The Year of the Boat

by Lawrence W. Cheek

  One of the boatbuilding books I read at the outset argued, sensibly enough, for balance. “Don’t look for perfection,” advised Greg Rössel in Building Small Boats. “We’re not building a Steinway piano. The goal is just good old-fashioned clean workmanship—a job that fits well and looks good.” The perfectionist’s automatically obsessive mind, though, will take these very words and grow all kinds of justifications for monomaniacal attention to detail. “‘Good old-fashioned clean workmanship’ is perfection,” he’ll argue. “Why shouldn’t a boat have the same level of craftsmanship as a Steinway—or even better? Nobody’s life depends on a piano.”

  The trouble with perfectionism, of course, is that the road to paralysis is paved with it. I’ve seen it among my university writing students, who can’t meet class deadlines because they’re afraid their work won’t cut it—even though the continuing education courses I now teach are nongraded. It’s the underlying cause of most outbreaks of writer’s block among students and professionals alike. I don’t know how much it helps, but at some point in every course I pass out a micro-essay I wrote on the syndrome. Here’s part of it:THE PERFECT WRITER

  Perfectionists are unhappy writers, and sometimes surprisingly lousy ones as well. So make yourself into a precisionist instead. Strive to be precise in your descriptions of things. Be scrupulously accurate; check everything before letting a manuscript out of your hands. Review every sentence to make sure that it’s clear, grammatically clean, and says precisely and directly what you want it to say. Omit unnecessary words. But after you’ve done all this, don’t kick yourself if you feel you haven’t lit up the night with your writing. Accept craft as being just as worthy as art. Just telling a story clearly is a wonderful accomplishment....

  I’m fairly good at taking my own prescription when I’m writing, because I used to suffer miserably over trying to render it perfect, and don’t care to revive the experience. But I was naturally less confident at boatbuilding and unsure how strictly to apply the principle of precision. If my -of-an-inch standard was unrealistic—and I was now convinced it had been—what is both adequate and attainable? Does the builder actually fail a moral obligation to the integrity of the design and materials if he simply covers up a mistake, like using a shim to plug a gap between bulkhead and hull?

  A British industrial designer and art professor named David Pye confronted these issues and more in a now-classic book published nearly forty years ago, The Nature and Art of Workmanship. Pye laid out a distinction between what he called the “workmanship of risk” and the “workmanship of certainty.” The first involves the creation of a unique object by hand, something that reflects its maker’s judgment and skill and cannot be made in exactly the same way twice—thus the “risk.” The latter is precision mass production, the results guaranteed to conform to the designer’s intention every time. Pye was not damning a world increasingly pervaded by the workmanship of certainty. (Imagine, for example, if books were still copied out by scribes instead of printed—how many of us would even bother with literacy?) But he believed that keeping high-quality workmanship of risk alive was so important that it went right to the heart of civilization itself: “To do a thing in style is to set oneself standards of behaviour in the belief that the manner of doing anything has a certain aesthetic importance of its own independent of what is done. This belief is the basis of ordinary decent behaviour according to the customs of any society.” Pye seemed to be saying that if I covered up sloppy workmanship, it was not merely a disservice to Devlin, but a moral cave-in that threatened the foundations of civilization. It isn’t that the world would be poorer if deprived of one exemplary wooden boat, but that compromised standards inexorably creep from one arena of one’s life to others, and the decay then ripples outward to infest society as a whole. It’s a relative of Rudy Giuliani’s conviction that cleaning up graffiti improves law and order generally. Giuliani put it succinctly in a 1997 mayoral speech: “Graffiti creates an impression of disorder and of lawlessness. A city tainted by vandalism invites more vandalism and more serious crime because it sends the message that the city doesn’t care and isn’t paying attention.”

  Wouldn’t “decent behaviour,” conversely, also have a ripple effect that reverberates from one side of the pond of human conduct to the other? For example, if you go to work in a place where the corporate culture is one of respect for other workers, wouldn’t that culture translate into respect for customers and for the work itself? All this was forming a nagging counter to my long-practiced belief that some things don’t need to be done particularly well.

