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graduation. After the Navy, where he was trained in the maintenance and repair of big diesel engines, he worked at the local boatyard, then in commercial fishing, and then in construction in New Jersey, where his father was living. When he married Jane, however, they found they missed their hometown life in Maine, and Hank went back to the boatyard, where he stayed for forty-four years, fabricating metal parts when needed, and all this in huge, unheated sheds where boats were taken out of the water for repair or for storage during the Maine winters.
    Hank is proud of his skills, but his greatest satisfaction came not from the work itself but from other aspects of his job. When I asked him about this, he told me, “What comes to mind is, not too long before my boss, Joel White, died, when he was already sick with cancer and his son had pretty much taken over, I said to him one day, it would have been about 1996, I said, ‘I know you think that I think that the boats are great and all that, and you’re absolutely right, but that really wasn’t what I was interested in doing.’ I said, ‘I enjoyed doing the work, but more than anything, it was just a lot of fun dealing with the people that we were making the boat for or repairing the boat for.’ I enjoyed that more than I did the actual work itself.”
    “Because you’re a people person,” Jane said.
    “Yeah, and he never knew that,” Hank continued. “He thought, Wow, Hank is pretty much into these boats. I didn’t want to drop an anchor right in the middle of everything and destroy a friendship, because we certainly had a great, great friendship, but I didn’t want him to go on thinking that I was the master boat person that he thought I would grow into. That wasn’t the product for me at all. The product was the people. So I’m kind of happy that we had that little piece of conversation, because I know that I didn’t mislead him into thinking something that wasn’t going to happen.”
    “But you really enjoyed making those fittings for the boats. You were so proud of—”
    “But you know why I was proud? It wasn’t because of the fittings, it was because, when a person would come to pick up their boat, and they had all this work laid out for ’em, I would just, you know, I’d stand off to one side—I couldn’t be in the center of attention, you know—just to see the surprised, happy look on their face; that meant more to me than the damn paycheck. I needed the paycheck to buy my bread; it’s that simple. Joel didn’t realize how much pleasure I was getting away from the product—the product for him being the work I was doing on the boats. And I was enjoying that, too, and proud of it, rightfully so. But that’s where I say I really got a lot more pleasure out of it than he realized. So by telling him that, I removed the guilt feeling that I might have had.”
    Jane and Hank could have earned higher wages in New Jersey or farther south, in a bigger boatyard, but that wasn’t the life the two of them wanted to have or where they wanted to raise their children. They bought a dilapidated house in Maine that Hank worked on after hours for over a year, waiting two years before they could afford a water heater and rigorously avoiding going into debt. In all the years that Hank worked at the boatyard, boating never became a significant part of the life he and Jane shared, because Jane tended to get seasick. When the time came to retire, “the plan was to go somewhere warm,” Jane said, “because he froze to death working at that boatyard all those years in the winter. He was always so cold. He said, ‘When I retire I’m not staying around here.’ ”
    I commented that Hank had chosen the right industry, because people take such pleasure in their boats. He could have done other kinds of skilled work someplace else that wouldn’t have brought that look to people’s eyes and wouldn’t have given him that connection between the quality of what he