The Year of the Boat

by Lawrence W. Cheek

“Do you feel as inept as I do?” I asked Patty.

  “I’m too tired to feel.”

  To our relief, David White met us at the fuel dock to help wheedle Serenity back into her congested slip. I expected a scolding; he must have observed at least part of our festival of ineptitude from the dock. Instead, he was disarmingly sympathetic.

  “That was kind of like learning to swim in the rapids out there,” he said.

  The next day Patty showed me a bruise on her backside the color of cherries and raisins and the size of a cell phone—a Serenity specialty, apparently. We were both walking bundles of aches. They would evaporate in a day or two, but I was concerned that the negative psychological imprint wouldn’t.

  What if this trajectory of enchantment with boats and the building and sailing of them ended right here, with the thud of an honest admission that we don’t like it? Completing the Zephyr would be pointless, clearly. And what then does one do with a half-finished sailboat in the garage? Too big to ignore, too insignificant to donate to a museum, too floaty to tow out to sea and sink.

  Maybe it would wash up on the Google beach:

  Mysterious sailboat hull turns up in Costco parking lot.

  CHAPTER 9

  WOOD WORK

  WILLIAM RUCKELSHAUS WAS speaking downtown at a breakfast meeting of People for Puget Sound, an environmental action organization I’d just joined. Ruckelshaus ran the Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1970s, but enjoyed his fifteen-minute nova of fame as deputy attorney general in 1973, when he resigned rather than follow President Nixon’s order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Now a private citizen and environmental activist living in Seattle, Ruckelshaus still milks a bit of mileage out of his role in Nixon’s meltdown. After thanking the group for inviting him, he added, “Ever since I left Washington, I’ve enjoyed speaking into microphones I can see.”

  After this token joke, he turned serious. Puget Sound is in real trouble, he said, its salmon and orca populations threatened by a panoply of pollution sources. The most ominous statistic is that we 3.8 million humans now huddled around the Sound will balloon to a projected 5.4 million in 2020. “The pressures are enormous,” Ruckelshaus said. “We have to change the way we live and interact with the environment.”

  I felt a wave of pessimism. Human cultures have demonstrated again and again that we don’t change in response to environmental problems until they become head-on crises, and by then a complete ecological or social collapse may be inevitable. The sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson has a theory why: Early in the course of human evolution we became conditioned to care primarily about the issues that affected our extended family and its surroundings, and at most one or two generations of immediate descendants. In an age of small, self-sufficient huntergatherer clans, this compact circle seemed like all that mattered to an individual’s welfare, so issues that might sink the entire culture in future generations could be ignored. But even before the Industrial Revolution and today’s global economy, that was boneheaded. As Jared Diamond documented in Collapse, whole civilizations have regularly blundered into oblivion because they made bad decisions about their environment and resource management. All that’s different today is that we have the technology to prolong our denial. If we decimate the salmon runs in Puget Sound, we can still fly seafood in from Alaska or Norway—until we foul their spawning grounds, or run out of jet fuel.

  But Ruckelshaus wasn’t ready to give up, and the tagline of his brief speech packed a compelling resonance. “We should not despair,” he insisted, “because failure always follows despair.”

  I pondered that through the rest of the day, though perhaps in confirmation of Wilson’s theory about self-centered myopia I wasn’t thinking about the health of Puget Sound, but about the boat in my garage. Lately I’d been edging toward discouragement, if not quite despair. The setbacks and doubts were piling on: that terrible first solo sail, the endless sanding, a crush of writing and editing work that had kept me from spending any more than token time on the boat for several weeks, and a flurry of minor mistakes that had me thinking that the Big One was coming, like the seismic tingles that precede a monster quake.

  But Ruckelshaus is right: Tell yourself that you’re in the process of failing, and it becomes a perfect self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s as true in the microcosm of a man building a boat as it is for a region or nation confronting an environmental problem. If you stop caring, then you start merely going through the motions. You cover up, gloss over. In an age of evangelical personal cheerleading, success slogans are trite and ubiquitous, but I recently ran across this thought from Albert Schweitzer, which seems sturdy enough to transcend popular culture: “The great secret to success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.” That would seem to describe Schweitzer’s life, and Ruckelshaus’s, and what I needed to do to get back on track with the Zephyr.

