Gumption: America's Gutsiest Troublemakers

by Nick Offerman

  I could spend an entire chapter describing the process, and you would be asleep by the first sentence, so let me try and nutshell it for you. First of all, Nat has to bring his historical knowledge of boat shapes to bear upon his imagination. This is the culmination of centuries of design, making improvements incrementally, builder by builder, across different cultures and different types of sea, river, or lake, until by now the craft has achieved a relative ideal. Nat understands how the shape and the weight of the hull relate directly to its performance and durability. Bear in mind that there are zero straight lines on this complex shape, and every piece will be made of wood in a way that it will keep the water on the outside, with any luck. As he says, “A boat is a piece of furniture you take out on the ocean and throw around.”

  Once he has conceived the general design, he sketches it out, and if it is a commission, he then discusses it with his client until everyone is happy with the concept. At this point, the lofting begins. Determining a series of those segmenting “globe” lines, using math and, apparently, sorcery, Nat then transfers those lines, full-size, onto an open floor, from which the shape and dimensions of each individual part of the ship can then be determined. Despite Nat’s humility in this area, he is truly considered one of the greatest living wooden-boat designers. To say that his craft involves an element of sorcery is actually an understatement. Combine that nuanced ability with the manner in which he and Ross Gannon seem equipped to solve any problem whatsoever that can be solved by tools, elbow grease, a hunk of mahogany, and an inbred understanding of simple machines, and you have the makings of the finest wooden boats that money can buy.

  Mr. Nat Benjamin grew up in the small Hudson River town of Garrison, New York, and vacationed at the Pleasant Bay Camp on Cape Cod, where he fell in love with sailing the eighteen-foot Baybird, designed by W. Starling Burgess. He was destined for a life on the open water, and his passion eventually found him crewing boats up and down the Atlantic Seaboard, until at age twenty, an offshore delivery took him to the Virgin Islands. It was there, at Saint Thomas, that his eyes feasted upon a fleet of old wooden masterpieces from the drawing boards of Alden and Herreshoff, Sparkman & Stephens, Fife, Camper & Nicholsons, and Rhodes, noted virtuosos from the golden age of yacht design. Beyond the hypnotizing lines of their boats, Nat was also taken in by the people who owned and sailed them. “They were crazy, but in a good way. They knew how to get the most out of life.”

  Called upon to skipper the delivery of such fine wooden yachts across the open Atlantic and back, between the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the American East Coast, a young Nat Benjamin grew to thrive on such adventure. Returning in a ship from Malta on one such voyage, Nat found his boat in bad shape (“It was what they called a sinking feeling”), so he pulled ashore in North Africa for repairs, “and these guys were good. We ripped off some planks and replaced them, and that’s when I first became fascinated by the work of the shipwrights.”

  Jimmy, Taylor, and I understand, as we were then flatly astonished when we cruised across the road to the larger build shed, in the yard of which were several boats being stored for the winter (including sloop Sally May, Nat’s first design, built for James Taylor in 1980). Inside, there was a Herreshoff yacht from 1905, undergoing pretty intensive repairs, which I would normally have considered a massive job, had it not been dwarfed next to an enormous Hong Kong schooner built in 1957 to a Sparkman & Stephens design.

  The vessel was stripped down to the frames and planks of the hull, and it was mind-boggling as Nat walked us through each piece of the puzzle and how it would fit back together. That’s always an important key for me when I consider any project “impossible”; I first consider the fact that, “well, somebody has done this already, so it can be done.” Then I remember the advice of Ted Moores, my teacher in canoe craft—you don’t have to build the whole boat at once; you just have to make the first piece, and then you make the second piece, and so on. Still and all, this stem-to-stern overhaul that Nat was undertaking would make a grown man weep. Even, perhaps, a grown woman.

