Peter Bevis: A Man And A Mission -- `The Kalakala . . . Has Magical Qualities'

There were the Coast Guard inspectors, the insurance underwriters, the city bureaucrats and the naysayers of every stripe, all the winged monkeys who would have kept most folks from ever reaching Oz, or even setting out on the journey in the first place.

Then there is Peter Bevis (pronounced BEE-vis), the Seattle sculptor who defied every odd to bring the historic ferry Kalakala back home to Elliott Bay last month.

Far from a fantasy detour, it was just another stop for Bevis, 45. He has spent his life making and meddling with art, trying to jar people into a sense of community.

As a young man of privilege, he chucked his first job out of college because he didn't like the predatory corporate culture of the stock market, and he fled upscale Westchester County, N.Y., because he didn't like loafers, the tassled kind.

As a sculptor of considerable talent, he cast road kill in bronze, and he put his singular intensity to work hauling a dead ferry back from Alaska.

Derided by many as The Silver Slug, the Kalakala to Bevis is a treasured public sculpture. Like his road-kill bronzes, he hopes it makes people think - about the kind of place Seattle was, and is becoming, and how to care more for each other in a world of traffic and hurry.

"It was not the Kalakala herself, although she has magical qualities," Bevis says. "The Kalakala is a way to build and bind us as a community in ever-growing Seattle."

Artistic, idealistic zeal. But then, if Bevis were the type to color inside the lines, he never would have gotten into this in the first place.

Bevis' mad crusade to rescue the ferry from its muddy grave on a beach in Kodiak, Alaska, should have failed - or never begun - for scores of good reasons.

Just last June, as the tide rose to float the Kalakala free, Bevis still had no title to the boat, no insurance, no permission from the Coast Guard to move the ship, no money to pay his work crew.

Then the phone rang.

A Seattle insurance underwriter spoke to him with crisp, understated urgency: "Well, Peter, these things have to be planned."

What could have been Bevis' darkest moment became his most defiant.

He dashed to the hardware store, bought every black eye patch he could find and outfitted his crew. They would be pirates if need be, but that boat was going home.

For Bevis, a pirate at heart, the rescue and return of the Kalakala was never about planning, paperwork, budgets or business plans. He had wasted seven years of false starts appeasing others with such tedium and getting nowhere in his quest to save the rusted relic. Then finally, in 1995, he moved to Kodiak with a few like-minded souls in tow.

They worked on the Kalakala in bad weather of Alaskan dimensions, on their knees in rusty puddles, raising a din of jackhammers and sledgehammers and grinders on the steel hull.

Bevis loved the haze of blue welding smoke, shot through with sparks like small comets, and wearing the uniform of Alaska: work boots, greasy and rust-stained canvas Carhartts work clothes, and sweat shirts chocolate with filth.

In his spare time, he and his spaniel, Lucy, would prowl the Kodiak junkyard for parts. They'd head off in his rattletrap van, smoke boiling up around the gearbox and windows stuck shut. A racing-car fan, Bevis would pump the prayer-and-a-promise brakes, grinding through hairpin turns with delight.

Water became his enemy and his hope. Rain sheeted in through holes rusted in the ferry's roof and floor; it trickled into the engine room, forming foul, burbling pools in the bilge. Through the rain, Bevis watched the tides that could lift the Kalakala from the muck and carry her home.

Though the vision was vintage Bevis, the labor was shared. Friends, relatives and hired hands gave money, sweat and tolerance to Bevis - no small task.

Inspiring, irritating

Like anyone who harbors incandescent confidence in the face of every good reason not to, Bevis can be unflappable and unbearable, inspiring and irritating. Over the years, he has burned through a string of disgruntled girlfriends, spouses, administrators and volunteers.

He once exploded firecrackers near a friend's ear. He tipped a girlfriend over in a portable toilet after a drunken party; the fall cut her face badly enough to require plastic surgery. King County court files are dotted with Bevis' name: a restraining order obtained against him in 1997 by the same scarred girlfriend, and a nasty divorce filing from his second marriage.

His boldness can seem reckless, but it gets the job done. He brought the Kalakala home $80,000 in debt but without serious injury or lawsuit. And his can-do passion has been shored by an obsessive work ethic, anchored one autumn afternoon years ago when Bevis was a 10th-grader. He and four schoolmates were ordered to remove a thick blanket of leaves covering a graveyard.

"We were leaning on rakes, saying, `This is so much work, we'll never get it done,' " Bevis remembers.

They wailed at their teacher for relief and, instead, got this life lesson:

Following the teacher's lead, the kids raked one small patch of the graveyard. Then they raked another small patch. One patch at a time, until it was done. The teacher nodded, "Gentlemen, that's how you do the impossible - a piece at a time."

