The Year of the Boat

by Lawrence W. Cheek

  The swooners may be giving in to an urge to connect with something more powerful than the beauty of surface and line, something that comprises the qualities of authenticity and integrity. For easy reference, I’ll call this deep beauty, and I plan to go into it more extensively later. But briefly, an object that has it would exemplify respect for materials, so that it does not mask or distort the essential nature of its component parts. Its design would precisely fulfill the needs of its user. And its form would not only follow function, but also relate in a deeper sense to the environment where it’s created and used.

  How many of the things that we own might qualify? In a typical American household, practically nothing—including the house itself. Almost nothing mass-produced will fulfill all three conditions. (The classic Gem paper clip, which cannot be improved, is an exception.) Many people own beautiful antique furniture, but how well, if at all, can a Chippendale armoire adapt to the functional needs of a twenty-first-century household? If we do happen to own something whose value and usefulness actually transcends generations, we are, I believe, blessed by it. Essayist Scott Russell Sanders once described a hammer, a saw, and a framing square that his grandfather and father had used in succession, then passed on to him. The tools functioned as well as they had two generations back, because they had been built to last and the work they had to do had not changed. More importantly, Sanders had inherited the fiber of their users through them. “I was taught early on that a saw is not to be used apart from a square,” Sanders recalled. “‘If you’re going to cut a piece of wood,’ my father insisted, ‘you owe it to the tree to cut it straight.’ ” His tools had been sharpened, permanently, with the morality of good workmanship.

  The implausible success of WoodenBoat magazine testifies to our longing for these qualities. It’s deeper than romanticism or nostalgia. When a New England boatbuilder named Jon Wilson launched the magazine in 1974, only a small, hard core of enthusiasts was thinking about—or building or restoring—wooden boats of any kind. Fiberglass, invented in the 1940s, had made the mass production of small boats possible, and the consequence was the democratization of pleasure boating. Who could argue with that? Wilson, though, believed that wooden boats still resonated with something at the heart of human culture, or even the individual human soul, something that would not become obsolete. In a retrospective five years after launching the magazine, he wrote:Wooden boats remind me a lot about what we’ve forgotten—or perhaps never knew. With rare exception, their shapes and structures reveal the accumulated experience of thousands of years. They have pleasing shapes, for the most part; the material itself demands it. As if the grace of the forest trees were bequeathed in abundance to every plank sewn. And each plank, in turn, has carried with it the duty to lie gracefully in place, resisting to the end any move toward the awkward and angular. That duty was once well understood. Designers, builders, and just plain lovers of boats could respond in awe to the nature of wood and let their hearts and hands be guided by it.

  WoodenBoat started with exactly two subscribers and an office that consisted of a corner in Wilson’s Maine cabin, which incidentally lacked electricity, phone, and plumbing. In 2007 its paid circulation nearly touched 80,000, which is surely more than the number of functional wooden boats in the country. Organizations and museums dedicated to the revival have blossomed. There are at least two dozen annual wooden boat festivals in North America. The one at Port Townsend, which by 2007 had blossomed into a three-day weekend blowout of music, art, food, workshops, and some two hundred boats, attracts 25,000 people every year.

  In some people’s minds the wooden boat revival has assumed moral dimensions. A few years back, a letter to the editor in WoodenBoat laid it bare: “The mass production of fiberglass boats is solely responsible for the unruly and discourteous crowds that we find on the water today.”

  The ripe whiff of elitism wafts from that dock, and I don’t share it. I’ve never had any antipathy toward fiberglass boats, but I’ve never quite felt rapture in their presence, either. At that first wooden boat show I found I loved the visual warmth of wooden boats, sailboats in particular, and also the fact that every one of them, even a simple dinghy, contained a story. At the same time, I had serious reservations about my suitability to become one of those stories. All my life I’ve enjoyed building things, but I hate maintaining anything. I avoid gardening, fence painting, window washing, gutter cleaning, furnace filter replacing, and most other essential chores associated with home ownership. I run the “spring cleaning” program on my computer once every three or four springs, and clean out the obsolete accumulations in my filing cabinets only when the drawers refuse to accept another scrap of paper. This is something more than garden-variety procrastination. It’s a deep-seated impatience with repetitive work that merely preserves a status quo rather than adding value. I’m not sure whether it’s a character defect or a personality type, but I know I’ve got it—and that it would be a deadly liability in wooden boat stewardship.

