To understand that place-in-place you have to listen to them talk about their craft, each in his own way stating an underlying force that has brought them quite successfully into a place of their own – by different routes; Pope into the 21st century with an explosion of modern materials, Gambell bringing time-gone-by into a balance with today’s requirements-and-reminiscence. The place where they meet is a crossroads of time but the core is the end product they create, the wings of a water-borne sailing craft. That’s where the roads converge.

Doug Pope came from the Rochester area of upstate New York, a place where boats are sailed on lakes – his, a Lightning class, very popular and much raced. Offered a second part-time job with a local sailmaker, he (who had come to have a feeling for what worked and what didn’t in sails) took it. Later, in a strange sort of enchantment, it took him. After coming to Maine, he worked alone as a branch of the Haarstick sailmaking firm, their man-in-Maine, so to speak. Pope learned his craft in finer detail as the materials became more and more modern and complex, coped in confidence and then enthusiasm with CAD (the computer generated engineering program which enables designers to see in three dimensions). He moved from a second floor loft (once an auditorium) to a building just off the Rockland waterfront, to his present wide-open space on Park Street, coping with materials that often look as if they were made by chemists rather than weavers.

Grant Gambell’s path couldn’t be more different, or have lead more inexorably to the historic (and historically small) loft where he makes sails for windjammers (and cruising sailors) surrounded by remembrances of days past. Gambell, who learned about sails and sail making from the all-but-legendary Nat Wilson as a history interpreter at Mystic Seaport – and the realities as a deck hand on summer schooners, came to Maine to sail, again as a "mere" deckhand, in the windjammer fleet. Then A.P. Lord, a sail maker from a long tradition of sail makers, enters the story. Gambell rented (then bought) the loft where Lord made sails for Camden’s schooners for over 75 years. He (Gambell, not Lord, of course) is there today, in an only slightly-enlarged garage loft on Limerock Street, in a neighborhood that has probably not changed much since Amos Lord’s day, living in the house where Lord once lived, and carrying on the tradition in that very loft with materials which often look eerily the same (although they have modern components), a bench which is the real thing, and a modern tool or two, but the same atmosphere.

With both Pope and Gambell, in the beginning the whole enterprise was a (you should pardon the pun) gamble, since banks are notoriously loathe to loan money to entrepreneurial enterprises. A strong sense that this is the path to follow, plus firm backing from your family and that breathless feeling that you have just jumped into deep water and you’d better swim vigorously are mentioned – and that you’d better not spend money before you have it. Pope for example, for all the high-tech material he uses in sailmaking, still cuts that material with scissors rather than buying the computer-driven cutting arm he dreams of…yet. "Keep the scissors sharp," he says. And that simple sentence stands for all the things he doesn’t say.

Entrepreneurship is a solitary street. Pope has two assistants now but it took him a long while of building the business to be sure there was enough work to justify their presence to himself. His business has grown slowly but surely so that it is now based on making new sails – over 200 a year – and the storing/winterizing/hardware, etc. is more of an adjunct part of the business. Gambell, oddly enough, even though he has a partner (the firm is Gambell & Hunter), is solitary – as is Hunter who lives and has his loft in Appleton on his farm. The two are on the phone daily and the business is a mutual one, but Gambell, in his historic loft, is the more typical entrepreneur. His part-time helper, comes in with, as he puts it, "the spring flood tide when every windjammer and every cruising skipper suddenly decides he has to have something done that he forgot to explain and now he wants it tomorrow." It’s at this time that Diane Flemming (who runs her own business making tapestry bags) comes in and cheerfully helps do whatever needs to be done. In a strange way, however, the ghost of A.P. Lord is a presence in that loft – although Gambell uses the computer driven CAD system as a starting point for most of his cruise boat customers’ sails, A.P. Lord’s own tiny notebooks with pencil drawings and dimension notations sit on a shelf above his old bench. And many times, when a visitor/customer comes up the steep stairs into the loft, Gambell is sitting at that bench, making notes of his own, which he keeps on 3x5 cards in a small file box.

All this having been said, these two very different people can work well together – and have on several projects. They both like and respect each other, recognizing the worth of their mutual aims and of the other’s outlook. After all, they speak the same language; it’s just (to continue the metaphor a bit) a difference in dialect. Both have thought through their placements as entrepreneurs on what is, in this day and time, not an easy road, and found there is a place for both.

Sailing – small boats or large, performance or nostalgic – is one of the few aesthetic pleasures still around in a world grown shrill and sudden. It is, as a lifelong devotee once put it, a dream, a pursuit, an active meditation. These two, each in his own way, each from his life-held vision, work to make that dream into reality.

Robert Frost’s "road less traveled" therefore seems, in this case at least, to fork itself again. That modern philosopher Yogi Berra has a saying that also applies: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." These two have, and it indeed has made all the difference.