  Patty’s unerring weathervane sensed my emotional doldrums, and one evening while I washed dishes she disappeared into her upstairs studio to work on her computer. This was her usual time slot for answering e-mail, but she took more than an hour and wouldn’t answer questions later about what she’d been doing. The next morning at breakfast there appeared a custom-made card at my place with a painting of a big square-rigger on the front and a caption that said: “Life is a great adventure—live it up.” Inside, she had written: “For the boatbuilder, love of my life.”

  Boats have numerous parts that casual onlookers never notice because they’re so mundane, and that drive boatbuilders nuts because they’re so tricky. One of these is the stem, which is sort of a vertical wooden bumper that forms the leading edge of the bow. It’s a vital structural piece because it terminates and draws together the sides of the hull, and because if the skipper slams onto a beach or into another boat, the stem takes the hit. It’s deceptively difficult to build because it has to gracefully define the long curve of the bow, and attach in some way that never allows water to seep in behind it and attack the wood with hidden rot. Builders of wooden boats have been known to prowl forests for oaks that grew crooked so they could saw one-piece curved stems from the trunks. Since I didn’t want to have to learn forestry to build a fourteen-foot boat, I looked for an easier way.

  Devlin’s plans were clear, but surprisingly stingy with details. He had drawn the stem in profile, but provided no template, didn’t suggest what kind of wood it should be, and neglected to show how it was supposed to be attached. Since I had built a kayak stem on Sea Major, which so far hadn’t fallen off or rotted, I figured I could maybe adapt that technique to the sailboat.

  Over dinner I described the stem problem to Patty and explained how I planned to address it.

  “Why don’t you call Sam Devlin?” she asked.

  “I don’t think I need to. I think this’ll work pretty well.”

  She didn’t say anything in response, but the faint crinkles of concern and disapproval lingered on her face. She was navigating the narrow passage between offering helpful advice and butting in. She didn’t want to see me discouraged or overwhelmed, but also didn’t want to find herself aboard a flimsy sailboat that’s breaking up in rough water because its very amateur builder was too stubborn to ask for help. She mentally reviewed the times Sea Major had survived nasty seas and rough landings, and decided to let it pass—for the time being.

  The next day I put my bright idea into action. I would create an inch-thick inner stem of thickened epoxy—hardest substance in the known universe—by pouring it into the crook of the V where the insides of the hull met at the bow. After it hardened, I’d trim it into a nice, smooth curve, then make a template and cut an outer stem of oak to mate with the inner stem.

  I scissored a temporary mold for the inner stem out of poster board and fastened it in place inside the bow with duct tape. I mixed six ounces of glop, thickened it with wood flour, then poured it into the mold. So far so good, need more glop. I turned to my worktable and mixed another batch. When I returned to the
Zephyr, glop was oozing from underneath the tape and forming a river in the bottom of the boat, like molten lava rolling through the main street of Pompeii. I grabbed more duct tape and tried to plug the leak, but of course it wouldn’t stick to liquid epoxy.

  I was using slow-curing epoxy, which bought me the luxury of not panicking. I had up to an hour to decide what to do before the lava would solidify. Realistically, there were just two options: muck out all the glop and start over, or figure out a way to live with what had happened. Since the bottom of the boat could use some fortification anyway, I decided on the latter. I snipped a couple of strips of fiberglass, layered them over the arroyo of glop, and brushed on more epoxy to saturate them. When it cured, this would all become part of the boat’s structure. It would look terrible, but should mostly escape notice under the deck—and it actually would strengthen the hull. Victory, of a sort, wrestled from the jaws of incompetence.

