A wise old man told me, “If you haven’t been aground, you haven’t been anywhere.” I have proven him right a number of times and one of those times I hit the old sloop a very hard whack on a very hard rock and started a seam, squished the cotton right out of it. So I grounded her out alongside the boatyard wharf to re-caulk it. I had caulked seams in a punt with a screwdriver and a hammer but never in a properly planked vessel. So I bought a caulking iron and some cotton and went to it.
Progress was slow and awkward. I hung the hammer by its claw on my pants pocket. I tucked one end of the long, fluffy rope of caulking cotton into the seam with the iron, stretched the cotton along the seam and pushed it in, took up the hammer and started to bang the cotton in with the iron.
Somehow I became aware of a Critical Presence behind me. I refused to turn around and face it. I didn’t have to.
“Drop that hammer!” said the Critical Presence, and he meant it. He took the iron from my astonished hand and all but ran up into the boat shop, Before I, very much surprised and a little offended, could get started up the path, he re-appeared in the shop door holding a caulking mallet, a hardwood mallet with a short handle and a long head bound with iron. He was an old man although not badly stooped, dressed in clean work clothes and wearing a flat cap. With quick, determined step he passed me, looked back, held up the mallet and said, “This can talk; the hammer can’t. Listen.”
He ripped out the piece I had started and pushed in a loop of cotton with his iron. He laid the cotton along the seam, at frequent short intervals leaving a loop. With the mallet and his iron, he “tunked” the cotton into the seam, evening out the loops. Then he went over the seam again “pounding” the cotton in harder. Finally, he whacked the cotton in very tightly and the mallet said “crack” at each stroke. “That’s caulkin’,” he said, and went on to finish the seam.
The experience had thawed him out considerably. He explained: “It burns me like a fire that high,” he held his hand at his side palm down just below his waist, “to see an ignorant, clumsy guy abuse his tools and bungle away at a job that a man who knew what he was doing could do fast and right. Perhaps I was a little gruff at first.
“How did you learn?” I asked.
“When I was 15, I went to work as an apprentice in a gang of caulkers. We worked on small Navy transports and then on wooden minesweepers. They had to be wooden so as to be non-magnetic. Then after World War I, I worked on yachts in this yard here until they quit building wooden yachts. Then I scrubbed plastic yachts for two years, gave up and retired.”
“I am very glad to have an experienced professional like you work on my boat. What do I owe you for the caulking and the instruction?” I asked.
“Nothin’. It has been good to hold my old mallet again and hear her talk to me. Now you take and paint that seam and fill her almost to the top with white lead and then put the copper paint to her and I’ll drink all that seam will leak.”
“Thank you again,” I said, “especially for the instruction.
He handed me my own caulking iron as he left and added, “Never set a seam with a hammer. It can’t talk.”