Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living

by Nick Offerman

  I had a job at the time hanging lights for Disney Imagineering. I was driving the forty minutes up Highway 5 to Valencia one morning when it hit me—I remember exactly where I was—that I was going to marry Megan. And I have to say, I was quite pissed off because I hadn’t been consulted. Life just dropped it in my lap—“You’re getting married.” She’s eleven years older than me, so it wasn’t the most likely pairing for that reason and more. Didn’t matter. I was hers. I thought, “Okay, I’m done.” I was incredibly happy at this realization, but I was a little angry, as a man, that I hadn’t been given the opportunity to weigh the options. I guess I got over it, but not for a solid thirty seconds or so.

  Looking back on that period, I have to laud Megan and Courtenay for their ability to see any goodness in Pat and me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of both myself and Pat, but in all fairness to us, we were looking like a pretty dubious wager at that point, when our noble wives had the guts to hold their horses, reach down from their regal coaches into the muddy road, haul us to our feet, clean us off, and make men of us. As I’d suspected it would, doing that play with Megan in 2000 really did save my life, in so many more ways than I ever could have fathomed.

  I guess the moral of the story would have to be: Read The Secret!

  Measure Twice, Cut Once

  When I encourage people to pick up a chisel and begin woodworking, I have to remember that I had a pretty solid twelve or so years of tool training before I ever sharpened a chisel myself. But I don’t think that should be daunting to anyone who is brand-new to the practice. My education was probably accelerated by my existing shop skills, but basic woodworking comes pretty easily whether or not you’ve been running a table saw for years.

  I had spent some time framing houses before learning to build scenery and props and then becoming a full-time scenic carpenter in Chicago. I have always loved building scenery. It holds a magical quality for me, the fabrication of some illusion upon which to place the action of a play or musical to best facilitate the imagination of the audience. Compared to, say, cladding the rafters of a roof in sheets of plywood, building scenic elements can be a lot more fun, containing a playful or whimsical quality that regular construction lacks. Building houses, both in the framing and the finish work, not to mention the cabinetry, is also mightily satisfying, in that one is creating a solidly comfortable dwelling in which people can make their lives, but, having become soundly ensnared in theater’s web, I thrived best spending my formative years in the scene shop. That is, until I moved to LA.

  Lacking the bountiful theater community of Chicago, Los Angeles did not provide me the opportunity to make much of a living building scenery. Sure, there are a multitude of scenery shops for television and film, but the best ones are all run by a union to which I did not claim membership, and I couldn’t find a position at the nonunion shops I investigated. My problem was that I was too honest with them. I told them up front that I was an actor, and so I would need to be able to go to auditions and then likely miss work if and when I booked a job. No shop foreman wants to begin a relationship like that, nor should they. My strategy should have entailed a little more smoke screen, as I could have gotten a job, then asked about auditions later, once they were crazy about me. I guess I knew better than to depend upon my ability to charm a bunch of carpenters.

  Whatever the case, I had to revert to basic construction carpentry, picking up work wherever I could. I built some mediocre editing-suite tables and shelf units for a friend from plywood and construction lumber. I did some custom built-in work at a sports bar, a couple of closet built-ins for another pal, etc. Then a plum assignment came my way. Kara, an old Defiant pal, was living in a Hollywood Hills apartment building. The landlord, Chuck, wanted a really nice deck built on the hillside below the building. I drew up some ideas and got him to green-light one of them that had a Frank Lloyd Wright feeling to the railing details. I enlisted another old Defiant pal, Marty McClendon, who had designed a lot of our more incredible sets in Chicago, to help me out, as we had always had a great time building together.

