Maritime Keepsakes
Lara started building her first ship in a bottle a month after she met Steve.
He sailed. She didn’t.
He fished. She hated seafood.
He swam. She sank like a stone.
He dove from cliffs. Again, she sank like a stone.
But when they stepped into that souvenir store in Annapolis and saw those elaborate wooden ships constructed in glass bottles—she swooned.
She painted. He didn’t.
She sculpted. Statues unnerved him.
She curated a gallery. He preferred galleys to galleries.
She once curated a museum. Again, he preferred galleys.
She picked a medium-sized bottle off the shelf. It contained a schooner. She knew this because Steve looked at the bottle and said, “Hey! Check out that schooner, would ya?” And immediately it seemed like the perfect activity to bond them as a legitimate couple: art and water. He could pick the boat, the bottle and the materials and she could piece it all together and add more maritime décor to his houseboat way back on Lake Union, Seattle. Beautiful there. Such a nice change of pace.
So, faster than an encroaching Nor’easter, they bought plane tickets and commenced collaborating.
He complimented. She worked even harder.
He dreamt about that perfect wave. She obsessed over that brass porthole.
He stepped out for coffee. She skipped breakfast.
He flew to Annapolis for that thing he needed for that other thing. She said, “Huh? Oh! That’s nice. You, too!”
Now, two years later, she put the finishing touches on her 8th ship-in-bottle project. And did so while living in his houseboat on Lake Union. She made her own workspace: a heavy, wooden table with a magnifying glass wider than her head and thicker than her forearm.
Though the boat in a bottle collaboration became a little one-sided, Lara loved the process. Unlike Steve, she drank up details and projects like they were tequila and she the worm. He was more of a big-picture man.
She filed, sanded and stained the slivers of Boxwood making up the stern and bow. She used pipe cleaners to adhere glue to the garboard strake and developed a soldering iron technique to make sure each pintle fit securely in their gudgeon without popping out. She found the simplest way to complete the task was to rig the masts of the ship and raise them up once securely inside. Masts, spars, and sails worked best when built separately and then attached to the hull of the ship with strings and hinges, and…Lara built these hinges from scratch. Tiny hinges from bits of brass and copper found in discarded heaps at Lake Union Hardware, back when she used to leave Steve’s houseboat to go to Lake Union Hardware.
In the meantime, Steve sailed. He fished. He swam. He travelled wherever water could be found.
He met another artist who loved to paint and sculpt and curate. Another artist who was just as taken by the ships in the bottles in that Annapolis souvenir store—the tininess of it all, the details.
Lara turned off her soldering iron one day to find that Steve wasn’t there. He actually hadn’t been there for quite sometime, but Lara hadn’t noticed until she popped the cork in Viking ship circa 900 AD and placed it on the shelf next to Courageous, Ted Turner’s America’s Cup Yacht circa 1977 AD.
“Steve?” Lara was alarmed by how muffled her voice sounded. She cleared her throat. “Steve? Honey? I finished if you want to grab dinner or something. Indian, maybe?” She stood and leaned towards the deck complete with planters and plastic begonias. Her knees wobbled and popped as she walked for the first time in however long. “I could go for tika masala anything: chicken, lamb, shrimp…”
It was easy to tell he wasn’t there because this particular houseboat was easy to search in one glance. Lara merely had to stand at the stairs and look up, then out and side-to-side to know that she was completely alone. Steve’s was a tiny boat: Lake Union Houseboat, circa 1930, Renovation circa 1968.
Lara liked tiny.
“Uh…hon?” Lara’s voice caught when she stepped on deck. It was still so beautiful. Perfectly sanded planks of mahogany, ending at hourglass-shaped fence posts above the outboard motor. The water was rocky, but the houseboat didn’t even bob.
And when she reached out to flick away what she thought was a dangling spider or speck, she realized that the speck was a leaf on the other side. It hovered just above Lake Union Houseboat, circa 1930, Renovation circa 1968. Hovered starboard of the perfectly sanded mahogany deck. Lara’s hand hit glass. Her fingers rubbed the curve of what felt and looked like hard air. The leaf stuck there. Mocked her. It able to fly away if the right breeze came along, where Lara was left to wonder where her air might be coming from, much less the right breeze. She thought about yelling but then realized that the women in the houseboats on either side of her were concentrating. And not just on either side, but hunched, focused women worked on projects in houseboats extending indefinitely from either side of her neighbors—all focused intensely on the boat parts and bottles spread out in their respective workspaces. Lara swallowed, though whatever was caught in her throat now didn’t go away.
The woman immediately on her right crafted a Spanish galleon scaled larger than most models Lara had researched, probably meant for a magnum or a Jeroboam. The corresponding lighthouse next to that vessel was a detail she’d yet to consider. Lara thought about waving, getting that artist’s attention, just for an unobtrusive second, and issuing a thumb’s up for such masterful work. Then she noticed how little sun was left.
Pity.
Sure, the twilight sky was nice and, yeah, she had a few questions for Steve. But there was another box of gathered bits of fine wood and metals on the table inside. And Staten Island Ferry, circa 1819 wasn’t going to build itself.
The End