Born Again

An 1881 Bowdish sailboat, abandoned in a northern Michigan junkyard, is rescued and restored to museum condition by John Parlin, wooden boat surgeon extraordinaire

- Frank Farwell

Only a small slice of the population sees beauty in a bedrag-gled, sickly dog at the local rescue shelter, and with derelict, beat-up old boats, I think it’s the same. Occasionally, though, a rare person sees beauty where others do not, as if viewing life’s unfortunates through a rose-colored MRI device that can view below an unflattering surface and find an unnoticed trove of goodness, character and promise.

So it was one winter day in 2000 for Mary Braamse Edgar, an energetic, detail-oriented attorney from East Lansing, Michigan who had grown up at her family’s Upper Peninsula camp at Rock River Cabins, where the river empties quietly into the south-central shore of Lake Superior. Back in 1994 she had heard about an abandoned antique boat in the area, but it wasn’t until 2000 that friends took her to visit the boat’s owner, Edward deNavarre, at his house in the eastern U. P. Mary found the derelict boat upside-down in deNavarre’s yard with its keel hogged from many seasons under the snow. It was a relic from a bygone era, a traditional rowing and sailing boat lying forlorn in the snow. It had a broken spine and decaying wind-and-snow load-tortured hull, and seemed to be calling out to her for help from another era.

Most dedicated wooden boat enthusiasts would have gazed respectfully for a minute or two, and then moved on. After all, the amount of work it needed was overwhelming; a restoration was out of the question. This frozen outcast of a boat was something to look at, but not, for chrissakes, to restore. No, no, no. It was something to gaze at wistfully and be reminded of bygone days seen only in history books’ grainy black-and-white photos—nothing more.