The Edge of Maine by Geoffrey Wolff

had only yesterday been a random scatter of parts in a carton, or to see Kenny clamber up the mast in a bosun’s chair to rewire an antenna. He would help Kenny or Kenny’s dad with projects on the water, such as moving boats from their slips to moorings when weather threatened trouble; taking boats over to the Penobscot River to bring them home in the spring; putting moorings down or pulling them.
    There’s an art to moving reinforced concrete fixed to a length of sturdy chain, the gear together weighing as much as two tons. The huge blocks need to be placed on a piece of the bottom precisely chosen to allow sufficient swing room for adjacent boats—moved inconsistently by wind or current—to lie at any conceivable angle to one another without hitting, yet not so distant from one another to waste precious mooring space. Some boatyards use a barge equipped with a crane to manipulate moorings; Eaton’s relied on Annabelle, a swift powerboat built in 1934 for a rusticator to ferry himself and his family from Mount Desert to Cranberry Island. Thirty-five feet, with a top speed of thirty knots, Annabelle was bought by the Eaton family in 1967 for nine hundred dollars. They put in a new engine and the yard used her as a towboat and, off-season, Kenny used her to drag for scallops, an enterprise notoriously hard on fishermen, gear, and boats. Equipped with a sturdy boom, Annabelle set and pulled and moved the yard’s many moorings; she has a black hull with a white pilothouse, a gold cove stripe, and gold lightning flashes at her bow. Kenny has been heard to declare, “You ain’t got money enough to buy her.”
    And that was after she sank at her own mooring in 1997, in sixty feet of water. The strain of all that work over all those years had loosened Annabelle ’s planks and transom, and her bilge pumps couldn’t keep pace with the leaks. You might think it was time to call the insurance agent. Instead, Kenny sent a diver down to attach a hawser to Annabelle’ s bow bit, and towed her, submerged, at highest tide as close to the beach as he could get her. As told by Captain Jim Moorhead, when the tide ebbed Annabelle sat high and dry, resting on her beam. “Kenny then put a few [support] stands on her high side, ran a line from the top of her mast to his pickup truck, pulled her upright, and put stands on the opposite side.” Before the tide flooded six hours later he had patched her up enough to float. “He changed the oil, plugs, and distributor cap, fired her up, and went to work.”
    Kenny Eaton’s ingenuity is legendary among local boat owners. He is as undaunted by hopeless cases as are those mechanics in Cuba who keep 1948 DeSotos and 1949 Hudson Hornets purring. So his solutions are especially in demand by owners of vintage sailboats. One such owner, a new-minted captain of industry with a summer mansion commanding the heights of Islesboro, a short sail from Castine, ran up a goodly yard bill at Eaton’s. The bill, slowly delivered, was even more tardily paid. It mounted. Kenny sent reminders. I’d call them “gentle reminders,” but I know better. (Kenny calls a lot of people “dear,” a Maine honorific pronounced DEE-uh and used, in the description of folklorist Edgar Alex Been, “dispassionately to address anyone, regardless of age or gender.”) It is difficult to get money on Kenny’s mind, but I think that once it gets there it stays there. And it’s no trick at all to get his dander up. So this was how it happened that—during an Independence Day lawn party at the vintage boat owner’s summer retreat, croquet mallets and wickets in place, ladies in sun dresses and gents in white flannels—here came a helicopter, piloted by a friend of Kenny’s, and out of that bird stepped Kenny, wearing boatyard clothes and holding in his hand a bill. Mr. Eaton did not have to wait very long at all to have that