The Boatbuilder

by Daniel Gumbiner

  “I’ll keep an eye on it.”

  “Why is JC always in such a hurry?”

  “I don’t know,” Pat said. “I just follow orders.”

  “It must be a big haul,” Alejandro said. Pat didn’t say anything. Just smiled and winked.

  Also at the launch party was JC’s girlfriend, Lammy. Uffa said he was surprised that she was here, that she rarely made public appearances. She had long black hair and smelled like tree oils. She spent most of the party over by the picnic table, speaking to Garrett. After she left, Garrett approached Berg and Uffa.

  “What would you say if I told you I just met the woman of my dreams?” Garrett said.

  “Forget about it, Garrett,” Uffa said.

  “Did Shakespeare tell Romeo to forget about Juliet?”

  “Forget about it.”

  “But I’m in love.”

  “That’s JC’s girlfriend, Garrett. Are you out of your mind?”

  Garrett looked sick.

  “Strike that from the record,” he said, and then he walked over to the picnic table to get a slice of cake.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE BEST PLACE TO see a boat leave Talinas was Bear’s Landing. These days it was a campground but, according to Alejandro, it had first been settled by Ed Vaquero, an American who gathered abalone and whose last name was not actually Vaquero. No one knew his real name, Alejandro said, but it was not Vaquero. In any case, if you climbed up on the dunes behind the campground at Bear’s Landing, you had a panoramic view of the bay and the ocean and this is what Uffa, Berg, and Alejandro did the day Pat left for Mexico.

  It was a cold day, with the wind coming from the west, like always, and Berg was wearing a jacket and a beanie. The three of them watched the Alma approach the mouth of the bay with some trepidation. The shoal by the mouth often produced breakers at the beginning of the ebb tide. Every year at least one fisherman died near the mouth, Alejandro said, usually caught unawares by a breaker. One year thirteen people died.

  But Pat and his crew passed through the mouth with no problems. As Berg watched the boat head out into the vast cabbage-green sea, he thought about all the lives it would lead. For so long the boat had been sitting in Alejandro’s shop, inanimate, but now it was out in the world, departing on its first adventure. He understood then what Alejandro had meant when he told Berg that he saw boats as living things. They had been in his study, late at night, looking at lines.

  “You see all of these boats,” he had said. “They have spirits. They are animals to me.”

  Berg felt connected to the Alma, invested in its future. He imagined, years later, running into the owner of the boat, whoever that was at the time, and learning about everything that had happened to it. He imagined crawling inside the cabin and looking around, seeing how everything had aged.

  Later that night he lay in bed, in the cubby, with Nell. She had wanted to come up earlier in the day to see the boat depart, but she couldn’t make it. She was working a shoot in the city that ran late. It was a fast-food commercial and they couldn’t get the lighting right for the cheeseburger.

  “I’m not even kidding,” she said. “They were fixing the lighting on this cheeseburger for like four hours.”

  Nell was absentmindedly flipping through one of the Persian poetry books in the cubby. Alejandro had lots of different books in the main house—ethnographies and novels and histories, books on architecture and sailing and keeping bees—but up in the cubby, for some reason, there was only Persian poetry. All of the books were inscribed in the top right corner with Alejandro’s initials, A. V.

  “Does Alejandro ever take the boats down to Mexico?” Nell asked.

  “No, he just builds them.”

  “Why do they need so many of them?”

  “I think the business keeps expanding. And also they don’t want to keep sending the same boats down there. It would look suspicious.”

  “Do you know what kind of drugs they traffic?”

  “Just weed.”

  “No opioids?”

  “No opioids,” Berg said.

  Nell laughed. “This is a sketchy little scene you’ve gotten yourself wound up in,” she said.

  “Nah, it’s not that sketchy.”

  She flipped a page in the book she was looking at.

  “These poems are pretty good,” she said. “Is Alejandro Persian?”

  “I don’t think so,” Berg said.

  “Do you think his children know how strange their life is?”

