Book Review:

HOW TO BUILD A TIN CANOE
Robb White
Hyperion, $23.95, May 2003

review by Hal Jacobs
for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Don't be fooled by the title of Robb White's How to Build a Tin Canoe.
Yes, White shares his secrets for building the perfect, lightweight tin canoe out of a 16-foot sheet of tin. (Start stomping right in the middle. Bare feet, very gritty, are best, but soft tennis shoes might work okay.)

But, first and foremost, White is a humorous old salt who loves nothing more than rearing back and telling stories about his love, nay, obsession with boats and adventures on the water.

From his first boat at the age of five (a little duck boat he finds in a Thomasville, Ga., carriage house), White muses over his 50-plus years worth of living, working and playing with boats as his favorite companions and the Florida panhandle as his beloved stomping grounds. Whereas Will Rogers spun tales about the Oklahoma frontier and Garrison Keillor dotes on small towns in Minnesota, White takes his pulse from the Florida mud flats around St. George Island.

The best stories in this collection are the ones that describe his childhood explorations and misadventures in 1950s. Back then, five small children could take a boat out for the day, catch their own lunch -- clams, soft-shelled crabs, oysters, puff fish (the soft bones are child safe. Don't eat the liver, and never put one of the spiny kind in your bathing suit pocket), and not return home until long after dark.

We were children of the flats. Around here, there are miles and miles of them. The shallow water covers sandy plains of grass that are almost continuous from Yucatan to the Keys. . . . The discovery of the wonderful diversity of the flats occupied us to the limit of our capacity. We tried our best to find out what lived in every hole (a never-ending quest-some of us are still at it after fifty years).

White's passion for boat building grew while he was stationed in Puerto Rico on shore duty. There he apprenticed himself to local craftsmen, learning the tricks of the trade. On his return to the Florida panhandle, he aimed to become a master boat builder. Instead, he quickly realized he couldn't compete with the cheap aluminum boats stacked outside every discount store. So he crafted his lovely boats by hand on the side, meanwhile taking any job he could find, including painting houses, working on tugboats and teaching eighth-grade science.

Of course, all of this is great fodder for A Portrait of a Crusty Old Salt who loves to digress, share recipes, stretch the truth, and wax a little nostalgic about his daddy's old half-inch Versamatic drill and the outboard motors of his youth (cranking a WWII-era Evinrude storm boat motor was a matter of intuition, brute strength, dedication, and reckless desperation.)

But regardless if you're an old salt, young wannabe or even just an avowed landlubber with a strong yen for old Florida, this is the one book to stow away this summer.

An edited version of this review appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, August 3, 2003.

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