Dirt Work by Christine Byl

Author:Christine Byl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2013-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

BOAT

Commute In forests and mountains, you get to the trailhead by truck, to the job site with boots and mules. But if the trails are surrounded by water, not land? If you are in Southcentral Alaska, where the Copper River Delta and Prince William Sound entwine so that land appears to float? No more trucks, boots, stock. Steady yourself, crouch low. Step into a boat.

Ocean Craft The seventeen-foot Boston Whaler is known as “the unsinkable legend.” A flat-bottomed utility boat built for fishing, day research, and hauling tools or crews, the stripped-down Whaler is as ubiquitous seaside as Subarus in ski towns. It’s not a luxurious boat, but a Whaler rides seas of three to four feet, is tough to tip, light and sturdy, and tucks trailered in a corner of the yard. Pair it with a ninety-horse Evinrude and cruise semiprotected waters, even if you’ve hardly driven a boat before. It’s a ship for fools.

River Raft Rubber inflatable, all grown-up bath toy. With puffy gunnels, dry bags wedged between coolers and seats, a raft bobs on river waves like an optimist. A finger thwack to the rubber tubes will bruise a nail but leave no imprint. On long trips, it swallows the extra gas can, a box of cheap wine. Durable, buoyant, chubby yet sleek. Like a grade school buddy: unflappable, in primary-colored clothes.

Vocabulary Hull, gunnels, rudder, ballast, tiller, keel, paddle. Double letters mimic the symmetry necessary for flotation. Boat words, as with many words for work, sound deliberate. Saxonic. Deck, motor, oar, bow, stern, davit, fore, aft, transom, cockpit. The emphatic syllables, the grit of language distilled to convey essence—grunt, heave, float. Latinate words, too—navigate, triangulation—describing action more than thing. How many words for boat are there? Vessel, raft, ship, dinghy, craft, skiff, barge, dory, punt, ketch, shell, launch. The current or the tides a propellant they share, inescapable momentum, water as surface, as engine, as fuel.

Measurement The sea’s maps are charts, showing depths and shoals, cliffs and islands, shipwrecks, beaches, buoys, and harbors. Measure waves in feet, bottom of trough to top of crest. Wind and boats both travel in knots: one knot, a nautical mile, is 1.15 miles per hour. Do seasoned boaters convert highway speed-limit signs in their heads? Forty-five miles per hour, how many knots? When traveling on water, your own speed matters as well as the speed of the medium, an extra dimension. On ocean, neither water nor vessel is still—always the rise and plunge, wave in, tide out. On rivers, current flows in cubic feet per second, the volume of water traveling past a point at a certain time. Sometimes it seems that the raft stays put and, beneath, the water moves.

History The Eyak have lived at the mouth of the Copper for ten thousand years. Today, Alaska’s smallest Native tribe numbers fewer than two hundred members, the old Eyak village incorporated into the town of Cordova. These indigenous residents of the Sound were kayakers, the palindrome kayak an Aleut word, related to the Inuit qayak, meaning “hunter’s boat.

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