Whale Boat by Aster olsen

The plywood plank would not conform to the boat’s frame despite Trond’s frustrated efforts. The workshop floor was covered in sawdust and sweat and discarded tools from where he’d thrown them, and now he tasted wood mixed with blood from where he’d chewed through his lower lip—a habit he’d long thought abandoned. Trond could see where the two hull planks should join, how they should want to nestle together, partially overlapped, with the one firm to the other to create a watertight seal—even before the caulking made sure—but no matter how he bent and forced the plank, there remained a gap. He shifted the strip of supposedly pliable marine-grade plywood again, seeking the perfect frictionless joining he had seen Erl accomplish so easily, pushing and swearing at the curved body of the dingy. Planking the hull was such a simple concept that he’d felt his mind drift during Erl’s instruction—he’d thought of that denim skirt Lilly had worn the last day before summer started, when he’d seen her on the deserted third floor, pressed against the corner lockers by Stellan—and planking a hull was as simple and easy as he’d expected it to be as he observed Erl build his own boat—a routine and repetitive process—but what came easily to Erl now evaded him. He’d snapped one plank in stubbornness and frustration, and his second attempt seemed to be going no better.

“You have to work with what the wood gives you,” Erl had said to Trond, gently, clasping his weathered scar-faded hands in a subtle plea for cooperation, then had handed Trond one of his own pale planks, meant for his own boat, measured and cut and soaked in water, a noble sacrifice for Trond’s second attempt. “A boat becomes a boat through integration and cooperation, not domination,” he said. “Otherwise, it is not a boat. It is a pile of dead trees that will sink no matter how strong you row.”

Trond had measured twice, checked the diagram three times, replayed the movements of Erl’s hands over the wood, and then begun again. This time the gap was even bigger.

The preliminary process of framing the boat had given Trond a false sense of security—an overconfidence he enjoyed, like when he and Stellan and the rest of the eight boat’s engine room felt their inevitable dominance when they sized up their competition at last year’s state regatta. He’d felt that dominance as he chiseled and planed the wood into smooth curves matching the template, and the frame assembly—though it required the occasional further refinement—had gone relatively smoothly. He’d won. And even better, for some parts of the process, Trond had forgotten all about Lilly, all about Stellan. Erl had even been impressed. He'd smiled and clapped Trond on the back so hard that Trond had lost his breath for a second, the older man surprising Trond with his strength. When they’d first met they’d shaken hands, as men do, and Erl’s calloused firm grip had made Trond wonder if his own hands must feel girly smooth despite his years of rowing in the five seat behind Stellan as Lilly perched in front of them both and encouraged them to stroke harder and faster, to push past their limits and reach for victory—not that he shook hands with girls, though Lilly’s hands had been soft.

Erl was not impressed now. After a few more minutes of failure, Erl told Trond that it was late, that he needed to get home, and that they would continue working on the boat the next day. Erl left the workshop, tromping through a thin layer of saw dust on his way to his car, the ocean still and black behind him, swallowing the dock that extended into it from the workshop. Trond failed to plank his boat for another half hour.

Trond put down his tools and walked over to Erl’s in-progress boat he was building alongside Trond’s miserable attempt. He ran his hands along the smooth overlapped joins, so tight that the thin lines of caulking Erl had beaded precisely between them became superfluous, a decorative flair of garishness and a demonstration of Trond’s inability, his failure, his unmanliness. Erl was smaller in stature than Trond, old and pudgy and balding. As far as Trond knew, Erl had never married, had no children, and only kept the workshop open by begging for donations and running summer camps for children. By all accounts he was everything Trond knew he should despise: a weak unaccomplished man. But he had those hands, didn’t he? He had this boat. Trond couldn’t build a boat by watching his favorite video game streamer.

Trond ran his hands over the well-joined planks, seeking out flaws, and when a splinter pierced deep into his pinky he laughed, or tried to, but it came out more as a wail as his blood stained the boat and floor, and before he let himself think, he had slid the flathead from his belt between the now imperfect join exposed by the splinter and stabbed at the wood, pried and twisted until he felt it give, until the entire board came loose and the hull was marred and ugly.

