Bevels

"A little humility would look good on you," said Ray Elliott in justifying his call. 

We'd been two days stomping along Locke's Cove brook, cutting black spruce where they grew out and up from the bank. 

We were after the strength of grain in the curved trunks to timber out a 16 foot open boat in Ray's shop perched above St. Anthony Harbour a few hours steam away. 

Ray cutting a grown timber.

All that was left of a community that had been Ray's entire world before resettlement was the camp in which we were staying, a few stone foundations and a rusty hulk of a bulldozer that as a young man he'd bought to haul timber until it broke through ice and had to be carted back to Locke's Cove piecemeal by dog teams. 

Ray's humility was bought dearly. 

Less so from a life building boats and fishing the Labrador as from the joy and pain that come when a human cares deeply for the lives around them. 

And so for all his wisdom, Ray's call that we steam the Spiteful Lady home to St. Anthony despite a stiff nor-easter and her loaded down with timber to teach Mike and I some humility, was not likely to have the desired effect. 

We were young. 

Life's bevels were still years away. 

But there was a lesson. 

Pounding up around Newfoundland's Northern Peninsula, we became intimately aware of every seam and bevel in the 26 foot Spiteful Lady. 

How the thousands of decisions made in a wooden boat all have to be sound in the face of such power. 

Much like a life, a wooden boat is a sum of balanced forces held in tension. 

A good boat, like a good life, is born from countless small moments of care. 

This summer Ray Elliot was buried in Locke's Cove by some of the many who will miss him. 

Ray insisted on us using a box compass and paper charts on the Spiteful Lady’s trip from St. Anthony to Nova Scotia.

I missed him this weekend when I returned to the shed. 

Not just because I wanted to ask him about the changing bevels on timbers as they meet the keel to accommodate a garboard plank that's probably years away. 

But to hear his care. 

"My maker didn't design me to understand him," was one of his lines. 

"A plank is like a man, none of them is perfect," shared from the shed door as he caught me picking through spruce with too fine a comb. 

 "If they're in trouble, they're all our responsibility," said while trying to find diesel on a Sunday to fill a neighbour's furnace he'd learned was empty. 

I know he'd have had a fine line on the self-indulgent pointlessness of building another boat. 

And I'd retort that it never stopped him. 

The Spiteful Lady fresh out of the shed.

After a near two-year hiatus, I've returned to the boat project. 

Important things got in the way, as they do – the boys needed bedrooms, the barn needed a new roof, the house's deck was rotten, cursing and mumbling over plumbing in a dark basement. 

There was plenty of life going on. 

But while cutting blow-down black locust at Addie Doucette's two years ago for firewood, there were a few trees with nice crooks for curved timbers. 

Then they were in the yard and I figured I'd better mill them and stack them away to remedy a potential hazard at the bottom of the sledding hill. 

A roughed out timber before getting bevelled so that planks will land fair along it.

Hauling out the ten foot long, two and a half inch thick planks through the scattered idle afternoon this summer I was reminded my back is now 43 years old. 

And that life has taken a few shavings off in the nearly two decades since I first sat down across Ray's kitchen table, watching him gleefully tear into a plate of jiggling boiled cod heads. 

Beside him a bag of hard tack and a tub of margarine. 

“They say you can eat cods heads all day and never get full," he said with a smirk. 
"They’re the tenderest part of the fish.” 

Carving the planks into the compound curves of grown timbers, I've thought of evenings in Ray's shed. 

"They're like a bone you'd expect to find in a bird's wing," he said of grown timbers. 

As she takes shape, the battens tell a charmed tale of how the water will wrap under her 30 foot hull as around the arse of a gull.  

Those who don't appreciate a gull's arse might do well to watch one riding a swell.  
Eleven foot wide and deep she has the sturdy lines of a good sea boat. 

She’ll have a set of timbers every 14 inches.

I'd like to claim some greater purpose of preserving traditions or honouring memories but that echoes false. 

I'm just drawn back to the boat for now. 

I figure it's alright so long as it's not getting in the way of real responsibilities. 

The black locust timber and the hackmatak plank didn't cost me anything. 

Two boxes of galvanized bolts, another of nails and a sack of oakum will get me a lovely hull. 

It can take as long as it takes. 

If she never gets wet, that's probably fine too. 

The boys, now nine and ten, have been learning to peel off bevels with a hand plane and I hope during our time in the shed and in the woods gathering material I may have said something worthwhile. 

I'm thankful that they got to meet Ray when we took our summer vacation to St. Anthony two years ago. 

He had pictures of them on his wall. 

Ray was with me this evening in the shed as the rain beat down outside. 

How as we pounded into the wind past Fishing Point head he watched for a lull in the waves, and then with a casual twist of his left hand signaled to cut her hard and run with it for home.