  I visited a friend who lives aboard a thirty-seven-foot sloop in a Seattle marina. “It’s really no different than maintaining a house,” he explained. “Except that if you put things off, your home sinks.” Or as still another owner at the Lake Union show told me, “You’ve got to be very dedicated and very anal.”

  For a few days I actually considered Patty’s startling proposition. Technically, it was feasible: we could convert our dry-land equity into this wooden boat and live aboard; the $400-a-month moorage fee would substitute for the interest we were paying on our mortgage. The sloop was breathtakingly beautiful. It promised a steep but exhilarating learning curve. It would rip us out of the ruts of predictable routine, and as the artist who scooped up the Chinese junk put it, sometimes in life we are well-advised to do crazy things. On the other hand: abandoning home and plunging life savings into a forty-five-foot sailboat when you don’t know how to sail, don’t even know whether you might like to sail, goes beyond crazy—it’s reckless.

  An embryo of an idea, not as precipitous but just as ridiculous and impulsive, stirred in my mind: I could build a sailboat.

  CHAPTER 2

  WHY BUILD A BOAT?

  A PEASANT FISHERMAN IN Mexico or Malaysia has every reason in the world to build a boat, but a middle-class American in the suburbs may have to go to some trouble explaining and convincing.

  If you live alone, no problem. You don’t have to justify building a boat any more than you would making crab-andgouda enchiladas for breakfast. No one needs to see you or be affected by either, and if you choose to report your adventure to friends, they can just write it off as one more charming eccentricity. Four years after that transfixing afternoon at the wooden boat show, however, Patty was dubious, and not without cause. Over the last several months I had been talking about building a sailboat with gradually increasing frequency, like a Geiger counter approaching a cache of plutonium. Every time I brought up my latest idea she would nod silently, her head bobbing in a small and noncommittal arc, neither asking questions nor supplying encouragement. I knew what this meant; no one married for thirty-five years remains oblivious to nonverbal communication.

  I couldn’t blame her. My history is littered with grand plans and colossal efforts that dribbled into inconsequential scrap heaps.

  Through most of the 1970s I studied piano, first with Patty and then with a demanding concert pianist. I was a serious and dedicated student. I would come home from my job as a newspaper reporter around five most afternoons and hit the Yamaha grand for two hours of rigorous practice while Patty taught her young piano students in another room. I looked forward hungrily to that daily practice session because I loved the music I was playing, and because it provided mental release from the stresses of newspaper work.

  Eventually, though, the piano imposed its own form of stress. I hit a plateau—it felt more like a concrete wall—where I couldn’t seem to make any more progress. I’d made it into the minor leagues of the serious classical piano reperto
ire, playing the lesser Mozart and Beethoven sonatas, Chopin nocturnes and waltzes, and—a personal favorite—the Schubert C minor Impromptu. But I couldn’t break through to the next level. I ached to play big Beethoven, like the fiendishly difficult Waldstein sonata. And I increasingly realized I wasn’t going to get there, ever. I had enough musical ability to read a score and hear precisely the interpretation I wanted in my head, but I couldn’t make my fingers realize it. I daydreamed about taking a yearlong sabbatical and practicing four hours a day, the standard for concert pianists, but I knew even at that level of effort I would never be good enough to play anything like the Waldstein in public for paying customers. If I couldn’t satisfy an imagined audience, it was equally unlikely that I could ever satisfy myself. And so I became a piano dropout at the age of thirty-five.

  Periodically, the piano returns to haunt me, a nagging ghost of desire—and guilt. A few years ago Patty played the Waldstein, among other red-meat pieces by Bach, Brahms, and Brubeck, in a dedication recital for a new grand piano at her church. I assisted by turning pages and, when asked, coaching her practice sessions. This latter was a delicate balancing act, as anyone knows who’s ever dared to critique a spouse’s or lover’s artistic work. The task became particularly tricky with the Waldstein because I was playing the son of a bitch, vicariously, through her. I wanted to take control, to make it my performance. But we both understood what was happening, she put up her usual stiff resistance to letting anyone push her around, and I throttled back on the suggestions that were arising essentially to satisfy me. And we stayed married.

