News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
It's still early March, but I pulled our maple taps last weekend and filtered our syrup. This early spring is making me worried for our fruit trees; their buds are beginning to form, and a hard frost in a couple weeks could knock off all the blossoms.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about creatures, friendship, and personality.
- Chris Smaje draws on Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger to make sense of his ongoing debates with George Monbiot and to demystify the shifting partisan landscape: "It strikes me that all of us–the two Naomis, George and me–are seeking a way out of present problems with the liberal or leftwing politics of our formative years. I believe some of those exits are more plausible than others, but whatever the case we seem to have entered a period in history when hard political boundaries of old are melting and changing shape. Old allies and familiar nostrums have lost their lustre, while new bridges start to form."
- Garrett Martinez considers how national debates about immigration and other issues can distort our relations with our neighbors: "In these movements, we are but a speck of dust in the great desert. But here, where our feet are, we hold a power forgotten."
- David Bannon praises the blessings of a pen pal: "A pen pal is not limited to handwritten letters. In fact, one of my most valued friends writes to me nearly every week via email. Over two decades we have shared much laughter and much sorrow. His compassion and advice have helped shape my life."
- Michael Strand suggests we have more agency regarding our use of technologies than we sometimes think we do: "A quarter of a century ago, Wendell Berry wrote, 'the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.' That division has come, and all must choose on which side of the divide to stand."
- Daniel Griffith imagines a Cain and Abel story for moderns: "When we dig in the soil and lift it up to inspect it, to sift through it, to attempt to understand it, does it become something else? Disconnected from the soil beneath your feet, does the soil in your hands transform into something that is not soil? This is the delusion. "
I was recently talking with someone who has built a couple of wooden boats, and he recommended Jonathan Gornall's How to Build a Boat: A Father, His Daughter, and the Unsailed Sea. It's a lovely account of an amateur's effort to build a traditional clinker boat for his young daughter (you can read an excerpt here that's accompanied by some photos):
If your particular existential crisis urges you to climb a mountain, the chances are you’ll head for Everest. Likewise, if it’s long-distance solo rowing that floats your boat, you’ll probably set course on the Atlantic. And, should you decide to defy a complete lack of skills, and aptitude, to build a traditional wooden boat, then lapstrake construction really is your only option.
Because here’s the thing about lapstrake: there is no boatbuilding technique so respectably ancient, so historically resonant, so seductively beautiful, and so bloody difficult.
On paper it doesn’t sound too bad. Lapstrake (also known as clinker or clenched lap depending where in the world you live) is the process of building up the hull of a boat with a series of strakes, a strake being composed of one or more planks joined together end to end. Each strake is slightly overlapped by the one above and fastened to it with copper nails driven through the overlap at regular intervals. On the inside of the overlap the ends of the nails are hammered down over a circular washer, or rove, which pulls the planks tightly together.
Ta-dah! Sounds pretty easy, right? But you and I—as of September 2016, at least—have absolutely no idea. None at all.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro