I named it the Intertunnel, of course. You might call it the Interwebs, or the Hypertubes, or THE AOLs, or whatever. But no matter what you call it, it’s not a place; it’s more like a trip. An Alighierian trip. It starts out innocently, but it doesn’t end up that way — like a double date, or maybe representative democracy.
Maybe you start out a German tenor —August Schramm, let’s say– and there you are, standing up straight and trying to get Mozart up a stump in a concert hall where everyone can get a look at him.
But you can’t leave well enough alone, can you? You get one of those cameras full of pixels and brimstone, and point it at yourself, and upload that badboy to the Intertunnel. Pretty soon you get to poking around on the Interwebs after you watch your own video on YouTube. In no time at all, you’re picking Lady Gaga’s merkin hair out of the Intertunnel’s intellectual shower drain:
There you go, folks. We’re done here. The Intertunnel is finished. Kaput, if August is tuning in. You can turn it off and go outside now. But for God’s sake, don’t press the print button first.
(Thanks, I think, to reader and commenter and correspondent Charles Schneider for sending that one along. I guess. Pretty sure. Maybe. Whatever)
It never reached minus twenty, but Boreas sure let it rip. The wind was blowing about thirty miles an hour. It was awesome, in the true sense of the term.
Things don’t work like they should when it gets down to ten below zero. Two years ago, it was more than twenty-one degrees below zero here. It was astonishing. I looked out the window in the crepuscular morning light, and it didn’t look like Earth anymore. There is a phenomenon called ice fog, where the air is too cold to hold any moisture whatsoever, and whatever humidity it’s carrying turns to ice in the air, and looks like a snow flurry that doesn’t move.
Well, ten below or so is cold enough, even if it doesn’t look like Neptune’s weather when you look out the rimed window. My wife’s car wouldn’t start, and still won’t. It made a sound like a dog dying of mange while gargling with bees and ball bearings. My son and I twice tried jumpstarting it. When I compressed my gloved hand over the jumper cable clamps, the rubber insulation on the grips crumbled up and blew away. I’d only seen things crack and blow away like that during Bugs Bunny shorts. I had no idea real things could act that way. The morning of the 25th, I could swear even the Intertunnel froze here. The pixels wouldn’t come through the pipes, except haltingly.
The drain of the utility sink in my workshop froze and had to be defrosted. I’ve been unable to get the temperature in there over 45 for a solid week, no matter how much heat I dump in, but I couldn’t see a danger of pipes freezing. Of course the trap for the drain is one floor down, in the area where we stack the frozen drifters we like to collect, so it froze. We had to go down there and stand underneath it with a blow dryer like deranged eskimo hairdressers to get it going again. The weather outside is like a bookie. It’s all you can do to keep up with the vigorish. The principal is out of the question.
It’s been a solid fifteen or twenty degrees below average here for weeks. Around here, in January, that’s saying something. The weather webpage is absurd about it. First they try to tell you the world is ending, to get your attention. There’s some sort of IMPENDING DOOM banner displayed most every day, and they’ve taken to naming snowstorms that bring a half-inch of snow that’s not worth shoveling as if they’re arctic typhoons. I admit it: twenty below got my attention. Then Armageddon doesn’t show up — it was only nine below, I’m certain of this because I have a thermometer that keeps low and high readings until you reset it, and I was watching it closely. Then they pretend they never said it and keep going. Later, when no one’s looking, they entered it in the record of observed temperatures as minus four — a good, solid, roomy, well-built, gilt-edged fib, because global warming, that’s why.
I said the winter was a worthy adversary the other day. I was mistaken. He’s a sneaky pisser, that arctic fellow, and if you see him, tell him for me I hope he gets the blind staggers and his wife runs away with the guy that drives the firewood truck.
This is Provincetown, Massachusetts again. 1940 this time.
That’s a working boat. By “working,” I’m referring to the fact that it’s used to catch critters in the ocean or haul stuff around. A working boat is not a pleasure boat. There used to be many more working boats than pleasure boats.
I love this picture. You can still go places and find people caulking the seams of a wooden boat in this manner, but it’s getting pretty rare. Most boats are made of fiberglass now, and are one big lump built on a plug and them popped off like a muffin from a tin, only you keep the tin and throw away the muffin. If boats are made from wood now, they are generally “cold molded;” that is, they are laid up from epoxied layers of marine plywood.