  “I feel like the older ones do. I don’t know about Tess.”

  “She reminds me of myself as a kid,” Nell said. “Just this floating orb of energy, drifting from one imaginary narrative to the next.” She paused for a second. “I didn’t even know what I was at that age, didn’t have a sense of myself as possessing a body. It was so liberating. You could become anything. I remember this one week, when this huge imaginary playground battle took place. I was in kindergarten, probably about Tess’s age, and a feud developed between Ellen Wilson and Danny Sartori. It had to do with something insane, like him thinking she cut him in line for the slide. But everybody took sides, and it became this vast rooftop playground battle. Our playground was on a rooftop. We were city kids.

  “For that whole week, Ellen Wilson was this queen, commanding her army. At the beginning of every break, the respective armies would line up at either end of the playground, and then they’d rush each other. Combat consisted of tagging another person. If you got tagged then you were taken to the opposing army’s jail. You could be rescued from jail if someone from your army was able to run up and tag your hand without first getting tagged by one of the other army’s jail guards. We were riffing on Capture the Flag but it was also something else. Ellen had jesters and courtesans who surrounded her while she sat on her throne, which was two milk crates stacked on top of each other. I was one of the jesters. I told stories and sang songs for the court. I invented this whole mythology about our people and their culture. I was so nerdy. Pathologically nerdy. Also, I was obsessed with Ellen Wilson. She was the coolest and I was always trying to impress her.

  “I remember the yard monitors were so perplexed by the whole thing. They had none of the background story, had no idea why we were doing this or how the dynamics of this game had been so quickly and widely disseminated. But for us, playing was so intuitive. We found a common thread and boom, we were off to the races. That’s what Tess is like right now. It’s beautiful. I hope she gets to keep that for as long as possible.”

  She closed the poetry book and put it back on the shelf. Then she scanned the spines to find something new.

  “Nell?” Berg said.

  “Yeah?” she said, craning her neck to look at him.

  “I love you.”

  CHAPTER 18

  AFTER THE LAUNCH OF the Alma, they began work on a new sloop for JC. This boat would be for his own personal use on the bay. It was the vessel Alejandro had been designing on the loft floor the first day Berg met him, and it was going to be a thirty-four-foot sloop, with a fairly large rig to counteract the size of its beam and draft, which were both greater than average. Alejandro had based the design on the old American centerboard sloops, which the French had become enamored with and adapted to create their Clipper ships. Alejandro loved pointing out that it was these boats that had captured the imagination of Impressionist painters like Monet, Renoir, and Manet, who featured them in their paintings of the races at Argenteuil. When Nell had visited the week before, he explained the origin of these sloops, and he and Nell bonded over their mutual love of Caillebotte.

  Before they could begin building JC’s sloop, however, they needed to mill more wood. Alejandro milled all of the wood he used to build boats with an Alaskan chainsaw mill. His old boatbuilding mentor, Orhan, had designed the mill, which featured a simple handle that was attached to the chainsaw with two long cords. Using a choke-style throttle, Alejandro ran the mill at a high rpm to prevent the chainsaw from stalling mid-cut
. It wasn’t as clean or accurate as the machinery used at a proper sawmill, but it was portable, and it allowed them to harvest trees along any roadside in the county.

  The most important part of milling wood, Alejandro explained, was finding the right tree. Often, they were able to scavenge wood, to mill a tree that had already fallen on some rancher’s property. But regardless of whether they cut down the tree themselves or scavenged it, it was crucial to select the perfect tree, because milling took several days, and if you chose poorly, it could end up being a huge waste of time.

  “We’re like sushi chefs,” Alejandro said. “We need the finest materials. The tree really has to be just right.”

  The first time Berg went scouting for wood with Alejandro, they drove up into the hills behind Talinas. Alejandro parked the car in a turnout on Kehoe Road and they walked along Bass Creek. He pointed out different species of plant as they hiked next to the creek. White alder, big-leaf maple, ferns, coffeeberry shrub.

