The Year of the Boat

by Lawrence W. Cheek

  I bought an unfinished piece of cedar an inch thick and five feet long to make the curved piece of the thwart. It had a small knot, so it was cheap—only $16. I’d decided I had nothing against knots as long as they weren’t in a position to subvert a critical piece of structure. I didn’t view them as imperfections; they were the geography of the tree. I was also saving money buying an unfinished board. I’d learned that cedar was so easy to smooth out—three minutes with a sander would do it for this piece—that it now seemed silly to pay for factory milling. I hadn’t realized this when I picked out that $99 piece for the centerboard.

  Periodically I thought about Dad and the projects we’d attempted together before a deep estrangement in my high school years had made cooperation impossible. Neither of us had known much about woodworking, but he had bought a package set of Skil power tools—circular saw, drill, sander—and together we had groped our way through a remodeling of our single-car garage into a rudimentary family room. Without heat or air-conditioning it didn’t prove to be much of a “family” habitat, but it turned into my retreat from the torrents of alcohol-fueled criticism I could expect if I hung out in the main part of the house. The project didn’t fully qualify as a happy memory, but it helped me realize that despite our vast outward differences, there was more of my father in me than I’d been willing to accept to this point in my adult life. The garage renovation was a big and intimidating job he hadn’t known how to do at the outset, as is my Zephyr. He also passed on to me a moral compass firmly locked onto honesty, responsibility, and ethical work. Somewhere in there had been the spiritual lodestone that had helped both of us quit drinking. In the light of all that, our differences didn’t seem very important.

  I used the empirical method—cut and try, cut and try—to make cardboard templates for the slight curves where the ends of the thwart had to butt into the sides of the hull. I transferred the templates’ shapes to the cedar, then used the rudder I had made several months ago as kind of a French curve to complete the outline of my elegant thwart. (Don’t those two words combine for a delicious oxymoronic resonance?) I measured the length three times, then cut it out on the bandsaw. Then I sawed a board for the other plank of the thwart. I planned to leave a ⅛-inch gap between them so water could drain off the seat. Finally, I shaped the mounting brackets out of some scrap cedar.

  Not one of these pieces fit.

  One plank of the elegant thwart was of an inch too short. The other sported a bum curvature at one end. The brackets nested sloppily in the crooks where the hull pieces met.

  I could have made all the pieces fit through liberal bastings of glop. But I was getting thoroughly sick of sanding it, and I also felt I ought to stick with my original plan just to screw in the thwart so it could be removed if it ever needed renovation. If I glopped the gaps, the thwart would become a structural piece of the boat, locked into place for eternity.

  I bought another cedar board, smaller and cheaper yet—only $9. It wasn’t wide enough to take the elegant curve of its predecessor, but I was starting to feel that the boat needed an infusion of economic reality. Using the badly fitting pieces as almost-templates, I was able to cut and trim their replacements with just enough adjustments that they fit fairly well—almost precisely, in fact. I’d learned the secret to boatbuilding: just make everything twice. One more mistake surfaced as I slicked the thwart with a coat of clear epoxy to waterproof it: the colors of the two cedar pieces, which the epoxy brought out, were radically different. One was the hue of honey, the other ginger ale. But I would not do it over again. The Zephyr would just have to celebrate the ethnic diversity of the cedar forest.

  While I fit the seats, Elizabeth popped in for her daily visit, this time with her mother, Pam. Elizabeth opened with her usual question: “What are you doing?”

  I showed her the seat, which to her eyes looked pretty much like a couple of plain boards that I’d been fooling with for three days. “Why don’t you just finish the boat?” she asked.

  I couldn’t think of an answer. I must have looked existentially lost, as if she’d asked the meaning of life. Pam stepped in to save me. “Because Larry’s a perfectionist,” she said.

  “Oh God no!” I said, and I practically leaped around the boat pointing out its gallery of mistakes. I wasn’t sure whether I was rejecting Pam’s label because I didn’t deserve it or because I was afraid of it, but either way, I knew I didn’t want it.