It's how Bevis saved the Kalakala.

"You do the obvious," he says. "You empty the garbage, you get organized, you start with the most unimportant thing. You take two buckets of rust, and you carry them out - after all, you're going for a dog walk anyway. You break the impossible into possible chunks."

Twice divorced with no children, Bevis has nurtured enduring connections with his spaniel, more than 100 trees he has planted along the Lake Washington Ship Canal since 1990, and the Kalakala.

"Trees respond to me real well," Bevis sighs. "And I seem to have a pretty successful relationship with a rusty old boat."

He is bearded, balding, bespectacled and round-bellied. He manages an aristocratic bearing even when checking the oil in a backhoe, using a twig for a dipstick.

He has intelligent, alert eyes and a warm laugh, and he can be witty and philosophical by turns.

He works at a makeshift desk in a walk-in cooler aboard the Kalakala. He looks happiest in filthy work clothes.

And when vision-questing takes its toll, he escapes to a cabin near Lake Chelan, on 185 acres inherited from his grandparents.

Born to wealth

Bevis was born to wealth. It took several pages of his parents' divorce filing in 1984 to divvy up the family property, valued then at millions of dollars. He is sensitive, even defensive, about his family's money, which is held in a trust he does not have access to.

"We were not privy to how that worked. I mowed yards, painted houses; I always worked," he says. "The things I've done to pull this (the Kalakala) off are beyond what an accountant would put on the bottom line. My personal skills and resources are sound. That's what backed this, not the family's stuff."

But his mother, Mary Pat Bevis, has helped. She provided double cash equity to secure a $350,000 letter of credit for work on the Kalakala last February. But his mother made it clear that her son would have to make the Kalakala sink or swim on his own.

"I have felt Peter-the-dreamer must face the reality that not everyone in the world gives a rat's ass if that boat is mired in the mud or not," she said in a telephone interview from her home in New York.

Raised in Peshastin, Chelan County, Bevis always had what his mother calls "an extravagant imagination."

"I don't know what he is - Peter Pan?" she muses. "I don't understand him at all. But I honor him."

The four Bevis children weren't pressured to pursue a particular career. One son became a commercial fisherman; another studied architecture. The daughter was drawn to the theater, and Peter Bevis has worked as everything from a commercial contractor to a deckhand on his brother's fishing boat.

Sculpting is his first love. He still does custom castings at his foundry in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood. But for years, the Kalakala has consumed him, as have all his grand and often misunderstood projects. He has flown to the coast of Ireland to cast seabirds, killed in an oil spill, in bronze; he helped bring a giant sculpture of Lenin to the heart of Fremont; he traveled to icy Alaska to cast moose killed by the railroad.

"I wish he'd have smaller dreams," Mary Pat Bevis says. "`But he wouldn't be Peter if he were practical and wearing wingtip shoes."

One bucket at a time

Ten years ago, when Bevis got his first good look at the Kalakala, the 1935 ferry was pocked with rust. Moss and ferns sprouted from the muddy deck. The interior had been cannibalized for a cannery.

But the art-deco main staircase and wrought-iron railing stood proud. The sweeping curves and generous spaces of the ship still held delight.

Over the next 10 years, Bevis and a troupe of artists, artisans and hangers-on emptied the Kalakala of nearly three decades of junk, one bullheaded bucket at a time. It was that graveyard leaf pile of his high-school years, cranked up by the Alaska factor.

Where else could a guy hire a crew to work on a boat he didn't own, or have permission to work on, with workers he didn't have the money to pay?

The flamboyance added to the project's pirate allure, attracting volunteers from Seattle. Work-hungry local crews signed on, happy to make do with improvised methods and materials that Bevis affectionately dubbed "Alaska-standard or better." By night, some would marinade themselves in martinis in the local bars; by day, they would slam on the steel of the Kalakala with 4-pound hammers.

Some of the locals rooted for this crusade; others helped by looking the other way. The city manager decided that was wise civic policy: He just wanted the carcass of the Kalakala the heck out of Kodiak.

A protective bubble of magic seemed to envelop the Kalakala. Despite the high-risk, low-tech rehab effort, no one was ever seriously hurt. Despite hilarious financing and sketchy planning, things got done.

Bevis reveled in it, but he lost sleep and gained weight. Asked what he wants to do now that he and his dearest are safely home, he answers: "Take a nap."

Designing his life

Bevis was 14 when his family moved from Washington state to New York, where his father took a job as an executive with a paper-products company. Bevis graduated from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where he studied fine arts.

He went to Chicago, working his way up through the markets, but soon became disillusioned by the corporate world. He returned to Bucknell, married his girlfriend and took a job as a warehouse manager; the fun part was driving the forklift.

He was doing the 40-hour-a-week, pay-the-mortgage bit, complete with health benefits, and says he was dying a bit every day.

"It just doesn't go anywhere, it doesn't do anything," he says. "If you worked at Boeing from 9 to 5, how would you measure your years - `Oh, that was the year we went to the Grand Canyon'?"

So he moved to Seattle and picked up construction jobs. And he started work on his own foundry, to continue the bronze casting he had learned at Bucknell.

"I worked hard to design my life . . . so my artwork would not be dependent on the marketplace, so I could make the sculptures that needed to be made," he says. "Art has become a commodity, something bought and sold. It should be something that holds you in aesthetic arrest and takes you somewhere you haven't been."

He raced cars for fun, liking the fact that if he didn't pay attention, he could get hurt.

"I may not live long, but I live a lot," he says.

Sculpting appealed to his impatience. He likes steel and sparks, welding and noise. Three-dimensional progress. He calls it "working direct."

His signature sculptures are typically visionary and weird: Bevis casts road-killed dogs, coyotes, cats and more in bronze.

Friends knew to call with road-kill sightings. Bevis would speed to the scene, setting out orange road-construction signs that blared: "ROAD KILL DEAD AHEAD. HAVE A NICE DAY." He wore a blaze-orange vest and posted traffic cones so no drivers would challenge him.

"Orange is the color of authority," he says.

Bevis has cast otters killed in the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 and seabirds suffocated in an oil spill in Neah Bay. The faces of the otters, down to their whiskers and teeth, are expertly, sensitively rendered in metal. The twisted piles of seabirds could have come off the beach an hour ago.

These pieces are not meant to be pretty, but they do what Bevis wants: They make people think, and they raise awareness of the cost of our love affair with the automobile. Dead animals, fouled beaches.

Bevis' work is on display at the Fremont Fine Arts Foundry, 154 N. 35th St., a funky chunk of concrete that is another of Bevis' odd triumphs, built without much expert help, piece by stubborn piece. It includes a gallery, live-in artists' studios, a working foundry and office space for the Kalakala Foundation. The front hedge is trimmed in the shape of the Kalakala; the back storage yard boasts a cement mixer, a car shot full of bullet holes and a half-dead forklift.

Meltdowns, clashes, chaos

Bevis' freestyle methods are both blessing and curse, attracting followers who often burn out. He carried the passion of a bronze sculptor to the running of a nonprofit foundation, and it wasn't always a good fit.

Many who volunteered with the Kalakala Foundation have since quit, disillusioned. At first, they loved the boat, the sense of adventure and the work. Before long, most just loved the boat.

"It was the ethic of the foundry," says Tom Putnam of Seattle, who made a film about the project in 1995 and served on its board of directors. "You want something done, you give it a kick or turn a firehose on it.

"It was fun, no doubt about it. But there were always meltdowns on the board, personality clashes, chaos. Peter, more than anyone I know, takes it right up to the edge without going over - at least so far."

The foundation, formed in 1991, bumped along, regularly shedding and rebuilding its board of directors and taking until this year to finally file all the required paperwork with the Secretary of State's Office.

Gerry Peret, a former treasurer, said she enjoyed Bevis' charisma and imagination but found artistic license too thin a thread to tow the Kalakala home. "I am one its strongest supporters, but I just couldn't be involved anymore," she says.

Within days of the Kalakala's successful homecoming early last month, the foundation sacked another executive director and, as usual, is scrounging for cash.

The road ahead holds costly questions: Who will provide permanent moorage; how will it be restored - and to what use; where will the money come from? Estimates put basic restoration of the rusty boat well over $200,000.

That is just the type of challenge likely to wake Peter Bevis from his threatened nap.

He sleeps on the Kalakala these days, in a walk-in cooler on the car deck, warmed by a woodstove made from an old depth charge. The ship is moored at Pier 66 in Elliott Bay, with Lucy, his spaniel, standing watch.

Bevis never doubted he would get the Kalakala home.

"You have to listen to yourself, listen to what's important to you, then act on it," he says. "Have the confidence in yourself that you are not crazy, and that what you do is worthwhile."

But rescuing a clunky slice of art-deco coastal history has always been, for him, about more than salvaging an old boat.

Over the decade of his odd and stubborn quest, the silver ferry built a sense of community goodwill bigger than any one person's role in its return.

"The Kalakala has her own magic," he says. "I feel fortunate to have participated in it."

Lynda V. Mapes' phone message number is 206-464-2736. Her e-mail is lmapes@seattletimes.com