Building a boat

MANILA, Philippines - THIS WEEK’S WINNER

Benjamin Mangubat is a faculty member of UP Manila teaching history at the Department of Social Sciences. His interests are wide and diverse, from history to boat building to possible cures for cancer. He won third place in the 1998 National Centennial Literary Awards and has written various literary works. His writings and other creative works are posted on his website, benjaminmangubat@multiply.com.

Books, not dogs, will forever remain man’s best friends; they don’t bite, they have no rabies, they don’t require regular and costly maintenance (except the eBook).

One book inspired me to engage in a project that redefined my life for the past three years, stretched my financial capabilities and reinforced my belief in the spirit of creativity fast becoming rare in universities, even at UP, the national university.

John Pollack’s Cork Boat convinced me to build a boat — admittedly,   an oddball of a project in an institution known for producing the best doctors and health professionals in the Philippines. 

Flashback to 2007. I was in my 25th year of teaching in the university — 21 years at UP, four years in various campuses. UP was celebrating its centennial the following year, and there I was, obscure and still lurking in the shadows of anonymity.

My years in the university were undistinguished and unremarkable, except for occasional spurts of luminosity in the literary and creative field, my academic credentials suffered from an overall lack of brilliance. 

I was hoping that the following year, 2008, would be a turning point. I churned out three proposals and submitted them to UP Diliman in the office of the Vice President in charge of the System’s Creative Works. One proposal was for the recreation of the Butuan Boat and a Chinese junk, both pre-Spanish boats powered by solar cells (my answer to La Salle’s solar-powered car), an annotated version of The Philippine Saga by Otley Beyer, and a book of interviews featuring UP’s prominent social and natural scientists coming from the different units of the UP System. All my proposals were turned down (although one was picked up by Art Valdez and his Everest team, who ended up doing the Butuan Boat), not really a big surprise in the context of my reputation as a maverick and a loose cannon aiming potshots at administrative gaffes. Many administrators in UP consider their offices as personal fiefdoms, dispensing favors and approving grants on the basis of whim, caprice and personal connections. If you have a dour reputation, you don’t get anything.

I was resigned to the prospect of celebrating UP’s Centennial as a spectator and fence sitter.

Until I saw and read John Pollack’s Cork Boat.

I read the entire book in one night and, before the sun was up, I knew what to do. I was not going to build the Butuan boat or another cork boat. I was going to build a Styrofoam boat! Cork is buoyant but Styrofoam is more buoyant. The Internet confirmed this. At long last, I think I had discovered a novel way of utilizing used Styrofoam, that artifice of a compound that will outlast mankind for years because it does not decay or deteriorate. If John Pollack built the Cork Boat as a fulfillment of a childhood fantasy, I would build the Styrofoam boat as my contribution to the environmental movement. If John Pollack begged from the bars and hotels of Capitol Hill for used corks, then I would beg for used Styrofoam from nearby government offices and private institutions.

I imagined myself being given awards by Greenpeace for outstanding contribution to environmental cleanliness, a plaque of appreciation from my chancellor, and a congratulatory letter from the office of the UP president. Who knows, I reasoned, I could even be cited by the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore who got the prize in 2006 for his film, An Inconvenient Truth.

In any case, I was determined to achieve much more than what John Pollack did in 2004. Pollack was a former speechwriter of Congressman David Bonior of Michigan and later presidential speechwriter to President Bill Clinton. In between jobs and in between tensions arising from existential angst, temporary unemployment and conundrum brought about byconflicting values (hypocrisy and hubris in Washington, DC), Pollack managed to build a huge cork boat (made of 165,321 individual corks tied up by 15,000 rubber bands) with the help of his parents, neighbors, friends and close friend Garth Goldstein. Goldstein devoted a great deal of time and money in helping Pollack to achieve his dream.

If Pollack could do it, why couldn’t I? I am a  decade older than John, had savings a bit larger than what he spent for the project ($6,000), a lifetime supply of chutzpah and behavior bordering on the obsessive. If I could get UP’s support, then from my state of near-anonymity I would be a overnight celebrity and possibly be interviewed by the major networks.

If Pollack had a Garth, I had a sidekick, too: an old worker in his 70s who called me kinakapatid as my late father stood as his ninong on his wedding day. Ricardo Vitug, or Mang Carding, was a carpenter who had no knowledge of boatbuilding but needed extra cash. I had no knowledge either, but neither did Pollard nor Goldstein. I allocated money for the project (my estimate at that time was P50,000 as I intended to use second-hand wood, condemned wood, procured from the other colleges in the UP Manila campus (we have six colleges in UP Manila). Since I would be using used Styrofoam, my expenses would be minimal. In hindsight, the decision to build a boat was all based on ignorance, naiveté, lack of research and poor planning, basic ingredients for failure. But at that time, I had Pollack’s book, his childhood enthusiasm, and a small savings for a start-up. Build it, tickle the imagination of people inside the university, and UP will eventually pick up the tab. 

