I started writing this last May, but wasn’t quite sure where it was taking me. I got as far as Kenya and then laid it aside. Today I think I’ve finally got my bearings on this post, and know how I want to finish it off.

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In 1998 we got a Newfoundland puppy and a year later my wife got the idea that we should get a rowboat to teach the dog water rescue work. Being an incorrigible DIYer I thought I’d give building the boat a try, and a friend of mine suggested I look up Harold “Dynamite” Payson, and through that I found “Instant Boats” and the work of Phil C. Bolger.

 By the later Summer of 1999 we were taking our freshly painted Teal out for it’s first sail — by “we” I mean Peggy with our first child in her belly, our (now full sized) Newfoundland dog, and me — gently gliding across the nearby bay. I celebrated the birth of our daughter by beginning on a Bolger “Light Scooner”, which had it’s maiden voyage on October 1st, 2000 with wife, now hatched daughter, the dog, and me. (That me , the dog and the scooner circa 2001 in the picture.)

Through boat building I also met Bob Wise, who along with his wife Sheila, built the “ultimate instant boat” in the form of the Loose Moose II, a plywood sharpie sailboat big enough for them to live aboard and capable enough to cross an ocean.

Phil Bolger’s instant boats work so well (cheap and fast to build, capable for their purpose) because they strip away the pretense of what a boat is suppose to be, and get to the heart of what it needs to do. They use materials in novel and efficient ways. They don’t cleave to romantised forms.

I built my Teal on my patio in a couple of weekend for a couple hundred dollars. Bob and Sheila built the LMII in about a year in an aircraft hanger at Charles De Gall airport for less than most people spend on a new car. Bob and I began corrisponding, mostly me asking him questions about the reality of making a big boat.

In the Fall of 2002 I got a commission to make a promotional documentary about an NGO relief program in Afghanistan. I knew Bob been had in Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance during the offensive against the Taliban earlier that year, so I asked if Bob had any advice for me. What he sent back was this:

1) Grow a beard.

2) Get good kevlar.

3) Get really warm long underwear.

4) Can I come?

A couple months later we were in a bar in Belgrade, Serbia, having just finished 10 long days with a stubbornly unhelpful Russian guide. (The story of how we ended up in Serbia instead of Afghanistan we’ll save for another day.) Bob was talking to me about shooting film, and I was having trouble hearing him. He was telling me my work was good enough to shoot on real cameras. I was hearing him say that because I shot on video my work wasn’t real. I remember being near tears as he (patiently) explained to me all the things that shooting on 16mm would let me do that I couldn’t do on a Sony handicam.

Bob persisted. When Bob got back to the Caribbean (he and his wife live there on a boat) he sent me a link to a camera on eBay, and the next thing I knew I had a Russian-made Krasnogorsk K-3. From the first shot I saw come out of that little wind-up camera (Kiko Martin as the trigger man) I realized Bob was right. My work was good enough for film, and I was just been to scared to hope that shooting film would actually make a difference.

Another half year later and Bob and I were sitting in Jomo Kenyata Airport in Nairobi. We had just spent a month in the parts of Keyna where the tourist don’t go; the parts that are people, and cattle, and poverty. Kiko had gone back to New York a week earlier with 30 precious spools of film, and Bob and I spent another week on Lake Victoria making a short film about fishermen and boats.

 
Fair Winds/Uncertain Future: The Fishing Dhows of Lake Victoria

Having already sold me on shooting film, Bob was on to what to do after the film was made. He was talking about Bruce Brown and Warren Miller and four-walling, he was talking about short-run digital printing, he was talking about pitching production stories to industry trade magazines. This time I wasn’t resisting, I was taking notes.

At the time Marie and Jack was finished but virtually unseen by anyone. There were fewer than 200 hand-made copies in the world. Six years later, we’ve done six or seven commercial pressings of the Marie and Jack DVD, and we have five more of our erotic documentaries completed, all of which have been financially and critically successful and three more in post-production. There are literally tens of thousands of copies of our films in the world, and all of this is in no small measure due to taking Bob’s advice and running with it.

Bob also helped me when I decided it was time stop waiting until I had enough time to build a big boat and just to buy a good old plastic boat and get on with it; and for the last couple of months he has been helping me get ready for my impending trip from New York to the Virgin Islands (or where ever we eventually fetch up.)

So why back to this post today?

Back in 2002, when I asked Bob why he, a person with way more film experience than I had wanted to come work on one of my ULB docs, he said, “If you get it about Bolger, you probably get it about making films, ” and I guess that kind of turned out to be true. I’ve been able to take an unconventional approach to the idea of putting sex on film, come up with some novel technical solutions, and put that all in service of an objective, instead of a form. 

But the thing that’s on my mind today is what happens when someone shows you that many of the obstacles to making the boat you want to make, or making the film you want to make, or living the life you want to live are all in your imagination? That your reasons you can’t are really excuses, conceived in doubt and nurtured by fear?

Over at TheAmericanScene.com a commentor asked me the following:

Tony,why the hell can’t I find anyone who wants to pay me to think up great ideas? It’s like they all want me to work them out, write them down, edit and polish the bastards until they shine like the sun. And even then most of them won’t pay! What gives?

I know he was asking (half) in jest, but it made me remember something I wrote about boat-building right around the time I was first getting to know Bob:

That may be the most seductive aspect of Phil Bolger’s work. When you look at plans for any of his oversized “instant boats” you can actually imagine building them. Sit down with a pad a of paper and a calculator, and you can actually imagine being able to afford to build them. You start to believe you could actually have the boat of your dreams for less than a Korean station wagon. It’s tremendously exciting. It’s even a little scary…

There’s nothing so awful as the moment you realize your dreams are within reach. I have literally been reduced to tears by the sudden epiphany that the only thing standing between me and living the life I want is the doing. When I look at the plans for the the Loose Moose II, or Illinois, or Wyoming, or Breakdown Schooner, I am faced with the terrible knowledge that they are all within reach; that if that’s what I really want, it’s something I can do; that my day of reckoning has arrived.

But what I’m realizing today is that day of reckoning arrives over and over again. That everyday presents the opportunity to decide to do what you want to do, and with that, the opportunity to make excuses.

Does that mean the glass is half full or half empty? I’m not sure. I guess it depends on what you want.

(Between my starting this post on May 18  and finishing it today, Philip C. Bolger chose to end his life rather than allow Alzheimer’s to take away his ability to decide when it was no longer worth living. In the early morning hours of May 24  Phil rose from his bed without waking his wife, went to a secluded spot in the back of their property, put a pistol to his head, and pulled the trigger. Phil’s solution to this last terrible “design brief” was as bold, ruthless, and rigorous as any of his most celebrated boat designs. He is survived by his wife and long-time collaborator Susanne Altenburger, and legions of fans, who feel as I do, that his designs and the philosophy for living that he expressed through those designs, left a powerful and positive mark on our lives.)

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