A Connecticut Craftsman Breathes New Life Into Old Wooden Canoes

Schuyler Thomson loves wooden canoes. He has built, paddled and poled them, guided wilderness trips in them, won a national downriver championship in one and, since 1979, has made a full-time profession of repairing and restoring them. His shop, a red post-and-beam bungalow, sits under some ancient maples in the yard of his boyhood home on Weekeepeemee Road in Woodbury, Conn. Thomson, 38, works six to seven days a week restoring life to moribund canoes. He works quickly, deftly, although that was not always the case. In his green days, jobs that now take him minutes, such as steaming and fitting a new cedar rib, took him hours. Or days. Or weeks. Hurled tools were an embarrassing feature of that period. So were hurled oaths, smashed fingers, broken windows. Thomson persevered. He did not do so for the money—there is very little money in canoe restoration—but in homage to his two major maxims: 1) If you own something worth having, it's worth taking care of and 2) If you're going to do something, do it all the way.

Thomson's commitment to full-time excellence in a field strewn with part-timers and hobbyists has won him a growing reputation as one of the best and most respected wooden canoe restorers in the country. Enthusiasts from as far afield as Texas, Georgia and Wisconsin have brought him their boats for repair.

"Schuyler is head and shoulders above every restorer I've seen," says Culver Modisette, head of the trips division of Great World, wilderness outfitters in Avon, Conn. "Plus, you just don't see many out there doing it full-time. Schuyler restored a 60-year-old, wood-and-canvas Morris canoe of mine—an antique—and did a beautiful job. His attention to detail is great."

The challenge for any canoe restorer lies in matching his work to that of the original craftsmen so that signs of repair are undetectable. In that, as in other aspects of his craft, Thomson excels. "I've seen a wood-and-canvas Old Town canoe that Thomson restored," says Jerry Stelmok, a wooden-canoe builder in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, "and you can't even tell it's been repaired."

"Schuyler's philosophy is an interesting one," says Jill Dean, who with her husband, Jeff, runs the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association in Madison, Wis. "He's not absolutely keyed to creating museum-or show-quality pieces, like a lot of restorers—which is not to say he's not capable of doing just that. He's more interested in keeping the boats in use, which means, besides making them look beautiful, making sure they're solid and structurally sound." Stan Wass, a Connecticut-based outdoor writer and former national-level canoe racer, adds, "Sky will take hulks and turn them into serviceable watercraft where others wouldn't touch them. He approaches his work from a real paddler's point of view."

That point of view has helped put more than 300 wooden canoes back on the water in the seven years that Thomson has been in business. He continues to repair 50 to 60 canoes a year. Most need recanvasing and stem work, the latter because of moisture's tendency to settle into a canoe's ends. Some also need new rails, ribs, thwarts, planking, or need to have their seats rewoven, their decks replaced. "I do maybe 30 complete overhauls a year," says Thomson, who may at a given time have six to 12 canoes in various stages of repair in his shop and the adjacent "ready yard."

The grounds, the shop and the massive 15-room colonial house where his parents reside hold special meaning for Thomson. He and his brothers, Peter, 36, and Alexander, 32, grew up there. The shop was once their playhouse, the lawn their island and ocean. When Thomson was eight, his mother began reading him a 12-book series by Arthur Ransome, the first of which was called Swallows and Amazons. It is a fictional account of four English children and their camping and sailing adventures, and it entranced Thomson. One day during this period, he fashioned a sailboat in the backyard, using play blocks for the hull, a flagpole and bed sheet for the mast and sail. Peter was dragooned as first mate. "I wasn't interested in sailing anywhere," says Thomson. "It was just being on that boat."

The lawn is flat and rectangular, a snug harbor for the canoes Thomson fixes. When one is 95% done—when its hull is painted and its insides await the fifth and final coat of golden spar varnish—Thomson often resists completing the work, preferring to let the unfinished boat sit for a few days on the grass. Maybe it's indolence, he says, or impatience to undertake more challenging jobs. "Or maybe I just like having lots of canoes around."

A summer morning; in the air there's a brothlike humidity. "Wretched drying weather," Thomson mutters. He nimbly unlashes the ropes binding an 18-foot Old Town canoe to the top of a visitor's car. At 6'2" and 185 pounds, the mustachioed Thomson is lean and fit, his long arms cabled with muscle developed from 11 years of racing. "It's an OTCA," he says, brushing the dust from a six-digit number branded on the canoe's stem. He goes to his shop, returning a moment later with a list of serial numbers and corresponding years of various Old Towns built since 1905. "Late '45," he says, locating the canoe's number. "A wartime boat," which explains why the seats are slatted, not caned. "Couldn't get Philippine cane in those years." He taps the iron stem band, and with pliers he extracts an iron tack from one of the canoe's planks. "Brass and bronze were scarce then, too." A history and Latin major (B.A. U. Conn., '69), he savors these physical contacts with the past. To the visitor, the canoe, recently rescued from a woodpile, is a mess: no canvas, rotted ends, cracked ribs and planking, broken thwarts and rails. "It's fixable," Thomson says, and draws up a repair estimate:

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