  I pondered these questions for a couple of days while I also considered my growing gaps and bulkhead stick-ups. I was on the brink of boatbuilder’s block. Patty said I should call Devlin and ask his advice. It was an eminently sensible suggestion that I didn’t take because I was afraid he’d tell me to throw the pieces away and start over. Finally, the threat of having to ask for help opened up the blockage. I decided that ego could be used as a litmus to test whether a particular piece or joint on the boat is good enough.

  Here’s how it would work. The first question would be: Is it functionally good and safe, as far as anyone can know? If not, something clearly has to be rebuilt. If it is, then comes the second question: Does it need to look better so that other people will think well of the builder? In other words, is egofulfillment the prime motivation? If so, the extra work wouldn’t really be essential.

  This referred back to the concept of “deep beauty,” as I defined it early on. Deep beauty respects materials, function, and the user’s needs. If a person actually needs a boat that generates waves of compliments everywhere it goes, then I supposed it would be legitimate to build it with immaculate detailing so as to accomplish exactly that. But I also suspected that person would not be a lot of fun to hang around with.

  I asked Patty to come out to the garage and hold one end of my tape measure at the bow. I ran the other end to each corner of each bulkhead and the transom. Every dimension on the left (port) side matched every one on the right (starboard) within ⅛ of an inch. All the vertical dimensions lined up as well. My 13½foot boat was within ⅛ inch of being perfectly symmetrical.

  It seemed perfectly good enough.

  CHAPTER 6

  GLOP

  IN THE SPRING OF 1839, Henry David Thoreau and his brother John built a wooden dory about the size of my Zephyr for a summer trip down the Concord and Merrimack rivers. The boat’s construction “cost us a week’s labor in the spring,” Thoreau reported, and admitted it was no great triumph of craftsmanship. “It was strongly built but heavy, and hardly of better model than usual . . . [but it] proved a sufficient buoy for our purposes.”

  In the 492 pages of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the thrifty Thoreau spends just one paragraph describing his boat. Even though it was a recreational craft rather than a workboat, he saw it as strictly utilitarian, not something in which he cared to invest a lot of labor or emotion. If something like it were to show up at a wooden boat festival today, everyone would scorn it: “Now there’s a boat you should only row in the dark.” As our society has become increasingly affluent, we’ve become increasingly self-conscious about design, craftsmanship, and especially cachet among the things we own and do. Utilitarian is out, unless you dress it so elegantly that all actual utility is erased—like my neighborhood’s $50,000 SUVs that their owners wouldn’t dream of slogging through mud to deliver hikers to a remote trailhead.

  The American twentieth century saw countless commodities and activities ascend to the level of connoisseurship, most filtering their way from the rich down to what used to be called the middle class. In Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks pegs it as “a cultural consequence of the information age.” Newspapers, magazines, catalogs, television, and finally the Internet showed us what we needed to do and own in order to live tastefully. Modern Americans, for example, cultivate the art of coffee brewing and drinking (and spend for it) at a level that a generation
ago would have astonished the average French citizen, who, after all, was drinking pretty decent coffee already. If a neighbor offers you coffee and then reaches into the pantry for a steel can of Maxwell House, you—and I—pass silent judgment: way uncool. Hikers in the mountains around Seattle self-consciously compare their gear—the carbide-tipped, shock absorber-equipped trekking poles, the altimeter/barometer/ pulse monitor/wristwatches—at least as much as they talk scenery. (Hey, nature will be around forever. The trekking poles will be obsolete by next summer.)

