Brothers From Other Mothers

Arch Davis makes boats, teaches boatbuilding, and sells boat plans in Belfast, Maine.

I’ve built a fourteen foot skiff using methods nearly identical to those shown in the video. I never launched it.

I’d never met or heard of Arch Davis before, but I knew he was my brother from another mother when I saw his sawhorses there in the background in the video. I have waxed poetic about sawhorses before:

(From 2008: An Invitation Into A Disorderly Mind)

I’m not a blogger.

I hate the word. It’s inelegant. The Internet is disorderly and inelegant, so it fits, but I more or less have never gotten the urge to be “a blogger.” This might seem counterintuitive to those who read the URL for this page and see dot blogspot right in my name. Google named it, I didn’t. Google couldn’t even name themselves properly. Who should expect them to name others wisely? I tire of gibberish in great things.

Bloggers are other people. I am not casting aspersions. I’m just telling ya, is all. I confused a few people yesterday, because I put the raw feed from my head on the page. If you look at the picture I supplied, and read what I wrote, it’s entirely coherent. But old friend AJ Lynch’s observation:

and new friend anonymous’:

are entirely fair. They are cruising the Internet looking for people expressing themselves forthrightly. There’s nothing more forthright than the Internet. I can’t ever recall being told to Die In A Fire in real life, after all.

So I’m a little too obscurantist for the Intertunnel. I can’t help it. I write essays here. It’s different. I apologize unreservedly, in advance, for everything I’m ever going to say in the future.

Those were my wedding vows, by the way.

Perhaps I owe it to my audience to explain the idiosyncratic workings of my mind. Here goes.

See the picture at the top of the page? I saw it on our beloved Intertunnel yesterday. What’s the first thing that comes into your mind when you see it? Wanna know what mine is? This:

Marilyn Monroe is sitting on a very old school sawhorse, one that I’ve made myself. I have never encountered another person still making them this way. I learned it from men, all dead now, for whom Marilyn Monroe was more than a Elton John retreaded song reference. My modern carpenter friends would never make sawhorses this way, as it is complicated and labor intensive compared to their designs. But I’ve used mine for 25 years and kept them outside for much of it. They don’t even wiggle in the joints yet. I do, and I generally am kept indoors at night. There is no shame in the carpentry trade in buying pre-made sawhorses now, either, although the people I first learned carpentry from would have never spoken to you for the rest of your life if you brought one to work.

Oh, and Marilyn Monroe? She’d be camped out on my doorstep waiting for me to come home, if she was still alive. Girls like that are a dime a dozen. I’d have to send my wife out to shoo her away. But man, look at those legs.

They’re 1×6 utility grade pine. Set the framing square at 24″ on the blade and 4″ on the tongue to get the angle right.