The building of boats: In the Mind of the Maker

By ROGER EMILE STOUFF
The building of boats, Charles E. Richard says, may begin with printed plans and in mathematical measurements, but there is another way: boats birthed from the mind of a maker.
Producer and writer Richard presented a short documentary Thursday at the Alex P. Allan Memorial Library in Franklin.
Richard, who has written and produced films for PBS for more than 20 years, is a University of Louisiana at Lafayette Endowed Professor and a Research Fellow at the Center for Louisiana Studies at UL Lafayette.
In the Mind of the Maker is a study of the boats built by Edward Couvillier of Myette Point, and the sons to which he is passing down that craft, Larry, Justin and Kevin.
After presentation of the film, which chronicles Couvillier’s building of a cypress Cajun push boat, a vessel unique in the history of Louisiana and the United States, perhaps the world, Richard asked the audience why someone like Couvillier would build such a boat.
Son Larry Couvillier asked during the production, “Why build a boat like this anymore? There is really not much reason anymore.”
Those boats were built to fulfill a need, Richard said, which does not exist anymore since the advent of motorized vessels. “We have motorboats,” he said. “If you want to catch fish, as Mr. Edward still does at 87 years old, he’s not going to use a rowboat to do that, not if you have a choice of using a motor. It’s a question that’s been on my mind a lot. Why keep building a boat whose need has passed?”
“Because he could,” an audience member said. Others noted the pleasure of passing down the craft down to future generations, preserving history and a dying knowledge.
Couvillier uses no plans: his boats are conceived and become tangible by eye, an eye that can see the right—and the wrong—in the construction, Richard said.
He had not built such a boat in more than 60 years, but Couvillier supervised and participated in construction of the little skiff, and was at the oars when it was launched.
Cypress planks, wide and thick, make up the boat in the mind of its maker. “We can make a box float that will float,” Richard quoted one of the sons. “But if you’re going to build something, make it beautiful.”
Though the Couvilliers now use a combination of power tools along with traditional hand tools, the building of the push boat remains a style and concept that harkens back to a bygone era, an era that might have passed from memory if not for people like Edward Couvillier.
Richard said the boat was last built in the late 1950s, with the production of engines. “The knowledge of how to build them was almost lost until the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans,” he said. “(UL-L Professor) Ray Brassieur convinced a builder named Raymond Sedatol to build a push skiff. Raymond said nobody builds that anymore, why do you want to do that? Brassieur replied that it is exactly because nobody builds them anymore.”
The Cajun version of the rowboat differs from others in America in one profound way: rather than sit to row with a pull-stroke facing the stern, and constantly looking back to check the boat’s course, the user of a push boat stands, facing forward, and pushes the oars to propel the boat. Richard said the traditional boats elsewhere were meant for more open waters, but in the swamps, the need to slip between cypress trees and navigate the swamp took precedence.
“Larry Couvillier said if you go to any boat show you want, anywhere in America, and they’ll have fiberglass or aluminum boats, but it’s the wooden boats that people have to stop, touch, run their hands over it,” Richard said. “It’s an instinct, an impulse they just can’t fight.”
Through it all, Richard said Couvillier has remained humble, and perhaps somewhat mystified by all the attention to something his people built and used solely to provide for themselves.
“There are still some skilled boat builders out there who build equally beautiful boats,” Richard said. “We wanted a character, and a family where that tradition is being passed on. I was introduced to Mr. Edward by Jim Delahoussaye, who narrates the film, and Ray Brassieur…I think there is something at work in this family that is much bigger than boat building, in terms of staying connected to heritage, and connected to the land that you live in.”