July 5 2008 "Dear Ken & Friends"

July 6^th 2008 – Dear Ken & friends:        

     Your gushing embarrasses me, more than it flatters. I know that this is through no fault of your own; but it's just that nobody has ever has been so complimentary. I forgive your attempt to befriend as being all in a decent and friendly spirit, it's just that my own idiot self's thinker rarely thinks of me in very complimentary terms.

     The book I was and still may be am writing, slash, rewriting . . . after a half-dozen failed attempts to give it a title, currently is titled Hardway in my mind's screwball (but in a nice sweet way) eye. The text I sent in to the Library of Congress in 2000 was titled Stars Last, but Stars Last didn't last as a title for my book, but remains a chapter title. For nearly the whole of my life, I have been Hardway; to such a great degree as is nearly undeniable. I didn't become aware of this until right around the time, or shortly thereafter, of that monster psychedelic upwelling that surrounded me and had its way with me. I grew up there in the thick of it, so to speak, and what musical friendships I did have were enough to give me and my Scot sense of thrift, the free pass into the ceremonies; and I thoroughly enjoyed myself's experiences therein, on their dime. I mean, I dunno how other to explain this grinding propensity and affinity for being so cheap. Like, when I get extra money, I do blow it rather stupidly sometimes . . . But for this second two-thirds of my life, I have conserved and conserved and husbanded, and rebuilt, remodeled, salvaged, and or built a major portion of the shack-grade structures I have lived in and out from—11 of them! And I justified this by always thinking of the 'rent' I was not having to earn money to pay for; and, of course, the less money I felt under pressure to procure, the less negative and stress-causinf stuff there was to hinder my own truer progress through the changes inborn in my dna (?) to give growth through the many beings we are born with—or, at least, that is how I feel about what I seem to have been 'dealt'--and therefore: the quicker I might even maybe grow up. Hardway took an awful—too awful—long time of it, growing up. I mean: All the 'tools' were 'there', plain as day; caregivers of my youth and toward manhood took care to inform me of what all good children of good stock and decent parents must be informed of. I cannot in the least fault them for they were, as were their immediate ancestors before them, derailed from our millenia old agrarian roots. But not derailed from the bloodlustinesses of butchers, plain and simple. We have been slaughtering other life seemingly forever. It is so in our blood; re: dna, that I fail to fathom how mankind is ever going to be able to break this habit: It was  just (seemingly) too necessary for too long of a time in our history (and herstory) for a few generations to be able to eradicate. I like my pork fat. Haven't bought or eaten beef since the sixties. Lived a fairly spartan existence and vegan for a few years; but my second child-bearing partner was an unreformed meat-eater and, of course, I went along. Philosophically, I think of meat in terms of being a flavoring agent and not as the main course. And I am getting way off the subject I had intended to pursue when I began this. The flattery is embarrassing, but funny and comic in extremis. And, in some vague and indefinable way, sort of makes up for a lot of rather more badmouth directed my way through the years--verily earned by just being Hardway—by ny critics.  *  It was my waterfront and waterborne mates and matesses who first saw the truth in nicknaming me Hardway; and I lived with it and learned to thrust out my chest with pride, when called for, and say: Yeah: None other. What the hell, I figured, just about everything I try to do is not often very linear and takes at least three times before I 'get' it straight enough for rock and roll or government work--speaking of which, I'd rather not say.

     So: Hardway it was, was it? Yep. I absorbed this character willingly and with many friendly associations. Associations (thoughts/remembrances) that all too often could make some cry, but when you are (I am) a Hardway type, you just start to chuckle or guffaw out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of the multitudes of Murphy's Law variations there are! But back to wood boats is where I want to try to focus a paragraph or two (although there is a far larger body of related materials that will all too often tend to clutter my more essential and basic boat thoughts.)

