Bound to boats and life

April 2010

By David Roper

He broke his right hip at what was then his “advanced” age of 87. He was lifting the battery out of Coda, his last and final boat, which was tied to the dock at the end of a pier. He slipped and fell, refusing to let go of the battery. No one was around. So he dragged himself up the gangway and to his car, pulled his cell phone out of the glove compartment, and called an ambulance.

When I heard him relate this story to me that night – especially the part of not letting go of the battery – it brought me back to one late-summer day in 1960 when Dad and I were walking down the Hingham Yacht Club float toward the little boat we’d built together. We passed a boy about my age struggling to carry his small outboard towards his own skiff. He slipped and fell off the float. In an instant, he was gone.

It was low tide, and there was only about four feet of water where he fell. Still, he went under and didn’t come up. Dad got down on his knees and reached under water, felt around, finally grabbed one of his arms, and started to pull him up. “Need help,” he said, “he won’t come up.”

But just then the small boy shot to the surface, and Dad pulled him onto the float. He blinked at us, coughing, while water cascaded off of his soaking clothes. “You were stuck there underwater somehow,” my Dad said finally.

“Not stuck,” the little boy said, “I was hanging on and I didn’t want to let go.” He looked down into the muddy water, a devastated look on his shivering face. “My outboard,” he said, “I was hanging onto my outboard down there on the bottom, but when you pulled me up it made me let go. Now it’s gone.” It was, no doubt, one of the boy’s first lessons in how suddenly things can change for the worse.

Dad broke his other hip six years later at age 93. He was headed to his den, missed the step, and landed on the floor under the half-model of the boat he spent his honeymoon on 68 years ago. This half-model of Phyllis, the old family cruising cutter, hangs on the wall next to a framed blueprint of her line drawings. Around both of these are many pictures taken during Phyllis’ best days days when the old sailor was young, when the saps and resins of youth kept the planks and ribs resilient to the turbulent and rolling seas.

He may have suspected at the time that his left hip was broken, but he didn’t call anyone. Not wanting to be a burden, he lay there under the half model, then finally decided to pull himself up, broken hip and all, work his way upstairs, find some bandages for the cut on his arm that came from the fall, and go to bed.

“I’m done,” Dad told me he’d said aloud in the empty house that night. “Call Dr. Kevorkian. Get the angels ready; I’ve had enough and I’m headed up.” He wasn’t.

I’m writing this now at my dad’s house, and thinking of how I and others have to cope. We have little training in coping, yet something seems to be built in. Not long ago I reconnected with a middle-aged friend of mine who had lost his lovely wife to cancer. “I was facing devastation of both my life and hers, and I seemed to have no coping mechanisms,” he told me. Then he tilted his head and looked lost in thought and a little puzzled. “So I began to build a strip-planked canoe. I don’t know why I knew to turn that way; I just did. It kept me sane and focused on something at a time when the ground was leaving my feet.”

The family home is empty now while Dad is in rehab. There’s not a sound except for the grandfather clock he built years ago. Its pendulum squeaks a bit while it swings through its arc, but the old clock still goes on, though it can’t keep time. Behind my chair in the big bay window are two Plexiglas cases. Each one contains a boat model; one of the Phyllis and the other the Eastward, the trawler my parents covered 35,000 miles in after Dad retired. But what’s important to me now is why the models came to be.

I think back more than a decade ago when my mom was bedridden for three years after a stroke. Dad was her caregiver. It was a lot to undertake for an 83-year-old, but he never complained. Instead, as a relief from caring for Mom, he began to build these models of Phyllis and Eastward. He started from scratch with a stack of soft pine boards he’d glued together. From there he hollowed out, carved and faired the hulls, built all the rigging, and made fully detailed cabin interiors with miniature fixtures to match the real boats, right down to a tiny needlepoint pillow that said, “Screw the Golden Years.”

On the cabin top of each, he substituted clear plastic, so the viewer could look down into the two-foot-long cabins at all the details. Just before he sealed off the cabin top on the Eastward with its skylight, he placed a thimble-sized silver urn on the port bunk. “Put a few of my ashes in that someday, OK?” he said to me.

I wander into the attached garage. The nutshell pram I built years ago is stored there. It needs attention: The plywood transom has delaminated and the whole boat cries for fresh paint. The plan years ago had been to build it with my two kids, the way Dad and I had built my skiff when I was little. My kids, now grown, hadn’t participated much, though. They’d had busy lives as budding teenagers.

So I built it alone, once and awhile showing them my progress and attracting a vague or token interest. But I knew, deep down, it set in. I knew the seeds were planted. Someday, when amid their own trials of life and loss, my hope is that something in them, such as the idea of building a boat, will allow them to come up with an alternative to despair.

In the garage, I spot an old boat cushion on the floor and a sanding block nearby. I kneel down on the cushion and begin to sand the delaminated transom in readiness for yet another season. Somehow, it just seems like the right thing to do.

Dave Roper sails Elsa, a Bruce King-designed Independence 31, out of Marblehead, Mass., where he lives and works.