I  shared Pollack’s enthusiasm for the absurd — once, I drugged a piglet so I could take a photo shoot. I joined the Bagyo Milenyo contest of the MMDA by submitting a huge anting-anting carved from the trunk of a mango tree. Four people were required to carry it. I saw in Pollard a kindred spirit who, in spite of his age, would want to go back to his childhood dream and do things he never did when he was young.

Carding went to UP Manila and we started planning where to build the boat. It was December 2007 and we calculated that by February or March, we would have our boat ready. In any case, UP’s Centennial Celebration was slated for June 2008, and we had enough time to launch it in time for the centennial.

I wanted the boat built beside the Oblation, along Padre Faura St. so people could see and donate their used Styrofoam. No pwede. I imagined a lightweight boat carried by people on their shoulders from our campus down to the Manila Bay. How would we bring it there? Hoist it. Carding said that the low-lying electric wires would prevent us from hoisting the Styrofoam boat to the fence and down the street.    What material would we use, he asked? Palo china, the one they used for furniture. No pwede, replied Carding, they would not be able to withstand the waves. We would float it only at the Manila Bay, never beyond it. No way.

Waves hit objects like cement and they would level anything in their path.

How long would the boat be? Thirty feet by 15 feet, enough room for one class. Make it 12 feet, Carding opined, so the gate of the parking lot would have enough space to let it out.

While Carding was thinking of the wood we would use, his eyes went up, sideways and finally down as his mind raced back to the time they made a wooden cabinet inside a boat owned by a cousin. Bingo! The wood we were looking for was down below; in fact, we were standing on top of it. It was red lauan, measuring four inches thick, six inches wide and eight feet in length. Several of them were embedded in the walkway. They were the trusses of the ceiling of the Rizal Hall that were replaced by steel bars. Some of them were being used as benches, some were given away, and the ones we were standing on served as dividers of gravel on the pathway leading to the Rizal Hall. Some were piled up at the back of the building. The administrative officer told us to get permission from the dean and we could have the wood we needed for our boat. As for the construction site, why not use the vacant lot near the canteen?

The following day, I decided to talk to CAS Dean Dr. Reynaldo Imperial. I have known Imperial for decades, having joined him in the underground movement during the martial law years.   Our discussion was brief and to the point — you can have the wood you need provided you leave some for the construction of benches.

My project was off to a good start, unlike Pollack’s who went to all the bars of Capitol Hill collecting used corks, who at 38 years was indulging in an activity of a 12-year-old. But he was scientific about it — he cajoled, begged and ultimately pressured a mathematician to come up with the total number of corks he needed for the project. The initial number was modest, 6,144 corks for one individual to stay afloat at waterline. He needed four to six times that number to stay dry. It was in the initial building of the boat that John Pollack became a regular fixture in Washington, DC’s bars and restaurants collecting individual corks so he could amass thousands for his boat.

If Pollack had a rough start, mine was smooth sailing, at least at its initial construction stage. Using his traditional knowledge of structure and constructing homes and buildings, Carding immediately fashioned out the basic frame of the boat. He cut, clamped and nailed the red lauan to its center keel. In a month, the lauan wood had taken the shape of a huge skeletal frame and all it needed was additional wood to fill in the gaps. 

The College of Dentistry donated all its leftover wood to the project, Medicine also donated some of its second-hand wood.

The majority of the small wood that was used to reinforce the frames inside the boat came from the College of Arts and Sciences as we benefited from the reconstruction of the toilets whose doors were dismantled and condemned at the time we were building the boat. Room 313, the audio-visual room of the Department of Social Sciences, was remodeled and hundreds of small wood found themselves being attached to frames and walls of the boat. The inner skin was gradually thickening, but the outer layer was still undefined and uncertain. I was sure that I wanted Styrofoam for its outer shell but how could I get the necessary mass needed to protect the boat? 

Desperate moments require desperate measures. I told my stu-dents in history and promised them a 10 percent bonus in their midterms if they would bring used Styrofoam. The trick worked. I was swamped with Styro, some brand-new, a great portion of it used.   By February, Carding suggested that we use marine ply for the external shell. I rejected the idea. I wanted an experimental, out-of-the box boat, not a conventional wooden boat which everybody was doing. It was a decision I would regret later; it would render everything we did in Rizal Hall useless, time-consuming and a total waste of resources. But at that time, I did not know — nobody in UP Diliman or Manila knew how to build a boat, at least not the size we were doing. The people I consulted knew it in theory, but a boat built out of Styrofoam was unheard of, untried and unimaginable.