     The dream—at least my dream—is, was, and will always be: A whole logtruckful of—no, let's take that back—a whole forty feet long cargo container full of gently curved lower tree trunks: forty footers! Oboy! Bring 'em home---in my novel, they are old-growth teak logs from Burma—and whack 'em up into your (my) unsinkable dream, for once and forever; and no more messing around with inferior product. I served what amounts to an apprenticeship in wood boat-wright ways; plus had enough time in sailing to have grasped a few of the intangibles possible in the life of a person who has to travel about in the deeper waters of the salt water seas. Wood floats. That is the be all and end all of how I feel about: Why only wood? Cement boats are way too fragile, if you ask me. Yes, of course, I know that there are individuals who have sailed them long and far; but you will never catch me trying to hitch a ride on one of them; no way. Steel, if done artistically for true sea-kindly shape, can become an intoxicating nautical dream—wow: the indestructible boat; visualizing it banging away on some rocky reefs, possibly south of the equator . . . I have seen the finest product of the alumiweld aluminum boats and—providing they are fabricated from all the same grade stock of aluminum: or electrolysis will disintegrate the aluminum's integrity too soon—that almost inspired me; but, again: that metal potential deathtrap, if it gets full of water, just doesn't inspire the kind of hope-of-survival that I sense from images of a wooden boat. Metal boats pop seams too. Plastic is way way inferior, except for built-in styrofoam floatation. Decide upon a shape—and the more like a seabird's ass under the waterline, the better; although more difficult to pull off—erect some sort of framework to start bending boards onto and fitting. I have seen two other fellows render knockoffs, built-from-scratch, of the famous Spray of Joshua Slocum's 1895 book Sailing Alone Around The World; one done in the lapstrake style, where you overlap the planking and fit frames in later; and the other done in carvel style: plank-edge to plank-edge, erecting the interior framing framework first. Dudley fished his lapstrake, but Peter just lived aboard his while happily raking in the dough with a business card that read: “I can fix your leaks!” as one of the finest cabinet-maker's embodiment of shipboard (or boatboard) cabinetry, as well as a journeyman level wood boat (carvel planked) caulker—aside from maybe a little dab of fungicidal bedding compound in between the overlapping plank-edges of the lapstrake planked boat, there is no caulking required; it is accomplished by hammer-and-anvil ing the copper rivets tighter.

     I worked on and was close friends with a fellow who bought a 41 feet long Mekong River sampan, surplus from Uncle Sam for $296! You ever read the Defense Surplus Sales Catalogues? He did and found this boat and bid on it and won it. God: Whatta dream. A bit splintered up, cracked and with all its caulking fallen out, up on blocks, dry as a bone in the boatyard he had it delivered down to; where a dozen of we of his brethern and mates, plus old ladies, spent a twelve hour summer day doing what we could to render it ready to be put in the water that very evening, by boatyard demand—no arguement—hardnose, something about insurance liability, yahdiddy yahdiddy. 

     Built of long teak planking about two inches thick on Apitong frames (indonesian hardwood relative of the mahogany family; a definitely superior hardwood) on an Ironwood keel—uncle sam had confiscated it and stuffed two gimmy (GMC) 671s (large 6 cylinder diesel engines) into it and mounted a fifty caliber machine gun on the bow and it survived the Vietnam War to be carted home to Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo California to be stripped of its machinery, where my friend Steve found it. It wasn't two years or thereabouts before he had that 41 footer up and running and seaworthy and was making fifty grand a year fishing it! The beauty of salvage, if immersing oneself in green slime and salt crust, and usually losing skin, can be thought of as beautiful, is when a guy like Steve finds a thirty year old Caterpillar four-banger for only $200 and manages to get it totally back up to snuff for another $200—unheard of in Caterpillar prices—and goes out and makes a couple-hundred grand with it for a few years . . . and then goes down the tubes on cocaine abuse . . . But hey, the expression comes to mind: Bid 'em high and sleep in the streets. A final word about this sampan: After two whole days and nights of two gasoline pumps going all the time, Steve got the boat the 30 miles from Vallejo to Waldo Point, north Sausalito with an outboard motor, and slammed (fig.) it on our muddy beach there to further caulk and clean out the hull. Up in the very bow was a patched over hole in the top left plank—a shitty non-nautical blunder of some us gov't landlubber worker's idea of a boatpatch—and Steve pried off most of the Bondo and plywood . . . and finds an unexploded ordinance stuck into the stem of the boat! It made the front page of the next day's local paper: “Bomb squad called out!”

