Boat Building Humor courtesy of John Steinbeck

L

Larry Eckart

Well-known member
Guys (and Dani),
I am re-reading Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. I came across this page about a guy who builds boats but never finishes them, and thought you all might enjoy it.

Think of this as a litte pre-summer or late-spring humor for all of us on Duckboats.net. The sequence ends with this conclusion about the boat builder in the story: "I think he's nuts!" My wife has said the same thing about me more than once!

Larry

(Setting: Two guys named Doc and Hazel are walking back after catching a mess of starfish to be sold for research. They begin talking about Henri the boat builder.)

Doc chuckled, “Is he still building his boat?”

“Sure,” said Hazel. “He’s got it all changed around. New kind of boat. I guess he’ll take it apart and change it. Doc- is he nuts?”

Doc swung a heavy sack of starfish to the ground and stood panting a little. “Nuts?” he asked. “Oh yes, I guess so. Nuts about the same way we are, only in a different way.”

Such a thing had never occurred to Hazel. He looked upon himself as a crystal pool of clarity and on his life as a troubled glass of misunderstood virtue. Doc’s last statement outraged him a little. “But that boat,” he cried. “He’s been building that boat for seven years. The blocks rotted out and he made concrete blocks. Every time he gets it nearly finished he changes it and starts over again. I think he’s nuts. Seven years on a boat.”

Doc was sitting on the ground pulling off his rubber boots. “You don’t understand,” he said gently. “Henri loves boats but he’s afraid of the ocean.”

“What’s he want a boat for then?” Hazel demanded.

“He likes boats,” said Doc. “But suppose he finishes his boat. Once it’s finished people will say, ‘Why don’t you put it in the water?’ Then if he puts it in the water, he’ll have to go out in it, and he hates the water. So you see, he never finishes the boat- so he doesn’t ever have to launch it.”

“I think he’s nuts,” said Hazel.
 
I have a fiberglass canoe remodel.

It landuishes not due to fear, but a commitment to an idea that my lizard brain can't let go of.

A 'sane' person would scrap it with a hatchet in about 10 mins work and free up the stilorave space in both their garage and their mind.
 
When we moved into our house, the shower in the master bath was not tiled. This was in 2000. In 2002, I tiled it... But never caulked the corners... The Master is above out living room. I finally finished it last summer. My reason for not finishing it, was because I was afraid it might leak...
 
Larry~


Thanks for sharing this. I read Cannery Row a LONG time ago. Steinbeck is always worth one's time. Thoughts like this are priceless:


"He looked upon himself as a crystal pool of clarity and on his life as a troubled glass of misunderstood virtue."


(And Mr. Steinbeck had never met me......)


All the best,


SJS
 
This is timely. I'm reading Red Pony with my students now. Treat yourself to Tortilla Flat this summer. It's a small book and very funny.
 
Larry.

One of my favorite Steinbeck "reads" is his journal: Log From the Sea of Cortez. The Log from the Sea of Cortez, is a collection of journalistic musings kept by Steinbeck and his comrade-in-arms, Edward F. Ricketts (Doc from Cannery Row) that narrated their epic six-week marine animal collecting expedition down the Baja peninsula and into the Sea of Cortez.

Don't know if Steinbeck ever carved and painted, but this quote from the journal became one of my favorite "art quotes" a long time ago:

"The safety-valve of all speculation is: It might be so. And as long as the might remains, a variable deeply understood, then speculation does not easily become dogma, but remains the fluid creative thing it might be. Thus, a valid painter, letting color and line, observed, sift into his eyes, up the nerve trunks, and mix well with his experience before it flows down his hand to the canvas, has made his painting say, "It might be so." Perhaps his critic, being not so honest and not so wise, will say, "It is not so. The picture is damned." If this critic could say, "It is not so with me, but that might be because my mind and experience are not identical with those of the painter," that critic would be the better critic for it, just as that painter is a better painter for knowing he himself is in the pigment."
 
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