Sprezzatura

Grant Buday hauls, mucks and writes on Mayne

In January I helped Dave steal a 35-foot fishing boat. It was 10 in the morning, the rain had paused and the sea was as flat as slate. Cutting the motor we slid alongside in silence, climbed aboard and peered in the wheelhouse window. Derelict. The deck was strewn with Budweiser cans and scabbed with seagull droppings. Dave pointed. I lashed a rope to her bow, unhooked her from the float on which she was illegally moored, and we towed her to the government wharf, where we rearranged all the other boats to make room, and then tied her up. It takes a bit of labour to hand-haul a fishing boat into place, especially working on an algae-slick dock. We kept our hats pulled down low and worked fast because people don’t like strangers meddling with their boats, even if they are tied up to someone else’s mooring and you’ve been sent to rearrange things.

As we took off, the motor scored a groove in that smooth sea and we were laughing. The last thing I missed at that moment was teaching, the cement-box classrooms, the fluorescent lighting, and the bored faces that used to confront me each time I stepped into the room. I taught college English for six years. I didn’t quit, and I wasn’t fired, but somehow, in a way I still can’t quite determine, I got disappeared. Maybe it had something to do with my consistently bad evaluations, one of which suggested I should not come to class drunk. In fact I never came to class drunk—hung over, yes, drunk, no. Or maybe it had to do with reading the racing form during staff meetings. Either way, one semester there was no work for me, nor the next. Secretly I was relieved, and yet guilty too. How could I have blown such a job, no, such a position, such a career?

That was over a decade ago. Since then making a living has been challenging. If my scripts and novels came through I’d be able to put a down payment on a house; as it was, I could hardly make the rent, and seeking cheap rent was one of the reasons my wife and son and I had left Vancouver for Mayne Island.

Mayne is one of the more obscure islands in the southern Strait of Georgia. Just over 1,000 people live here year-round, including retirees, tradesmen, a few farmers, and a lot of louts. There is also a plague of potters and crafts-people. I’d always secretly disdained people who moved to the Gulf Islands. Things that mattered happened in the city. Give me the grit and noise and speed. The islands were where you took early retirement, bought a second house, put on a cardigan, and faded into the twilight of a middle age spent carving napkin rings. Then a friend told us about a house renting for less than a basement suite in the city. We packed up and became rural.

As well as potters, Mayne is infested with whitetail deer, a graceful but suicidal creature with the habit of bounding in front of cars. The narrow roads are winding and hilly and people here are bad drivers. Many of them are drunk by noon. It’s terrifying to visit the local liquor outlet in the morning and watch the bottles of rye and boxes of Budweiser being toted out. But it’s an amiable place. There is the occasional B&E, and the odd scuffle at the local pub, the Springwater. By far the worst injuries one suffers are the wounds that come from the pathological backbiting. Everyone knows everything about each other, or so they think. And if they don’t, they make it up.

* * *

I was feeing pretty good about myself after the fishing-boat caper. In fact I’d been telling people about it, improving the story with each retelling. Dave had taken me on as a sort of apprentice, a position I was too poor to pass up, and one that I hoped might provide some interesting characters.

Dave’s eyes are always narrowed, as if suspicious, as if gauging, as if judging. He’s the sort of man who strikes terror into the hearts of guys like me because he can do things. He knows motors and tools, runs a tuna boat, builds docks, dives and welds. He even paints and carves and has sailed the world and lived in Japan. What we have in common is travel; he’s been lots of places and so have I. The one area in which I have a little more expertise is words. Fortunately, he likes words. I gave him sprezzatura: grace under pressure.

“Write it down,” he said.

I took out the pad and pencil I keep in my jean-jacket pocket. We were in his boat on our way to another job. Seated on the wet thwart, I wrote it down and tore out the page and passed it to him. “Sprezzatura,” he said, trying it out like a new wine.

We were going to move a float. We passed Georgeson Island, home of bald eagles, as well as sea lions that groan in the fog as they mate. The sound is often likened to the spirits of drowned sailors; I tend to think of the groans of constipation. It was raining when we glided up to the float in question. It was not a downpour, not a drizzle, but a good steady West Coast rain that had hit stride and was ready to continue for the rest of the day.