  Over dinner one evening, I tried to explain why I wanted—needed, even—to try building a boat.

  I’ve been feeling more and more frustrated with my magazine work, I said. The assigned articles are getting shorter and shorter—most editors seem to think readers’ attention spans expire in three minutes—and the pieces are predictable and flimsy. The work is just income—most of it doesn’t mean anything to me.

  “I know,” she said.

  “I’ve figured out a plan,” I continued. “If I just discipline myself to work more efficiently, I can compress the same amount of shallow magazine reporting and writing into a shorter work day. I can finish by two or three in the afternoon and go out to the garage to work on the boat, and it’ll be like a daily sabbatical. I need that different kind of fulfillment, creating something tangible with my hands, and something that isn’t trivial.”

  She listened. She didn’t counter, as many spouses might, that a sailboat is trivial. She understood that this would be something more than a grown-boy toy, and that what I was proposing was very different from going to a dealer and buying a factory-produced boat. I wanted to go deeper with her at this critical moment, to explain how I felt that building a boat could be an exercise in building character, but the concept was still too loosely formed in my mind to shape into words, even with my most intimate and trusted friend.

  She decided to trust me, even with my checkered history of failed plans and imploded ambitions. “Well,” she said, “you’re not quite a boatbuilding virgin.”

  Four years earlier, acting on a weekend whim, we had taken the ferry over to Port Townsend, the fetching little Victorian seaport on the Olympic Peninsula that aspired in the 1880s to become the Boston of the Northwest. Planted conveniently where the Strait of Juan de Fuca turns the corner into Puget Sound, Port Townsend appeared to be the perfect port of call for sailing ships. Westerly winds in the strait would blow the vessels right to it, while if they had to continue up the calmer sound to Seattle or Tacoma it could add days to the sailors’ voyages. Unfortunately, these ambitions were blossoming in the twilight of commercial sailing. The advent of steam-powered shipping scuttled Port Townsend’s plans. A few generations later it would become the B&B capital of the Northwest, the one plausible modern use for all those overblown Victorian houses. The town also still harbors quite a few maritime cottage industries, one of which is a highly respected kit-kayak manufacturer, Pygmy Boats.

  We hardly needed another kayak. We already had two factory-built fiberglass kayaks, and our only beef was that they were heavy lumps to heave onto our tall Subaru’s roof rack. But to upgrade one’s flotilla, any excuse will serve. A wood kayak could be substantially lighter—around thirty-five pounds instead of fifty-five—and much prettier as well. We walked into the Pygmy world headquarters and arranged to paddle several of their demo models around Point Hudson Harbor, conveniently right outside the shop. After an entertaining hour on the water, switching among five different boats, we bought the smallest model, the Arctic Tern 14. Its parts—precut pieces of ⅛-inch-thick marine plywood, a bolt of fiberglass cloth, and a few bits of hardware—all fit into a long, skinny box that might have been used to pack a tall floor lamp. I thought at the time, Inside this scrawny box is a boat that’s supposed to venture out on the Pacific Ocean! It seemed no less preposterous than buying a forty-five-foot sloop that we wouldn’t know how to sail: just cheaper.

  When we got home I methodically swept the garage, cut open the box, and laid all the pieces out on the floor. It didn’t look like a boat or a prayer of becoming one. I remembered a TV interview with Bill Clinton between his 1992 election and inauguration. “I feel a little like the dog that chased a pickup and actually caught it,” he’d admitted. “Now what am I gonna do with it?” I felt like the dog-elect. I dug into my flimsy magazine assignments instead of the boat project, and didn’t even touch the pile of plywood for the next three months.

  What was going on? I wanted the kayak, and I wanted the challenge of building it. I had no rational reason to fear it—I had built a two-manual French baroque harpsichord from a kit in 1978, and it had turned out decently. The harpsichord’s construction manual was a two-hundred-page book; the kayak’s instructions barely ran forty pages. I fashioned a joke-excuse for my procrastination that seemed to have some plausible whiff of truth. “Nobody ever drowned because a harpsichord came apart in a concert.” The real reason was darker than fear of trusting my life to inexpert craftsmanship. I was drinking at the time, but trying to closet it in a daily window of time that didn’t compromise either my writing or my marriage. I feared that I couldn’t squeeze both the drinking and boatbuilding into the same three- or four-hour weekday afternoon window.

