SHORELINES

promise it would be restored. But the museum went belly-up and the collection – and Ambrose's family boat — disappeared. "To this day I don't know what happened to it," he says. Ambrose wants to make sure it doesn't happen to others. Although he builds canoes from scratch, much of his work these days is restoring ones that have spent decades in boathouses or garages. He understands when owners tell him the boat has been in the family for generations. And he carefully pieces them back together. Since he does this work part-time and works on several boats at once, the process may take more than a year. The payoff comes when it's time to give the boat back. "There's nothing like handing a restored canoe back to a family and the kids' eyes light up, knowing it was Dad's or Granddad's, and now it's our turn to put it through its paces," Ambrose says. Alabama doesn't have the canoe heritage of New England, where boat builders in the 19th century first developed ways to replicate the birch-bark canoes that Native Americans had long used. Instead of starting with sheets of bark and building a frame inside it like the 6 Indians had, the craftsmen constructed a wooden canoe frame over a form, and then covered it with canvas. A few builders and companies like Old Town in Maine continued making boats this way into the 1960s. But then technology took over. "When fiberglass and aluminum showed up it pretty much killed the mass demand for wooden canoes," Ambrose says. His customers include collectors and people who only recently have discovered the beauty of the boats. Lex Brown, of Heflin, learned about them when he was working with a canoe livery business on the Tallapoosa River. He was astonished to find a builder just an hour away on Lake Martin. "Steve is an incredible talent. I know several folks that work on old canoes across the country, and he is one of the best," says Brown, who has had Ambrose restore canoes for him. "I'm a little hesitant to put them in the water; they're that perfect." It's all the more astonishing when you see what Ambrose starts with. Quite often, the canoes have been ignored for decades and are literally falling apart. Sometimes a collector gets lucky, though. Ambrose just received a boat from Houston that had been sitting in a front yard. When a customer of Ambrose's asked if it was for sale, the owner gave it to him. After a few thousand dollars and months of work, it will look better than new. "I know several folks that work on old canoes across the country, and he is one of the best." Although his skills are widely praised, Ambrose didn't start working on canoes until a decade ago. His mother gave him a book on wooden canoes for Christmas, and he was hooked. Ambrose had never built a boat, but he knew woodworking. As a child growing up in Cincinnati, he made furniture with his father, who was an engineer. It certainly helped that Ambrose was comfortable with tools and wood, but the hardest part was having to forget much of what he had learned about furniture making. "After you have been taught to make everything straight, plumb and square, it's hard to work with a boat that's all curves." Ambrose has brought his own style to this rich tradition. He works in a Lake Martin

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