Page 13 - The Complete Rigger’s Apprentice

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tad out of date—a garment with a past—but I love therefore working with it is different.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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