  We first dug six large holes and poured cylindrical concrete piers deep in the ground, upon which to anchor our structure. Next we built the legs, beams, joists, and cross-bracing of Douglas fir, treated for termite resistance, finally cladding the actual deck in redwood, which is naturally impervious to rot and the elements. It felt fantastic to be outside working, earning some recompense with our brains and muscles, instead of sitting around wondering when our agents were going to call with an audition. The railings were last, and they were comprised of six panel sections with an interior geometric pattern of rectangles reminiscent of a Wright stained-glass window. I designed these patterns by simply messing around with different combinations drawn to scale with a ruler on some graph paper until I found the iteration that was most pleasing to mine eye.

  This was a big moment for me, looking back, as it was the first time that I was filling the role of designer. I had always enjoyed working alongside great designers in the theater, taking their plans and engineering the best method by which to accomplish their desired results, but now I was wielding the pencil! Once I had perfected my railing design, I then had to deduce the best way to build it, which led Marty and me to our first use of a common woodworking joint known as the shiplap joint. We cut them primarily on the table saw, a tool we had known and loved for many years but had never utilized for cutting joinery. This was a major development that was soon to provide further inspiration.

  Soon after I had begun courting Megan, a well-heeled acquaintance of hers wanted a really nifty folly built on his property. His exceptionally nice, new house in the hills had an extra acre of what was basically park land tacked onto the backyard. Out in this “park” he wanted a cabin where he could go and have a glass of wine with his guests before dinner. Marty and I jumped and took on this project as well, hiring a couple more helpers, and once again we were thrilled to be working on such a substantial structure. We’d begin each day’s work at seven A.M., and drinking our coffee as the morning sun burned off the mist in the trees made us feel like we could have been in the middle of nowhere instead of smack-dab in the center of Los Angeles, creating such a satisfying sense of escape from the shitty, superficial grind of “the business.” Our design was built around a post-and-beam structure, with some of our first attempts at beefy joinery connecting the six-by-six-inch posts. With a hexagonal deck off the front corner, there was plenty of floor space to clad with reclaimed Douglas fir two-by-fours that we had salvaged from a one-hundred-year-old house in Santa Monica, igniting our desire to reuse as much of the valuable timber that goes to waste every day as we could. If we as a society properly reclaimed all of the construction lumber heading to the landfill and the bonfire every day, we wouldn’t need to cut down another tree for twenty years, if ever.

  After we finished that cabin, another friend wanted a yoga studio built in her yard in west LA. By this point, I’d discovered, mainly in Pasadena, the architecture of Greene and Greene, who were contemporaries of Frank Lloyd Wright in the early twentieth century, and I became completely besotted with their style, which adds some sexy Asian curves to the Craftsman or Mission aesthetic. My design for the “Yoga Hutch” emulated their designs, as near as I could afford, anyway, and Marty and I were really enjoying our education as we continued to challenge each other to execute more complex designs and joinery.

  One day, as I was chopping out a humongous mortise with a framing chisel, I realized that this huge mortise-and-tenon joint that I was creating to join the posts and beams together was also one of the bedrock joints used in antique furniture. I thought, “Hey, if we can build this structure, then surely we can build a table, which is just a smaller-scale version of a post-and-beam cabin.” Another harbinger of the impending change in my carpentry style was instigated by a film job that I got during the construction of the Yoga Hutch. I had to leave my job site for a few months while I work
ed on the film, which was nothing short of an asshole move. I left this mostly finished building under construction in the backyard of these nice people while I traipsed around shooting a film. Not the coolest move. I promised myself from there on out, I would only build pieces in a workshop, where I could give a client a safe “lead time,” so that I could complete their commissions when I was able to, without leaving a mess lying around their property.

  I started driving Megan crazy because everywhere we went I would be on the floor, underneath the old tables, looking at the joinery. I was obsessed with the tricks employed by furniture makers over the years to ensure a structure’s solidity. A contractor that I knew saw what was happening and recognized my symptoms. He gave me a few issues of Fine Woodworking magazine and said, “If you want to get into this stuff, this is all you need,” and sure enough I got a subscription and was just swept away down a river of knowledge upon which I am still paddling madly. I had guzzled all of the Kool-Aid, reading voraciously of woodworking, and then beyond to boatbuilding.

