The first time I saw a bairdarka frame was in Mark Starr's office at Mystic Seaport. (The documentation specialist at Mystic Seaport, Mark also led the Greenland Kayak building classes offered there. He has since left the Seaport.) I'd finished building a Greenland kayak the day before and I was meeting him in his office before we went to load the kayak on my truck.
On the wall, or hanging from the ceiling (I can't recall), at any rate at eye level, was a bairdarka frame. I asked Mark about it, and he said he'd built it quickly for an exhibit at the Seaport.
He may have built it quickly, but I was simply struck by its form and construction. All those chines and lashings, the individual pieces thinner than anything we'd used in our kayaks, but as a whole it didn't seem any weaker. And to my eye, the frame was beautiful, almost a living thing.
That was nearly four years ago, and my sense of wonder at the bairdarka form hasn't gone away.
In his wonderful book, The Aleutian Kayak, Wolfgang Brinck talks about bairdarkas having a spirit. This spirit seems inherent in the boat itself but also a function of the builder's efforts: "Objects reflect their creator's spirit, which you impart to your boat as you work on it. The longer your work, the more of your spirit the boat will have" (p. 3).
For me, building skin-on-frame boats is different than working with metal. I've built one folder from scratch using aluminum tubing, high-density polyethylene, and PVC skin and modified another. For whatever reason, I couldn't connect to the project the way I have to wooden skin boats. Perhaps it was the precision required in making a folder -- something I had some difficulty with -- or perhaps I simply couldn't find the spirit in the materials.
Spirit -- Brinck talks about baidarkas being living things with spirit lines -- carved grooves running the length of the gunwales -- an acknowledgment: "The spirit line is like the digestive tract, the circulatory system, and the nervous system of an animal all rolled into one" (p. 61).
I've found the building process to be more forgiving than other woodworking: planks don't have to be planed to a mirror finish; because the skin holds everything together, less than perfect joinery can be used. All this is true to an extent, but as I read and learn more, it's apparent that some of the joinery used in traditional boats was both sophisticated and precise, along with being well engineered. Those builders knew what had to be done perfectly and what didn't. That balance was surely the result of having to depend on the craft for survival, but some of it may also have been a reflection of the individual builder's skill and ability.
Builder Gregor Welpton, whose boat-building work is documented in Qayaks & Canoes: Native Ways of Knowing, published by the Alaska Heritage Center, echoes the spiritual nature of boats and ties it to their building:
I won't even pick up the wood if the wood isn't speaking to me beforehand. But once the piece of wood that I've got starts speaking, I decide to make it sing, and the board, the tools, all of this kind of comes together. What might look like a chaotic flow from the outside really becomes one great big song of creation … and that's why I build these things, because I hear it in my head, I feel it through my heart, and it comes out through my hands and the boat is just completely born (p. 84).
I imagine that for native builders, anything so connected and essential to their survival must have been approached differently. Subsistence living, for all its hardships, seems to require getting at the essence of things quickly -- without the essential, survival is in doubt.
Those are my sentiments and sense of what's going on in skin-on-frame boat building. As I read and build more, my appreciation and understanding should grow. But for all that, I'll still be like Plato's man in a cave: so much of what I see will be shadows, the product of limited experience and a life without the leavening demands of subsistence.
Still, I can't help but feel that my efforts, however imperfect, are more than indulgence or vanity, that attempting to appreciate older ways can only add to understanding. If my connection to the past and to another way of life is only through shadows, I'm still the richer for it.
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