The Year of the Boat

by Lawrence W. Cheek

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1 - DEEP BEAUTY

  CHAPTER 2 - WHY BUILD A BOAT?

  CHAPTER 3 - LOOKING FOR A PLAN

  CHAPTER 4 - IMPATIENCE

  CHAPTER 5 - IMPERFECTION

  CHAPTER 6 - GLOP

  CHAPTER 7 - GRIT

  CHAPTER 8 - WIND WORK

  CHAPTER 9 - WOOD WORK

  CHAPTER 10 - THE ZEN OF SCREWING UP

  CHAPTER 11 - FAR FROM PERFECT

  CHAPTER 12 - GRETA

  CHAPTER 13 - ALULA

  CHAPTER 14 - QUALITY TIME

  CHAPTER 15 - MIND-BENDER

  CHAPTER 16 - EBB TIDE

  CHAPTER 17 - BIRTH DAY

  CODA - THE TEACHINGS OF A WOODEN SAILBOAT

  GLOSSARY

  REFERENCES AND RESOURCES

  APPRECIATION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  For Patty

  who may have doubted

  but never spoke of it

  CHAPTER 1

  DEEP BEAUTY

  THERE ARE PLACES IN North America where no one thinks about boats. I come from one of them, El Paso, a city stuffed into the acute western wedge of Texas between Mexico and New Mexico. The only local body of water is the Rio Grande, which farmers have sucked down to a miserable mocha dribble by the time it reaches El Paso. A hundred miles upriver are a couple of reservoirs that technically qualify as boating destinations, but to me they’ve always looked as bleak as the windswept Chihuahuan Desert around them. In the seventeen years I lived in El Paso, I never met anyone who owned a boat nor, as far as I knew, dreamed of one.

  A painting of a boat somehow imprinted itself on my childhood memory, however. It hung on a wall of the Club Zaragosa, a restaurant-nightclub just across the Mexican border. My parents frequently went there to eat, drink, and dance—cerveza was ten cents a bottle, and there was a brass orchestra on weekends that to my twelve-year-old ears sounded respectable. The painting depicted a serene lake somewhere in central Mexico. In the background was a volcano, and in the foreground a darkskinned man stood on a small wooden pram, propelling it with a pole. There appeared to be no practical reason for the man to be in the boat—no fishing gear, no passengers, no larger boat he might be approaching as a tender. It appeared that the boatman might simply be wasting time, and I wondered why an artist had chosen to celebrate such a thing.

  Today I’m wondering about the chain of events that has braided my recent adult life with a boat, and whether I may have just wasted a precious year. I’m building a boat—a modest wooden sailing dinghy that fits, barely, in my suburban Seattle garage—and I’m in trouble. I just discovered, thanks to the scrutiny of a boatbuilding friend in another suburb, that four months ago I left out a piece of its structure. A sprinkling of minor mistakes, scattered across the course of a year, appear to have mated and multiplied into swarms. Neighbors continually drop in and practically swoon over the boat’s graceful lines, but all I see are mistakes and misjudgments, some cosmetic, some possibly fatal to its safe functioning. I’m depressed and discouraged. I don’t know whether I’ll have a respectable and usable sailboat when I finish it, or a learning experience that’s too deeply flawed even to give away.

  My work has been incomprehensibly slow, stumbling, often incompetent, plagued by doubt, and at the same time infected by too much pride to ask for help. I started out knowing I was fully unqualified to build a boat, but buoyed by the belief that every first-time boatbuilder is unqualified, by definition. Building a doghouse or a gazebo doesn’t begin to prepare you for the complexities of a boat, nor for the emotional surf you’re headed into.

  Throughout the project, I’ve had a continuing struggle not so much with perfectionism—“perfect” was never my goal—but with finding a level of imperfection that seemed reasonable and comfortable. A boat must be built well enough to shield its occupants from an environment that will quickly kill them if they’re fully exposed to it, must be able to sail efficiently and maneuver reliably from point A to point B, and return a tangible dividend of joy to its owner, balancing the inevitable grief it will also bring. A handmade wooden boat is an organic creation, nearly a living thing in itself, and the beauty designed and built into it has a direct correlation to its lifespan. “A wooden boat must be loved if it’s to survive,” wrote Jenny Bennett, a British editor who commissioned a professionally built daysailer about the size of mine, “and that’s considerably more likely to happen if it’s pretty to look at.”