  If one is bewitched by woodworking (as I am) and one begins a program of study (as I have), then one must first assay the classic joinery—the mortise-and-tenon, the dovetail, the sliding dovetail, the mitre joint, the box joint, the finger joint. Eventually everything breaks down into simple techniques. The entire discipline of working with wood really only comes down to a handful of tools and methods with which you can do damn near anything with wood in three-dimensional space, to the extent of the limitations of your material. Once you master those simple tools and techniques, you can then craft toward whatever item your predilections steer you to. You might want to build bread boxes or bicycles or chess pieces or sailboats, and you can!

  I was immediately and powerfully drawn to the work of George Nakashima, a Japanese American woodworker who popularized his table style consisting of a single slab of a walnut tree with the natural edges retained, resting upon different sculptural varieties of a trestle base. These tables look equally at home in an ancient temple or a modern-architectural house, because the slab of wood itself is the work of art. My first attempt was an homage to his Frenchman’s Cove table, which his daughter, Mira, has been producing since she took over the Nakashima operation after her dad passed away. She maintains a very charismatic company in Pennsylvania, if you want to see some superb American work.

  The more I learn about woodworking, the more I am convinced that I don’t ever want to decorate my pieces with a lot of man-made gingerbread. Many virtuoso craftspersons work in many styles, and they do some mind-blowing things with solid wood, in the Federal style, Art Nouveau, Victorian, and others. Not so much for me. I think it’s all about creating a piece of furniture that allows the wood itself to draw the focus. What Ma Nature has wrought in the grain and color and figure of a given piece of tree is generally much more magical to me than any dentil edge I might adhere to it. Finally finishing the wood, especially with a hand-rubbed oil finish, after careful scraping and sanding, simply reveals the story that particular tree has been getting ready to tell us for decades or sometimes centuries. Usually the story is full of twists and surprises and breathtaking beauty, but hopefully the story does not include a chapter about a lag bolt that someone screwed into the tree eighty years ago, only to be rediscovered by your expensive table-saw blade.

  I knew I needed a shop space but could not find anything remotely appropriate and/or affordable, until one day I was helping my friend Daniel Wheeler, a high-end sculptor and maker of things, to cast Pat Roberts’s supine form in plaster so that Daniel could sculpt a Formica-faceted mountain range in the rough shape of Pat’s carcass (an amazing piece of loving work—the sculpture, not Pat’s bod, although that’s not too shabby either). My motorcycle needed a jump, so I went to the neighboring warehouse spaces looking for some jumper cables (I’ve never driven without cables since—and neither should you), and I found them at a large photography studio. The forty-by-eighty-foot white room was very barren, and the photographer told me he knew right where the jumper cables were because he was moving!

  “Oh, really?” I replied, and immediately took down the landlord’s information.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I used to do a killer business shooting the cover photos for VHS porn movies.”

  “You don’t say?” I replied, looking at the expanse in a new light indeed. Were my boots lightly sticking to the concrete floor?

  “Oh, yeah, the money was great,” he said, “because the photo on the box is what gets your rental at the video store. Think about it. But the video store is dying. I can’t afford to stay.” He then toured me around the huge room, upon the walls of which were still poster-size versions of some of the photos he had accomplished there in this empty, dusty warehouse. There was a sandy beach scene, complete with water, and a snowy ski-bunny hillside, with pine trees and a cabin, and on and on, every photo with a scantily clad sexpot in a coy pose of one sort or another.

  “Well, I’m sure things will work out,” I said, licking my chops—no, not at the Chesty Morgans, but at the potential shop space!

  I got the place and, with Marty’s help, turned it into a woodworker’s dream shop, where I still ply my troth to this day. Mr. McClendon and I both owe an undeniable debt of gratitude to Fine Woodworking magazine for the expert tutelage it has given us over the years. We have read that magazine cover to cover every month, completely infatuated even with the classified ads in back. I could tell you where to get tiger maple in Virginia or what gentleman in Ohio will tune up your antique molding planes for you. I’m the same way with WoodenBoat magazine, which is about as delicious as a periodical can get.