The float measured about 15 feet by 20. Next to it was a 40-foot aluminum ramp, one end of which was submerged in the blurred depths of the rain-stirred sea. Our mission: raise the ramp, drag it onto the float, then tow it back to Horton Bay where it would “winter.”

Dave studied the job. “Get the come-along.”

A come-along? What was a come-along? I spotted a winch-type thing. “This?”

“Hook it up and crank it,” he said.

The come-along is a lever, gear and cable contraption designed to crush your finger. I turned it in my hands like a monkey with a cell phone. I could already see myself getting one of my fingers mangled, and then being reminded of it every time I fanned them out above the keyboard. In the tension of the moment—and the moment was tense, for we were on the job, I was being paid, and was terrified of appearing inept—I tried to figure out how the thing worked. Not quickly enough, however. Dave clomped over in his outsized gumboots and regarded me. He seemed about to remark upon my abilities, or rather, lack of abilities, then changed his mind, for he is not an unkind man. “Hit this, pop that, crank there.” And he clomped back. I got it hooked up and began cranking. We managed to raise the ramp a centimetre, maybe two, but no further. Next we tried a pair of six-foot iron pry bars. After that we lashed ropes around the ramp and pulled. Nothing, only a silent shout from my back: Stop! Dave pondered the float while I stared at my rope-scorched hands and then, a veteran of 12 years of yoga, did a tentative forward bend. The rain intensified. I began to wonder at the state of my life, a practise I indulge more than is perhaps healthy. Six books published, a couple of screenplays optioned, one film made but never distributed, no bank account, no credit cards, big debt, 17-year-old car.

* * *

For the next three hours Dave and I laboured. Sometimes the ramp moved up; sometimes it moved down. Ultimately it remained where it was, submerged.

“We could just walk away from it,” said Dave.

“Good idea.”

“But I’m buggered if I’ll let it beat me. You know what we need?”

“A crane?”

“Sprezzatura! And lunch.”

Lunch involved sitting on the cement step of the ramp owner’s house. The ramp owners were in Costa Rica. We sat on the cold clammy concrete watching the rain drum on our outstretched legs, eating sandwiches that tasted like novels slicked with mayonnaise. Dave mentioned a book he’d read about a New Zealander who went and lived seven years alone on a tiny South Pacific island. I thought about that, contrasting the cold rain falling now to tropical rain. Was it raining in Costa Rica where the owners were? I hoped so.

I peered in the window of the house. On the bookshelf were novels by James A. Michener, Nora Roberts and Robert Ludlum. What, no John Grisham?

We returned to the float.

“Let’s have a look underneath.” We pried up a plank exposing clumps of barnacles, mussels, kelp and slime, and tried loosening the mooring chains. The bolts were seized solid. The only thing that finally worked was to beat at them with a ballpeen hammer. It’s satisfying to beat things with a hammer. This was followed by more labour with the come-along. By this point I was proud to say I had got the hang of the thing, and I could alternately winch things up or loosen them off. The ramp was significantly higher now. We pried and winched and pulled while a sturdy wind spat rain into our faces. I slipped and one leg went into the drink. Soaked to the crotch, I poured the water from my boot and wrung my sock. It almost goes without saying that I had not dressed right for the job. Forking out money on oilskins and hi-tech, high-priced Gortex was a terrifying commitment. My wet denim stuck to me like depression, my frozen hands resembled bled meat, my back was in spasm, and I was clenching my teeth so tightly against the cold that I feared for my dental work—dental work that I could not afford to fix. Dave was carrying along quite nicely in all-weather gear, for he likes his work and has therefore invested in the appropriate clothes and equipment, a sign of the fact that he is where he wants to be.

And then we got one corner of the ramp onto the float! And not only that, we discovered that the ramp had a roller underneath it. We dragged the float forward until the ramp straddled it, lashed it down, cleared up the tools and headed home. It was nearly dark, but the rain had stopped, the sky had cleared and a new moon shone brilliant but cold.