John Pollack’s boat, on the other hand, was long in conceptualization, which avoided the mistakes of my boat project. To bind the individual corks together, Pollack and Goldstein used computer models to simulate the best and most durable structure that would bind thousands of individual corks into one whole structure. After some failed attempts, Pollack’s former girlfriend, an architecture graduate of Yale pursuing a master’s in public policy in Harvard, devised a system that allowed the corks to be bound in an interlocking banding pattern using rubber bands. It was a major breakthrough as the system allowed them “to build uniform logs of unlimited length and significant strength.”

We had no similar breakthroughs. Styrofoam cannot and will not bond with epoxy or rugby — it melts upon contact. I decided to use chicken wire instead; with it serving as the outer skin, we could simply stuff the Styrofoam inside and pour starch glue inside. The boat was gradually looking like a boat, albeit, its skin, jagged and uneven, looked like the scales of a giant whale. My expenses were beginning to bite and to affect my small savings. My initial expenses had reached more than P100,000 and I brought in my brother-in-law and two of his cousins to work on the boat. I had five people now in my employ — five people I was paying for less than a thousand a day. John Pollack recruited volunteers to work on his Cork Boat but allotted 6,000 for the whole project. The boat I had was being built by professionals — in the sense that they were being paid — but none had any knowledge of building a boat made from Styrofoam and recycled wood. I consulted people from the Coast Guard and two officers came — one was my brother-in-law, and the other, a father of one of my students. They looked at the structure, nodded to its structural integrity but expressed reservations on my recycled wood and Styrofoam shell. The outer skin must be reinforced, either with used marine ply or fiberglass. I chose neither. I opted for the cheaper Portland cement. The chicken wire, now stuffed with hundreds of pieces of Styrofoam, would hold the cement and Styrofoam together. I checked the Internet; I discovered that cement was being used as a material for boats and ships. Bingo! I had an alternative.

It was a bad decision. The boat, already heavy due to the lauan keel and frames, became super heavy. When I decided to have the boat removed from campus on June 7, the eve of the University’s Centennial, the crane’s main body (courtesy of DPWH) tilted while the Styrofoam boat refused to budge from its platform. A bigger crane came late in the afternoon and successfully lifted the behemoth from its platform to the flatbed truck.

Pollack elicited surprise and incredulity when people learned that he was building a cork boat, but eventually, he became a minor celebrity in the US and later a major news item in Portugal when the boat sailed the Duoro River. My experience was the opposite. By late February our project encountered rough sailing and it has not even reached the waters yet. The dean sent me a letter asking me to vacate the premises and to remove the boat from the school premises.

Eventually, I decided to move the boat out of the UP campus on June 7, 2008, the eve of UP’s Centennial. Maj. Sagcang of the Philippine Ports Authority, with clearance from the management of PPA, gave us ample time to make the boat sea-worthy.

Pollack became a minor celebrity; I did too, but only within the premises of the CAS campus — many students called me Mr. Noah, and the boat, Noah’s Ark. But outside the campus, I was largely ignored; UP officials denied my request for funding; could not fathom why I was a building a boat. When I approached UP Manila’s chancellor for funding, he said I owned the boat. His unstated proposition was clear — if you own the boat, why the hell are we going to fund it?

The Styrofoam-cum-cement boat, aka the UP Centennial Boat, also called the Janvier Gabuna Boat, finally floated on June 25, 2008 and was towed by two bancas to Cavite City, and moored near the city hall for further repairs. It took another one and a half years to finish the boat.   When it arrived, intact, at the shore of Cavite City at the side of City Hall, my brother-in-law noticed pencil cracks in the boat’s hull. I immediately ordered stripping the whole structure of its cement and Styro; they were all replaced with marine ply.

The boat has since then been renamed the Cuy-Gabuna Memorial Boat, in honor of two members of the UP community who drowned — Prof. Cuy died in Lake Naujan in 1980, while Gabuna died in 1996 after saving a UP medical student from drowning.

Did I get famous for the effort? I had my 15 minutes of fame (actually 10 minutes and 15 seconds) when Channel 5 interviewed me regarding the boat.

But fame in the modern world is of transcendent quality that has the lifetime of a soap bubble. If you want immortality, build a pyramid, a monument or a ziggurat. Don’t build a boat; you will end up poor, in my case poorer as I had to subsist on a weekly salary amounting P1,500 (as the institutions I borrowed from deducted the payment straight from my salary). The best way, really, is to get an institution and let it pay for the cost. Otherwise, shut up and don’t rock the boat.