The trouble with rationalizing mediocrity is that you can get used to it. The B average, or even the C, becomes the default mode. It feels so comfortable and normal that the effort to do A-level work on anything seems, by contrast, abnormal. Maybe so abnormal that it’s impossible. We forget how to push ourselves to the highest level, how to muster all of our resources of imagination and concentration and patience to bear on a task. That’s the tragedy of Willie Loman, aching to be recognized for greatness without ever being great. Which is “what most of us are doing, or dreaming about doing,” as Arthur Miller later claimed in an interview. He might be right. Why else would Death of a Salesman resonate so deeply in our culture?
I dreamed of a Grade A slam dunk on the kayak, which deserved the effort. I also doubted I could pull it off. As the weeks passed, workmanship issues arose. Some of them were impediments of my own making. To keep some of the clutter off the deck, I decided to fit the hatches with a hidden system of bungee cords that would hold the lids down tight with tension from below. This simple concept proved phenomenally difficult in execution. I was no longer following instructions in the manual; I was creating something new. I carved a handful of L-shaped oak brackets to hook the bungees, but they had to be strengthened with sheaths of fiberglass and epoxy. That was a job for expert hands. I struggled for a week and inexpertly cobbled the system into existence. It worked adequately but looked awful—if you were to open a hatch and peer inside.
The boat’s inside, in fact, was thoroughly blemished with pimpled and wrinkled fiberglass. Outside, from a dozen feet away, she looked spectacular. And once I got fully acquainted with her after a few sessions on Puget Sound, she performed spectacularly. Our two factory kayaks, both substantially larger and heavier, suddenly seemed about as responsive as bathtubs bobbing on the waves. The ultralight Pygmy accelerated faster, turned more crisply, and demanded more alertness if her occupant cared to stay upright in a churning sea. The hatches leaked only a little, and the hull seams showed no sign of distress when big waves lurched and kicked the little boat around. In a fond nod to her tiny dimensions, I named her Plankton.
Empowerment, inadequacy. I felt a considerable glow of accomplishment for building a boat that was not just seaworthy, but remarkably capable. But was that really such a big deal? Someone else had designed her, written the instruction manual, and precut all the critical pieces. All I had done was follow the instructions, imperfectly but not disastrously. I had assembled a kit, nothing more. The Pygmy catalog, in fact, goes out of its way to minimize the home builder’s piddling contribution: “The building process takes no special skills. Hundreds of men and women with no prior woodworking experience build Pygmy boats each year.” Apparently true. In the first year I paddled Plankton I saw dozens of Pygmys and other kit kayaks in the waters of Puget Sound, and most of them looked at least as good as mine. In the hidden recesses of the hull and under the hatches, I feared that they all looked better, and the few that I had a chance to inspect up close, in fact, did.
A year later I signed up for a ten-day course in kayak building at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding in Port Hadlock, another coastal town on the Olympic Peninsula fifty miles northwest of Seattle. This time it wasn’t on a whim. The tuition was $850, and rental for a one-room cottage a few miles from the campus another $500. We would be learning how to build a wood-strip kayak, a quantum leap in complexity and beauty beyond the Pygmy kits. I had seen a couple of professional builder Joe Greenley’s wood-strip kayaks, and they were floating sculptures. Greenley was the course’s instructor.
My enduring memory from the first day of the course is: linguine. Immediately following introductions, we watched and sort of helped Greenley mill a stack of cedar planks into strips ¾ of an inch wide, of an inch thick, and 18 feet long. They seemed as limp as wet linguine and just about as elegant, and it was impossible to imagine how this nest of noodles was going to become a serious, seagoing boat.
Wood-strip construction is an ingenious but labor-intensive technique for building small boats. Its origins are murky, but it may have been devised by frugal Maine fishermen as a way of using the free offcuts tossed out by sawmills. To strip-plank a hull, you cut out plywood cross sections of the boat’s shape at intervals of a foot and set them up along a spine called a “strongback.” Then you bend the strips around the cross-section forms, glue them together, take out the forms, and sheathe the boat inside and out in fiberglass. Like an airplane fuselage, it’s a lightweight, frameless structure in which the stressed skin provides all its strength. It’s deceptively strong and rigid. I asked Greenley if such kayaks could take a beating in rocky surf landings. “That’s not what most people use them for,” he said. “But I could build an icebreaker this way if someone wanted it.”
