On the perils of making things.

My earliest memories as a child involve drawing things and building things.  My drawings were not so much Artwork as they were concept sketches as part of a design process.  The ones that I remember involved taking balsa-wood gliders from the dime store, taping a balloon to the underside of the fuselage and using this as a propulsion engine.  The system was weaponized by taping a needle to the nose of the plane.  I'm not certain what need I had for a weaponized balsa-wood glider, but necessity is not always, or exclusively, the mother of invention- sometimes invention is born simply from the availability of the materials and the imagination.

I did spend a great deal of time, as I recall, drawing and redrawing these inventions to make them look good.  I had an eye for proportion, and pleasing shapes.  However, if I drew something that seemed mechanically or structurally improbable, though beautiful, I was unsatisfied.  Later when I learned of the great tug of war involving form versus function, I was already well acquainted with it, as I had wrestled with it since coming into consciousness.

Designing on paper was most often the way I began a project, but not always.  If I found an object that gave me an idea, making use of whatever it might be, then building extemporaneously was the most expeditious way to the goal.  I remember once as a child, probably eight or nine years old, walking by the unused chicken coop in the back yard, past an open shed where lumber and other wooden odds 'n ends were piled.  Sticking out from the pile was an old, grayed, decorative post that looked like it could be the bowsprit of a pirate ship.  I was not allowed to play in the wood pile, it was home to rats, ferrel cats, and the occasional skunk.  Moreover, the wood was dirty, rotten in places, and full of nails.  But the bowsprit-piece looked like you could just pull on it and it would come out.  I gave it a tug.

Soon it was extricated and dragged into the center of the back yard.  Since no harm befell me while removing it, I concluded that the rule itself, like so many others, was arbitrary and without merit.  I was encouraged by this, and soon a great deal of additional lumber from the shed was stacked and propped up haphazardly like a log-house, or a house of cards.  My aim was to make a scaled down, but still large pirate ship.  The ground itself was the gun-deck and there were gun ports and rails.  It was such fun, imagining I was a pirate, sailing up and down the coast.  It all went very smoothly until I decided my ship really needed a mast.  I looked at some of the poles I had at hand.  I was able to drill these into the turf by twisting them around so they would stand- sort of.  They were all too small, so back to the shed I went and dug through it until I found a large cedar pole.  It was immense!  It seemed to me to be a hundred feet tall. (It was likely only ten feet tall but I was a small child).

It was quite heavy, and I struggled mightily to prop it up, several times I lost my grip on it and it fell with a crash.  But eventually I lifted it up like the flag at Iwo Jima.  Then I had to figure a way to keep it standing.  I tried to twist it into the ground the way I often did with small sticks, but could not drill trough the turf with such a large pole.  I took the other sticks and leaned them against it teepee-style, which held it up, but it wasn't correct, masts were single poles, not teepees.  I dashed inside to find a picture of a sailing ship as reference.  My Mother was asleep on the couch, my Grandmother was dozing in an armchair.  My Sisters were gone too, likely down the street playing with the neighbor's girls.  I considered waking the grownups to show them my ship, but decided to wait until the mast was up.  I looked in the bookshelf to find a book with pictures of ships, to see how the mast was held in place.

Ropes! ropes are the answer, all the pictures in my Golden Treasury of American History showed the masts guyed with ropes to the gunwales, to each other, and to the bowsprit.  All I had to do was take down all of the rarely used clothesline from the pulley on the back porch, cut it into serviceable lengths and tie it to the top of the mast and then to someplace on the rest of the structure- it hardly mattered where, I figured, because there were lots of ropes in the pictures, and I'd be sailing the Spanish Main in no time!

Sharp knives, suitable for cutting rope, were kept in the kitchen drawer, and easily procured, but were technically off-limits.  However, as all of the officiating adults were napping post-Sunday Dinner, the required equipment could be quietly obtained and if returned clean and unobserved, then permission to use them seemed to me to be an unnecessary formality.  I supposed that they might wonder how I cut the rope and be concerned, but by this time I had already broken a lot of rules and would likely be in trouble on multiple counts so it really didn't pay to worry on any particular one.  Plus, when they saw the magnificence of the finished ship, all would be forgiven.

Soon enough I had liberated the clothesline from its mundane existence to be repurposed on the high seas of my imagination.  It seemed like plenty enough rope.  I divided it into four even-ish pieces, now I just needed to tie the mast from the top to four points around the rails, nice and secure.

The first problem was to get up to the top of the mast and tie on the ropes.  The mast was still standing against the shorter poles, tee-pee style.  I considered dropping it to the ground and tying the ropes on in safety and comfort, but recalling the Herculean effort it took to get it raised in the first place, I discarded that idea immediately.  No, I would leave the mast in-situ, tie it all off and then remove the supports.

