Well, I'm back.
(Special Contest for Alert Readers: name the book whose final line that is.)
Back from mountain climbing under the vast and dry skies of California. Returning to humidity was a bit of a shock (how do people SURVIVE here?) but my sweat glands have kicked back into turbo-mode after a few bike rides. And it's good to be home.
One of the things I missed, without even realizing I was missing it, was the smell of fresh-cut wood, sawdust, spiderwebs; the short scraping sound of sharpening a pencil with a knife; the clean thin vibration of trimming a piece of fir with a very very sharp handsaw.
So it was that I was up at 5, coffee in hand, for a return to boatbuilding. This morning I was wrestling with the starboard sheer stringer. This one piece of wood defines the top edge of the boat -- arguably the most important curve in the whole thing.
It's also so long I had to open the garage door so the end could stick out into the insect-singing darkness. (It'll be trimmed to length later.) So it was clamp-spring-clamp-drop clamp-swear-clamp-bendy wood-clamp-drink coffee.
Altogether an enjoyable way to spend the dawn.
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2 comments:
Nerd alert! Nerd alert!
It's the same book whose Rankin-Bass movie contains that old chestnut, "Where There's A Whip, There's A Way."
Nowhere else have I heard a war anthem that could have been written by the Bee Gees.
Ha! You're right.
"Where there's a whip, there's a WAY!"
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