What an Apprentice Learns From One Board

The kid lasted six hours before he asked when we’d start on the boat.

His name is Caleb Ostrander. He’s twenty-two. He fixed phones at a kiosk in the Ferris Junction mall until the kiosk closed, and then he wrote me a letter, on paper, asking for work. Nobody writes letters. I hired him for that. I pay him seventeen dollars an hour, which comes to six hundred eighty dollars a week, and I spent his first week on one board.

Six feet of white oak, rough-sawn, an inch and an eighth thick, thirty-eight dollars at Lund’s mill. I put it on the bench with a number five plane and told him to make one face flat.

“How flat?”

“Flat.”

Monday

He wanted to start planing. I handed him the stones. A dull plane teaches you nothing except that you’re weak. He worked the iron until eleven, and when it finally took the hair off his arm he grinned like he’d been paid.

Then he went at the oak and tore it up. Ragged gouges, chips the size of a fingernail. He pushed harder, which made bigger chips. At one o’clock he asked about the boat.

I turned the board end for end and walked away.

Tuesday

Wood is a bundle of straws, and the straws don’t run parallel to the face. Plane up the slope of them and the iron gets underneath and rips. Plane down the slope and it shears clean. The edge of the board will show you which way they run, if you look. He hadn’t looked. Now he looked.

The first whole shaving came off around nine. Six feet long, thin enough to read through. It curled up onto his wrist and he stood there. He folded it into his shirt pocket when he thought I’d gone back to my own work.

Then he reached the swirl by the knot, where the grain changes its mind halfway along. There’s no right direction there. You set the iron finer, close the mouth, skew the plane, and take what it gives you. Ten inches of board cost him the afternoon. By four he’d quit asking about the boat. He’d quit saying anything, and I took that for progress.

Wednesday

I gave him the winding sticks. They’re two straight pieces of maple. You set one across each end of the board, crouch, and sight over the tops. If they aren’t parallel the board has wind in it, a twist, like a very slow propeller.

His had three thirty-seconds of an inch. He’d spent two days making a beautifully smooth propeller.

He marked the high corners and worked them down. He checked and went back and checked again. At ten to five I laid the long straightedge on it every way I could think of, and we couldn’t get a sliver of light underneath. He took a picture of it with his phone. He left the board lying on the bench and went home happy.

I knew what would happen. I could have told him.

Thursday

He came in at seven and set the straightedge across the width, and there was daylight under the middle. A good sixteenth. He said a word. I’ve said it too, and to better boards.

Here’s what happened. He’d opened up fresh oak on the top face, and all night that face had been giving off moisture to the air. The bottom face, pressed to the bench, hadn’t. The top shrank and the edges curled up. Everything you cut off a board changes what the rest of it wants to do. A board is never finished being a tree.

He went down and sat on the ramp for forty minutes. I watched from the window and didn’t go out. My last apprentice quit on a Thursday too. He sells insurance now. I’ve wondered whether I should have gone out to him, and I still didn’t go out. I cleaned the glue brushes, which didn’t need it. By my count the thirty-eight-dollar board had now cost me about five hundred dollars.

When Caleb came back he didn’t mention boats. He asked how you keep it from doing that.

Best question anybody had asked in that shed since spring. I showed him stickers, two scraps of wood under the board so the air gets at both faces. Then he started over.

Friday

By afternoon it was flat on both faces with one edge square. It was also eleven-sixteenths thick. Chasing flat had eaten more than a third of the board. Too thin for a thwart and too short for a plank. He held it up and asked what it was for.

The true answer is that it’s for a garboard that lies down on its frames and stays there for thirty years. I could have said so. Old Amos Tull kept me nine days on a length of pine in the winter of 1994, and all he ever told me was “You’ll want that later,” which was correct and no comfort. Nobody can tell you what a thirty-second of an inch feels like. A straightedge tells your hand, over and over, until your hand knows.

So I told him it was for nothing. He nodded and put it up on stickers anyway. I liked that.

Around four he was hanging up the tools, and I saw him stop at my bench. The big one. I’ve worked on it for twenty-two years. He looked at it a while. He went and got the winding sticks, set them on it, crouched, then moved around to the far end and crouched again.

“Your bench is in wind,” he said.

“Go home. It’s Friday.”

It is, too. A sixteenth at the far corner. I checked after his truck left.

Monday morning I cleared everything off it and left the plane on top.