  Al Garther owned all of this land, Alejandro said, and he let them mill on it. Al had made his money in some sort of Asian-clothing-marketing concern that Alejandro chose not to ask too many questions about. Al lived in a house at the northernmost end of the property and rented the house on the southwest corner of the property to Leanne Korver, the local Pilates teacher and the mother of Demeter, the woman Uffa had begun seeing. Berg hadn’t spent that much time hanging out with Demeter but Uffa was clearly smitten.

  “She’s a mystic alpha queen born under a wolf moon,” he’d told Berg the other day.

  Alejandro hobbled along the banks of the creek and Berg followed after him. On occasion Alejandro paused to study the bark of a pepperwood tree. He needed one that grew straight up, he said, and had no wind twist and few branches. These types of trees were usually found on the northern slopes of hills, where trees had to grow very quickly in order to reach the sun and, as a result, could not waste energy creating limbs. Trees like this produced straight wood that flexed the proper amount and had few knots.

  Berg found one good pepperwood tree but it was not close enough to the road for the wood to be milled and then feasibly transported. Around midday they stopped and ate lunch: chicken salad sandwiches and pickles and molasses cookies. They drank green tea from a thermos and dangled their feet in the creek. It was cold but not too cold, like a glass of ice water left out on the counter for an hour.

  Alejandro had milled several trees along this creek and it was always one of the first places he visited on a scouting expedition. The pepperwood from around here tended to be extra resistant to rot for reasons he couldn’t completely explain. When he’d first started milling, he’d performed all sorts of tests on the wood in the region. He would bury planks from different trees in the forest and then come back to examine the extent of their decay. White oak, black oak, Douglas fir, pepperwood, black locust, eucalyptus. He dropped sledgehammers on them from various heights. He soaked them in water. He had cataloged all of this work and self-published a small pamphlet called A Study of the Trees in Talinas: With a Focus on Milling, With a Special Focus on Milling for Boatbuilding. He had shown Berg a copy of the pamphlet at his house. Alejandro is many things, Berg remembered thinking, but he is not great with titles.

  Berg wiped his feet dry with the sleeve of his shirt and put his boots back on. Alejandro walked several yards away from the creek, barefoot, and peed on a patch of poison oak. Then they continued to follow the creek. Every once in a while Alejandro stopped, knelt down to examine a plant or an animal track. He took clippings of Mexican tea and dandelion greens, stuffed them in his backpack.

  At a certain point, the road peeled away from the creek and Berg and Alejandro followed it. As they moved away from the creek, the flora began to shift: now there was tanbark oak and madrone, a few redwoods. To their left a meadow unfolded, the grass soft and smooth like a green tablecloth stretched over the ground.

  While they searched, Alejandro talked about why he thought it was important to mill their own wood. It was cheaper, for one thing, and better for the environment. But also, it made them reliant on the world around them. Alejandro was very critical of sophistication. He believed that confusion and trouble grew out of complexity. He wanted people to have an intimate relationship with their own environment. The problem, he said, was that people had become too dissociated from the circumstances and conditions of their immediate surroundings. They treated the land around them with indifference and inattention, because they did not feel like they relied on it in any substantive way.

  “Many people have written about this,” he said. “But it continues to be true. We continue to live, by and large, apart from the land. If you work the land, you begin to understand how much you need it, how much it underpins your entire existence. And also,” he said, stopping by the creek and pulling out his water bottle, “you develop an affection for it. When we really pay attention to a thing, we begin to love it, and then we care for it.”

  It was Berg who found the tree, hours later: a majestic pepperwood with small green leaves and very few branches. No wind twist whatsoever, if the appearance of the bark could be trusted. They took the leaves and crushed them in their hands, inhaled the sharp medicinal smell. Pepperwoods were also known as headache trees, Alejandro explained, because their scent was thought to both provoke and cure headaches, depending on who sniffed them.

