Carpentry was new to me, and that first job was not a promising start. We were a young three-man crew left to hold the fort while the boss wintered in the Caribbean. The lead carpenter, Kendrick, was a West Indian who mostly thought about meeting girls with “powe’ful thighs.” Neither he nor Bobby, a ruddy-faced construction worker from South Carolina, knew enough to make us productive. There were days when we only managed to fit one rake board to a gable between the three of us, all the while freezing our asses off (as we put it) in the February cold.
My father wasn’t happy with my choice of work. He’d always assumed I’d pursue a professional career such as law, medicine, or even, God forbid, architecture. He wasn’t prepared for his son to become a tradesman. More than once he said, “You’ll regret doing work that doesn’t challenge your mind.” But from the start there was a mind/body wholeness to carpentry that put it way ahead of what I imagined office work to be. Nonetheless, I did make time that winter, while my brain was still tracking in an academic groove, to take the law school admission test, just in case my father turned out to be right. My mother, on the other hand, was fully supportive. If I had chosen to rob banks for a living she would have been proud, so long as I did it well.
Skilled labor was completely new to me. Back in high school my father had given me the nickname Helpful Henry after I dropped and shattered a light bulb while changing a ceiling fixture in the kitchen. That nickname, with its implication of ineptitude, was mine to inhabit or not, and I didn’t really want it. I see it now as my father’s projection of his own disinterest in mechanical matters. He couldn’t have pointed to the carburetor under the hood of his Pontiac LeMans and he didn’t care. In the Jewish-American culture in which my father grew up, working with your hands dropped you many rungs down the social ladder. Yet carpentry provided an identity into which I was eager to grow. The carpenters I knew on Nantucket were young off-islanders who, like me, had moved there to find a different sort of life. They were independent, irreverent, competent, and self-reliant. I couldn’t wait for the day when the soft leather of my new hammer holster would be as scarred and weathered as theirs.
In taking a job as a carpenter I was challenging elements of a story I had inherited from my parents and their parents before them about who I was and how the world worked. But I was not a lone rebel. The ideas I was trying out permeated the culture of the time like spores of wild yeast. The process of rewriting the story by which I found my place in the world was simultaneously both personal and generational.
Carl Borchert
In January 1973, the Vietnam War ended and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announced the end of the draft. For an apprentice carpenter who had been expecting a draft notice any day, the world became more luminous. I no longer faced an imminent detour to Vietnam or prison.
Then, in March, I was offered a job on a more dynamic carpentry crew. My new employer, Carl Borchert, had worked as an engineer outside of Boston, designing weapon systems for Raytheon, before moving his young family to Nantucket to build a more morally attuned life (plate 1). Carl was six foot six, full-bearded, and Abraham-Lincoln thin. The one time I saw him trip and fall, he went over with the slow-motion grandeur of a redwood.
Carl’s thinness was deceptive, though. One Saturday afternoon, my friend Al slid my 1967 Toyota Corolla off one of the dirt roads that crisscross the open moors of Nantucket. The rear passenger wheel hung in the air about five feet above a cranberry bog, and we exited the driver’s side quite gingerly so as not to tip the car over the embankment. In those days a Toyota was not much more substantial than a tin can with a windshield, and Al and I were strong young carpenters, but we couldn’t budge the car by lifting the rear bumper. So we walked to the Polpis Road and hitched into town to find Carl, confident he could solve any practical problem. To our surprise, instead of hooking up a winch or a towrope, Carl simply stood in the bog, hefted the Toyota onto his shoulder, and shifted it back onto solid earth, easy as pie.
I worked for Carl about a year and a half, building vacation houses from the ground up. He was not an easy boss, but he ran a cheerful, motivated crew, and I learned a tremendous amount. The other carpenters were Billy, a red-haired stoner and early EST cultee4; Dave, a scruffy Boston tough whose idea of a joke was “What do Germans like to do at the beach? Fry kikes and shoot Segals!”; and Joe, a family man who was so tightly wound that he wouldn’t pick up female hitchhikers on placid Nantucket Island for fear of being accused of rape.
Being fresh out of school, I was accustomed to frequent feedback. Good grades mattered. But Carl wasn’t one to praise, although he assuredly let me know when my work wasn’t up to standard. One day, I was hammering vinyl-clad windows in place, missed a nail, and cracked the vinyl. A few minutes later, try as I might, I made the same mistake again. That was when Carl added the growled phrase “numb nuts” to my growing carpentry lexicon. It was several months before I figured out that Carl’s signature on my paycheck was the full measure of his approval – the only one I was likely to see and the only one that really mattered. I had graduated into the working world.
For all that, Carl Borchert had a nature as true as a granite block. You knew upon meeting him that the rough, honest surface carried right through to the core – that he possessed a reliable moral compass. I don’t mean by this that he was absorbed in a deep inner conversation or was self-righteous. His morality found expression in the integrity of his actions. As a builder, for example, he didn’t do the fanciest work, but every step in the process was done solidly, soundly, with no corners cut. And just as he chose carpentry over weapons, so Carl eventually chose restoration over new construction. He didn’t want to contribute to the overbuilding of Nantucket as it became clear that the lovely, quiet, open-spaced island that he loved was doomed to overdevelopment.
The house that Carl built for his family, a pole barn, was a metaphor for the man. No plasterboard interior, no trim, no finish. The aesthetic of the inside was formed by the exterior and structural components. Telephone poles, redolent of creosote, ran floor to ceiling at wide intervals. Between them, the interior walls were formed by the backside of tongue-and-groove exterior sheathing. Looking up to the ceiling, one saw the underside of second-story pine floorboards, framed between floor joists.
When I picture that house now, I see late-afternoon sunlight streaming through the west-facing kitchen window. A small vase of yellow and purple wildflowers, translucent in the raking light, sits on the worn maple table. Kitchen paraphernalia and books crowd the unfinished pine shelves on the wall opposite. A tacked-up postcard shows a large, bearded man standing at a sink piled comically high with dishes, with a caption that reads, “Because a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.” The only building in sight is a small barn down across the meadow, where Carl and his wife, Karen, keep horses, goats, and chickens. By the barn is an extensive vegetable garden, fenced to keep the deer out. On the far side of the garden is a marshy expanse where wild iris bloom in spring, and beyond the marsh rises the low, scrub oak forest of Nantucket.
To the northeast, behind the house, is a major icon of my life: Carl and Karen’s clothesline. Two cross-barred, gray-weathered posts rise out of the grass, with lines of sash cord strung between. It may not sound like much, but set in the mown meadow between house and wood, that clothesline possessed a simple, functional beauty that bespoke an entire way of life.
The Carpenter’s Life
September of 1973 marked the beginning of my second year on Nantucket. My father, visiting, said that my newly muscled fingers looked like swollen sausages. My hands had indeed changed, and I had newfound confidence in them. On Carl’s crew, I saw an entire house grow under their care. In my spare time, I bought an abandoned 1952 Ford pickup for twenty-five bucks and put it back on the road, figuring things out as I went along (plate 2). Mostly I worked with parts that I surreptitiously scavenged from other abandoned vehicles, plus the occasional new item ordered by mail from J. C. Whitney. I replaced the brakes, brake cylinders, transmission, starter, and fuel pump; rebuilt the carburetor; put in new sparkplugs