PROFESSIONALS BUILT THE TITANIC.
I wondered whether some of the attitude of amateur care I planned to lavish on my boat would automatically leak over into the other arenas of my life, or whether I would have to struggle to make a conscious transfer. And would a transfer even be possible? I’d been finding it increasingly difficult to care about the majority of magazine assignments that had been coming my way the last few years. Maybe the assignments themselves had been so dumbed down by value engineering and marketing considerations that quality (beyond the basic level of accurate information) didn’t matter. How many American workers and engineers and teachers feel like they’re caught in that trap?
Maybe we all need to build sailboats—as a personal antidote to the forces that keep demanding more speed, more efficiency, and less substance.
I decided to prepare for the Zephyr both logistically and mentally by cleaning and organizing the garage. I hadn’t cleaned it in two or three years. I had never organized it. Tools were tossed haphazardly in drawers, bird nests of rope and electrical cords were heaped in a storage closet, shelves held a random assortment of prehistoric paints and long-expired chemicals. Environments influence the acts we perform in them, and this one could not possibly have had a positive effect on the boat that was about to be created in it—quite aside from the fifteen minutes I would squander every time I needed to find a screwdriver. True, I wasn’t particularly concerned with time management. But I needed to keep frustration and impatience at bay, because these are qualities that I could build into the boat if they started roiling and seething with nowhere else to go.
Garages are an important and, I think, frequently overlooked component of American ingenuity, providing incubation for a dazzling variety of enterprises. Hewlett-Packard and Apple computers were born in garages, as well as a Texas man’s wheeled, stainless steel, multiple-turkey deep fryer. As long as Americans keep building houses with garages, we’ve got at least one advantage in industrial and intellectual competitiveness. The flip side is that the American garage is also a symbol of decadence and stagnation, serving as a repository for all the stuff that the typical household doesn’t know what to do with (and therefore by definition doesn’t actually need). The stuff shifts and redistributes itself throughout the landscape, migrating from garage to garage via eBay and lawn sales, like coastal dunes being heaped and rearranged by the wind.
I spent an astonishing five days renovating the baby boat’s prospective room, and in the end I drafted a friend with a pickup to dump the junk—we’d do the earth a greater favor by decommissioning a load at the landfill than by reconstituting it in someone else’s garage. A week later I couldn’t recall a single item that departed—that’s how important it had been to keep the stuff around.
I needed to give Plankton a new storage berth to open up more room, so I spent another afternoon building a couple of overhead shelves near the ceiling and devised a primitive pulley arrangement to hoist her up. I had to build the shelves and pulley system wrong so I could see why it didn’t work, then take it down and try to rebuild it correctly. Three times, in fact. This process left a dozen unused holes for screws and U-bolts in my clever kayak hoist. I could have filled them but it seemed like a waste of time; they were out of any line of sight. But the shaky execution of this setup made me question my aptitude for building even a simple boat from scratch. I have a nearly immaculate inability to conceive an idea for a mechanical device in my head, draw it on paper, and then build it. I have to first build it wrong so I can see why it’s wrong, then try to make it right. I can’t make the direct conceptual leap from two-dimensional representation to three-dimensional reality.
I thought, I’ve got to do better than this on the Zephyr. But is this skill learnable at my age, or at any age at all? Or is it like tone deafness, the inability some people have to sing “Happy Birthday” in tune with the rest of the crowd?
When the garage finally seemed neat and vacant enough to accommodate an all-consuming project, I cleared an entire afternoon for a tool-buying expedition. This felt like the point of no return—once I bought all this stuff, I would be committed to building an actual boat. If I didn’t, the only possible use for the tools would be to attack the mountain of Mr. Fixit projects that had been awaiting me around the house, most of them for years. This alone would be a colossal incentive for actually following through with the boat.
