Bobby Ives likens the program at the Carpenter’s Boatshop, which he and his wife, Ruth, established in 1979, to a safe harbor. There, he says, people from all walks of life and ages can drop anchor and reassess their direction while living a simple, structured life for nine months.
Apprentices at the Boatshop have ranged in ages from 20 to 75 and include people from the United States and Europe who are in between or are thinking of changing jobs, are preparing for retirement, recovering from addictions, emerging from prison, just out of school or taking a year off.
“The only thing apprentices have in common,” says Ives, “is that they are in transition.”
He and Ruth established the program after spending three years as ministers and teachers on Monhegan Island and three years at the Methodist Churches in New Harbor and Round Pond, with a two-year hiatus in between when they lived alone on Loud’s Island. While on the island, they fished for lobsters, did carpentry and built boats.
Each weekend, they rowed ashore to serve the Sheepscot Community Church. The Iveses hoped their year-round presence on Loud’s Island would encourage residents who had moved to the mainland to return and revive a year-round island community of fishing, farming and boatbuilding. When that didn’t happen, they decided to create a mainland “family-community-school” centered on boatbuilding and dedicated to service and a “reverence for life.” In “The Apprentice Handbook” they expressed their dream that each year’s eight apprentices would “not only build fine wooden boats, but may they with God’s blessing build their own lives into ones of love and peace so they can more gently serve in the world about them.”
The Boatshop community, which ranges from 16 to 21 people, also includes members of the clergy who are taking time off to renew their energy by working with wood, instructors who have completed the nine-month program and have returned to volunteer further time, and occasional visitors. Bobby Ives says he received his most valuable training in boatbuilding from Edward Sorel, a retired Norwegian boatbuilder who spent summers on Louds Island. After the Carpenter’s Boatshop was established, Edward and his wife stayed for seven summers in a guesthouse there, and he helped out in the Boatshop.
Ives says over 90 percent of the people who come to the Boatshop have no experience with woodworking. During the nine-month program, each apprentice is taught to use and care for tools and builds two small boats like a skiff, dory tender, sailing dinghy or peapod. Each also works on a restoration project that Ives has agreed to take on because it gives students the opportunity to work on a classic design like an Old Town canoe or a unique boat like a current project, a 1937 Lake Michigan Swan Sloop, one of 10 ever constructed. Students also learn seamanship, using one of several boats owned by the Boatshop.
The Boatshop program is based on tenets of the Benedictine tradition, which sees that the work of God is fulfilled in seven fundamental activities: work, prayer, study, service, worship, recreation and hospitality. Life at the workshop revolves around a highly structured schedule that incorporates each of these activities into the daily schedule. Room and board are provided. Funds to support the Boatshop are raised by the restoration work and donations and sale of boats built by students. Everyone in the community shares in daily chores, including cooking, cleaning, composting, taking care of animals and splitting firewood to feed 16 woodstoves in the main house and outbuildings.
“We say we’re socialists by day and capitalists by night,” says Bobby Ives, explaining that in their off time, students are free to earn pocket money by doing for-pay projects in the surrounding community. They also regularly volunteer time for community work.
In the closely-knit community, disagreements naturally arise. Which type of music to play during work hours always produces solid arguments, but Ives says he likes to have these debates, pointing out that they provide an opportunity for him to show everyone “that we can resolve these abrasive personal situations with words rather than hurtful types of actions.”
Ives has maintained a lifelong interest in ecclesiastical and ecumenical history. The Boatshop program is open to people of all faiths or none and does not proselytize. Rather, Ives says, learning about practices of different faiths with each year’s group of apprentices has enriched the community. His major concern has been to encourage people at the Boatshop to incorporate their religious beliefs in every aspect of their daily life rather than save them for the Sabbath.
Laura Zylstra had graduated from college and was headed for a career in advertising when she decided to take a year off and apply to the Boatshop in 1991. She wanted to learn to work with her hands, and thought that would be the major benefit she would derive from the program. But, she says, she came away with much more: “The time with Bobby and Ruth was the single most pivotal year of my life in terms of being a real profound influence on how I make choices,” she says. “They have been such a positive example for Todd [her husband, whom she met at the Boatshop] and me in terms of the choices we make about what we do with our lives – trying to choose livelihoods that can be outward giving. They helped us see that you can live a life that is incredibly rich and full without having it all revolve around status and money.”
She and Todd recently returned to settle in New Harbor after being based for a year in India while he was Regional Director of Habitat International for South Asia and she developed a fund-raising program for the organization in that area. Both continue to work for Habitat International out of their new location. About 55 percent of Carpenter’s Boatshop graduates continue to pursue woodworking careers. Tom Price went on to win a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study traditional methods of building gondolas with one of the last wooden gondola builders in Venice, Italy. Subsequently, he opened a school in Venice to preserve this dying art. Kenneth Kortemeier, who before attending the Boatshop had studied traditional woodworking techniques in Appalachia, is shop master at Atlanta College of Art, where he builds traditional American furniture and helps students take their ideas for wooden sculptures from concept to actuality. Other graduate occupations have included construction of whale models, building organs, teaching boatbuilding to at-risk public school students and work with Maine Affordable Housing projects. The Boatshop also offers for-pay weeklong summer workshops in Shaker Furniture Building and building a Monhegan Skiff. Some are designed for clergy, and others are open to area residents who commute.
The Boatshop facility has been growing ever since Ruth and Bobby and the first group of apprentices converted a barn for 3,000 chickens into the machine shop. In subsequent years, the community added a student dormitory onto the Iveses’ farmhouse, moved a donated home to the property and converted it into work space, and constructed the “Barn-Chapel,” a restoration shop and a large woodshed.
Two years ago the Boatshop joined in alliance with the Damariscotta River Association and Pemaquid Watershed Association to buy Crooked Farm, a large tract of land adjoining the Boatshop property. The Boatshop retained the buildings plus 10 acres and the associations used the remaining acreage to create Crooked Farm Preserve, with trails that lead to the Pemaquid River. This fall, Bobby Ives expects work will be completed on the restoration and expansion of the 200-year-old Crooked Farmhouse, which will be home for clergy on sabbatical, instructors and apprentices. Food preparation for everyone will be shifted from the Iveses’ home to the new kitchen in Crooked Farmhouse, and all will eat there at a large oval table. This giant step in supporting the Boatshop’s mission will be completed as the program approaches its 25th anniversary celebration. But, this is a bittersweet time for the community, since the Ives discovered last fall that Ruth has a malignant (Glioblastoma Multiforme) brain tumor. Despite initial surgery, the tumor recurred and Ruth is now undergoing experimental treatment. Nevertheless, she and Bobby have not faltered in their mission, and the Boatshop has continued to provide a closely knit community centered around boatbuilding, and, as Doc Schilke of Wiscasset observed after hearing Bobby speak about their work, “person building.”