NOTE: The Pink Boat in the Barn is written about the time when we built our ocean rowboat Excalibur in a barn in southern New England. Since most of our money went towards the boat project, we had very little left over for living expenses. Tony’s barn where we built Excalibur, became more than just a boat building space.
“The Pink Boat in the Barn”
December 1980
The old cow barn in Touisett, Rhode Island where we built Excalibur was dilapidated from years of nonuse and lack of upkeep. The ceiling of the long cedar shingled structure was covered with moldy building boards that were loosely nailed to the ceiling joists. Frayed wires poked through ceiling holes, some extending down with a low wattage light bulb dangling off the end. We replaced the ones hanging directly over Excalibur with clean, 100-watt bulbs and suddenly the barn looked worse.
On either side of the boat were poop-covered remnants of wooden stalls that cows had once lived in. Tony, the owner of the barn, still kept hay at the far end next to the bunny hutch. Tony’s barn – boat building space cost us 100 bucks a month, a sum we could barely put together after daily expenditures on fiberglass and marine plywood for the deck and hatches, stainless steel bolts and nuts, and various other marine sundry. To build a boat and have some sort of living expenses, we needed to find sponsors and live frugally. Over the year, Tony’s barn became more than just boat building space for us.
In midsummer we got lucky when friends from the Narragansett Boat Club told us about fellow club members, who were looking for house sitters for their c1700 Historic Registry home in southeastern Massachusetts. We stayed there for 2 months. After working with fiberglass all day, we took long hot showers and relaxed on the back patio with our horded cans of Budweiser. From the Ethan Allen four post bed in the early mornings, we could see mist covered green fields outlined with split rail fences. From another window we could see the owner’s charming 18th century garage / horse barn with its white clabber board sliding and barn doors fronted by black wrought iron door handles. I couldn’t imagine any horse ever messing up that barn.
After the summer, we were back to the Tony’s barn living and working full time. For a brief time, we lived in our 1978 brown Pinto wagon that we parked in an old unused cornfield behind the barn. It was late November by then so the ground was hard and the car had no trouble driving over the frozen corn stalks to our spot. We set up our sleeping bags in the back of the Pinto and continued to plan the ocean row as we drifted off to sleep.
We didn’t always have to sleep in the car, however. There were times when we scraped a few dollars together so we could stay in a motel somewhere along Route 6 in Massachusetts. Once I suggested we stop at a motel I knew was managed by an in-law to a cousin. I figured they would give us a break on the rate since we were distantly related. They didn’t go for it and refused to take our $25. They wanted $35 so we drove off.
As the weather become colder, Curt, in his orange down vest and down pants from his climbing days, worked with the single-minded dedication of someone driven to succeed at all costs. In my multi-layered turtlenecks with sweatshirts and cords, I alternated between boat building and typing out letters to potential sponsors from the front seat of the Pinto. Many evenings we would walk out of the barn to be greeted by the constellation of Orion in the clear winter sky.
After a short hiatus, at a relative’s empty house in Sakonnet, Rhode Island, we moved into the bow cabin of the boat thought it was still unfinished. Living in Excalibur, which was set in a boat cradle on the filthy cement walkway, was an experience. Though Tony had long been out of farming, he still kept a few chickens and rabbits around. It was in that barn that I learned that roosters crowed at all hours of the day and night and not just at daybreak. There wasn’t anything barnyard charming about those roosters.
One day, wanting to take a break from boat building and typing letters, I followed two around the yard, watching with increasing fascination as one rooster chased the other. I knew one was the father of the other since I had observed their short life span from chick to full-grown rooster over the months. The younger rooster was chasing the older one, his father and it wasn’t for fun. At times the younger one would catch up to the father and furiously peck at his head that was rapidly becoming bloody. Finally the father escaped into part of a darkened outbuilding where rooster the younger couldn’t find him. I found him though and kneed down to peer under the farm machinery to see the old rooster hiding and panting heavily in fear from his frantic near escape. I realized that the son was in the process of taking over as the new alpha rooster of the barnyard. The old rooster I was looking at knew this and as much as one can sense fear from a simple creature like a chicken, I could tell he knew his days were limited.
In late February 1981, the boat was finished. The day we left the barn, Tony and his wife and son came out to say goodbye and wish us well. Tony told us he had seen us when we were building the boat and he wanted to see us when we got back. He had repeated this several times over the year and it now felt like a good luck mantra. We were ready to load the boat onto a freighter and set off for Casablanca, Morocco, the starting point of the Atlantic row.
Cairo 12/11/09
