Playing Fair and Being Kind

STRENGTH AND POISE

I am, sometimes, embarrassed to see people who are extras in films carrying something I could, at one time, carry three of. Tonight, I saw two people carry a small log. To me it was small. I have carried three of them through the woods on my shoulder at one time avoiding trees and other impediments. What joy it brings me to remember the challenge of lifting something above my center of gravity and walking off with it. The thing was to have it under control. Anyone can lift a load but it takes strength and poise to keep it balanced and tamed.

When I was cutting trees in the woods; at Barbara Damon’s fifty-acre lot, I could cut trees for a few hours and then stack them in piles to be carried out at a later date. That was so much fun. I was in control of my body and I could work all day, it seemed. I think I was seventy-one years of age. That was a few years before I totally retired and started volunteering at Maine State Prison. That’s a whole other chapter to be covered under a different label. The point being that screen writers do not know the life of laborers. Especially those whose lives revolve around the trees and forests, even the sea. Those men are brutes who use the challenge of physical adversity as games and fun and a way to shorten the day. There is no exhaustion. There is the joy of expending what we have to offer and then finding more to give, to expend, to offer up.

I would be at work in a boatyard. That in itself is a statement of leading a rugged life. Every job requires herculean strength. Cutting planks, carrying them to the place they belong, putting them up and clamping them in place. Finish the fitting. Drilling the holes for trunnels. Driving the trunnels to fasten the plank. To be strong enough to pick up the maul and to drive accurately takes strength and poise. And also, the innate requirement to keep the other men at bay. To put up with their foolishness, crap, poppycock. Their weird way of saying “You are one of us”. Not many trades include so much of an integration into a new way of thinking and speaking.

Working in a shipyard that works for the Navy is certainly a whole new experience. The jargon contains antiquated terms and phrases that can confuse the lubber certainly. The most basic word that is used is “head”. The head is the toilet. ‘Scuttlebutt’. Scuttlebutt can be either the water fountain or the information one receives wherever the ‘scuttlebutt’ exists. It’s the same as ‘watercooler’ news. It refers to ‘news’ that is gathered at places where workers congregate. Many bits of terminology are sprinkled in the general conversation of the people who work in a shipyard.

Many of the workers in a shipyard are former Navy men. They have a predilection for this type of work. It is what they have done all of their lives. Shipyards were, for the most part, shore duty for them. If they were not at sea and not on shore duty, they were in a shipyard helping to build a ship to go to sea on.

We have wandered away from strength and poise. Let me conclude that strength and poise are a way of life in the land of shipbuilding. To use one’s strength and poise was an everyday event, all day. It’s nothing to brag about.
G. M. Goodwin
12 April 2020