  By nature and purpose, a little daysailer ought to be simple and utilitarian. Historically, they all were. The first Star-class sloops, which appeared in New York in 1911 and sparked the revolutionary idea of amateur sailboat racing among the nonmoneyed classes, sold for $240 each. Over the winter of 1914–15 the famed Herreshoff shop in Bristol, Rhode Island, produced its first twenty Herreshoff 12½s for a price of $420 apiece. For comparison, a 1915 Ford Model T sedan cost $740. Today you can still buy a basic, factory-produced fiberglass sailing dinghy for half the cost of a cheap new car—in the range of $5,000 to $10,000. But a wooden sailing dinghy worthy of a connoisseur, expertly built and painstakingly detailed, can cost more than twice that new car’s sticker. An heirloom-quality Haven 12½, the successor to the Herreshoff 12½, starts around $40,000 and ascends through the stratosphere on a steep ladder of options.

  Of course I’d rather own the classy Haven than any comparable production boat, just as I’d rather have a mug of freshly ground Starbucks French Roast than Maxwell House. And of course it’s always possible that a taste for better things can be interpreted—often rightly—as affectation or pretension. But I think small boats are by their very nature exempt from the charge. I’ve never seen a small boat, particularly a boat with sails, that struck me as pretentious. Big yachts are another matter. The dividing line is—well, etched in the retina of the beholder. I think it might be in the neighborhood of a forty-foot length.

  I hoped my Zephyr would turn out to look a little more like a carefully crafted boat than the plain-vanilla fiberglass variety, or Thoreau’s one-week wonder, although at this point it looked like it could go either way. I suspected Henry wouldn’t think much of my intention to spend a year building it. He scorned anything that imposed commitment or confinement on its owner—a schedule, a job, a house that demanded daily labor to support its upkeep. “As long as possible live free and uncommitted,” he lectured in Walden. “It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.” His cranky libertarianism and no-nonsense frugality appeal to me on a gut level, but I wonder what civilization would have to show for itself if we all took it to heart. Creating things of beauty generally demands fierce commitment on the part of their creators, and it’s precisely these things—Brahms’s symphonies, Wright’s architecture, Herreshoff’s sailboats—that enrich civilization.

  But a boat doesn’t have to be a masterpiece to simply enrich its builder or owner. This is a comforting thought, and I was indebted to a friend named Vicki Altizer for illustrating it for me.

  I’d had no idea Vicki had a boatbuilding episode in her past. She’s a few years younger than me, petite and vivacious and strikingly pretty—hard to imagine her flocked with sawdust and spattered with paint. But I was telling her about the Zephyr one evening at a dinner party and she said, “I built a sailboat, too, when I was thirteen.”

  “A model?”

  “No, a real sailboat. I still have it; I took my son out for a sail on Lake Washington last summer.”

  I asked if I could come over and see it. Of course, she said. A few days later I was at her house in suburban Bellevue, staring in amazement at Lady Bug, which Vicki had wrestled out from deep storage in the garage for a daylight viewing. She was a miniature, snub-nosed plywood pram just under seven feet long. She had a square ripstop nylon sail and a varnished closet-pole mast. The workmanship appeared solid but rudimentary. “I was thirteen ,” Vicki reminded me. But Lady Bug was indeed a real sailboat: Vicki used to sail her among the San Juan Islands.

  The catalyst, as Vicki related the story, was her childhood neighbor, a “Renaissance man” named Arv Cunnington, who was building a twenty-six-foot Thunderbird-class sailboat in his garage next door. Vicki’s parents both worked, and she disliked coming home after school to an empty house, so she began hanging out in Arv’s garage, watching him work. One afternoon she confided that she wished she had a little boat that she could use by herself at her family’s summer property in the San Juans. It wasn’t about the water, but the allure of a small swatch of independence. At her age, driving her parents’ motorboat by herself was out of the question.

  “I’ve got plans for a little sailboat,” Arv said. “I’ll show you.”

  Arv pulled out the plans from a closet. Vicki was struck by how similar they looked to sewing patterns—and at thirteen, she was already an accomplished seamstress. She asked Arv to go over all the materials the boat would require, and she scribbled a list. A few days later, pointedly neglecting to inform Arv or any other adult, she gathered up her hoarded babysitting revenue, enlisted her older brother to drive her to a marine supply store, and trundled back to Arv’s garage with $69 worth of marine plywood, fiberglass tape, epoxy, and assorted bits of hardware.