  When Marty and his winning bride, Jennifer, were blessed with a bun in the oven, I was able to realize a dream that had been percolating for a while thanks to the WoodenBoat classifieds. A fellow named Warren Jordan had plans available to purchase for the “Baby Tender,” which is a lapstrake-planked rowboat built to the scale of a cradle. It even hangs on custom davits! You can bet your sweet caboose I built that little boat for Marty and Jen with a hull of Alaskan yellow cedar and black walnut trim. Witnessing the hull of a boat take shape upon your bench is like spinning a Corvette from wool. Thar be witchcraft afoot in the boatshop, sure, now!

  We continued to leapfrog off of each other, attempting projects ever increasing in difficulty. Ours was a beautiful partnership, fueled by the sounds of Kool and the Gang, the Gap Band, Parliament, and Funkadelic. Sadly for me, Marty was called back to Wisconsin to merely run an entire college theater department, the Lord’s work, but we both still love to send each other pictures of our most recent sweet joinery. I could never have learned all that I have so far without his collaboration. In the last year, our circle of life has gone full-on “Hakuna Matata,” as we have both realized the crazy sex dream of writing articles for Fine Woodworking! Who shot who in the what, now?! Check out FW number 231 to see McClendon’s Greene and Greene–style bed in American cherry, but don’t look at it unless you’re prepared to BLOW YOUR LOAD.

  Hooked on boats but good, I then had the chance to build my first canoe, Huckleberry, and shoot a how-to video of the process for Ted Moores and Joan Barrett of Bear Mountain Boats in Peterborough, Ontario, the premier company for all of your canoe-building needs. Ted literally wrote the book (Canoecraft) on building cedar-strip canoes and kayaks, a manual from which I learned to find my ass with both hands and many more techniques even more efficacious. Jimmy Diresta shot the video and earned himself my second canoe, Lucky Boy, as part of his recompense. These canoes are designed by Ted and Steve Killing, and I will reiterate that when the hull begins to reveal its voluptuous curves to the builder, boners there be, and that goes for the ladies as well. Experiencing a problem with depression? Ennui got you down? Build a goddamn canoe, and trust me, you will be happy as a clam at high tide. Most of the work is done with hand tools, which means you get to crank your tunes for hours of pleasure. Check out any Tom Waits or Petra Haden Sing
s: The Who Sell Out. Iron and Wine is amazing on the spokeshave. I also played a lot of Supreme Music Program, a band fronted by Megan Mullally, whose three albums are like fully formed novels. Lady got pipes, y’all.

  Even the paddle of the canoe can prove to be an immensely satisfying undertaking and a place I often suggest that beginners choose as their starting point. It’s great training in the block plane and the spokeshave, and there is nothing so gratifying as crafting a handled tool from wood. To date I have carved a spoon and fork, several canoe paddles, a life-size replica mahogany axe, and a baseball bat. The moment of enchantment occurs when the item is nearing completion and you are sanding the shaft or handle. You can begin to feel the work that this tool will perform, whether it be rapping out a triple or paddling against a brisk current. I can tell you from many hours of experience that propelling a wooden canoe that you have built with a paddle also made by your hand carries so much more than a sense of pride. One begins to tap into the primal ingenuity that strings us together with countless generations of our clever forebears who collectively did all of the long division for us when it came to sailing and aerodynamics and, well, every sort of simple machine, really.

  When I paddle across the big water, I feel a direct kinship with my ancestors, in that we have both cheated the river. With the chair and the table, we outsmart gravity. With the boat, we outsmart water and wind and distance. Lest we get too cocky, though, as soon as we (I) start to think this way, Ma Nature slaps us (me) with a squall and dumps my canoe over a submerged tree trunk, reminding me that behind that spokeshave there still stands a jackass.