I needed to get the step ladder from the garage to reach the top of the mast.  It was heavy, and yet rickety, and I needed to stand on the next to highest step to reach near the top of the mast-pole.  But I gathered my courage and climbed to the top.  I managed to tie a tight-enough knot with the first rope, so it wouldn't slip unacceptably far down the mast.  The three other ropes were easier since their looped ends could rest upon the first knot and therefore wouldn't have to be too tight.

At this age, my knot tying skills were in still in their infancy.  The only knot I knew was a sort of a square knot; like tying your shoes, minus the loops.  I had been taught to tie a proper square knot, but had trouble remembering the sequence.   Even today I have to silently say to myself, "right-over-left, left-over-right," in order to tie one successfully.  But I did my best, and once a knot was tied, I would give it a tug to be certain it would hold.  Some did, some didn't, so I tried again.

It turns out that what had at first seemed like plenty of rope, was in fact barely enough.  The knots had used more of the rope than I had anticipated and I wasn't able to tie the running end as far along the rails as I would have liked, considering that I needed to knot them there too.  But I did my best and tied them to the rails.  It was hard to get them tight, partly because of my poor knotsmanship, but mostly because the smooth 2 x 4 rails allowed the whole thing to slip.  I wondered if I could slide the loop back enough to take up the slack and then drive a nail into the rail to fix it's position.

Hammers were in the cellar, no problem there, but nails were likely still kept in Grandpa's shop behind the garage.  Sadly, he had passed away a couple of years earlier and the shop was now locked.  Fortunately most of the lumber stored in the shed bristled with nails, and after a few minutes with the claw hammer I got enough mismatched, bent, and rusty nails for the job.  The 2x4s, used for the rails, had hardened, warped and dried in storage, making them ideal for ship's rails, but making it hard to start and drive a nail.  I had to bash with the hammer two-handed, and many of my hits missed their mark, causing the nail to bend.  Fortunately this bend very nicely held the rope in place almost like a staple.  It was a discovery I have used many times since.  After considerable effort, I got the ropes passably tight and secure, and it was time to remove the supports from the mast and set sail.  I timidly kicked the supports out from the mast, prepared to run away in all directions at once, like Rocinante.  But the mast held, tentatively, but held nonetheless.

Then, as now, I like to stop frequently during projects and admire my work.  I surveyed the craft from different angles checking the lines.  From some viewpoints it really did look like a pirate ship!  I was giddy with excitement.  I hopped aboard.  I saw the kitchen knife, still on the ground, I had neglected to return it, but this was fortunate since a true pirate would need a cutlass, so I tucked it into my belt.  I played for what seemed like hours.  There was a freshening breeze as afternoon slowly turned to dusk.  I walked along the rails, checking my knots and making adjustments here and there, as I imagined real sailors had oft to do. 

I became aware of movement inside the house, maybe Mom or Grandma had awoken from their naps, or maybe my Sisters had come home.  I couldn't tell.  I stared through the window in the back porch door to see.  I wondered, with growing concern, how I would slip the knife into kitchen unobserved now.  Then the world turned black.

My next blurry and painful memory was of my Mother pleading with me to wake up.  I was lying on the ground with the huge cedar pole mast next to me.  It had fallen, and struck me in the back of the head.  I don't know how long I was unconscious, but it was nearly dark now.  My Mother wept a bit in relief, helped me to my feet and walked me inside.  She got me a cold compress which hurt as it was applied to the growing lump on my head.  I kept feeling it to see how big it would get, and determined, to my disappointment, that the lumps that Daffy-Duck and Yosemite-Sam got from Bugs-Bunny were gross exaggerations.

Soon the soothing, conciliatory tone from my Mother began to turn accusatory, "What were you thinking?" "You might have been killed!" and "Who is going to clean up that huge mess in the backyard?" were the major themes, as I recall.  There was no mention of the missing kitchen knife, the obvious trips to the off-limits woodshed and the garage for supplies and tools, not even the cut up clothesline was brought up.  Any of these infractions would, under normal circumstances, be grounds for punishment.  But apparently a near-death experience trumps a list of minor infractions.  Good to know.

I wasn't badly hurt.  I probably wasn't out for very long.  Likely my Mother heard the mast fall down and came running.  I do not recall getting in much trouble, I don't even remember putting all the wood back in the shed, though I must've done it.  What I mostly remember was the joy of making that ship and being carried away in my imagination.  That feeling, the joy of making, has never really left me.  I've become far more careful about structure and safety when I make large, potentially dangerous things, but that comes naturally as one ages, I think, and is a gift given by mishap, and living to understand mistakes and learn from them.