  We asked Nat what price an overhaul like this would run a person, to which he replied, “About a million.” As we stood, blinking and nodding with false understanding, as though we hadn’t just shit ourselves, he continued. “That’s considerably cheaper than building new.” Okay, so wooden boats aren’t the cheapest investment out there, but then when I stack it up against a wooden-slab dining table from my shop that goes for ten thousand dollars, it seems rather a bargain. The table has maybe ten parts, and most of that price is the labor and the cost of a large slab of tree (usually around two or three thousand dollars). A boat certainly has more than a hundred times as many parts, all of them curved. In boatbuilding, fine-furniture making, and home building, if anybody’s getting rich, it’s generally not the men and women swinging the mallets. So what is it that drives these goofy boatbuilders, if not the almighty dollar?

  Part of it, for Nat, is simply knowing that he and his shop mates do things in the best possible way they can be done. Their techniques may be centuries old, but they are becoming largely lost to us in this modern era of mass-production and computer-generated 3-D printing. On top of which, he told us that, with old boats, it was just worth it to some people to maintain a masterfully built classic rather than spend that fortune on something new. His theory is not at all unlike the way Thomas Lie-Nielsen makes his tools. It is the adherence to the importance of quality in all parts of life, I feel, that protects us from the creeping tentacles of consumerist thought.

  Nat described to us the technique of steaming wood so that large planks can be bent around the curves of a hull. In a long box, large enough to encompass the plank, steam is pumped from any primitive kettle arrangement (steam is easy to make), and the wood is steamed for one hour per inch of thickness. Nat was talking about a clipper ship, the Charles W. Morgan, which had recently taken skilled wrights seven years to rebuild at Mystic Seaport. The planks on her were three and a half inches thick and forty feet long, which means they would require three and a half hours in the steam box. “So many skills have been totally lost,” he went on. “I mean, they used to build clipper ships much bigger than that up and down the coast here; in every backwater creek they used to crank those things out in ninety to a hundred days, from lofting to launching, finished. What people do these days is a joke compared to the work Herreshoff did on his yachts.”

  We spoke further of the dearth of valuation for hand skills in today’s society, and what a destructive and dangerous attitude that is. Nat described the joyful sight of seeing the native children in third world situations strip a palm leaf of its fronds (leaving a paddle-shaped stem), jump into a dugout canoe crafted by their fathers, and paddle into the ocean with aplomb, as happy as clams at high tide. One of the most inspiring books I’ve read on the topic of such lost skills is John McPhee’s The Survival of the Bark Canoe, which details a young Maine man’s quest to keep alive the noble Native American craft of building a perfect canoe with only ingenuity, a knife, a match, and products that one can glean from the woods.

  I think that part of what defines gumption involves a willingness, even a hunger, for one’s mettle to be challenged. Just like Wendell Berry, Nat finds no use for a computer in his work, especially when it comes to designing and lofting, even though most modern designers have switched to CAD programs. The familiar note here seems to be that people with gumption will bristle when less is required of them. A part of human nature tends toward laziness and comfort, which is the part being so lucratively exploited by corporations, but there is a more noble part: the portion of the human spirit that revels, not in ease, but in having its capabilities tested. These estimable characters know the profoundest, bone-deep satisfaction of having themselves challenged by the world, and, relying only upon their human capabilities—their gumption—they not only win the contest, but they infuse those around them with the inspiration to shine as well.

 
; Nat pilots sail-powered boats across the ocean, navigating primarily with the celestial bodies and a sextant. He and Ross and their boatyard have produced more than sixty substantial vessels, most of them born of his pencil, not to mention a veritable fleet of smaller craft. He holds a license from the US Coast Guard to captain a ship up to a weight of one hundred tons. Standing in his chilly shop in December, surrounded by all the tools and sawdust, Nat Benjamin said to me with a slight grin, “I find that I have friends that are retiring, and I think, ‘Gosh, have they had such lousy work that they want to retire?’ . . . If they told me I couldn’t go to work, I would be pretty upset.”

  Echoing the subjects of so many previous chapters—Wendell Berry, Eleanor Roosevelt, Benny Frankles: If you don’t love your work enough to have a good time doing it, then maybe you’re showing up at the wrong job. Nat Benjamin, most assuredly, is not.

