Page 13 - The Complete Rigger’s Apprentice
P. 13

He had a long length of rope stretched between   Yet there is art in rigging, and there is art in
                  two posts set in the ground, and he was worming,  describing what rigging is all about. No wonder

                  parceling, and serving, which is to say he was up to  that, among the classics in the genre, there are titles
                  his elbows in pine tar and enjoying every drop of it.  such as The Arts of the Sailor by Hervey Garrett
                      Brion was also lecturing the crowd about his  Smith and The Art of Knotting and Splicing by
                  belief that the word “marlinspike” was an unfor-  Cyrus Lawrence Day. (Clifford Ashley was an artist,
                  tunate corruption of “marlingspike” and must  too, though not quite as highfalutin; his monumen-
                  therefore be rooted out of the American nautical  tal work, superior to all others, was titled simply
                  lexicon, now and forevermore. He was introducing  The Ashley Book of Knots.)
                  his rigging posts as Emily and Wiley (“Post!” he   Smith, Day, Ashley—they were traditionalists
                  shouted to the bewildered audience, “Now do you  who saw the understanding of rope and rigging
                  get it?”) and his rigging vises as Old Shep and his  as a continuum involving the drag of knowledge
                  sister Edna St. Vincent Belay. His act, which was  from the past into the present. Their additional
                  half carefully constructed and half anarchistic, was  responsibility, as they saw it, was to push that
                  a cross between Popeye dancing the hornpipe and a  knowledge into the future, and in most respects,
                  street mime imitating Zsa Zsa Gabor. It is my favor-  they were successful at it. But our times are differ-
                  ite memory of the man.                       ent from their times. We have rope, of course, and
                      My favorite piece of memorabilia from Brion is  they had rope, but ours is vastly different from
                  a leather jacket he gave me a few years ago. It’s a  theirs in both composition and manufacture, and
                  tad out of date—a garment with a past—but I love  therefore working with it is different. So, too, is
                  it never theless. For one thing, it smells of boatyards  describing how to work with it. The straight trans-
                  and rigging lofts, as it kept Brion warm while he  fer of knowledge from the past to the present is
                  learned the rigger’s trade. For another, it has been  not enough; with it must come an appreciation of
                  customized with varnished star knots in place of  the evolutionary, developmental nature of modern
                  the original buttons, a touch that reminds me of  ropework and rigging. That is where Brion Toss,
                  the work of Clifford Ashley, Cyrus Lawrence Day,  a traditionalist who can talk about the pluses
                  Hervey Garrett Smith, and other writer-riggers of  and minuses of swaged terminals with the best of
                  an earlier generation.                       them, comes into the picture.
                      Writer-rigger. Now there’s an interesting com-  Brion Toss doesn’t write knot books. Oh, sure,
                  bination. Marlingspikes and manuscripts; pine tar  he has his diagrams and his arrows, and he will go
                  and the pen. Who would ever imagine it? Yet within  on about shoving this rope end through that loop,
                  the broad nautical field there has always been a tra-  but this is just the beginning, the jumping-off point
                  dition of writing about rigging and a subgenre that  for discussions about where this knowledge all came
                  could loosely be described as literature about the art  from and where it might be leading. Brion is a true
                  of rigging.                                  writer-rigger, a legatee of the gentlemen of the past
                      No, I’m not talking about knot books. Those are  who saw the art of rigging as part history, part schol-
                  a dime a dozen, and they are usually written by peo-  arship, part mythical anecdote, and part down-and-
                  ple who discovered how to tie a bowline yesterday  dirty grunt work, complete with rope burns in the
                  and are trying, unsuccessfully, to describe the pro-  palms, wire cuts on the fingers, and leather jackets
                  cess in print today. Lots of drawings with bights and  permeated with pine tar and bear grease. His, like
                  frayed ends, and arrows pointing this way and that,  that of his predecessors, is the layered approach,
                  and not enough text to make them understandable  with the concept of the knot or splice or rigging
                  to a maritime savant. “Insert A in B, loop it around  element at the top of discussion and the meaning
                  C, and pull” is about as literary as the run-of-the-  of it all at the bottom. In between is all manner of
                  mill knot book will ever get.                relevant (and sometimes entertainingly irrelevant)

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