  Over the last year I’ve done almost nothing but think about boats, building this one and learning to sail on bigger ones and trying to discern whether there is any deeper meaning in the process. I never expected any of this.

  Early in my adult life I settled in Tucson, which would seem to be just as unlikely as my hometown of El Paso as a venue for anyone to entertain boat thoughts. The river that used to trickle through the southern Arizona desert, the Santa Cruz, literally dried up in the 1940s as agriculture and urban growth drained down the water table. The Santa Cruz riverbed today is a dry channel flanked incongruously with mesquite-and-cactus city parks and occasional homeless encampments pitched in the shade of sprawling tamarisk trees. But Arizona, land of audacious schemes, has substantial boating destinations: Lake Roosevelt, created by a dam on the Salt River northeast of Phoenix; and Lakes Havasu, Mohave, Mead, and Powell along the Colorado River. Among the urban legends I heard on arrival in Tucson was that Arizonans owned more boats per capita than residents of any other state. I swallowed it—Arizona seemed so exotic that any cultural perversity might be plausible—but this statistic, at least, turned out to be spurious. One in every thirty-four Arizonans, according to current registration figures, owns a boat. In Minnesota, one in six.

  I came to know a handful of people in Arizona who had boats—wealthy folks who kept sailboats in San Diego or the Sea of Cortez, or working stiffs who would trailer their speedboats to Lake Roosevelt for grim weekends of beer and sunburn. I have one memorable boat story, which involved a friend in medical school at the University of Arizona in the early 1980s.

  In October of 1983 it rained furiously and freakishly for three days in Tucson and even more in the mountains heaped like a collar around the city. The Santa Cruz and its normally dry tributaries, most notably the Rillito, suddenly reawakened as real rivers. The Rillito (ironically “Little River” in Spanish) is an eroded channel up to eight hundred feet wide, and at the peak of this flood, chocolate-brown water boiled through it so savagely that it gobbled acre-sized bites of riverbank, one after another, like a dog devouring meatloaf. I stood among a knot of saucer-eyed spectators on a hilltop and watched as one of the acre-bites collapsed into the Rillito’s maw, the house on it splintering like a popsicle-stick model. At exactly this same hour Michael Collier was in a Saturday morning pediatrics lecture at the medical school, looking out at the rain and daydreaming about the kayak languishing in the shed behind his house. As soon as class ended he phoned friend Curt Green, a fellow kayaker who was typically “up for anything,” and the pair lashed their kayaks to Collier’s ’66 Volkswagen bus and headed for a possible launch spot upstream on the Rillito.

  “When we got there and saw it, our jaws dropped,” Collier recalled later. “It was just awesome. It was running at 20,000 cubic feet per second. We didn’t hesitate for a minute.”

  Collier and his friend launched into what amounted to a five-mile-long brownwater maelstrom and rode it halfway through Tucson. “We were in trains of waves that were higher than the kayak was long—twelve feet,” Collier recalled. “We passed condos that were actively falling in. At one point I pulled into a nest of branches to rest, and shared it
with a rattlesnake.” He insisted it wasn’t all that dangerous. “I’d been kayaking for twelve years at that point, and I had a bombproof roll. I’d do it again today if those skills were intact.”

  I thought then that Collier was certifiably insane, but he graduated from medical school, completed his internship and residency, and is today a respected practicing physician. Conditional insanity, induced by the poorly understood reaction of water, human, and boat, is a more likely diagnosis.

  It is possible that boat mania is somehow genetically encoded in the human brain. Our distant ancestors built boats to extend their foraging range and populate new lands when the natural resources at home grew scarce. Natural selection would therefore seem to favor those with the more adventurous genes. (The earliest evidence for human travel in boats is the settlement of Australia and New Guinea at least 40,000 years ago—around the time that Neanderthals, who apparently built no boats, vanished from the earth.)