  15

  GEORGE NAKASHIMA

  Hey, look, it’s a Japanese American! And his redoubtable daughter Mira—that’s a Japanese American woman!

  Talk about the American dream. George Nakashima was born in 1905 in Spokane, Washington (home of the best boot company, White’s Boots. Made in America! [The 100 percent kind!]), to a newspaper reporter descended from samurai lineage named Katsuharu Nakashima, and his wife, Suzu, qualifying him from the get-go as an heroic American citizen. Boom.

  A bright young pisser, George graduated from the University of Washington with a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1929, then went on to earn his master’s degree from MIT in 1931. He moved to New York City and worked as a mural painter and architectural designer. Bingo.

  Feeling pretty tall, he hopped a ship to France, where he undoubtedly ate the hell out of some crepes and snails while kicking about the country for a year like a hotshot young American architect. His tour continued to North Africa, and finally Japan, where he got a job with an American architect, Antonin Raymond. In 1937 George volunteered to design and supervise the construction of a religious sanctuary in Pondicherry, India, where he underwent “a deep transformation of consciousness” so profound that he was given the Sanskrit name Sundarananda, which means “one who delights in beauty.” Bango.

  Nakashima’s work thereafter was inculcated with a religious zeal, even as he created his first furniture for the ashram dormitory. He believed that “it was necessary to remove the desire to promote one’s individual ego from the creative process and to devote work each day to the divine,” a notion quite contrary to Western culture, but one that would inspire him to great heights nonetheless. Bongo.

  Returning to Japan, young George canvassed the island nation, absorbing the subtly alluring details of traditional Japanese architecture, and met Marion Okajima, also born in America, who would become his wife. Walkin’ tall, eh, what, Georgie? A groovy Sanskrit name and a foxy bride on top of a winning disposition and a surplus of talent for design? The lovebirds moved to Seattle and opened a furniture workshop in 1940, and Marion gave birth to a beautiful daughter, Mira, in January of 1942, and everything was peachy kee—(sound of tires screeching to a stop!). Oh. Dang. Pearl Harbor.

  You youngsters may not be hyperaware of this little speed bump in our great nation’s track record regarding civil liberties, but if you’ll recall from chapter 7, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, ol’ FDR pooped his presidential drawers and, under the pressure of his advisers, issued Executive Order 9066, which yanked about 120,000 Japanese Americans from their (mostly West Coast) homes and plunked them unceremoniously into concentration camps.

  “Say what?” you say.

  “That is accurate reporting,” I reply.

  “No shit?,” you add.

  “That’s a negatory on the shit,” I persevere.

  “That is fucked up,” you conclude.

  “You don’t say. Read on.” This next part is juicy and shameful.

  We (white folks) tossed the Japanese into camps, despite the fact that two-thirds of them were US citizens, like the Nakashimas. This action was undertaken out of sheer racism and fear. Classic white-guy move. We tucked the “Orientals” out of sight, just to be on the safe side, while we were firebombing Japanese cities in preparation for a massive attack of the Allied forces on Japan. Remember, this is mere decades after the “Yellow Peril” was the commonplace term for our civilization’s fear of some sort of Asian invasion.

  World War II, to me, is best represented by a group of boys of varying races, playing with their toy guns on a playground. They are shooting and seriously wounding one another, taking sides with their allies, and seeing who will dare to push the game the furthest. One kid with a weird, tiny mustache is playing like an asshole, like he owns the playground, so he is subdued, and it seems like things are going to wind down, except that Japanese kid is refusing to give up. He lands a couple of good shots on the American kid, just on his elbow, but still, it smarts. So the American kid pulls out a nuclear bomb and nukes the Japanese kid. The playground is stunned. Nothing remains of the victim but a white shadow on the side of the school building.

  Like it or not, if you end a war by being the biggest asshole (by far), you are not really a “victor.” You’re the biggest asshole, who had the last word, and the reason nobody retaliated is not because the other nations think America is the best. It’s because there is not another world power willing to be such a dick on the playground. Knee-jerk “patriots” who proclaim our country’s obvious superiority are ignorant to the fact that, while we are indeed superior, it’s actually as bullies that we have established our dominance.