I spent $925 on tools, supplies, and essential accessories such as safety glasses and a filtering respirator. The centerpiece was a $400 Chinese-made bandsaw, which was actually a bandsaw kit that took two full afternoons to assemble. I used this process as practice for working carefully, methodically, and mindfully. The instructions appeared at least to have been edited by a native English speaker—there wasn’t the usual “Put now the under widget to the deep bracket against firmly.” Just the standard annoyances with nomenclature, figuring out which piece was which. How is a regular person supposed to know what a “trunnion support” looks like? It would cost the manufacturer, what, another two bucks to identify each part with a stick-on label?
When I finally prepared to switch it on I was apprehensive—I’d never operated an industrial-strength tool bristling with carbon steel teeth, let alone built one. I put on my new safety glasses and backed three feet away so I could prod the “on” switch with a stick, just in case the machine decided to kick the ninety-three-inch blade into orbit around my head. But nothing dramatic happened. It ran smoothly, issuing a soft baritone thrum that sounded almost sweet. I penciled a few sweeping curves on some scrap plywood and practiced cutting out vaguely boatshaped pieces. Bandsaws are excellent for cutting curved lines, which is why they’re more useful than table saws in boatbuilding. After half an hour’s practice I unilaterally awarded myself a B in bandsaw management. I had thought earlier it would be a good idea to spend a couple of days practicing different kinds of cuts, but I seemed to be getting the hang of it quickly. And I was impatient to start on the Zephyr itself.
On the morning of September 26, 2005, a monster semi sidled up to the curb in front of my house, and the driver, a man named Milo, ambled to the door to announce that he had my marine plywood outside. Milo struck me as a throwback—not only because of his immense, tapered Norse-god beard, but also because he’d already phoned three times that morning to update me on the progress of his other deliveries and estimated time of arrival. As we started unloading, he told me he’d left Edensaw Woods in Port Townsend at 2 a.m. for a swath of ten mainland deliveries. “If I’m lucky with traffic, I’ll make the 2:30 ferry and get home around 4,” he said. There was no trace of anxiety or resentment over a fourteen-hour workday. Instead, he was giving me the impression that my dinky $360 order of plywood was the single most important item on his agenda for the day.
“What are you building?”
“A little fourteen-foot daysailer.”
“Terrific. Can I see the plans?”
I unfolded the plans. He studied them approvingly and assured me, “You’ll have a lot of fun.”
“Have you built a boat?”
“I’ve thought about it,” he said. “I’m afraid it’d become an obsession and I’d miss my kids’ soccer games.”
Milo and I delicately leaned the seven sheets of African okoume plywood against an inside wall of the garage, then he wished me luck and lumbered away for his next delivery. I had the feeling I’d been given a gift, that Milo’s unhurried, friendly demeanor had left a residue of serenity that could form a baseline for my work on the Zephyr. Why hadn’t he seemed rushed? Five minutes wasted making casual conversation with me could translate into missing the ferry later in the day. But he wasn’t focused on the ferry, several hours in the future—for whatever reason, it was somehow important to him to make that present moment, my plywood delivery, a pleasurable encounter for both of us.
I’m compulsively responsible, like Milo, almost neurotic about phoning ahead if traffic is going to make me five minutes late to an appointment, bu
t I don’t share his easygoing patience. I hate wasting time. I’m exasperated by pointless complexity, which is why I refuse to slog through the 128-page instruction book for my cell phone and learn how to store someone’s number in it. The procedure should be obvious and intuitive—and since it isn’t, I’ll punish the fathead engineers who designed it by not reading their instructions. Friends have gently told me they discern a particle of self-defeating irony in this position.
I had thought that this sailboat, once built, might be the perfect teaching tool for one who recognizes a need for more patience and serenity in his life. It won’t be hurried, even by favorable winds. A powerboat is about a destination; a sailboat is about the journey. If you’re planing over wave tops at 40 knots, you can hardly be aware of anything but the sensations of speed and the commotion needed to produce it. You’re not going to hear the rhythm of the water slapping a shoreline or notice a seal shadowing the boat: everything is focused on the machinery. I have no objection to people who choose to enjoy the water in motorized form (except when they’re too loud or too close or scaring wildlife away), but I don’t think it’s any way to get in touch with the environment—or by extension, with yourself. A sailboat can never overpower nature, only make use of her. That’s a valuable metaphor for many facets of human endeavor, most of all for cultivating patience. I had absorbed all this from my few times out on sailboats, but what I needed now was to move my acceptance of the ordained-by-nature pace of sailing into the hands-on process of building the boat.