  If boats aren’t imprinted in our atavistic makeup, it seems provably certain that the craving to visit or inhabit new environments is. And a boat—a raft made from logs, a kayak, a luxury yacht, a battleship—is the most practical way of adapting ourselves to a natural environment for which we are physiologically unsuited. Collier wasn’t quite crazy enough to swim the raging Rillito, and if he had been, his genetic line would have terminated abruptly, right there. With the help of boats, people cheerfully accept preposterous risks or hardships to be out on the water. I recently toured a sailboat that the owners had lived on for several years. They were a family of five. The boat was twenty-seven feet long.

  A substantial fraction of our wild-ass dreams involve boats in some way or another. A travel writer named Paul Bennett explained in National Geographic Adventure magazine how he and his wife, Lani, decided over martinis one evening in 1999 to chuck their jobs, buy a sailboat, and set off on a transoceanic voyage with no goal other than staying afloat and alive. Neither had any substantial sailing experience. But they did it, and lived to tell. Around this same time, Jerry Joslin, an Oregon bronze sculptor, noticed a seedy-looking Chinese junk docked on the Columbia River, a couple of kids living on it for cheap rent. He bought it and spent five intense years restoring it. “Sometimes we do crazy things,” he told a local newspaper. “Sometimes it turns out in life you are well advised to do that; it’s called chasing a dream.”

  In a gemlike piece titled “The Sea and the Wind That Blows” essayist E. B. White, a lifelong sailor, explained such “crazy things” with eloquent rationality: “If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble.” John Steinbeck, reflecting on a 1940 expedition in the Sea of Cortez, suggested something more mystical: “Some have said they have felt a boat shudder before she struck a rock, or cry when she beached and the surf poured into her. This is not mysticism, but identification; man, building this greatest and most personal of all tools, has in turn received a boatshaped mind, and the boat, a man-shaped soul.”

  I paid little attention to boats and water through the decades I lived in Arizona. Mountains and canyons formed a more obvious and practical attraction. I never had the nerve to try climbing with ropes and carabiners, but I came to love hiking in steep, spiky places. The last of the three addresses my wife, Patty, and I occupied in Tucson was a house at the northeastern edge of the city where the Santa Catalina Mountains spilled into the desert basin in a tumble of canyons. I was working from home by then, and I fell into a routine of hiking those canyons for two or three hours every morning before settling into the day’s research and writing. I could no more envision living in an environment without mountains than one without oxygen.

  In 1995, unexpectedly, we moved to Seattle. It was a career move for Patty, who was recruited into a nursing management job at a colossal hospital. There were mountains on the horizons whenever the rain and fog relented for long enough to see them, and it was no coincidence that we bought a house in the one suburb that has a halfway decent mountain right in it.

  Patty had grown up in Houston, forty miles from the Gulf of Mexico, but this was the first time I had ever lived near ocean or lakes. Less than four months after moving, we got ourselves seduced by the lavishly abundant water of Washington. On a weekend trip to the San Juan Islands, we spotted a sign in the waterfront village of Eastsound: “Sea Kayak Tours—No Experience Necessary.” Well, why not? Something about being on an island, even for a weekend, overwrites the default-mode inhibitions. The tether to solid ground, to mainland personal histories, is temporarily slack. An hour later, bobbing on the wavelets of Doe Bay, we knew we were having a life-altering experience. Since then we’ve logged thousands of kayak miles—mostly close to home in Puget Sound and British Columbian waters, but also off the coast of Maine and in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez.

  We felt no urge to graduate to any larger type of boat. Sea kayaking appeared to present more than enough challenge and adventure to last us the rest of our lives. A sea kayak can go anywhere, as long as one is patient enough to do it at a speed of 3 knots, and cultivating that patience (along with the physical conditioning that necessarily accompanies it) is a virtuous goal. A kayak, in fact, is not only a boat, but also an extension of the human body; the paddler morphs into a kind of honorary sea mammal. You’re intimately connected with the marine environment, and you learn to appreciate it—and deeply respect it—at many different levels.

