The Year of the Boat

by Lawrence W. Cheek

  I had been delaying actually implanting the centerboard for a good reason: I didn’t want the added heft of that hunk of lead in the boat’s belly during all the times we were having to flip her over. And also because of procrastination: I wasn’t confident that I had drilled all the holes accurately enough that the centerboard would pivot inside the slender sandwich of its trunk, as it should. If the hole alignment proved to be off by even a couple of degrees, the centerboard would bind, or even be impossible to install. And I didn’t actually know how to install it, since the pivot shaft, a big 2½-inch stainless steel bolt, was to go into a secluded cranny of the boat, hard to reach and impossible to see for the sake of alignment. I couldn’t remember any other step that had depended as much on blind luck as this one.

  It was a cold, gloomy, stormy January Sunday, and we were stuck indoors all day. At breakfast I asked Patty if she would help with the job.

  “There’s a good chance it won’t work,” I warned her. “But I’ve spent a couple of days thinking up a contingency plan, and I sort of have one. It would be a colossal amount of extra work, but at least I have an idea.”

  I knew exactly what she was going to say next, and she didn’t disappoint me.

  “If you expect the first try to fail, it will. Why don’t you try expecting success?”

  “I’m not being pessimistic, I’m being realistic. And by having a backup plan, I won’t be completely demoralized if the first try fails. Unhappy, but not devastated.”

  We’ve had versions of this debate hundreds of times in our thirty-six years of marriage, usually with a reasonable degree of tolerance for each other. Her worldview hasn’t been shaped by a life innocent of disappointment and even tragedy—entirely the opposite, in fact. Her father died in an airplane crash when she was sixteen, and barely two years later her fiancé was killed aboard a Navy ship in the infamous Israeli attack on the USS Liberty. And then there were my drinking years, when she had little cause for optimism about our future together. But she has always tried to face trouble with a positive attitude, and maintain a fierce belief in the power of faith to shape events.

  She can argue persuasively that it does. In the shattering aftermath of her father’s death, she was able to do a lot to hold the family together. And in the last year, she’s remained unshakable in her wild belief that I can actually build this sailboat even when the prospects have looked thoroughly bleak to me. Unquestionably, that conviction has exerted a tangible force by helping me slog through the cycles of discouragement. Still, if I had been inclined to argue at the breakfast table, I would have asked her to explain to me in raw physics how positive thinking could favorably shift the alignment of holes and bolts. Since I needed her help, I didn’t.

  The boat was upside down on a cluster of four worktables, whose arrangement created a tunnel for me to crawl underneath. Patty climbed a stepladder and guided the centerboard into its slot, positioning its now-invisible hole about where it should line up with the holes in the trunk. Of course it didn’t. For an hour we experimented with measurements, cardboard templates, pencil marks on masking tape, wrenching the heavy centerboard in and out, and, yes, forced positive thinking—everything except what we really needed, which was X-ray vision. Until you’ve tried to build a boat or a clock or a fax machine, it’s hard to fully appreciate what mass production has done for humanity.

  For Patty, this was physically difficult and painful work. She is petite, sensitive to cold, and lately has been cursed by the arrival of arthritis in her hands. Her ten-hour weekday shifts as an oncology nurse in a busy outpatient clinic drain her energy through the week, and she needs weekends to recuperate. I had gotten peeved at her a couple of times when she’d seemed reluctant to help me with some small operation on the boat. What I really wanted was for her to begin sharing my passion for boatbuilding, to pass happy hours in the garage with me planing and sanding. But that was unrealistic and unfair; she didn’t have the tolerance for physical discomfort or any compelling interest in the process. The role she wanted aligned with her weekday profession as a caregiver: providing philosophical perspective and emotional first aid. And she was unerringly good at that. This morning, though, she understood what a critical operation we were facing, and that I needed someone with more patience and commitment than I could ask from a neighbor. She wasn’t complaining.

