies” and “sports.”

We may say we “love” stamp collecting, or bowling. These don’t often lead someone to change their life. What’s different about boats is both that they give us something huge to love, because they immerse us in experiences of the world unmediated by our day-to-day habits; and because they require so much of us. These two considerations work together to draw us in deeper and deeper. We fall into what might be described an obsession, although it’s important to distinguish between this and dedicating one’s life to tobacco, or alcohol, or stamp collecting, or bowling, or golf; all obsessions in that they are falls into a set of repetitive behaviors that distance us from life; while boats may lead us to ways to integrate disparate aspects of our lives and to integrate ourselves within our world.

For many it doesn’t rise to that level. It remains a form of low-grade obsession, a way to pass time more or less stereotypically in between time spent stereotypically in the pursuit of what are considered life’s necessities. Or we escape from our old lives, but then fail to replace our previous existence with anything but a repetitive immersion in a new set of poorly integrated behaviors. We fail to achieve a new integration that would be more meaningful than the one that was left behind. This is hard, but the potential is always there in every encounter with a boat’s sweet shape, or the tickle of a breeze on our cheek as we puzzle out the best lay for a tack.

That following boats can lead to a short-circuit of the old without finding a better new doesn’t condemn the whole enterprise. The same can be said of any means to find deeper meaning or greater satisfaction. No first step guarantees a successful result.  For me what makes boats so powerful as potential vessels of transformation is that to engage with them is to enter into the possibility of finding avenues for satisfaction and paths to integration. While many other possible focal points may lead us into strictly physical, or intellectual, or emotional, or even spiritual, endeavor; boats have the capacity of engaging us on all of these fronts. This “oceanic” quality is intrinsic to boats. This recognition is what opens us to their possibilities as vessels of transformation.

This site revolves around boats. Horizons of Significance focuses on our predicaments living in these “difficult times.” In that pursuit I’ve run into the value of improvisation. We have evidence all around us of how the urge-to-plan and the will-to-control have failed us. We face instability on so many fronts that it is finally becoming apparent that this approach has reached its limits. If we are to proceed we will need to develop a comfort with uncertainty and greater abilities to improvise.

The paradox involved in changing one’s focus from control to improvisation is that the process requires a pursuit of self-mastery. The urge-to-control is strongest when we lack a discipline that helps us fight it off long enough to begin to get good at improvisation. Of course this is what an old-fashioned childhood was all about, before it was squashed by the reach of the will-to-control down to the youngest of us, where every act must now justify itself as an item on a checklist on the path to high status and power. We need sages like Jung and “experts” of all kinds to give authority to impulses we all have as children; to go off into a world beyond imposed constraints to play, to find ways to order our lives to our own liking outside of presupposed patterns. Boats give us a wide range of opportunities for this kind of play in contemplations and activities that stretch us.

Boats are a marvelous stage for our play. They require us to form them, build them, sail them, maintain them. In return they give us so much at each point. They take us along on an internal journey as they take us beyond conventional realms to face elemental conditions and pivotal situations. We are confronted with immensity of life, of space; and we journey to new places populated by new people – even when we’ve just crossed a harbor to step ashore and find the familiar transformed by a new viewpoint, the frequent result of even the humblest “voyage” in the least prepossessing craft.

This potential is clarified for us in difficult times. Superficial justifications that trap us in convention erode when we are faced with straightened circumstances. Whatever had seemed inconsequential, even as it squandered and “spent” our precious time and life, looms with increased import. Do we really want to do what we’ve “always” done? It gets harder and harder to ignore this question. Meanwhile boats sit there quietly in our imaginations drawing us to them and a realm of play that may lead us to our “inner necessities,” to the “object of our love.”