He'd left the workshop in a panic. Trond thought about not returning, giving up this odd new hobby he’d decided to dedicate himself to during his summer break. Wooden boat building was supposed to accomplish several things he had deemed important: it was, he had told himself, primarily a way to connect with his grandfather, who as a kid had run with two whaling ships before immigrating to America. Trond was a year older than his grandfather had been when he left for his first hunt, and last year he had begun to hide his hands from men like his grandfather. Unlike his grandfather’s hands, Trond’s were too smooth, with long and thin fingers like surgical instruments instead of the stubby thick tools he imagined masculine men should have. Men who could kill such a monster as a whale must have manly hands. While he couldn’t hunt a whale—couldn’t have hands like the storm-churned winter sea, couldn’t have Lilly—he could build a boat. His hands could be rough windswell against a concrete bulkhead. He’d started at Erl’s workshop a week later, and though he’d quickly built new callouses, he found them to never be thick enough for his liking. He worried that men, even men like Erl, still saw him as soft. And Trond was much too tall and large to be delicate and smooth like sunrise lake water. He was not like Lilly.

Perhaps he should have taken up any number of other masculine pursuits instead of boat building. Guns, cars, gambling, cigars, maybe even politics. He’d made a similar decision before to masculinize, when he had dedicated himself to shaping the pudgy middle schooler with the girly nickname into a member of the state championship rowing team, with wide lats and washboard abs and veiny quads. Those hobbies would make more sense than boat building—he already had his fill of boats every morning for crew practice. The truth was he’d fallen in love, or at least lust, with the idea of whaling. Not the industrial whaling his grandfather had broken himself doing to scrimp money for passage to the new world, but with the older form before the invention of the harpoon cannon and explosive tip had ruined the image of one man standing precariously and bravely in a small wooden row boat surrounded by churning sea, a spear held above his head, ready to impale a deep creature so immense that it could splinter the boat he stood upon, splinter the spearman’s bones with a flick of a tail if it chose to do so. Building a boat was a way to approximate this past, and a way to figure out how to be the kind of man who could hold that spear. To be the kind of man who didn’t dwell on heartbreak like a soft handed girl.

But he hadn’t anticipated how intimate boat building would be: when Erl slid his palms over Trond’s knuckles, guided his hands gently and surely—made sure the saws and chisels and planes and orbital sanders were used properly—Trond reminded himself that boats were women. He and Stellan and the other boys always called their boat she and her even though it was named Coup de Grace—a name he’d misheard as Cooter and inadvertently renamed her as to a chorus of laughter when the other boys had heard him say it. Lilly hadn’t laughed, but he hadn’t meant it. It was a harmless joke. Plus, it helped him fit in and look cool. Like Cooter, he would build the perfect woman to slip into, this time with purpose, with a slickly smooth hull to ferry him through the soft chop of the grey blue ocean.

Erl, he finally decided after several days of avoiding the workshop, would understand his outburst, would understand that sometimes men had to be men, that violence and property damage were to be expected. Sometimes a man had to wield a spear and cast it into the heart of a whale a hundred times his size, despite the danger. Perhaps Erl would even respect Trond now, would measure his callouses sufficiently thick. Trond returned to the workshop the next day.

Erl had left a message: Trond was to find a new teacher, and a new workshop. He was to leave his key in the overnight drop box and pick up his half-built boat and remaining wood by Thursday, before it all went into a dumpster.

Men, Trond knew, were supposed to be motivated by sex, winning, or money. But for the rest of that summer—for days, then weeks, then months—Trond found himself motivated by spite. He would build his whaling boat by himself the way he originally should have, without Erl’s interference. He told himself this at early morning practice, while at his part time summer job his mom had insisted he take up, and while falling asleep. He would build a vessel worthy of his grandfather, a vessel worthy of hard and rough men not afraid to work with their hands. Every day was a focused routine, a pursuit of consistent excellence that left Trond with no free time for the frivolous pursuits of his classmates: he said no to parties and hangouts to play videogames as the whiff of cut lumber seeped into his jeans, and within a few weeks the invitations slackened to a trickle and then dried up completely. Trond went to practice, worked the opening shift at a store selling maps to tourists, and came home early afternoon smelling of sweat and ink and bleached paper. He built the boat each afternoon until the sun faded and everything became grey and the frogs began to chirp and drone.