  A few moments later, echoes of the awkward exchange still lingering in the air, I thought of the name for my boat. I’d been considering names for months, trying to find one that somehow encapsulated a story, yet wouldn’t sound pretentious or hilariously ironic if we ever had to radio the Coast Guard for help. The best boat name I’ve ever seen is Never Again VI, but its story didn’t fit my project. I’d considered Precursor and Perseverance, but both seemed overly serious for a fourteen-foot dinghy. The Zephyr’s name, thanks to Pam’s inspiration, would be:

  Far From Perfect.

  In the summer’s air spaces between writing, teaching, dealing long-distance with Dad’s care, and work on the boat, I was devouring every book on sailing and wooden boatbuilding I could find. Some were technical, some unabashedly romantic, some chronicled swashbuckling adventures Patty and I would never, ever undertake—crossing the Atlantic in a twenty-seven-foot sloop—and a few tried, always with difficulty, to grapple with some deeper meaning, to elucidate the values somehow embedded in handmade boats. It was those values that I chased the hardest: What were they? And was there a tangible manifestation, or were they something mystical? Not being a mystic, I hoped for the former. Michael Ruhlman offered an exquisite proposition in Wooden Boats, his profile of the boatbuilding firm Gannon & Benjamin: “The science and beauty [of wooden boats] were inextricably linked, were perhaps the same thing.” But the commentator who made me think the hardest was a Rhode Island boat designer named Antonio Dias, who wrote in a rambling but intriguing book titled Designer & Client:It may seem ludicrous to expect boats—and pleasure boats at that—to be vehicles for a search for truth. Aren’t they toys, conspicuous consumption, status symbols? . . . Twenty-odd years down this path, I must say that I still have reason to doubt this conventional wisdom. I continue to see glimmers of the transformative powers inherent in boats and refuse to abandon my expectations.

  . . . A boat demands investment from us. And I don’t mean financial investment. Every boat presents a challenge; that’s what makes it seem almost alive. Without care, boats die—and a dying or dead boat is, at the very least, heart-wrenching. The more time we give to boats, the more they thrive—and the strange part is, so do we. They open us to their own rhythms and to those of the waters they carry us over and through....

  The phrase that resonated deeply was open us to their own rhythms. A sailboat most obviously does this, because in a sailboat we have to understand and cooperate with the wind and current; trying to overpower them is patently futile. This can form a template for our full spectrum of relationships with the natural world, if we allow it to. I was beginning to discern tidal rhythms in my boatbuilding project, too—cycles of fatigue and discouragement alternating with optimism and the joy of accomplishment. Permeating them all was the idea contained in the name Far From Perfect. It was wry and self-deprecating and would save the trouble of apology and explanation if I ever got to the point of exhibiting her in one of the wooden boat shows, but it also captured a moment of acceptance that could ripple outward from the boat to embrace other things and people.

  Which brought me around to my father, once again. Our relationship, fifty-eight years long, had been very far from perfect. We had never been able to pal around like some fathers and sons; our interests and worldviews seemed chasmically different. Neither of us had tried hard enough at the time in our lives when it could have made a difference. But now, near the end, each of us seemed to have accepted that imperfection and made the best of it that we could.

  I wrote my grateful notes about the core
values he had passed on to me into my boatbuilding journal, which became this book. Fifteen hundred miles away, in a place where no one thinks about boats, he tacked a color photo of Far From Perfect beside his bed and showed it off to all his visitors.

  CHAPTER 12

  GRETA

  ON A WARM AUGUST SATURDAY morning Patty and I tossed Sea Major and Plankton onto the Subaru’s roof rack and drove to a beach park just across Commencement Bay from Tacoma. It’s our usual launch site for what has become our favorite paddling destination, a long, deep inlet up the south end of Vashon Island. Although we have to cross the east channel of Puget Sound to reach the island—this includes crossing the shipping lanes—the four-mile-long inlet is arguably the loveliest kayaking environment in the region. It’s quiet, secluded from wind and waves on three sides, and punctuated with interesting but not pretentious waterfront homes. And there are always sailboats to ponder.