This boat is carvel planked. That means that the planks butt up to one another, and display a smooth hull when they are complete. Other wooden boats are made lapstrake, which means each successive plank overlaps the one placed just before it, which renders the zigzag profile you are familiar with from clapboard siding on a house. Most old salts call that method “clinker,” not “lapstrake.” You should hear what they call you after you leave their shed.
The hull of this boat is probably made from oak frames with cedar planking, but there are lots of species of wood that work as well for either item. Each plank on a carvel planked boat has to be fitted to the curve of the boat, usually a multiple curve with a twist thrown in. And the inside must be “backed out” to match the curve of the perpendicular frames, and the outside must be made “fair,” or shaped to remove all trace of the faceting that a series of flat planks presents. If you saw the pieces laid flat you’d think their crazy shapes could never fit together to make much of anything. The curves of a boat hull, gentle and sharp alike, are exceedingly beautiful.
The planking is fitted in a very unforgiving way. The frames are like a skeleton inside. They are usually steam bent to get them to the curved shape you need. In WW II, Liberty boats tried to improve on solid wood steam bent frames, and made massive built-up frames using the then currently newfangled epoxy to hold it all together. They were immensely strong, and they all broke. The sea requires a certain flexibility.
As I was saying, the planks must fit together very tightly on the inside edge, but be open a bit on their outboard edge, to allow the planks to be caulked to seal them from leaks properly. The boat in the picture is being refurbished, not constructed, so you can see traces of the paint that has been scraped off on the planks. The planks were usually screwed to the frames, with each screw head painstakingly countersunk and plugged with a wooden plug. The old salt would call the plugs “bungs,” and would make sure the grain in the bungs ran the same direction as the plank, even though that was unlikely to make a difference. If you asked him about the bungholes while referring to them as plugholes he’d probably tell you to shut your cakehole, after your check cleared, anyway.
You can see the skein of unspun cotton in the picture as the man works it into the seam with a “crease iron” and mallet. He has all sorts of irons for all the various places on the hull, but the crease iron is for long straight runs. He works the cotton into the seam by rocking the iron, which looks like a wide chisel, back and forth, and hits it at the opportune time to set the cotton in the seams.
There was an expression then. “His mallet rings.” It was a sign of respect for a man whose easy familiarity with his task and his tools manifested itself with an audible clue. The sonorous, metronomic ringing of the wooden mallet, wielded expertly on the rocking iron, marked you as a man who knew his business.
My mallet doesn’t ring. I have spent my life trying to manufacture with my effort and my mind what my hands do not give me naturally. In a way, it is like manners. If you don’t have them, you can pretend that you do; it is essentially the same thing in practice.
But I know it, just the same; and in a quiet moment it rankles.
It’s ten degrees, but it won’t last. The sun is retreating and dragging the thermometer with it. The violet days are here.
There was a moment before sunset when the sky and the earth and everything in, on, and between them turned this lovely purple hue. It’s an indescribable color. Light through a lens fashioned from a limpid pool, frozen. It can’t mean anything but cold to my eye. I don’t know how many bedrooms I’ve seen painted this color. It’s arctic looking, and the person that chose it always told me it was, you know ” a warm color.” Yes, it is, in the same way a walrus butthole planted on a floe is warm. To a lunatic, it might be warm.
But cold as a concept is not as bad as many make it. It is a fact, here. It will be below zero, day and night, for three days in a row. It will be ten, fifteen, maybe push twenty below zero at night. Winter is not fooling around anymore. So what.
Winter is a full time job in Maine, E. B. White said. But he lived Downeast, where it’s warm compared to here. But he understood. You have to look it straight in the face, and deal with it. You can’t go out in your socks and scrape the frost from your windshield with a credit card. I’ve made over 500 fires already, and I’ve only used one match, once, to do it. You have to prepare yourself for winter. It reminds you that you’re mortal, and that there are seasons, and those seasons have meaning. It shows you that your life will pass you by if you’re not careful. Winter is useful that way.
I see a great number of people talking about how they’re going to deal with a coming apocalypse. They’re going to hoard this and grow that. They’re going to be the Omega Man crossed with Johnny Appleseed. Forgive me, but life is plenty hard here, and I can’t help but notice you’re not moving in next door to me before the apocalypse. I doubt you will the day after. If winter is too much for you, I doubt you’re prepared for an army of zombie Robespierres or whatever it is you’re planning for.
I can’t say I like the winter. I’ve always been cold. Poor people are often cold, and I have been poor in my life. I’m not a fool and I don’t like misery. But I respect the winter here. It’s a worthy adversary, and so, goddamn it, am I. Bring it on.
Month: January 2013
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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