You could, in theory, construct a stitch-and-glue boat out of fir plywood from the local lumberyard, the same stuff you’d use for the doghouse roof or a quickie bookcase. But it wouldn’t be good quality. Fir tends to splinter when it’s sawed, and structure-weakening air gaps hide in the inner plies. The high-quality okoume plywood Milo had just delivered was intended for hardworking marine use, and it also had a fine, satiny grain and a faintly pinkish color. I kept running my hands over it, savoring the feel on my fingertips, until I suddenly realized the ridiculousness of the moment—I was wasting time. I now had everything I needed in hand to begin the boat.
The first step in making a stitch-and-glue boat is a large and frightening one: draw its major pieces on the plywood. This means scaling them up from the plans, a process boatbuilders call lofting. This would be almost effortless if boat parts were just rectangles and parallelograms, but such parts would only form a clunky, slab-sided barge. The beauty of a sailboat is in the organic sweep of its sheer, the line where hull meets deck; and in the forward-thrusting chin of the bow and rake of the stern. Straight lines and right angles will kill any boat, aesthetically. Imprecision in lofting will kill it functionally. I decided I would try for a standard of accuracy of of an inch, the smallest increment I could measure.
Boatbuilding is caked in hoary traditions, and I encountered one of them right away. To transfer the shapes drawn in Devlin’s plans to the plywood, I had to interpret a constellation of dimensions expressed like this:1-1-7
1-4-6
2-3-1+
This is boatbuilding shorthand for feet-inches-eighths. So the first number, 1-1-7, means 1 foot, 1 inch, and ⅞. It gets worse. The second number, 1-4-6, translates to 1 foot, 4 inches, and , or, distilling the fraction as we were taught in fifth grade, ¾. The third number, 2-3-1+, means 2 feet, 3 inches, and ⅛ plus , making the fraction . Or, as I had to mentally translate from Devlin’s plan to my tape measure:2-3-1+ = 27 inches
An hour of this, and my patience was strained almost to the snapping point—literally on the first act of the first afternoon of building the boat. And it stretched way past an hour. After I laid out all the points on the plywood for drawing the first two pieces—the two side panels of the hull, 14 feet long and roughly the shape of giant sword fern leaves—I checked every point and found three or four of them off by a fraction of an inch. I replotted the offenders, checked them again, and finally drew the long, sweeping arcs with a pencil, connecting the dots. Then I checked everything a third time, found yet another mistake or two, and redrew the lines. The whole process consumed three hours—just for drawing two side panels of the boat.
The ancient convention of 2-3-1+ struck me as a ridiculous affectation, a medievalism, a rejection of modern logic as absurd as the Flat Earth Society. We might as well be specifying boat dimensions in cubits. If I were president, we’d go metric at midnight tonight and 2-3-1+ would become 69.1 centimeters. I called the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding to find out if anyone knew why boatbuilders cling to such an antique convention. “Boatbuilders are pretty simple people,” an instructor named Tim Lee told me. “This just makes it simple to add and subtract fractions. It’s really easy once you get used to it.” He didn’t make it sound like a scolding, but there was an implicit rebuke in his answer: Give it time. Work with it. Try a little patience.
Over the next three afternoons I drew all the Zephyr’s pieces on the plywood, again checking each dimension three times. It didn’t seem to get any easier, and I still had to correct several mistakes each time I checked. At least I was correcting them with an eraser instead of throwing away great slabs of expensive okoume that I’d cut out wrong. I couldn’t recall being as meticulous—patient—as this about anything, ever. It was an unfamiliar feeling, but it seemed to carry a modest tingle of virtue.