  After three months I ran dry of too-busy excuses and plunged into the project. Almost immediately I enjoyed a modest rush of success. Like most kit kayaks, Pygmy uses the stitch-and-glue method of construction, in which the builder “stitches” precut panels of the hull and deck together with wire, then solidifies the joints with thickened epoxy. It’s a straightforward way to build a kayak, requiring no great skill. Occasionally a step in the instruction manual would be unclear, and somewhat to my own surprise, I felt no reluctance to call the Pygmy factory several times to ask for guidance. The employees I talked with were invariably helpful, clear, and they didn’t charge anything for answering questions. The computer industry could learn something here, if it cared to.

  The first serious test was fiberglassing the interior. To do this, you have to fit a rough-cut layer of fiberglass cloth fourteen feet long into the banana-shaped chamber of the hull, mix the liquid epoxy and hardener, ladle it evenly onto the glass to saturate the fibers, then squeegee away the excess, leaving no gaps, air pockets, or wrinkles; and complete the entire procedure in the thirty minutes before the epoxy begins to congeal. Panic is obviously not helpful. And panic, it seemed as I closed in on the last five minutes of the epoxy window, was the only rational response. The cloth wouldn’t lie snug in some of the corners, and there was a panoply of wrinkles that seemed determined to survive. I’d had a drink to blunt the anxiety, and it wasn’t working. Decision time: Jerk out the whole epoxy-saturated cloth, throw it away, clean out the hull, and try again the next afternoon—or let the blemishes stand and deal with them as well as possible later, with filler and sandpaper?

  I let them stand.

  Patty drove in from work a few m
inutes later. I was still tinkering with the cloth, delicately prodding it with brush and squeegee, trying to coax out the worst of its misbehavior. The wet epoxy was spectacularly glossy, and the mahogany of the hull was resplendent. Patty was enormously impressed.

  “It’s stunning,” she said.

  “Well, yes, but there are some problems.”

  For years she has been trying to retrain me to accept compliments without swatting at them, as if they were flies. She points out, correctly, that doing so deflates the person offering the compliment, that it insults her judgment. I’ve always felt that accepting an undeserved compliment is a moral lapse, like pocketing the benefit of a waiter’s mistake on a restaurant check. I suspected this was going to be a recurring issue when I finished this kayak and began taking it out in public.

  By this time I had completed enough steps successfully to convince myself that I could build the boat, but could I build it well? Could I lay the exterior fiberglass and epoxy smoothly, with no pimples or wrinkles? Could I make the hatches watertight? (Leaky hatches are the bane of countless kayaks, even many factory-built models.) Would the chine and sheer seams be strong enough to survive an unplanned beating? This last issue was, and is, critical: I wasn’t planning to baby this boat by paddling only on calm lakes; the world—well, Puget Sound, at least—would be its oyster.

  I have never been a notably sloppy craftsman, but neither am I meticulously good. If you were to size up a room I’ve painted, a bookcase I’ve refinished, or a car I’ve just washed, you would probably issue the same grades my high school teachers did: B average. Unrealized potential, could do better. Attitude problems. That “attitude” actually is a kind of value judgment, which I think is defensible in some circumstances. Let’s say it takes an hour to do a Grade B car wash. Grade A would require another hour of detail work. Is the extra time worth it? For some people (and some cars), yes—and I wouldn’t argue with anyone who consciously made that choice. To me, it isn’t. I like my car, I don’t love it. The B wash is enough to preserve the car’s value and respectability. I’m constantly aware that time is a nonrenewable resource, and I want to slot the extra hour it would take to make it an A somewhere else. I had the same attitude toward high school, although I couldn’t have articulated it like this at the time. Back then, a mousy B average was enough to gain admission to most state universities. (Things have changed, not necessarily for the better.) That was my goal; I did just enough work to get there, and no more. There were too many other interesting things in high school that were begging for time. There still are.