  The Manifest Destiny was our nation’s presumptive attitude in expanding west across the continent, with the absurd aim of “democratic conquest,” declared (by us) justifiable, based upon our virtue. You ask, “But who could bestow such a privilege upon this particular group of white people?” Why, the answer is God, of course. That’s the Christian God. The same white-bearded fellow who approves of our playground “diplomacy” in the Middle East, for how much difference is there, really, between the Yellow Peril and the Muslim Terror? The same deity, we were told (by George W. Bush), that put George W. Bush in the White House, despite his losing the election—a miracle indeed.

  I really like the teachings of Jesus, by the way. They are beautiful and profound and morally unimpeachable. I only wish, like Wendell Berry, that so many of these gosh-darned Christians felt the same way. Mr. Berry is classy and respectable, and I admire him powerfully, but he’s not here right now, so I’m going to go ahead and assert that the vast number of Americans who claim to follow Christ and yet support actions like our imperialistic tendencies, including slavery, “internment” camps (sounds more gentle than “concentration”), genocide, “police actions,” torture, and “collateral damage” . . . well, you’re clearly full of shit. Now, let’s talk about a goddamn nice furniture maker.

  Despite their lemony incarceration at the hands of their cool, white captors (and fellow Americans), the Nakashimas made lemonade quite handily. While imprisoned, George met (and began to assist) Gentaro Hikogawa, a fellow inmate who was trained in traditional Japanese joinery. This style of joinery employs no fasteners, relying instead upon cleverly mating puzzlelike components that are designed to remain dependably conjoined for as long a time as the wood timbers themselves do. Once again, we are presented with a discipline that chooses beauty, quality, and patience over speed and profit.

  Nakashima wrote, “The decline in quality of modern furniture is probably due in part to the use of the quick, easy and cheap dowel joint. The decline of modern domestic architecture can be traced to the popularity of the stud wall put together with hammer and nails, a type of construction calling for no joinery at all. By contrast, the early American house and barn with their excellent joinery still represent the best we have produced and will greatly outlast contemporary buildings.”

  Nakashima took to this ancient joinery style like a televangelist to your grandmo
ther’s pension dollars, and when his family was sprung from the Idaho camp after being “sponsored” by their white pal Antonin Raymond, they set up a home in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where Raymond lived. The young family had to start over very much from scratch, and they spent a rough couple of winters getting their domicile together, literally stacking the stones from the property into walls.

  It wasn’t long before George was crafting what would become his signature style of sculptural tables, chairs, benches, and cabinets in his Pennsylvania studio. The Nakashima table style can best be described as employing a large slab of wood—made from one vertical slice of the tree—which has been flattened and smoothed on its faces but retains the organic, natural outer edges. In the beginning, he used no power tools, mostly because there was no power. As a purist student trying to emulate his work, I always felt conflicted when employing electricity upon any step of a Nakashima piece, until I read this: “As much as man controls the end product, there is no disadvantage in the use of modern machinery and there is no need for embarrassment. . . . A power plane can do in a few minutes what might require a day or more by hand. In a creative craft, it becomes a question of responsibility, whether it is a man or the machine that controls the work’s progress.” Boy, that was good news. I was further tickled to discover that George would drive a couple of large screws up through the bottom of his tabletops into each wing of the famous butterfly keys that he installed along cracks or seams. Screws!

  He applied his philosophy of gentle curiosity to the wood, revering the material with a most Eastern sensibility. “I have always been interested in meditation and mysticism,” he said. “I think I’ve always been that kind of seeker. But I am also Japanese enough and pragmatic enough to want to give this spirit physical expression.” I suppose I can’t blame him for citing his Japanese heritage after being, you know, thrown into a concentration camp with his wife and infant daughter, but I hope that we Americans can evolve our country into someplace where George would not mind flying his flag.