 Ah: The boat dream.  Out in the ocean, when in larger seas, the water levels rise up and up and even come on board now and again. Scuppers let most of it slide and slither back overboard. Worthy of note, for sea boats, is the boat-builder who builds some tumble home into the topside shape of the upper works of the hull—lean the bulwarks inward a little—curl the top of the boat's stem inward, so that the two highest planks of the boat actually lean in toward the center of the boat. Why? Well, when those higher than usual waves ride up almost to coming on board, and after they have tried their best to inundate you, the lean of these upper planks and bulwarks just makes most of the water fall outward, back off and down toward where it came from; plus this shape reduces the amounts of spray created by straighter or more flared shaped front ends of boats. This holds true for the stern as well. Geez; I don't quite know why I am typing all this. Maybe it's because I do not want to start retyping other stuff that surely does need retyping. Although I lost all computer files of the book, I was left with a freshly printed-out hard manuscript. This was in late June of '05, so you can see how long it has been me avoiding coming to terms with the continuum of the book-writing thingy. Yes: I probably have, or could have some sort of marketable product of some sort, but being Hardway and all, it often seems like such a bugaboo of a row to hoe. Sticktuitiveness has never been one of my strong points—except when it comes to not eating what I think of as: Old Dead Food . . . *  My truck caught fire and burned up last month and every ounce of sticktuitiveness that I have been able to muster has been focused upon getting another (30 yr old) truck legal and reliably servicable. Having worked the bulk of my life in things mechanical—wood, metal, processes, rigging—I hate mechanicing. Well, hate may be too harsh a word, but it can just drive a poorboy nuts sometimes, even if he is a reasonably decent mechanic. Although lying down under the back of the truck the other day while hacksawing, upside-down, through the four totally-frozen nuts and bolts holding the receiver hitch framework onto the frame--so I could then get at the gastank for replacement: holes in it—is not anyone's idea of fun, I actually enjoyed taking care of business on my new (old) truck. (Neither a cheater pipe on my breaker bar nor the tire shop's air-driven impact wrench loosened any of them.) All 'work' gives the worker that satisfaction of having gotten something actually done instead of just wishing it so and staying depressed because the stupid tool isn't right yet and you can't just use it like you are supposed to be able to; like it is supposed to function on your behalf and not the other way around. God: I'm getting way off subject again.

     Do you understand the necessity of swivvels in any line—rope or wire cable—undergoing stress? Anchor lines included. I once dragged anchor in a high gust of wind—maybe fifty or bit more—because the stretching of the rope applied enough a twisting to actually flip the anchor out of its muddy grip on the bottom and blew up on the gravelly beach across from Waldo, where I stayed stuck for the low tide and needed some assistance in getting the (house)boat back off on the next high tide in the morning. Believe it or not, I ended up on that very same beach a few months later by quite another failure of my gear, but that time, I was not blown quite so high and dry and just rowed my anchor out into deeper water off the beach and, at the high tide in the morning, just pulled my own self back off that beach that time. And no: No serious hull damage occurred in either grounding. A guy like Hardway needs a little, if not a lot of luck to survive the waterborne fare. And as far as I am concerned, as long as the lucky breaks don't lag too far behind the unlucky ones, I am a happy camper.

     Another sweet boat dream is, after you have built your twenty-some odd or thirty-some odd feet long boat, (and fastened it with copper or bronze,) you add a thick layer of copper sheeting over the whole hull. Spendy? Damn rights, but copper is poison to marine organisims. And did you know that barnacles cannot get a hold on any surface that has been smeared with STP oil treatment? Those suckers were growing right on the (42 inch—42 x40 three blade) bronze propeller of the fifty foot harbor tug I had for seven years. That is until I smeared the prop with two cans' worth of STP.  About a year later, I put the tug on the beach to do some touch up bottom painting and check on the prop--which was always getting dinged by flotsam or jetsam—to see if it needed my efforts with two sledgehammers to straighten out the dinged edges—and the STP was still doing its job! Do you have fresh water barnacles up there?  *  And then there are the semi-submersible wackos; except that the smashings of surface wave action are significantly reduced in a semi or submersible unit. *  I have noticed that (Douglas) fir trees from higher on the hills seem to have more strength than the ones harvested from down in the valleys. I could be wrong on this—Hardway is wronger oftener than he is right—but this fact is my impression from personal experience, felling the two different strengths from those two different locations: the lower-elevation growing one did not measure up to the mast I was or had been envisioning whereas the higher-growing one did. I don't know. What else? I'm getting tired of sitting here typing for this session of the here and now.  *   So: Please: stop showering me with such glorious praise. It makes me nervous, or is unsettling in some vague and nearly indefinable way. And I am just happy to have an 'excuse' to maybe write something to somebody who doesn't just read and think: god, what a boob. I will send more later. And so long for this letter-frum-Adam.  *   I enjoyed the Owsly update blurb. His effect still lives in my everyday consciousness, and forms many basis of my outlook and perspective on the world and my interrelationship(s) with it, although I quit using it when the Owsly stuff quit being available, and found other more naturally-occurring “spiritfood” substitutes.