Thinking Back to the Boatyard

Recent conversations and memory vacations have had me thinking a lot about the month following my graduation from the University of Connecticut in May 2004. That month was spent with my brother, Aaron, living on our newly purchased 40-foot Valiant sailboat in a Fort Pierce, FL. That description is, of course, misleading. Instead of rocking gently in warm Floridian waters to the mellow tones of Jimmy Buffett, we were holed up fifteen feet above the ground in a boatyard, buffetted by the hot, dusty wind that whistled through frayed rigging and swept between neglected hulls.

Mornings and afternoons saw us engaged in labor-intensive boat repairs about which we were almost wholly ignorant. In between blindingly expensive trips to West Marine, we ground into the hull of our boat with a variety of power tools whose instructions we’d just read and slathered on noxious chemicals with paint brushes, trying to ignore the burning gel that dripped through the tears in our cheap latex gloves and into our microscopic fiberglass lacerations.

In the late afternoon, we quit work and passed zen-like in the mode of bums. We found a motel with an outdoor ice machine and filled our cooler. We gathered a $3 Walmart dinner of canned beans garnished with hot dogs. We bathed in the ocean surf and rinsed off under outdoor beach showers.

As night fell, we savored the taste of cold root beer trickling between our stolen ice cubes, listened to the radio, chatted, read, wrote and climbed down the ladder one more time to use the bathroom before bed.

Despite the comforts, mental work and comparatively vibrant social life I now enjoy, I grow occassionally wistful for a time when I strengthened my home with my hands every day, and slept under the stars each night.