So, I continually try to figure out why I write what I write and why I build the models that I build. And recently, more often than not, I’m finding out that whatever the subject, my interests in the two mediums are often closely related.
My current modeling project is a 1/96th scale resin kit of the USS Weehawken. She was an American Civil War monitor. I’ll get more into her history later as I talk about building the kit. But for now all you need to know is she was one of the most powerful warships of the period and she sank. She did not sink to enemy fire, but to weather and waves many would not consider rough. During an ammunition onload someone failed to properly distribute the heavy iron shot, leaving her out of trim and down by the head. On 6 December 1863 she sank in “choppy” water. She took a few waves over the bow and went down within minutes. Between 24 and 30 men of her 70+ crew drowned in water so shallow that nearly one-quarter of her stack was reportedly sticking above the waves after she settled on bottom.
I’ve always been intrigued by this story. I guess it’s a fairly common one of technology being overcome by nature, but it pulled me in so much that I started writing my own fictionalized version of the sinking. Who was responsible for not stowing the ammunition properly? Even with that, was there someone asleep at the pumps that could have stopped the disaster? (Actually they couldn’t have. An engineering “feature” of these ships had all of the pumps aft in the engine room; useless in Weehawken’s bow-down attitude.) I began conjuring images of a man tormented by the heat of these steel ships in Southern waters, the thud of enemy cannon balls striking the hull, the thick smoky air. And, what the hell, maybe he thought there were mermaids just through the thin hull beckoning him out into the cool waters. I wrote a few paragraphs.
The words lead to a desire to build a kit of the ship. I got luck, someone actually made a kit. That’s always a plus. I have little room to scratch-build at this time. And I found it cheap on eBay! Another plus. I could have built this model as any of the other ships of the Passaic class, even ones that survived into the 20th century, but I chose Weehawken. I started cleaning up the hull and planning the build as I worked on the story. With work and school I have to share time between building and writing, so some evenings I sit with my laptop, others I fill the house with the smell of resin dust and primer. When I build a model I do a lot of research, and I do the same when I write about a historical subject. Now I was killing two birds, so to speak, and I was all about Weehawken. The darkness of her demise and the oddity of it pulled me to her.
The building progressed, but then I lost interest in the story. It wasn’t going anywhere after those initial few pages and I had recently written two war themed pieces. Another one seemed a little much at the time. But as I found my interest in the words on the wane, my interest in the model was growing.
I’m currently more than half-way through the build, and now that I can lay my hands upon an approximation of her hull, see where the water came in, and imagine the death rattle of steel and equipment subsiding into gurgling seawater. The story starts to come back to me. No one has ever accused me of being drawn to cheerful stories, and the model, a solid material focus, makes the images I conjure in my mind more real. Solid.
One day I’ll come back to my story of the Weehawken. Until then, the subject continues in a different medium, for the time being.
