Uncle Terry's Boat

Uncle Terry announced the boat at Thanksgiving. This is how all of Terry's projects started, at a table, with a fork in the air, to a family who had learned to look at their plates. "I'm building a boat." "What kind of boat," my dad said, in the tone of a man asking what kind of cancer. "Wooden. Sixteen foot. Cedar strip. I've got the plans." He had the plans. He'd bought them online from a man in Nova Scotia and printed them at the library, forty pages, and they lived in a binder in our garage, because Terry didn't have a garage, he had a condo in Mississauga, and we had a garage in Guelph, and so, as it turned out, the boat lived in our garage too. For three years. Year one was the frame. Terry came up most weekends. He'd arrive at nine with coffee and a new tool he'd bought and didn't need, and my dad would come out around ten with a face on him, and by noon they'd be arguing about a measurement, and by two they'd be sitting on upturned buckets drinking beer and agreeing the plans were wrong. By the end of the first summer there was a skeleton in the garage that looked, honestly, a bit like a boat. Year two was the strips. This is where it went sideways, because cedar strips have to be bent, and steamed, and Terry had built a steam box out of a length of PVC pipe and a kettle, and the first time he ran it he blew the end cap off and put a dent in the garage door that's still there. My mother, who had been patient for eighteen months, came out and said, "Terry, if you kill my husband I'm keeping the boat," and went back in. Terry thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. My dad didn't. But the strips went on. Slowly. Two or three a weekend, glued and clamped with every clamp Terry owned plus every clamp he borrowed plus, at one point, four of my mother's hair claws. By the end of year two you could stand in the garage and see a hull. An actual hull. The neighbours started coming by.

Year three was finishing. Sanding, fibreglassing, varnish. Terry's hands were wrecked. Dad had stopped complaining, which was how you knew he was in it now, properly, the way he'd been in it since about the second month and hadn't wanted to say. They named it. There was a whole discussion. Terry wanted Second Wind, Dad wanted something to do with hockey, Mom said it should be called Garage, and that's what went on the stern in the end, in gold letters. Garage. It's a good name. It's honest. The launch was in August, at Guelph Lake, on a Saturday. Fourteen family members. Two coolers. My cousin brought a speaker. Terry and Dad carried Garage down to the water between them and put her in, and she floated, she actually floated, level and pretty, and Terry got in, and then Dad got in, and they pushed off, and about eight metres out we all noticed that the boat was sitting lower than it had been. "Terry," Dad said. "I see it." "Terry, there's water in the boat." "I see it, Ron." They rowed back with a certain urgency. It turned out one of the strips near the keel hadn't sealed, a gap you could fit a credit card in, and Garage was taking on about a litre a minute, which is not a lot until it is. They got her onto the beach with a couple of inches of lake in the bottom, and stood there, dripping, and looked at her. My mother said, "Well. She floats." Dad started laughing. Then Terry. Then everyone. It took another month to fix, and she's been on the lake every summer since, and the story of the launch gets told at every Thanksgiving, with the fork in the air, by whoever gets there first. Terry's talking about a sailboat. Dad's looking at his plate.