There were seven of us in the class, none with any real boatbuilding experience. Two were surgeons; I immediately assumed that their mental discipline and long practice in performing precision work with their hands would make them good boatbuilders, then dismissed that as a cliché. The cliché proved to be true. There was a retired teacher, a retired electrical engineer, a retired airline pilot, a young guy trying to find himself, and me. Each of us, happily, seemed to have some skill that proved useful in the class. I was good at taking notes.
Greenley was good at building boats. And good at building, period. After just the first day, I was in awe of how efficiently and mindfully he worked. He never set a pencil or plane down and forgot where it was. He never seemed to become annoyed or frustrated by a mistake or difficulty; he would move from problem to solution in a straight line, without letting it get mired in any emotional muck in between. Do I need to say that Greenley’s calm, rational, efficient manner of working contrasted starkly with mine? I suspected I might have something to learn here beyond how to make a boat out of cedar noodles.
He was no Zen philosopher, however. During a break I told him about my muddled work habits and asked how he’d managed to train himself to be so orderly and efficient. His answer was pure practicum: “Wear a canvas shop apron, and keep your most important tools in it—pencil, tape measure, knife, glue.” He hadn’t had to train his mind; the discipline was already there. He only had to buy an apron.
Greenley operated his business, Redfish Kayaks, as a one-man outfit. There wasn’t enough profit margin to bring in employees, and anyway, I had trouble imagining anyone who could meet his standards of workmanship. He built six or seven kayaks a year, selling them for anywhere between $4,000 and $8,000 depending on the fanciness of the woodwork, and supplied “kits” consisting of milled cedar strips and plans. (Unlike Pygmy, he did not tell buyers they were easy.) He enjoyed talking about his customers; each boat had taken on an individual life because of them. One had staged a marriage proposal using his Redfish kayak: he took his girlfriend out paddling, and at an opportune moment staged a capsize in the Redfish. When his girlfriend, still upright in the other kayak, reached out to help him back into his boat, he tucked a ring into her hand. She accepted it. One “kit” builder reported to Greenley that the project had lifted him out of a profound depression. But another claimed that building a Redfish had precipitated his divorce.
“As far as I know, none of my kayaks has been involved in a conception or birth yet,” Greenley told us.
Over the next nine days, we closed in on what began to look like a contradictory and self-defeating goal: we were building a boat of such breathtaking beauty that its eventual owner would surely be reluctant, even terrified, to put it in the water. Even in its raw form, festooned with staples and clamps and bits of masking tape and epoxy dribbles, the cedar radiated so much visual warmth it could have heated the boat shop through the coming winter. Why does anyone ever paint a wooden boat—or for that matter, a wooden house? The hull and deck, fitted together, had an organic sweep, like the sleek and graceful form of a dolphin: a curve ordained by nature. We students begin to openly covet her, masking our sin with humor. When we arrived at the shop one morning, Lynda,
the retired teacher, discovered that a fly had gotten itself stuck overnight and died in the drying epoxy on the deck. “Don’t worry,” cooed Tom, one of the surgeons. “It’s my boat.”
One of us, in fact, would cart it home, for keeps. The plan was that in the final hour of class on the last day we would draw straws for it. The approaching lottery weighed increasingly on our minds, threatened to become an obsession. Greenley said he had made a mistake the last time he conducted the class, giving in when the students nagged him into holding the raffle early. “After that, the ones who didn’t win all got a little sloppier with their work.” I was torn between wanting this boat—it would save a bundle of time and money, and I knew I couldn’t come nearly this close to perfection without Greenley hovering about—and building one that would be entirely my own. How many of us, out here in the twenty-first century, ever create something as beautiful and important as a boat, all by ourselves?