  I had a particular one in mind this day: a small, traditional, carvel-planked wooden daysailer whose lines and craftsmanship were achingly beautiful. She was usually parked a couple of hundred feet offshore near, I assumed, her master’s home on the inlet, but every time I’d paddled by, a canvas cover had been stretched over her deck. That’s smart preservation strategy for any wooden boat that has to snooze in the sun, but I kept hoping to drop by sometime when the owner had been lazy and hadn’t covered her up. I ached to see her naked.

  And we got lucky this day—she wasn’t wearing her smock. For the first time I learned her name, Greta, and I was able to peer over the gunwales into her cockpit. She appeared to be as beautifully crafted inside as out. There was a carving on the coaming with the insignia and the notation US 107. I thought that might be enough to track down her story, and possibly her owner.

  As soon as we returned home I launched an Internet mission, and discovered the daysailer was a classic twenty-foot BB11 designed half a century ago by the Norwegian builder Borge Bringsvaerd. A British website devoted to the marque praised it as “fast and dry, having an easily driven and particularly seaworthy hull form.” About 1,200 were built, and the design was so esteemed that many are still being regularly restored, sailed, and raced. There was nothing floating around cyberspace about the individual beauty named Greta, however, and I wondered how I could contact her owner. A moment later, it occurred to me: another Saturday, another expedition to Vashon, and a note in a Ziploc bag.

  I felt as though I was having serial affairs, sneaking out to meet assorted boats, hoping for a glance under their skirts, leaving my number in hopes of a hookup on a future date. But only traditional boats—made of wood, powered by sails, in forms that have not changed much for centuries. This seemed startlingly inconsistent with my normal compass heading of aesthetic taste. In my occasional day job as architecture critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer I’m a relentless opponent of nostalgia in architecture, such as the reactionary neo-Craftsman townhomes and smarmy Hansel-and-Gretel cottages local developers are throwing up in the suburbs and selling for $500,000 to inexplicably uncritical buyers. Retro design in cars and appliances doesn’t amuse me, and I’ve never owned a piece of Early American or Spanish Colonial furniture, authentic or replica. I believe good design respects function and reflects the culture of its own time.

  How was it that wooden sailboats were getting a pass?

  I dug out Kant’s The Critique of Aesthetics and Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty and waded into some aesthetic theory for a few hours. Those waters were frigid, and, for me, largely lifeless. I realized the questions What is beauty? and Why do we respond to it? are too personal and vivid to be considered in philosophical abstraction. The answers don’t come from sitting in a darkened study, thinking hard and deep. They’re more likely to occur on a hike in the Grand Canyon, or a walk on the beach.

  Because it’s out there, in nature, that our fundamental sense of beauty is rooted. I think that at a subconscious level, we compare the forms we know in nature to those we see in man-made objects, and react with instinctive pleasure if the object reveals a relationship to a natural form. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is a perfect example. It soars into the sky with an effortless grace that seems more like a force of nature than a piece of architecture. In fact, it is a force of nature: Eero Saarinen, the architect, took its form from the catenary curve, the arc of a chain hanging between two fixed points, and simply inverted it. It’s a universal truth, wherever gravity operates.

  We respond more readily to the curved line than to the straight. Curves are the fundamental lines of nature, from the curl of a huckleberry leaf to the exotic S of a great blue heron’s neck. Rivers carve serpentine paths in accord with a fundamental principle of physics: centrifugal force causes water to accelerate on the outside of a turn, increasing its power to cut away the bank. Rivers are more beautiful and more interesting than human-engineered canals because of these meanderings. It’s interesting to consider how Roman architecture blossomed in the third century BC, when builders began using concrete. That gave rise to the arch and vault, which softened the rectilinear severity of earlier classical architecture. Repeating arches, as in the Colosseum, set up a visual rhythm that echoed arrangements of natural forms—scallop shells, ocean swells, or a canopy of tree branches arching over a path—rather than the imposing but uptight architectural form of the Greek temple.