* * *

Working with Dave wasn’t the only thing I’d been doing; I’d also been mucking out goat pens and chicken coops at a local farm. Earthy work. Smelly work. But the next time the topic of dung comes up, I’ll be able to chip right in. Still, I preferred helping Dave, so was glad when he gave me another call.

This job involved diving. It’s better, if colder, to dive in the winter because the plankton is down and the visibility better. Out in the aluminum boat again, I helped Dave on with his dry suit. This is like being a gentleman’s gentleman. Your weight belt, sir. Your depth gauge. Your gutting knife. When he was all encased in rubber and had his tank on he asked me, “What’s today’s word?”

I didn’t know, so I said, “I’ll tell you when you get back up.”

He took one of the many lengths of rope that reside in the bow and demonstrated a bowline, having been unimpressed so far by my rope work. Instead of nifty little knots I created tangled clumps. He demonstrated once and then left it lying on the thwart, a perfectly composed knot as elegant as a piece of jewellery. When he came up from finding the block that currently lurked some 45 feet down under the frigid water, he wanted me to have mastered it too. And with that, he rolled backwards into the sea.

I studied the knot. I partially untied it and then quickly reassembled it before I went too far and got lost. I repeatedly glanced at the water, fearing Dave’s imminent return. It was as if I were back in the hell of Grade 10 trigonometry with Mrs. Madison (oh, the dread Mrs. Madison with the eyes of an outraged hen). Fear is a fine motivator. I’ve quit many jobs out of fear of being trapped in them. But as with the satisfaction that came with mastering the come-along, what heart-leaping joy accompanied my success at completing a bowline! I held it aloft for the gulls to admire. I laughed. When Dave surfaced I demonstrated not once but twice. And then I told him his word. “Mimesis.”

“Mimesis?”

“Mime. Mimicry. Hands-on. The best way to learn.”

* * *

Writers write. Stephen King apparently does 14 pages a day, Hemingway and Graham Greene did two. I was doing none, because Dave had more work. This time it was logging.

I never knew that logging was a spectator sport, but that’s the case here on Mayne. Word got out that some sizeable timber was coming down, and by mid-morning a crowd had gathered on Dave’s property, beers in hand. Some of the trees were precariously close to his house, and the lads wanted to see a faller at work, or maybe they were hoping to see a house get squashed, for nothing is more entertaining than failure, especially the failure of others. In this case, the faller Dave had hired was a burly, beery guy decked out in Husquvarna pants and suspenders. Here’s my theory: Loggers get horny over cutting down trees. Nothing gets them hot like big things toppling, that and the suspenders keeping their pants snugged up nice and tight. Add to this the Harley Davidson snarl of the saw, the spray of wood chips, the satisfying crack and split of the tree trunk as it begins to lean, the groan of the wood as its mighty weight shifts, and then the slow and majestic, and not a little tragic, descent of the giant as it crashes down, de-branching all others trees in its path. Birds flee screeching and then the dirt settles and there is a silence soon broken by the boys raising their fists and cheering.

My job was chokerman, clambering about the stumps, hauling a chain of the sort dragged by the eternally damned Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol. I looped it around the log, then to the bucket of the excavator, then leaped out of the way lest my limbs be crushed as the logs were dragged up the hill and stacked.

In the late afternoon it clouded over and began to snow. The audience had gone home to their gyproc and table saws and drill presses, their motors that needed oil changes, lamps that needed rewiring, pipes refitting, windows caulking. I stared up at the twirling flakes. The guy operating the excavator cut the motor and leaned out to watch as well. Dave, his smoking chainsaw idling in his hand, stopped to look. It was as if some pale breed of moth had hatched and filled the air. There were thousands, millions, and in the ecstasy of the newborn they danced and tumbled and landed on my arms where they sat, perfect in a world that was, for the moment, mercifully free of the racket of practical people with their saws and generators and backhoes. The snow was falling fast and soon there was an inch on the ground; at this rate it would be a foot deep by midnight. I took out my pen, which felt fragile after the choker chain, and looked at the artery of ink inside the clear plastic casing. I opened my note pad and the snow landed on my dirt-grimed knuckles and on the page itself, blurring the ink and the letters until the words were meaningless.