How To Build a Tin Canoe: Confessions of an Old Salt
by Robb White. Hyperion Books. 2003. 228 pp. $45 (Hardcover).
September 2023
Reviewed by Bob Muggleston
Ever meet someone who might have missed his calling? After reading “How to Build a Tin Canoe: Confessions of an Old Salt,” by Robb White, and getting to know the author – a highly respected boatbuilder – through the tales he’s spun in the book regarding his life in the American South and other warm climates of the world, I think he might have missed his. Instead of being a boatbuilder who occasionally wrote on the side, he should have been a writer who occasionally built boats on the side. The “Messing About in Boats” columnist who sometimes produced articles for “WoodenBoat” magazine was a truly gifted writer, one of the more unique talents I’ve stumbled across in some time, and it boggles the mind that an editor at either of the magazines I’ve just mentioned couldn’t convince him to pursue writing full-time.
But then again if he had, would he have had all these wonderful stories?
“How to Build a Tin Canoe” does concern itself with boatbuilding. A bit. But really, it’s a series of essays that track the writer’s life from the time he’s a little kid growing up in the Red Hills region of Georgia, building tin canoes out of materials he’s pulled off an old chicken shack, to his Lord of the Flies existence in Florida, to his adulthood back in Georgia as a respected designer of ultra-light wooden boats.
Someone on Amazon called him “A brilliant storyteller with a touch of Mark Twain and Will Rogers, but contemporary and better,” which of course sounds like just the kind of overblown, vacuous thing you’d read on the internet, but darn it if in this case it isn’t true (minus the “better” adjective; that’s a bridge too far).
The stories themselves. Hoo-boy, where to even start? In the foreword of the book Robb writes, “None of these stories are true . . . not a single word. If you think you recognize yourself in any of these fictitious characters I talk so bad about, that’s just your own paranoia. There is no point in suing me, anyway. Because of the nature of the boat-building business, I don’t own anything at all, and if you decide to take it out on my ass, just remember, you got to bring some to get some.”
How do you follow a statement like that? With one barnburner – and almost certainly true – story after another. Very early on, as a reader, you’re aware that you’re in the presence of someone who is relentlessly curious, and relentlessly curious people are often their own worst enemies: Why focus on one pursuit when you can chase 10? Over his lifetime Robb was in the U.S. Navy, worked in a furniture factory, taught school, cooked aboard a tug that pushed oil barges, and pursued a Phd in marine biology, among other things. All while building boats.
The stories he tells. This one only occupies three pages in the book: While waiting to lock out of the Mississippi River aboard the tugboat on which he’s a cook, Robb looks across the river at the Sugar Bowl, and realizes that he’s just read in the newspaper that the King Tut exhibition is showing there. The fastest way to get to the Sugar Bowl is by crossing the river and walking, so he strips off his clothes and puts them in a bucket, and then half-fills a sock with Susan B. Anthony coins that he clenches in his mouth. Halfway down the river he’s nearly run over by an Exxon tanker, and in the excitement, he loses his bucket of clothes. When he arrives on the opposite shore he wraps himself in a shower curtain he finds and, still holding his sock of dollar coins, sticks his thumb out for a ride.
Did he check out the King Tut exhibition dressed in a shower curtain?
I doubt it.
But who cares?
In the hands of a master storyteller anything is possible, and while reading “How to Build a Tin Canoe” you give yourself over to the narratives, as crazy as they might be, completely.
My favorite story, which I’ve re-told several times now to friends and family, mostly because it’s a straightforward one that’s easily understood and doesn’t require much of Robb’s wonderful writing for full impact, involves Robb test-driving a boat he’s just built for a client when he comes across a dead turtle in the skinny waters of Florida. Thinking it’s a hawksbill that his sea turtle expert friend at the University of Florida would appreciate, Robb scoops the turtle into the boat only to find that it is not a hawksbill, and it is not dead. It is, in fact, a snapping turtle that’s very much alive, and the snapping turtle proceeds to rampage through the boat, biting and tearing at all the delicate wood and varnish, and then “after eating the front of the boat up,” she turns to face Robb. “I went over the stern taking the broken-off tiller of the outboard with me where it was hung up in the britches leg of my shorts,” Robb writes.
What an image.
I was sad to learn that Robb White IV (his dad was a distinguished writer himself by the same name) passed away in 2006. At least he left behind “How to Build a Tin Canoe,” and one other book that reportedly contains much of the same content. Find a copy of this book. Buy it. I guarantee you’ll read it more than once.
I know I will.
Bob Muggleston is the editor of this magazine.
