Rowing like an angel
He fished a Friendship out of Vinalhaven
centuries before I knew him
working as a line chopper
for the surveyor, Edward Wayman Coffin
he was handy with a joke
out in the puckerbrush
all of which I told my new bride
the Chaplain’s daughter
she loved them
when I told him
he was horrified
when we had Joe and Mr. Coffin to dinner
he kept his eyes on the plate
never dared look at her
as beautiful as she was
I do not know if Joe ever built a Friendship
He and Mr. Coffin did build a Tancook Whaler
which they sold to a fool
who put a Genoa on it
and sailed out of sight south
much to everybody’s satisfaction
the Coffin shipyard in Owls Head
was a barnlike building attached to the garage
the lovely smells of wood being planed
paint and varnish
challenged any museum
as a real place of Maine art
it was Joe who named the yard
while they were lifting planks
he made the remark that boat building
consisted of tugging and grunting
Kendall Merriam was born and raised in Rockland. He has a history degree from Gordon College and pursued graduate studies in military and maritime history at the University of Maine at Orono and Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Conn. He received grants to study historical research at Colonial Williamsburg and the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Merriam has been widely published, including in Katyn W Literaturze (Katyn in Literature), a Polish anthology of literary works about the WWII Katyn Forest Massacre by 120 international authors, including Czeslaw Milosz. Most of Merriam’s work has a definite muse – family, friends, and strangers – with life’s larger themes of work, love, loss and death.
so the man from Tuckernuck
from then on
put on all his bills, checks, wayward correspondence
that it originated
from The Tug and Grunt Shipyard
he still uses Joe’s brilliant comment
as a minor memorial
to Joe, who I think he misses a lot
though having been in Maine long enough
to be a citizen
Joe told me one story
frightening in every aspect
once he was fishing 75 spruce traps
in a Friendship
for some reason he had to get into the skiff
he used as a tender and the line came loose
his beautiful sailing vessel started to pull away
he rowed as fast as he could
Neptune forgave him and gave him angel’s arms
he caught up and scrambled aboard
he had saved one boat and his livelihood
something that burned in his mind so
that he that he told the tale
of his friendship with the sea
Kendall Merriam lives in Rockland