  We crave the patterns and textures of nature so deeply today that we try to replicate them in plastics and composites, usually with egregious results. Remember the spackled linoleum on Mom’s kitchen counter or the schoolroom floor? That was supposed to insinuate granite. My Subaru, an otherwise commendably honest and forthright car, has swatches of inane plastic wood framing the center console. It’s a vestige of the “woody” craze a half-century back, when station wagons were encrusted with side panels of wood—first real, then fake—that had absolutely no functional value. What car manufacturers are trying to do is convince us that these mechanical contrivances are not entirely divorced from the natural world, and effect some link to the history of wheeled transportation, when wagons and coaches were made of wood.

  I’m analyzing my own emotional responses to sailboats, and here’s what I’m thinking: These creations combine some of the most compelling, elemental forms of the natural world—the curve, the fin, the wing—with just enough outwardly visible mechanical complexity to reassure us that human ingenuity has a rightful place in the gearworks of nature. This connection seems urgently needed if we’re ever going to reach that equilibrium in which we consume resources at a sustainable pace and respect nature enough to act like members of a community instead of lords of the manor. We won’t achieve that balance by repudiating all technology, nor by imagining that we can use it to invent our way out of every ecological crisis. A sailboat is a symbol of some middle ground, something that suggests a future in which beauty, comfort, and economy might all be achievable within the package of civilization.

  I’m also convinced that nobody looks at a sailboat as pure aesthetic form. There’s a whole storybook of human culture encapsulated in every boat with a sail, and at some level that colors our perception with intrigue and joy—the latter depending on point of view.

  The sailboat is arguably one of the four or five most significant inventions in human history, along with movable type, antibiotics, the internal combustion engine, and the personal computer. It enabled the settlement of three new continents and the establishment of global trade and warfare. Less obviously, it represented the first sweeping triumph of science over superstition: think Magellan. This may be why people who have no connection to maritime life still find themselves almost invariably dazzled by sailing ships or images of them. I have a vivid childhood memory of an intricately detailed model Spanish galleon occupying the prime display niche of my great aunt’s living room in the not notably seafaring town of Oklahoma City. It was the most prominent cultural artifact in the house—in fact, the only one I can recall from this distance.

  This is, of course,
a white Euro-American point of view. I haven’t yet found a romantic print of a sailing ship over any motel bed on the Navajo Reservation, nor in Makah territory on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. A few years ago, when a parade of replica tall ships sailed proudly into Seattle’s Lake Washington Ship Canal, a band of Native Americans unfurled a banner to greet Columbus’s Niña:

  OK, YOU’VE SEEN THE NEW WORLD. NOW GO HOME.

  Seattle being the unfailingly liberal and PC place that it is, no jeers erupted. In fact, there was a murmur of applause—from us descendants of those damn pilgrims.

  Despite these postmodern pricks of conscience, I think most of us see the sailboat as a symbol of liberation. In the seventeenth century it provided an escape from ecclesiastical tyranny in Spain and class oppression in England. Today it appears to offer an antipode to lives oppressed by schedules, deadlines, urban congestion, noise, and clutter. Nearly everyone who sails will tell you that a great part of its joy comes from aligning oneself to the rhythms of nature, the tides, currents, wind, and solar and lunar cycles, instead of to the grid of a calendar and appointment book. (Note that a tidal graph is a curve, while that appointment book is all straight lines.) A sailboat offers relief from incomprehensible technology; everything on it works according to basic and visible physical principles (unless its owner has chosen to encrust it with electronic navigation, autopilot, and other sources of trouble). Your attention is not divided among a clamoring multitude of information and entertainment; everything is focused on the choreography of boat through water and air. Watching a faraway sailboat from shore, moving slowly, a pure white wing slipping elegantly through the breeze, it looks like distilled essence of freedom, even if the reality is a crew working like dogs to optimize sail trim or a new owner facing years of crushingly expensive renovations to a rot-stricken tub that he bought in a moment of swoon.