  I had wormed the bolt about two-thirds of the way through, which meant it had found its way through one side of the trunk and the centerboard itself, but it hadn’t located the essential hole on the trunk’s opposite side. My fear was that it wouldn’t find this hole because the hole was in Belgium or someplace equally far from where it was supposed to be. I had run out of ideas. “The contingency plan is going to take about three days,” I groaned. “First, we plug and glass and paint over the existing holes—”

  “Have you tried everything?” she interrupted. “Have you really thought through the problem?” I groaned again but took the question seriously because it was an appropriate one—what I’d learned about boatbuilding had convinced me that many more errors are mental than physical. In reality, the bolt was probably no more than of an inch from finding its hole. And if that was true, then maybe we could use the centerboard itself as a giant lever to move it.

  I had Patty swing the centerboard up vertically—if the boat were in the water it would then have been pointing straight down—and pull it slightly toward her. With a series of pushes, pulls, and twists, we could next try pointing the bolt in four different directions and see if any one of them discovered the hole. But we didn’t even need four tries—the first was the right guess. The bolt threaded itself into the final hole and I coaxed it on through with a few dozen flicks of a ratchet wrench.

  Patty rotated the centerboard into its plywood nest. It grated a little, a tight fit. We wouldn’t know for sure whether the alignment was good enough until we got the boat in the water and actually tried to drop the board to counter the wind. Nor would we know if the neoprene washers were snug enough around the bolt to keep water from dribbling into the boat, my enduring worry. But for the moment I was enormously relieved. Aside from a terrific cramp along the entire length of my body from pretzeling under the boat for ninety minutes, the operation went as well as it possibly could have. And it did so without the benefit of any advance optimism on my part.

  But a day later, as I was outlining the operation in my builder’s log and reflecting on how we did it, I suddenly realized how my cloud of negativity almost scuttled everything and triggered the dire Plan B. My exaggerated imagining that the hole was in Belgium or someplace equally far was about to block the idea for the next, and ultimately successful, strategy. Only by assuming the most optimistic case—that the target was no more than of an inch away—did the next action become viable.

  Maureen Dowd, a columnist for The New York Times who has honed cynicism into high art, once wrote that “Perpetual optimism is annoying. It is a sign that you are not paying attention.” That’s irrefutably true, but perpetual pessimism is worse than annoying—it’s automatically self-defeating. I’ve always believed this, and have tried to chart a realistic course between the two extremes. Aim for success, but be prepared for failure. Seems entirely reasonable. But what Patty and the centerboard appeared to have shown me was that the preparations for failure can leak into the wrong compartment of the mind, the creative gearworks, and cause everything there to seize up. Learning to avoid that would take some practice, but maybe I’d just begun.

  CHAPTER 15

  MIND-BENDER

  A MAINE SAILOR NAMED Roger S. Duncan set out an idea that had me thinking. “People who build wooden boats have unique skills,” he wrote in a book about the creation of Dorothy Elizabeth, a twenty-eight-foot schooner he commissioned in 1996. “Almost nothing is square or level about a boat. One needs a flexibility of mind as great as the variety of three-dimensional curves and bevels... .”

  Flexible minds are underappreciated in these times—under attack, even—a
nd I’ll return to this broad issue in a few moments. My problem du jour on the Zephyr, though, demanded elastic thinking to figure out how to shape and implant the skeg. This is a five-foot-long fin that serves to help the boat track straight and also shields the more fragile rudder from scrapes on rock and beach. I’d already cut out the rough wedge shape of the skeg from a ¾-inch white oak board, but then I faced the problem of trimming and mating it to the curving centerline of the hull.