  Then came a magazine assignment to do a roundup of the Northwest’s wooden boat shows. We first hit the Center for Wooden Boats’ July festival on Seattle’s Lake Union, then the September Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend. Between them we saw more than two hundred watercraft of every possible description: sailboats, motor cruisers, speedboats, tugboats, rowboats, canoes, kayaks. Most of them, if not quite all, were beautiful. Their owners also shared a common quality: a devotion that bordered on fanaticism. I talked with several.

  “People come aboard, shake their heads in amazement, and ask, ‘How can you possibly keep up with it?’” said the skipper of a stunning seventy-eight-foot schooner named Sugartime, based in Honolulu. “I say, how can you not keep up with it? How can you ignore the responsibility of maintaining a thing of such beauty, fifty-two tons of the finest wood ever grown?”

  Another owner told me he’d just cast off his Seattle dental practice because it was demanding time that his boat, a seventythree-foot tug built in 1909 but now undergoing renovation into a pleasure cruiser, needed more urgently. “Three mangled fingers, four lost girlfriends, five lawsuits, and close to half a million dollars—and here I am,” he said. “But I know people who’ve spent more on psychiatry and therapy than I have on this boat, and I’m a lot happier.”

  The owner of a 1928 salmon troller converted to cruising confirmed that a staggering amount of labor goes into rebuilding and maintaining such a boat. “There aren’t too many successful conversions like this,” he said. “But there are a lot of failed dreams.”

  I asked directly about obsession. “A wooden boat will take every bit of perfectionism you can throw at it,” said the owner of a thirty-three-foot sloop. “It’s real easy to get obsessive—to go overboard, so to speak. You have to constantly remind yourself to keep looking at the big picture, and quit obsessing over the flaws that only you will ever see.”

  I wasn’t prepared for what happened next—it came out of nowhere, as unlikely as an iceberg in the Gulf of Mexico. We were studying an exquisite forty-year-old, forty-five-foot, teakplanked sloop, recently restored to within an inch of her life, with a sign offering her for sale at $189,000.

  “That’s how much equity we have in the house,” Patty said evenly. “It’s big enough we could live aboard.”

  Some moments back I linked boats and wild-ass dreams, but I never would have imagined my wife contriving one of the latter. She is wise, logical, prudent, impulsive only to the point of adopt
ing a homeless cat that might show up at the door. We knew absolutely nothing about sailing, living aboard a boat, or maintaining any watercraft more complicated than a kayak. I waited for her to toss off this freak whim with a laugh, but she didn’t. She was staring at the boat with a glint of steel in her eyes. The vision of owning this boat, fusing our entire lives to it, had started as a shiver in her spine, bypassed the Rational Judgment Department, and lodged with electric intensity in her cortex. She was boatstruck—a phenomenon that Michael Ruhlman, in his excellent chronicle Wooden Boats, says occurs only infrequently among women. But none of us is immune: woman, man, architect, zoologist, El Pasoan.

  We humans, no matter our gender or culture, crave to be around beauty. This is another quality that seems to be genetically imprinted, and it has to do with recognizing and feeling comforted by certain recurring patterns in nature. The swirl of a spiral galaxy and the concordant curl of a nautilus shell both evoke feelings of pleasure or even awe. We see in their similarity an underlying order to the universe, which is a warming reassurance in the midst of the messy unpredictability of human society—and of my office desk, for that matter.

  A wooden boat is a more plausible object of desire than most man-made creations. It’s an architectural form that pays respect to nature in a direct and honest manner. Its shape is determined by the nature of its material and the need to carve as efficiently as possible through water and air. It extends roots deep into the human story, connecting cultures throughout recorded history, and before. Remnants of an Egyptian riverboat from 2600 BC and a Viking ship of AD 800 have eerily similar forms, and any five-year-old in deepest Nebraska today would recognize them both as boats. A wooden boat in particular forms a retort to the prevailing pattern of intentional obsolescence and throwaway cheapness that has infected practically every other thing we buy and use today, including our houses. The only reason to throw away a well-crafted wooden boat would be if the owner has let it deteriorate beyond a reasonable feasibility of repair—and when that happens, half the time some swooning fool will try an unfeasible restoration anyway.