Kenneth Kortemeier led a full day of wood-working for five Great Salt Bay School students. (Photo courtesy Carpenter’s Boat Shop)
Teachers at the Great Salt Bay Community School in Damariscotta had a daunting challenge for The Carpenter’s Boat Shop in Pemaquid. Is there a way to convince a small group of kids to put down their digital devices and redirect their time and energy into the simple pleasure of carving a piece of wood?
The boat shop knew where to find the answer. Kenneth and Angela Kortemeier are co-owners of the Maine Coast Craft School in Bristol where they host summer workshops in a 19th-Century timber-framed, off-the-grid barn/workshop. They specialize in traditional handcrafts and pre-industrial wood-working skills and techniques.
Their work, they say, is grounded in their shared understanding that “there is something deep within us that longs to be using our hands to make beautiful things and we believe that engaging this elemental ‘maker’ in ourselves could bring about positive and tangible change in our world.”
On a snowy morning at the Carpenter’s Boat Shop in Pemaquid, five GSB students; three fifth-graders and two sixth-graders, stepped up to the test for a full day of hands-on wood-working.
Kenneth Kortemeier spent 10 years as an instructor at The Carpenter’s Boat Shop before moving on to the Maine Coast Craft School. With this small group of students, he had an advantage.
“I was told that some of the students are coming from lobstering families and that they’ve been using knives for their whole lives,” he said.
Since the students were not able to bring their own knives from home and the goal was for the skills learned to be transferable to home life, Kortemeier designed a project that made use of readily available utility (or box) knives. Kortemeier chose tasks that he hoped would be “calming and meditative and rely on introductory skills that could be practiced and built upon further after the class was over.”
The assignments for the two girls and three boys began with carving small decorative notches around the edges of small pieces of clear white pine. This decorative-carving project fully engaged the two girls, but the boys began to get restless and Kortemeier redirected them to splitting sections of white pine logs with the use of assorted hand tools, such as a froe and drawknife.
The students split small sections of pine that could be carved into wooden spoons, spreaders, or spatulas.
Lunch was part of the program, but the student carvers didn’t want to step away from their projects and, instead, grazed through their mealtime snacks. The afternoon turned into an open shop time. One of the kids wanted to make a bat, so they learned to use a shave horse and a draw knife to make it.
“Someone else wanted to make a little club for killing harvested fish and we did that as well,” Kortemeier said.
As the students became more comfortable with their skills and the tools, the projects become more elaborate. One of the boys wanted to build a deer-skull mounting plate for a deer he had recently harvested. Kortemeier assisted in designing and roughing out the mounts and the students carved them with spokeshaves and then stained them.
“They then set out on their own, each in a slightly unique direction, and they started carving letters, little animals and board-game playing pieces,” Kortemeier said.
Their phones and the video games were out of sight and fully out of mind.
“Everyone really was doing their own thing and having input in what they were learning and being asked to do,” Kortemeier said. “They were fully engaged. They were so super-excited to be here. They didn’t want to leave. One asked, ‘Can we come again tomorrow?’”
At the end of the day, the teachers at the Great Salt Bay Community School had their answer: There is life for young kids beyond video games.
Carpenter’s Boat Shop Executive Director Alicia Witham said the day long course was a pilot project for the Great Salt Bay and Maine Coast Craft schools and the boat shop, and its one she hopes to repeat in the future
“We’re working on growing our custom programs,” Witham said. “We’re turning 45 this year and, for the most part, we’ve been focused on our apprenticeship program. I very much love the core of who we are, but we have this amazing campus and I really want to share it with as many people as possible. So, our challenge is how to create programs for folks who want to be here.”
Eleven (and counting) open-enrollment initiatives already are on the books for 2024, each one offering a different kind of engagement. One such initiative is any one of the five-day build-a-Monhegan-skiff courses led by Carpenter’s Boat Shop founder Bobby Ives. The course welcomes people who can’t make the nine-month time commitment of the apprenticeship program.
Another is the artist-in-residence program that has added a new cultural dimension to the boat shop.
Collaborating with other organizations is yet another means to the end of expanding the not-for-profit organization’s community engagement. In addition to the Great Salt Bay carving class, the boat shop is partnering with the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences on a two-day residential toboggan-building class for six high-school students.
“It will build in math, science, creativity, art, and human history,” Witham said, adding the class will happen when the boat shop is quiet, six weeks before a new class of apprentices picks up the pace of the campus. “The toboggan students will be incredibly proud of their work, and they’ll be able to use the toboggan for recreation and fun. Or they can put it prop it up against a wall and, as a confidence builder, say, ‘Hey, we built that.’”
Even in the peak of the boat shop season, an active roster of custom programs extends the mission of the Pemaquid organization.
“We work with Bowdoin annually on a four-day freshman-orientation,” Witham said. “We’ve also created a week-long furniture-making class specific to 18-to-30-year-olds who identify as LGBTQ-plus. They’ll build furniture, confidence, community, communication, and trust.”
Throughout the year, the Carpenter’s Boat Shop’s monthly virtual lecture series will offer engagement to the boat shop. Upcoming speakers include Phoebe Jekielek, director of research at the Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership on Thursday, Feb. 15; Brittany Gill, executive director of Lincoln County’s Community Housing Improvement (CHIP) program on Thursday, March 21; and Thom Price, former boat shop apprentice who’s now a gondola boat-builder in Italy, on Thursday, April 11.
To learn more about the lecture series or the expanding list of custom programs, email director@carpentersboatshop.com, go to carpentersboatshop.org, or call 677-2614.