  There are expensive template tools that precisely trace curves like this, but Peter Gron had inspired me to try thinking outside the toolbox. He showed me how he’d made dozens of improvised plywood clamps for about a Canadian buck apiece. They were stunning in their sheer simplicity, and the way Peter came up with them was to look hard at the problem itself instead of surveying the existing options—the different types of commercial clamps. At issue was how to squeeze the sheer clamp, a twenty-four-foot-long wooden strip, tightly against the hull while its glue cured. Forty-eight C-clamps at five bucks apiece would have done nicely. Instead, the skinflint Peter cut out a pile of scrap plywood brackets in the shape of square-cornered horseshoes, and made a doorstop-like wedge to accompany each one. He then slipped the horseshoes over the sheer and “tightened” them with the wooden wedges. It was medieval technology, but it was economical and perfectly adequate for the job—and elegant in how it so precisely addressed the problem.

  I made a run to Home Depot with no plan except to wander the aisles and see what, if anything, occurred to me. I paused in the millwork department, mentally bending a piece of thin pine molding to match the keel line, then cobbling together a complicated template with a truss of dowels and braces. It would have looked like a model for a bridge—impressive in its refinement, but needlessly complicated for the job at hand. I was trying to think along the lines of Occam’s Razor: the simplest solution to a problem is likely to be the best. Slogging toward the tool department, I passed a bin of rough, near-throwaway cedar boards that just happened to measure five feet long. That was it! I bought two of them for $1.29 apiece.

  My idea was to bandsaw the curve on one of them as well as I could by eye, refine it by trial, error, and sandpaper, then use it as a template to lay out the curve on the much harder white oak skeg. Since cedar is soft and the scrap pieces were thin, they would be easy to shape. Having a second one on hand would serve as cheap insurance against messing up the first.

  It almost worked. After a couple of hours I saw that it wasn’t quite possible to fit the skeg template precisely to the curve of the keel. Every time I erased the last -inch gap in one place, it created a new one somewhere down the line. In light of my history, a -inch gap wasn’t bad. I declared the job done and sawed the skeg to the template’s arc. Then I chiseled out a little trough in the skeg’s new curve so it would mate more gracefully with the shallow V of the hull shape, lathered it generously with glop, and planted it vertically on the hull with a spirit level.

  It was essential that the skeg grip the hull mightily. Along with the stem, it’s the part of the boat most likely to suffer abuse. In effect, these are the boat’s bumpers. I ran two layers of glass cloth along the bottom of the hull and up the sides of the skeg, and over the course of two days saturated the whole works with five coats of epoxy. Since the skeg was vertical, the glop ran and sagged with gravity, creating a congealed mess that cost hours of sanding. But the dusty work was better than going out in a flimsy boat.

  I’d decided some time ago to leave the underwater area of the hull with a Grade C finish—who’s to be offended, beyond salmon and mussels?—but after pondering Peter’s bronzed urn of a hull, I was suffering pangs of guilt and inferiority. It was a reprise of high school, alarmingly. My two best friends were straight-A students, which eventually shamed me into ratcheting up my average, tediously and resentfully, to a B-minus.

  Unfortunately, this minor eruption of quality-control conscience arrived at the same time as a frigid early-winter storm, which dumped four inches of snow on us and sent the thermometer skidding to twenty degrees. Nobody would even notice this in Chicago or London, but it paralyzed Seattle. The school around the corner closed for three days, and nobody on our street even tried to leave for work. I threw open the garage door for ventilation—essential even though it was well below freezing—and mounted a fresh attack on the rough hull and skeg with the orbital sander. More guilt: the tool poured a profane racket into the street, where a sabbath-like serenity had descended with the snow. It was hard work, rendered harder by the cold. After the first two hours my fingers were almost immobile from the chill, my back ached from leaning over the hull, and my eyes had acquired a crust of grit from the airborne epoxy dust—and it was time to brush on another layer of glop so I could do the same thing again tomorrow.

  After five days of this I had a sturdy skeg and a Grade B hull, and I had arrived at a pivotal moment in the gestation of Far From Perfect: she was ready to paint.