  Thirty-five years later, Arv recalled that moment vividly. “I was astonished,” he told me on the phone. “Children’s pipe dreams are generally transitory. But Vicki was a very unusual child. And I was absolutely thrilled.”

  The work stretched over seven months, which Vicki recalled as one of the sweetest brackets of her life. Word rattled around the neighborhood, and people dropped by Arv’s garage to observe and marvel. She enjoyed the attention, but then, inevitably, the gritty reality of boat work threatened to overwhelm her. Arv knew precisely what to do. “He sat me down and told me this was common when taking on any large project, and you just had to persevere through the doldrums,” she said. “He broke down what I needed to do in small steps, taking them one at a time. We set a goal of finishing on my fourteenth birthday.”

  With that plan, Vicki became boatstricken. She collected her first-ever D in school, in geometry, as boat daydreams displaced attention in class. One could well argue, retroactively, that building a boat is an education in geometry. Arv, meanwhile, enforced quality control. When Vicki poured white paint over the hull—“I loved short cuts, and I thought it would be faster than brushing”—Arv wouldn’t have it. He made her scrape it off and repaint properly.

  She aced the deadline. On July 11, 1970, her fourteenth birthday, her father tucked the boat into the bed of his pickup, and a procession of family and friends trucked her to a small lake in north Seattle. Lady Bug was christened either with pink champagne or beer—Vicki’s and Arv’s recollections diverged here—and launched.

  I asked Vicki what, on reflection, the successful project did for her. “I was a typically insecure teenager, and now I had really accomplished something—something that had been my idea. I really don’t believe I ever asked my parents for permission. I just did it. It also gave me a goal, a passion, and a deep feeling of being cared about by members of a community.”

  But Vicki never became a passionate sailor, never built another boat. Although she still keeps Lady Bug close at hand, by the time I surveyed her she was looking slightly decrepit. Vicki confessed the hull leaked, and hadn’t been fixed. What had happened to the passion?

  “My life changed. I got busy. I’ve had jobs ever since I was sixteen. Raising my kids is my passion now. But building the boat had an effect on the way I do it. My number one goal is that they feel safe with me—safe to pursue the things they dream about.”

  She mentioned then that her son, Bentley, thirteen, was interested in boats. “Could he come over and see the one you’re building?”

  Thoreau’s dory, Vicki’s pram, and my dinghy (the terms are surprisingly vague and almost interchangeable) had one thing in common: they all were originally forms of workboats th
at evolved into pleasure boats. In a capsule, that’s the history of North American boating at least until the fiberglass revolution. As spare time gradually trickled into middle-class life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rowing and sailing for leisure occurred to more and more people who lived close to water. Since the nautical world is inherently conservative and respectful of tradition (as I discovered in my initiation to lofting), builders adapted existing boat forms to new uses rather than inventing.

  The earliest made-in-America boats of the colonies were birch bark canoes, copied from the indigenous craft of northeastern Indians. These light, swift boats frankly astonished the white settlers, who must have felt more than slightly embarrassed in their heavy, cumbersome rowboats. “In 1605 three laughing Indians literally paddled circles round the lumbering dory paddled by traveler George Weymouth and seven other men,” wrote Charles C. Mann in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. “Not only were [the Indians] faster,” John McPhee wryly added in The Survival of the Bark Canoe. “They could see where they were going.” The new Americans borrowed the native technology for inland exploration and, predictably, bloated it up—fur traders eventually commissioned Indian canoes that were thirty-six feet long and could float four tons of cargo. In the nineteenth century, the canoe form migrated to England for leisure-class hunting and picnicking, then finally back to America as an all-purpose pleasure craft. Along the way, builders found that canoes, like most small boats, could be built with an astonishing variety of materials. Indians peeled the pliable bark off birch trees, formed it into a canoe shape, then inserted cedar planking and ribs to give it strength. Since then, canoes have been built out of wood strips, plastic, fiberglass, canvas, Dacron, and least elegantly, aluminum.