In his mom’s backyard, nestled behind the garage, he erected a shelter from a large blue tarp and a few spare 4x4s. He found plans for a simpler boat online—he hadn’t picked up the boat Erl had helped him with—and printed them out at FedEx on large sheets of drafting paper. He scrounged a sturdy workbench from the garage and convinced his mom to borrow a few folding tables from church to store his tools. He borrowed screwdrivers and hammers and extension cords from the library. Table lamps, floor lamps and string lights were repurposed from his room and anywhere else his mom wouldn’t notice. Most of his tools came from his mom’s next door neighbor Frans, who had, during his divorce a few years before, decided to build his own woodworking shop. It was only after Frans had purchased the chisels, lathes, table saws, drill press, belt sander, clamps, and two battery drills, that he had tried to build a table, only to slice a fingertip off. Trond had fetched a bag of ice while his mom, a nurse, watched Frans for signs of shock. Trond couldn’t help but look in the bag as they drove to the hospital. Frans’s fingertip, even separated and preserved on ice, was remarkably smooth. Trond figured that Frans would not mind—or notice—how many of his dangerous tools were missing. He wasn’t the sort of man, Trond thought, who demanded respect.

The boat began to form. The keel was easy and quick, the pattern basic and dull. Trond’s joins became closer, the wood sealing together like an embrace, like a girl pressed into lockers during a kiss. Each night, after he had finished all he could that day, muscles cramped and tired, he would rub his hands across the new additions, searching out imperfection. Each day, he felt his fingers become more calloused, soon sliding against the rough wood with minimal discomfort. This happened until one day he was done with the hull, and his thickening fingers wandered across it and found no cracks, no misplaced joins, no faults in the caulking, nowhere for the ocean to seep in.

He sanded the boat over the next week, his grits growing progressively finer, removing the possibility for splinters. Trond painted on sealant—commandeering several box fans to ventilate the overwhelming vinegar smell—then varnish, to preserve the wood and bring it to luster, to transform cheap plywood into a floating jewel. He fashioned a simple bench for the interior, along with storage compartments in the bow and stern to hold rope and anchor and other supplies. On either side of the interior hull he fit hooks and handles for oars. As he’d taken to doing, he lay down along the false bottom flat decking of the boat, stretched to his full six feet with inches to spare, and imagined his maiden voyage, how the salt spray would catch in his hair and the sun would sizzle away his well-earned sweat and bake his calloused skin golden, how the sea would weather him into a respectable man as it was known to do.

By early August, the finished boat lay before him on the small trailer he’d borrowed from his neighbor, aglow in the twilight, eager to taste the ocean. He stayed up late that last night, even though he was working the opening shift at the store the next day and was exhausted from an extra hour on the erg from practice that day. There was one last part to make. A long, smooth pole, thick and heavy in hand, and carved into a deadly point. He coated it in layers of reinforced lacquers and stains, but he would freely admit it was for show, that he was a boat builder, yes, but he had not learned the manly art of weapon foraging yet. Before he went to sleep, he painted the tip a metallic grey, so that at a distance, no one would be able to tell it wasn’t real.

The moment the boat slipped into the bay was a release, a feeling far better than when he’d awkwardly groped Lilly’s breast through her padded bra as they made out a few months ago, before she went back to ignoring him at school and during practice, before she resumed dating Stellan. Stellan, though he was taller than Trond, and sat closer to Lilly in the four seat, now had fewer callouses than him. Trond found little comfort in that fact. As the boat dipped and bobbed in the gentle windswell, Trond examined his hands, the scarred-over cuts, the buildup of flesh to protect previous soft spots, and he saw the hands of a man. The hands that, if he were to run them over Lilly’s skin, would not cause her to giggle about their softness, but gasp at their roughness. Hands that his grandfather would shake, would say to him, you have become what your father never could.

He saw the hands of a boy who had stabbed a screwdriver into Erl’s boat.

Hands that hadn’t held a harpoon. Hands that hadn’t flayed a fish, much less flensed a whale, boiled blubber down for oil, hadn’t conquered a dangerous creature from the depths to provide candle light—civilization!—for those like Lilly and Stellan. Hands he somehow hated more now than before he built this boat. He checked his supplies again, then untied from the dock and paddled towards the spot where ocean and sky joined, scanning for distant spouts.

He rowed for hours. The sun rose high, cast its brutal heat upon him, and his long sleeve athletic shirt, the spare one from before he made the varsity team, stuck to his frame. His hat and sunglasses coated with his salty exertions, and he chugged liters of freshwater from his supplies. It was far slower than a racing shell, but sculling was sculling, and the water was almost as smooth as a lake in the morning, and every few minutes he watched the shoreline shrink. At noon he stopped for lunch. The bag—stuffed with protein bars, peanut butter sandwiches, and oranges—had slipped backward all the way to the rear of the stern compartment and onto the floor. It was wet. His boat had a slow leak. He scarfed food and turned back toward shore a failure. A half hour later, his hands began to bleed despite the callouses.