  The exercise with the skeg, in concert with events in the news, has kept me thinking about the virtues of the flexible mind. This is no small matter. It’s at the core of survival—definitely at the level of the individual and the tribe, and maybe in the macrocosm of civilization itself.

  I’ve been reading the works of a thoughtfully analytical writer named Laurence Gonzalez who specializes, of all things, in outdoor-adventure disaster. In his book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, Gonzalez analyzed dozens of accounts of mountain climbing, river rafting, and backcountry skiing mishaps, many of them with tragic endings. Gonzalez’s conclusion, distilled to its basic principle, is this: The people who get into trouble out there are the ones who cling tenaciously to their original plan or to an idealized model of their environment even as conditions around them deteriorate. An example would be a mountaineer who presses on for the summit instead of turning around when ominous storm clouds begin closing in. Instead of objectively assessing the real world of the present, he’s stuck in the twelve-hour-old model of the weather forecast, which had predicted more agreeable conditions. He’s in denial. He’s trying to twist reality to his expectations, rather than revising those expectations. If you could stop him and explain his behavior in just those terms, he might see it as the irrational act it is. Or he might not, because that obsolete forecast has woven itself into his emotional craving for the summit, and he’s locked in. This inflexibility may kill him. The survivors, Gonzalez says, are those who are willing to let go of a plan that’s decreasingly likely to work and smartly consider a new constellation of possibilities. He proclaims outright, “Rigid people are dangerous people.” And he quotes the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki on the wisdom of remaining open and teachable: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.”

  In the decade that I’ve been paddling, I’ve closely monitored fatal sea kayaking accidents—there are generally two or three every year in North America—and I’ve noticed that most of the victims separate into two categories. They’re either rank beginners who blunder into a situation they don’t understand, or they’re top-drawer experts who assume they can handle anything. The safest paddlers are those of us in the vast middle who have a reasonable store of knowledge and skills, coupled with a humbling fear of weather and the sea. I consciously work to maintain a likeness of that beginner’s mind, remaining aware that the marine environment holds a fathomless range of options for disposing of a forty-pound boat and its ridiculous occupant. (I was once chased by a five-hundred-pound sea lion, as if to confirm the ludicrous lengths to which ol’ Neptune will go.)

  The flexible mind constantly evaluates the changing environment and charts the most appropriate response. And connects a feedback loop. When an action fails to work, don’t just repeat it—change it. Foolish consistency is indeed the hobgoblin of little minds, but also something much worse: it has rained misery on entire nations and cultures. The endless cycle of revenge and retribution between Israel and the Palestinians is one depressing example; the
United States’s dogmatic approach to a widening circle of adversaries—Iraq, Iran, North Korea—is another, possibly even more ominous. Around the opening of the twenty-first century, dogmatism somehow acquired an upright standing, as if it were the structural fiber of morality. It isn’t, unless you think fondly of the Inquisition.

  It seems to me that relations between nations and religions would be more productive if we negotiated with each other like Gonzalez suggests we climb mountains: deal with what actually is, not with what we think ought to be.

  As I think back over the building of Far From Perfect I realize that lesson has been there at every turn, and as the building progressed I got better at recognizing it. When my beautiful $99 cedar centerboard cracked after a mere tip-over on the garage floor, I was at least flexible enough not to keep trying to force it to work when the nature of the material was arguing to the contrary. The challenge now is to expand that precept into the larger sphere of life. For example, I’ve been clinging to an obsolete model in my magazine writing, resenting a certain well-known magazine for not wanting any more of the relatively long, exploratory travel pieces I used to write for them. But none of my carping and whining has altered the magazine’s new direction, nor is it likely to. How many of us hold on desperately to jobs that aren’t working for us any more, or to careers that are becoming obsolete, unfulfilling, or meaningless? Instead of changing, we retreat into the warm cocoon of denial and hold on, because change is frightening: there’s no road map, no guarantee of success.