  The next day I built a stronger cardboard mold and tried pouring the epoxy stem again. This time several layers of duct tape held back the river, but the weight of the epoxy made the midriff of my mold bulge, as if it were pregnant. I should have predicted this, too; gravity causes endless problems with epoxy. I grabbed some spare rocks from my garden and weighed down the teeming paper dam, hoping it wouldn’t breach again. It held, but my improvised solution looked thoroughly ridiculous. What would Devlin think? He’d laugh, groan, or most appropriately pour a bucket of glop over my head.

  I let the inner stem cure under its weighted wall for a couple of days, then chiseled away the cardboard-and-tape mold. No question about its strength. Icebergs? Bring ’em on. Now, however, I had to make the exposed outer stem and attach it, a problem that I hadn’t actually thought through yet.

  I made a rough template of the outer curve of the bow out of poster board, then snipped away at it with scissors until it fit precisely. Then I transferred that curve to a slab of oneinch-thick oak. The board wasn’t wide enough to accommodate the whole stem in one piece, so I drew it as two pieces. Then I cut them out with the bandsaw. I’d become reasonably adept with the saw, so I expected my curve to fit to the inner stem as neatly as nesting spoons. It didn’t. Daylight streamed through innumerable cracks and crescents. I also realized that I hadn’t considered the direction of the grain in laying out the two pieces, so I now had this nice, vivid oak grain running north in one piece of the stem and west in the other.

  I could throw these pieces into the scrap pile and start over. Or I could trim and sand until the imperfect pieces worked, and to hell with the mismatched grain.

  I hadn’t yet thought too deeply about conservation issues regarding my modest boat—how profligate can a fourteen-foot sailing dinghy be?—but there was a startling mountain of scrap wood nesting under my worktable, and I fully believed what Ruckelshaus had preached so concisely and forcefully: that we’d better change the way we live and interact with our environment. In the macrocosm of planet Earth, a single amateur boatbuilder scrapping five board feet of oak makes no practical difference. But could the attitude expressed by the waste be significant? Could the refusal to waste make a point, create a ripple effect through civilization?

  I have tried making ripples. When we moved into our achingly suburban neighborhood ten years ago, I was dismayed by all the grass lawns, and by all the time, noise, gasoline, chemical warfare, and air pollution invested in maintaining them. In a fit of reactionary protest, I bought a human-powered push mower. The first time I mowed my front lawn, it actually drew a crowd of neighborhood kids, who’d never seen such a contraption before.

  “How come your mower doesn’t have a motor?” one asked.

  I felt a teachable moment coming on. “Because there’s only so much gasoline left on earth,” I said. “I believe we ought to save it for more important things than mowing our lawns.”

  The kid stood there for a moment, looking thoughtful. I wondered if I’d successfully implanted the conservation germ. He turned and wandered away. A few minutes later he was back.

  “I told my dad what you said,” he reported. “He said you’re a nut.”

  It would be nice to report that persistence paid off, and that human-powered mowers gradually spread through the neighborhood, but no. Several homeowners are now using rechargeable electrics, though, which is a modestly positive step. (More positive would be to get rid of all the worthless grass.) But we can’t ever predict or quantify the consequences of a proclamation of personal values. All I know for certain is that despair is the wrong route to fixing anything.

  Eventually, someone may ask about my mismatched stem pieces. It’ll be an opportunity to talk about a balance of values: I made an amateur’s mistake, I’ll say, that detracted from the beauty of the boat, but not its performance or safety, so I chose to use the flawed pieces. And anyway, there may be so many other things wrong with the Zephyr that nobody will ever notice the stem.

  I doweled and glued the misfits together. The joint was sketchy, and it took a good hour of sanding to make the stem begin to look like a coherent unit. Then I spent an entire Sunday afternoon trimming its curvature with the orbital sander to match the bow. This left only the problem of how to attach it. Since I’d built it unconventionally, there was nothing in any of my boatbuilding books to explain what to do next: I was on my own.

  “Why don’t you call Sam Devlin?” Patty suggested.

  What the hell. I just blurted the truth: “Because he’ll tell me I’ve chosen a ridiculous way to make the stem and that I’ll have to throw it away and start over.”