Becoming weathered into a man of the sea hurt. He regretted the lack of shade. His knuckles split open with every oar stroke and stung with salt water. His skin burned and blushed and his eyes watered—from the salt spray, no doubt. Each time he stopped to take a break to recover his energy he regretted the lack of shade cloth. He’d considered it, as well as a simple sail, but both were emasculating for a whaler, and—importantly—would interfere with line of site and execution of a whale.

He did not hunt. He did not scan for distant blow spouts. He bailed water over the side in the harsh afternoon sun and thought about how he would install an outboard motor. About how stupid whaling was. About how when his hands were softer they hadn’t been as prone to cracking. He thought about how Stellan had hugged him after they’d won state, and how good that felt.

The ocean’s surface came alive. Silver fish fluttered against the grey blue surface, once, then again. In the distance, several leaped through the air. From the pattern of splashes, the fish would leap near him soon. He grabbed the spear and steadied himself, standing with his knees slightly bent and the long shaft raised overhead, prepared for the next fish to jump. He would spear a fish, bring it back to the dock and filet it, and cook it for his grandfather. He’d cook for his mom, for Frans too. He’d catch so many fish that he’d give them away generously to Stellan and Lilly.

The breach happened not fifteen feet from him. The ocean parted, and a leathery black monster flew towards the sun. Trond had imagined a whale’s pupil to be black, dilated fear of a wide-eyed beast, dismayed to find itself this close to shore, surfacing out of desperation. The whale’s eye was blue—a vivid cobalt ring around a void of black knowledge—it absorbed his gaze, his own blue eyes greying in comparison. In all he had read about shipbuilding, of the history of whaling, there had been no mention of a whale’s eye color. He was overcome with that blue beauty, a large eye that looked back at him not with fear, or anger, or confusion, but somehow, with understanding, with compassion. The eye of a creature who was also alone but didn’t want to be. The whale was smooth and soft, powerful in a foreign, appealing way that Trond’s body, despite the callouses and sinewy muscle he’d dedicated himself to, was not, had only served to continuously alienate him. This was a powerful creature that could easily capsize his boat, could drag Trond to the bottom and leave him to decompose amongst the sea life which depended on whalefall death for their livelihoods, but chose not to. Did it see a whaler in him? Could the whale see murder in Trond’s eyes? Had his grandfather stared into the same blue ringed void? He must have. He had stared, and he had decided to sever that connection with a violent thrust. Every whale should want revenge. But this whale had chosen differently, had chosen a response of softness. With a splash far smaller and gentler than he expected for its size, the whale disappeared beneath the surface of the water, replaced by lapping waves, as if it had never been there.

Trond dropped his spear over the side of the craft, letting it drift away from him as he set about returning to shore. Two hours later he tied off at the docks in front of Erl’s workshop and winched his boat out of the water. Inside, he found that Erl had started on a new boat and was absorbed in tracing the outline onto planks of fir from carefully unfolded plans. He worked peacefully next to the boat Trond had stabbed, now finished, sanded and sealed and painted eye-blue.

“Could you help me repair something?” Trond asked after an apology poured out of him alongside tears that dripped into the glass of ice water Erl had poured. Trond’s skin was sticky from the aloe that Erl had pressed into him, and he hadn’t protested when Erl had handed him ibuprofen for his cramped back and burnt skin, nor when Erl had guided him to sit in front of the blasting air conditioner.

After a breath, Erl nodded, then raised a questioning brow and gestured toward the far corner. Trond’s half-finished boat sat there with a stack of planks next to it. His boat’s frame, he now saw when he inspected it, was slightly uneven in the spot where the planking had given him such frustrations. All it needed was a gentle shim to correct the frame, and the planks would lay flush. When finished, the lack of excessive stress on the planks would make the boat far less likely to develop gaps and leak. This boat was larger than the one he’d built without Erl; he could probably squeeze Stellan and the other boys and still have room for a mast and sail. Room for Lilly too. Trond rubbed aloe and lotion to soften his hands and hesitantly caressed the half-built boat, felt each of his mistakes that might never sand smooth, and decided on a name.

Aster Olsen is a southern biologist and trans writer living in Seattle. She is published in Hey Alma, Autostraddle, Inner Worlds, Ambrosia Zine, Itch, Lilac Peril, Smoke and Mold, and elsewhere. She is the creator and editor of TRANSplants, a zine series about transness and place. Find more of her writing at asterolsen.com.