Ode to the functionally elegant

This ancient Suburban has been cleverly re-purposed for yard usage. Photo by Bob Muggleston

June 2024

By Bob Muggleston

Over the last few years, working for a marine-canvas business, I’ve been in a lot of boatyards and taken photos of more unregistered yard vehicles than I can count. The one I’ve included with this piece is my favorite. My educated guess is that this Chevrolet Suburban, which belongs to the Shennecossett Yacht Club, in Groton, Connecticut, started out with sides sometime in the 1980s. Along the way someone at the club realized that if they removed the enclosed passenger compartment in the back, but left the roof, they’d have a great work vehicle. Hats off to whoever did it. The nautical touch is the rub rail. In theory I’d love to own this vehicle, but only if it was in a place where it didn’t have to be registered. If you know this Suburban’s backstory, drop me a line (editor@pointseast.com).

I’ve always been drawn to contraptions that my dad would have called “functionally elegant” – things that ain’t pretty, but either get the job done or are purpose-built for a specialized task. I especially love when functionally elegant things are used to create or service something of quality. Without machines like the Suburban, or half-rotted pickups, or windowless cranes, boatyards would grind to a halt. Have you noticed how big and expensive boats are these days? A percentage of the vehicles tending to this flock fall into the “functionally elegant” category, and seeing them always puts a smile on my face.

Of course, the functionally elegant moniker doesn’t always apply to just vehicles. Recently we got the news that 93-year-old Donald Street, the legendary mapper and route planner of the Eastern Caribbean, made his final passage. The boat from which he did all that was an engineless, 46-foot yawl built in 1905 named Iolaire. Don lived aboard Iolaire for many of the 53 years that he owned her, and produced nine books, roughly 200 magazine articles, and six seminal cruising guides while doing so. Iolaire was gorgeous from a distance, but even in the 1960s, when Don was still pondering his first cruising guide, she was quite old. Up close, I’m told, she looked more like an antique and less like a pedigreed racing yacht from the turn of the century.

In 1972 Don jettisoned the boat’s engine and replaced it with a chart table. She remained that way until Don sold her in 2009, when he was 78. Data from the charts Don created while chartering and cruising aboard Iolaire is still being used today, in modern navigation software, and updated versions of his guidebooks are still relevant. An unlikely machine from which to produce material with such quality and longevity? Not if it was the 18th century. But in modern times? Yes, for sure.

As a postscript to all this, Iolaire, a functionally elegant machine if there ever was one, was lost on July 26, 2019, nearly 10 years after Don sold her, after an unexpected jibe in heavy weather on the northeast coast of Ibiza, in Spain’s Balearic islands. What a fitting way for her 114-year career to end – doing the thing she was designed for. We should all be so lucky.

In honor of Don’s life and his remarkable career aboard Iolaire, I’ve dusted off an essay that I’ve had in-house here at Points East for a while. It’s always seemed like a bit of stretch content-wise for this New England regional publication, given its connection to the Caribbean, but now that Don is gone I think it would be a crime if I didn’t publish it. Ironically, it’s about an offshore delivery he did in the 1960s during which the “New York Times” reported that Don and his crew had all perished in a storm. Called “Saved by a half-gallon coffee pot,” and located on page 10 of this issue, it recounts how a simple galley item helped Don and his crew survive a deadly storm. Don did live to prove the naysayers wrong, of course. And it’s a great story.

Sometimes it seems like the Don Streets of the world will live forever. They don’t, of course. If we’re lucky enough, though, we know someone like this, and they’ve left behind a few great stories, or maybe even a machine that was capable of more than seemed outwardly possible. In his time on this planet Don managed to tick both boxes. To me, anyway, this was a life well-lived.

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