I've left something out, in that last entry about the books. I think I've not really said why I'm so pleased about having stumbled across them, and stayed awake long enough to bring them home with me.
It's not really about ship modelling, although that was the lens. It's more about connecting with other ways of being, about getting to hear someone else's stories and look at their pictures, seeing the faces of their friends as the storyteller saw them.
In Salt of the Sea, there's one fellow, mugging for the camera as he leans over his splitter's table on the deck of the Sophie Christenson. That was hard work, for sure, but there's hard and there's hard. There's the kind of hard that beats you down, day after day, with monotony and pointlessness, and then there's the kind that looks like that, but isn't at all. That splitter fellow, Sam Allen, is on top of his work, he's making it flow and the fish dance over the table. It's a beautiful, crisp, clear day and he's on the deck of a fine ship, piling up change in the bank with every backbone pulled. What's not to smile about?
Later on, Shields writes about off-season prep, and working on the sails in the loft his father leased for the purpose. This, too, was heavy, hard work:
Several men were required to handle the canvas as it ran through the machine. When sewing a center seam in a 40-foot-wide sail, for example, half of the total sail had to be rolled up under the machine arm. It was no small task to squeeze 20 feet of canvas into a roll under this machine arm of less than 12 inches diameter. As the sewing progressed, all of the full roll of this sail had to be fed through the space under the arm as the seam was made. Our machine would sew one seam at a time, and the design of the sail required three rows of stitching for each seam, one on the edge of each strip and the third down the middle.
One man would operate the machine, one helped feed the canvas to the needle, and one or two pulled the canvas away from the needle. Often only three or four feet of seam could be stitched before the machine had to be stopped and the large mound of canvas pulled forward. Further, the canvas had to be turned over to sew the second edge seam. It could not be made from the first or top side because there was no canvas edge to guide the needle along.
And after describing this and other back-breaking sail chores, Shields goes on to say:
The smell in this room spoke of the sea, especially during the hot summer days when the pine tar gave off its wonderful aroma. The salt that had impregnated the canvas also added to the odor, while the beach under the building had its own smell of clams, mussels, and other sea life. On top of all this there was the pungent odor of Stockholm tar. The sail loft was a wonderful place to visit or work.
I know some of this is having the right attitude, but some of it is also just having the right job.