  “This is the one,” Alejandro said, pleased but exhausted. “This is a beautiful tree, Berg. This is a beautiful tree.”

  Alejandro tied a piece of red cloth around one of the branches so they could see it from the road. Then he hobbled over to a nearby rock and sat down gingerly. He looked to be in some degree of discomfort.

  “Are you okay, Ale?” Berg asked.

  “Yes, my hip’s been sore lately. I went to the doctor to check it out and he told me it might get better if we just let it alone, but man, it’s killing me right now.”

  Berg thought about the fact that Alejandro would die someday. Perhaps soon. Who could say? So much would be lost when it happened. Berg could barely bring himself to consider it. It was too sad.

  He set down his pack and joined Alejandro on the rock.

  “Can I do anything for you?” he said.

  “No, it’s fine. I just need to rest a moment.”

  They sat quietly, listened to the sounds of the forest. Alejandro took out a piece of smoked trout from his backpack and broke off half of it for Berg, as if it were a chocolate bar.

  “You know, Berg,” he said. “Nell told me about your concussion. I was very sorry to hear about that.”

  “What did she tell you about it?”

  “The whole thing: the concussion, the pain pills, rehab.”

  Berg took a bite of the trout. He felt blindsided, betrayed. Why had Nell told Alejandro about all that? This had always been the problem in their relationship. Nell thought it was better to reveal everything and Berg preferred that some things remain undisclosed. Why didn’t she consider that the story of his suffering and his addiction was his to tell?

  “If you ever want to talk about it, I am here,” Alejandro continued.

  “Thanks,” Berg said. “I don’t need to talk, but thanks.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry. I’d just… I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “That’s fine, Berg,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

  They finished eating the trout and wiped the grease off on their pants. Before they left, Alejandro admired the pepperwood one more time.

  “Yes,” he said, seeming satisfied. “Time to go home.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “I DIDN’T KNOW YOU hadn’t told them,” Nell said on the phone that night. “I’m sorry. You’re right, it’s your story to tell, but I just assumed you had told them. I mean, you’ve been living and working with these people all day every day for what? The last six months?”

  “Well, you should have asked me first,” Berg said.

  “Okay, you’re right,” she
said. “I’m sorry. I apologize for that.”

  Berg looked out the window of the cubby. The trees behind the farmhouse looked green and bunchy, like broccoli florets.

  “I still want you to come up this weekend,” Berg said, his voice softening.

  “I was still planning on it,” she said. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell them? Why don’t you talk about it?”

  “I don’t know,” Berg said.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, Berg. You had a concussion. You kept having all those headaches. They prescribed you painkillers.”

  “I know.”

  “So there’s nothing to be ashamed about, right?” Nell said.

  “Right.”

  After they hung up he leaned back in bed. The things Nell said were not untrue, but they were incomplete. The way she told it, he was blameless. But he didn’t feel like that. He felt responsible. He needed to be responsible. If he wasn’t, then he lost all agency, any ability to combat the problem.

  He thought back to beginning of everything, to the concussion, three years ago. It had been a long time since he’d been skiing and he was having a nice time. Nell was down at the lodge and he was out on the slopes by himself. The air smelled like pine and hard rock and sweet alpine meadow. The sounds of the mountain were muted and seemed to come one at a time, emerging in their full particularity and then disappearing back into the white silence: the flap of a bird’s wing, the scrape of a snowboarder passing him on his right, carving her way through the ice.

  When Berg had finished the first few blue squares he felt ready for something more difficult. He took a lift to the top of the mountain, which would allow him to take any number of routes back to the bottom. Once up there, he approached a man who was wearing a red shirt that said staff. The man’s face looked red and burned, like a piece of meat that had just been taken out of the freezer. Berg asked him what the easiest black diamond was and the man said, “Devil’s Gulch.”

  Devil’s Gulch was not the easiest black diamond. Berg would learn this an hour later, as he sat in the emergency first-aid hut at the bottom of the mountain, getting examined by a nurse with a shaved head.