"Be Undaunted..."

We have the backbone timbers. After a week spent negotiating dates with the good people at Gannon & Benjamin, I arrived at my dad's house this past Sunday morning, where he was waiting with a big blue trailer hooked up to his green Dodge pickup. A moment or two later, after transferring my stuff to his vehicle, we were off - cruising North past the rolling hills of Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, then gradually shifting our course to the east, crossing the Hudson just north of New York City. Rolling through Connecticut, we sped past a nearly continuous traffic jam of vacationers in the westbound lanes heading back to New York from their Fourth of July weekends at the seashore. Later, we paused for dinner at an Applebee's whose walls informed us that we had stopped in Attleboro, Massachusetts - a name that sounded vaguely familiar to me for some reason.

After a beer and a half, it finally dawned on me that this must be the same town that my grandmother had once talked about spending her summers in as a teenager in the late 1920s. So that was kind of cool, even if all I did was grab dinner at a chain restaurant.

From Attleboro, it was just a quick ride up I-95 to my cousin Coral's house in Sharon, where she, her husband Henry, and their precocious troop of kids welcomed us in for the night. The kids in particular were interested in hearing about the details of our esoteric quest - especially once I unrolled the plans and described how the boat would be put together. Later, I'm pretty sure we four adults attempted to explain the concept of water displacement to an increasingly bored audience. Oh well.

The next day dad and I got up at 6:30 (some vacation day!) and after a quick breakfast, headed down I-495 to the Cautaumet Sawmill in Falmouth, where we waited for Ross to arrive from Martha's Vineyard. After a few minutes, he pulled up in a white truck with a steel frame that allowed for the transportation of large pieces of wood on top of the vehicle - quite a useful configuration if every delivery involves a trip on the ferry! Excitedly, I walked around to the back of the truck to take a look. There were the timbers, their ends painted with red lead:

A short time later, Tom from the sawmill retrieved a forklift and we began transferring the timber over to Dad's trailer:

Ross directs the loading of the Keel timber. It looked a lot bigger in person than in the pictures.

My first impressions of the lumber were overwhelmingly positive. This stuff is beautiful; I've never seen such a massive piece of wood be so straight-grained and knot-free. The keel timber almost looks more like a slab of metal or extruded plastic than wood:

It's also hard as granite; I tried scratching it with my fingernail, and barely made a mark. The comparison to granite may be rather appropriate, in fact; one unique characteristic of Angelique is its ability to incorporate large amounts silica into its cellular structure. This makes it heavy, but also unbelievably strong, and extremely hard on cutting tools. I foresee a lot of blade sharpening in my future.

While we were loading the rest of the timbers, I briefly mentioned to Ross that I would eventually need another large piece for the foregripe - the structural member that connects the stem to the keel. Overhearing this, Tom mentioned that he may have such a timber in the back corner of his lot, where it had been sitting for over ten years, so after we finished loading my order onto Dad's trailer he, Ross, and I followed Tom back to the edge of the lot where an enormous 12x12 of Angelique lay partially overgrown, and still sporting the marks of the sawyers who'd hand-hewn it from a single log back in the Guyanese jungle:

A few quick scrapes with a knife confirmed that under its weathered exterior, the wood beneath was well-preserved:

A look at the ends of this piece did make me a little nervous about the potential for ring shakes, but that's a question I'll have to pose to people considerably more experienced than I am - I think I might know just enough to scare myself! Returning to the truck, Dad fueled the truck and made sure that all the pieces were properly tied down while I settled accounts with Tom and Ross, then the two of us hit the road headed for home.

As we lumbered down the highway at sixty miles per hour, I stared out the rear window at the impressively massive load that we were pulling, began to feel more than a little like I was in over my head. I'd just made the single largest non-essential purchase in my life, and it was a bunch of wood. Excellent wood, to be sure, but that fact only added to my trepidation, as I imagined my inexperienced self taking a circular saw to those long, clear pieces and inadvertently rendering one or more of them completely unusable. They were hard enough even to move around - and I didn't have a forklift! How on earth was I supposed to build something out of them if I couldn't even move them? The presence of those massive timbers - now my massive timbers, threw the enormity of the task before me into stark relief. I felt daunted.

I started to express these thoughts to Dad, but was quickly cut off by his shout of "Oh my God, look what's behind us!"I turned quickly, terrified that my newly acquired timbers were about to be splintered by a collision with something even more massive. Instead, I saw this:

For the next few minutes, my dire thoughts were nowhere to be found, as we kept pace with the DeLorean while the two of us took turns reciting quotes from Back to the Future. When we were done,  I shouted a request of my own in the direction of the vehicular movie icon as it receded into the distance in front of us: "Can I jump in and take a ride to the time when I'm finished with this project?!?"

The rest of the drive passed largely uneventfully, and we made it back to Maryland in time for dinner with Brooke at Dad's place. The final leg of the wood's journey to the construction site will take place next weekend, when he'll haul it down to my back yard, where we'll take a considerably longer time unloading it using hydraulic jacks and block-and-tackle rather than a forklift.

After dinner, as I was loading up my car to return to Alexandria, Dad came over to the window of my car and, referencing my earlier anxiety over what I'd gotten myself into, gave me a final parting thought: "Be undaunted".

I will be.