At the same time, my newfound meticulousness was far from perfect or comprehensive. At least once a day I wasted a good five minutes looking for my pencil. I’d recently written a magazine profile of David Burch, who’s taught marine navigation to more than 20,000 students since founding his Starpath School of Navigation in Seattle nearly thirty years ago. The best navigators, he told me, “are the ones who always set their pencils down in the same place every time.” That echoed Joe Greenley’s system of organizing his tools in a shop apron. What I wasn’t getting from these guys was how one renovates a mind that’s long been satisfied with a high ambient level of disorder.
When Patty came home from work on the third evening of lofting I proudly showed her our boat—in two-dimensional form, at least, penciled on plywood. I fumed again about the 2-3-1+ nonsense and about how many mistakes the unfamiliar notation had caused. She peered at the plans.
“Why didn’t you just translate them into conventional measurements and write them on the plans?”
There was no possible reply—aside from grabbing a hammer and administering a dozen dope-whacks to my own skull. Later, as I pondered why I hadn’t thought of Patty’s obvious trouble-saver myself, I realized that grievances work like dams in the mind, frequently blocking the channels of constructive action. The dams acquire lives of their own, and it becomes more important to preserve that architecture than to open a way around them. I had liked bitching about the boatbuilding notation; it was an extension of my long-running exasperation with America’s refusal to join the modern world in the metric system. But it wasn’t a logical extension, because it had cost me time, trouble, and emotional energy. Patty’s simple idea would have crumbled the dam, eliminated it as an issue.
I began cutting out boat parts the next day. Since the hull pieces were too big to feed into the bandsaw—which would have been the most accurate way to cut them—I used my handheld jigsaw and cut slightly wide of the lines I’d drawn, in effect making a slightly sloppy cut that I could then shave and refine with a block plane and coarse sandpaper. It sounds like a slow, clumsy, and imprecise process, and I’m sure there are German craftsmen who can cut such pieces with startling precision using the jigsaw alone. But I had to proceed by trial and error, and this way, at least, the errors remained small and manageable.
In a week of boatbuilding afternoons, I cut out all four pieces of the hull, the transom, and three bulkheads. I shaved the edges exactly to the pencil lines. I planed a forty-five-degree bevel on the inside edges of the hull bottom, where the two pieces were to meet in a V. All the pieces looked good, but I couldn’t shake the ominous feeling that I’d made some kind of monumental
mistake that wouldn’t reveal itself until I put the boat together, when some critical part would turn up an inch too short. Remember the $125-million NASA Mars orbiter that burned up because rocket scientists confused their English and metric measurements? Something like that.
I worried that I might be edging into obsession, but I went back to the plans and measured all the pieces again—the fourth time, in all. I compared the angles on the bulkhead corners to the scale drawings on the plans. Every dimension of every piece appeared to be within of an inch of what Devlin had ordained. This was twice the tolerance for error I had firmly vowed to observe a week earlier, and I wondered if I might be doubling toward disaster. But the pieces were cut out, and they were the best I could do.
CHAPTER 5
IMPERFECTION
EVER SINCE I TURNED fifty a few years back, I’ve felt an insistent urge to try things I didn’t know how to do, mostly things that have scared me stupid. In 2003 I spent a month hiking several big chunks of the Arizona Trail, just a few weeks after buying my first backpack. The trail winds eight hundred miles from Utah to Mexico, plunging into every damn canyon and over every freaking mountain the trail planners could find, nearly all of it serious wilderness. The next year a travel magazine asked me, a certifiable acrophobe, to take a one-day canyoneering course in Utah and write about it. I don’t know why I agreed, but I did. The first rappel was twenty-five feet down into a frigid, bottomless pool in a vertical-walled slot canyon. The second, equally vertical, dropped forty feet. The third plunged 105 feet—a terrifying specification that our instructor, Nick Wilkes, somehow had neglected to mention before we started out that morning.
The Year of the Boat Page 5
