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A Unit of Water, A Unit of Time: Joel White’s Last Boat

Amazon.com Price:  $21.43 (as of 06/05/2019 14:10 PST- Details)

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Description

In a time when racing boats are mass-produced from synthetic materials, a dying breed of craftsman continues to build wooden sailboats of astonishing beauty. Boatbuilding is an ancient art, and Joel White used to be a master. Son of the legendary creator E.B. White, he used to be raised around boats and his designs were as sublime and graceful as his father’s prose. At a boatyard in Maine, White and his closely knit team of builders brought scores of his creations from blueprints into the ocean.
In June 1996, six months after being diagnosed with cancer, Joel White started designing the W-76, an exquisite racing yacht. It used to be his final masterpiece. Douglas Whynott spent a year at Brooklin Boat Yard, observing as this design took shape, first in sketches and then all over the painstaking building of the wooden craft.
The result is the poignant tale of both a genius at work and the people devoted to his art. Evoking E.B. White’s New England and its salty residents, A Unit of Water, a Unit of Time is a classic portrait of dignity, charm, and humble magnificence-and of a maritime community that assists in keeping a vanishing world alive.
E.B. White and his son Joel both had a respect for beauty, simplicity, and practicality when it came to their work. For E.B., it used to be writing. He talks about these qualities in The Elements of Style, the classic guide to English-language usage, and he demonstrates them in works like Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. For Joel, it used to be building and designing boats that are “simple of line yet sound in engineering, traditional above water and modern below.” A Unit of Water, a Unit of Time is a touching, engaging look at the life, work, and influence of Joel White and the craft of boat making.

Whynott spent a year (June 1996 to July 1997) at White’s boat yard in Brooklin, Maine. At the time, White used to be battling cancer, nearing the end of his life, and designing what would be his last boat, the W-76, a wooden racing yacht with “sublime lines and exquisite rigging.” A Unit of Water, the results of that experience, traces White’s life from his birth in 1930 to his childhood spent in New York and Maine, his naval architecture studies at MIT, and his eventual move to Brooklin, where he started working at the small boat yard that at last became his own. In the early ’80s, White and his crew stopped making fiberglass boats in favor of wooden ones; Brooklin, headquarters for WoodenBoat magazine and the WoodenBoat School, became the center of the wooden-boat revival and White something of a boat-building guru. The book looks closely at the art of boat making–shaping deck beams, making bronze chocks, boring holes through sternposts–and the many characters in the Brooklin boat-building community. It is very interesting stuff, and Whynott tells the story simply and thoughtfully, emulating White’s philosophies. He also describes White’s health battles with respect and poignancy and without getting overly sentimental.

Joel White used to be a man of few words who tended to downplay his accomplishments, but they shine through in A Unit of Water. One Brooklin boat builder, describing the “soul” of boats, could have been describing White: “Boats are live. They talk. The more poorly made boats talk more. The most efficient-made boats don’t talk as much. They are quiet–quiet soldiers, they call them.” –Andy Boynton

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