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Traditional Wooden Boats & Sustainability

Christopher Meehan and Ross Kelly using a chain mould

Anthony Keane OSB

As we come to the bottom of the barrel of our well oiled and carefully stowed, fossilised sun rays, and find much of our capital spent, we are faced with the appalling prospect of having to live more closely constrained by the limits of income, that is, as much of the sun’s rays as we can catch per annum.

While the ongoing tsunami of history crashes on irreversibly through time and will not be turned back, yet may we see some of the structures and patterns from pre-oil days in the waves beneath us shining, showing us how to survive conditions partly similar to what went before, and smoothing the way from an oil-free past into an oil-free future.

One such spectre or benevolent form is the delicate tradition of wooden boat building which forms a bridge or viaduct over the current spendthrift oily splurge, to conduct the vibrancy of a harmonious past into the viability of a sustainable future. Our ancestors, having with love and intelligence over thousands of years perfected the art of matching the steadfast strength of timber with limpid fluidity of wind and wave, offer to us a perfect craft, a way forward through the storms and mists of current economic uncertainties to the smoother waters of a self sustaining future.

Not merely does the wooden sailing ship offer us a way of natural impulse for our goods and selves along the surface of the earth, redistributing surpluses from place to place, it also offers transports of delight to those who rejoice in wisdom and its flitting transformations through many forms.

That the strength of the oak whose home is on land should so adapt itself to movement on water speaks of the exultant spirit of creation which transcends the limitations of particular forms and can move easily from one to the other.

This is the all-sustaining centre of a turning world, known to Hindus, pre-Christians and humble Christians alike. This is what the shamans sought to meet, that they might align themselves and their people with the life force of the earth and so have food to eat.

Liam Hegarty, Fachtna O’Sullivan and Donal Lynch selecting oak suitable for frames

Conversely, they needed food to eat that they might so align themselves and exult in his presence.

When the Christian missionaries came to Ireland preaching Christ, to their surprise the Irish seem to have replied ‘Christ! – we know him well. Is he not the singing of the bird in the trees, is He not the power of the wind and the waves, is he not the constancy and strength of the oak. How wonderful to know that He has come on earth and walked among us’.

For all people know and wish to know this Wisdom of Creation, the King of the Elements, the End of Love Longing, who tastes like a bee the sweetness of the flowers of the senses, and by whom we perceive perfumes, sounds and kisses of love, and who is ever at play in God’s presence, flitting from one form to another:

I am the stag of seven tines
I am a flood across a plain,
I am a wind on a deep lake

I am a tear the sun lets fall,
I am a hawk on a high cliff,
I am a salmon in a pool,
I am a lure from Paradise,
I am a breaker threatening doom,
I am a tide that drags to death,

I am an infant, who but I,
Peeps from the unhewn dolmen arch.

What is unsustainable cannot be sustained. Yet the seductive delight of the timber sailing ship, with its magical mixing of a trinity of elements, gives us the will and power to go with the flow and to live long and happily on earth, in harmony with the abundant energies of creation.

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