Posted by Jock on January 03, 2008 at 10:00:13 from 87.105.81.146 user Jock.
In Reply to: Boat-building article: Los Angeles Times posted by Pam Adams on January 02, 2008 at 20:02:37:
Thanks Pam for linking to a hauntingly evocative piece of writing.
Like the other old men at this Costa Mesa boatyard, where the hulls of peeling sloops
and half-made cutters rot on their wooden posts, Karl Markvart can't be certain he'll
live long enough to reach the water.
Again and again, he's watched the boat builders around him lose their race to the sea,
their unfinished vessels hauled off to the junkyard to make room for another boat,
another mad dreamer.
There's a similar passage in Racundra's First Cruise, where Ransome meets an ancient fisherman
living alone on an island in the Baltic. With everybody else gone, he is building a craft to
take him off the island. The topsides are golden in freshly planed wood, fungus grows on the
greying timbers below.