  “People have told you he’s a nice guy.”

  “Even nice guys tolerate only so much foolishness.”

  I decided I could chisel a groove into the inside curve of the stem and, with lavish applications of glop, glue and screw it to the bow. It took about five hours to gouge out the groove, a job that I extended over three days. I was working with agonizing delicacy to avoid the disaster of splitting the wood. Finally, the stem seemed ready. I filled its groove with glop the consistency of peanut butter and squashed it onto the bow, then secured it with duct tape. My boat looked worse than either sausage or legislation in progress. But a day later the glop had cured and I removed the tape, then for insurance installed rather handsome bronze screws fastening the outer to inner stem, and filled the angles at the sides with more glop, finally sanding it to smooth and even graceful seams.

  According to my log I had spent twelve hours on this stillimperfect piece. But the Zephyr suddenly looked a little more substantial, a little more like a real boat.

  A few days later I mailed Sam Devlin a letter. It seemed faintly quaint, this act of sealing a scrap of personal correspondence in a paper envelope and dropping it in a mail slot, but I wanted to include some bits of the story of how I came to be building his boat, and it felt like a more substantial package on paper. It also seemed like the fitting way to approach a builder of wooden boats in the twenty-first century. I asked if I could drive down to his shop near Olympia, some ninety miles from my house in Issaquah, for a conversation. I was a little vague about why. There were a couple of technical issues looming ahead in the construction, and I didn’t want to grope blindly through them as I had with the stem. But it was really bigger than that, and I couldn’t explain it to a stranger in an introductory letter.

  I’d been avoiding Devlin since I started work on his boat. When my freshly glued hull torqued itself apart and presented that ¼-inch gap between the pieces, Patty suggested that I call him to ask what to do. I didn’t. Same with the stem issues. When we had gone to the Seattle Boat Show in January there had been a pair of Devlin boats moored at the Lake Union marina. The owner of one had invited us aboard. It was a forty-one-foot motor cruiser that looked like a classic trawler dressed for an inaugural ball. The workmanship looked like what you’d expect to find on a good violin. Panels fit together with immaculate precision. The curved surfaces of the hull, inside and out, seemed to flow together as gracefully as if the entire boat had b
een sculpted from a single block of wood.

  “Sam’s around,” the owner said. “He’ll probably be back in thirty minutes.” I studied the cruiser for twenty minutes and slipped out.

  I wanted to meet him, but something just as strong was tugging me in the opposite direction. Fear of criticism, disapproval, inadequacy, asking ridiculous questions—a strong tug, all taken together. And thoroughly irrational. What reason would Devlin have to scoff at my half-built boat or my amateur’s questions? Part of his livelihood is selling his plans to builders like me. He wouldn’t have much of a business if he made a practice of ridiculing our efforts.

  I don’t dispose of irrational fears efficiently. I mull, sideline, deny, delay, and avoid; but finally, when a decision has to be made, I take it out and flood it with the hard light of rationality. And then, almost invariably, the fear evaporates. But I never seem to take the shortest route—like a sailboat, I have to tack my way upwind. On the surface that sounds like a very clever analogy, but it’s actually not good at all. The human mind isn’t constrained by the laws of physics: it can sail straight into the wind if it’s told to. My vectoring is a character defect. In this case it was driven by pride. Vanity. Fear of being found out for what I actually was: an amateur.

  Three days after I mailed the letter, the phone rang, and it was Sam Devlin. “Come on down,” he said. “I’d love to learn more about your boat.”

  Devlin’s boat works is tucked away on a remote tentacle of Puget Sound ten miles out of Olympia. It’s not in a place that tourists would ever stumble onto, nor would they notice anything remarkable if they did. There’s a two-story-tall corrugated steel building with a plastic Port-A-Potty parked at its side, and a wooden outbuilding the size of a small travel trailer with an asymmetrical peaked roof. A sign labels the outbuilding as the office. Half a dozen corroding boat propellers and anchors snore on the wooden building’s porch, the only picturesque touch in the complex.