During another break, I asked Greenley how he’d feel if someone commissioned one of his kayaks to hang in a living room somewhere as a work of art—literally too beautiful to put in the water. It wasn’t an academic question. A writer for Town and Country had just called to schedule an interview with Greenley, and in a kind of inverse snobbery, I told him that Town and Country subscribers are unlikely candidates for the hard work of sea kayaking. “I wouldn’t mind,” he said. “I take pride in my craftsmanship, whether it’s functional or aesthetic.” Greenley, I decided, was blessed not only with skilled hands but also with a mind that adamantly refused to overcomplicate things.
When the final Friday arrived, the class boat was about threefourths completed. It lacked bulkheads, cockpit outfittings—seat and foot pegs—deck lines, a forward hatch, and final sanding and varnishing. Greenley set up the raffle with his characteristic precision: he disappeared into another room by himself and used a table saw to cut one of the cedar strip scraps into matchsticks, one of them exactly ¼ inch longer than the others. He returned, holding them in his fist, and we drew.
I won!
I spent a month doing the final finishing work in my garage—Greenley could have done it in two days, not counting the drying time for six coats of varnish—and christened her Sea Major. Since Patty’s factory kayak was a less satisfying ride than mine, I gave her the new cedar-strip boat. Sea Major was a little high-strung in bumpy water, decidedly not a beginner’s kayak, but as I had with Plankton, Patty found confidence in her once she had logged some paddling time. And I found I wasn’t paranoid about either of us using her as an everyday kayak, picking up the inevitable dings and scratches from beach rocks and kayaker’s clutter bungeed to the deck. I had made some mistakes in the final, unsupervised finishing work, and she wasn’t too beautiful to put in the water.
CHAPTER 3
LOOKING FOR A PLAN
DRINKING AND BOATBUILDING are two activities that should never, ever coincide, for an archipelago of obvious reasons. But they’re not obvious to the determined drinker.
If I point a flashlight into Plankton’s hatches today, I can see several depressingly sloppy junctions where the bulkheads meet the interior sides of the hull and deck. Getting bulkheads to fit well is a difficult job under the best of circumstances, and I had figured to blunt the guilt-in-advance of not getting it right with a balm of vodka. Clefts of epoxy with the look and texture of dried oatmeal now form a memorial to Dr. Smirnoff. On the aft hatch cover, right out in the daylight, there’s a wayward cut mark half an inch long where some fool saw veered away from the cutout line. It’s filled with epoxy so it has no effect on the boat’s structure or watertightness, but it’s a permanent reminder of my condition on the afternoon I cut out the hatch. I’ve never told anyone what happened there, not even Patty, but I wouldn’t have to. She knows.
I became an alcoholic unusually late in life, sometime in my late thirties. The date is vague because it was gradually and almost imperceptibly that I slipped over the line from normal drinking—an occasional cocktail after work, or a couple of glasses of wine with dinner—into drinking I had to do in order to face everyday life. Four or five years passed before I recognized that I had become an alcoholic, and then, surveying the options, I decided that instead of trying to get sober I would be a fully functioning alcoholic. And I was: in 1995, the last year we lived in Tucson, I wrote two books and a dozen magazine articles and taught two journalism courses at the university, all while sneaking about two-thirds of a bottle of cheap vodka every day. It felt like trying to hold together a house of cards in a blizzard. It was insanely difficult, physically and emotionally miserable, and finally doomed to fly apart.
Alcoholics who are fortunate enough to find a road to recovery will at some point look inward and try to discover why they drank, because that understanding appears to be an important piece of maintaining sobriety. It really isn’t as complicated as most people imagine. We all drank because we had a disease, a chemical imbalance in the brain that caused us to crave alcohol beyond the point where a rational person would stop craving and drinking. Still, there is usually an emotional imbalance that parallels the chemical malfunction, and it’s wise to try to deal with it.
Fear, more than anything, fueled my drinking. Until the past three years, there wasn’t any time of my life that wasn’t bracketed in fear. Fear of failure, fear of criticism, fear of looking foolish, fear of punishment, fear of pain, fear of death, fear of being found out. This last is a fascinating and pervasive phobia that has only recently begun to get its due notice, and that certainly has a high probability of surfacing whenever one tries to build a boat. Fear of being found out—the hollow, gnawing premonition that some morning the world will notice that you don’t really know enough to be doing what you’re doing, that you’re an incompetent, a fraud, a poseur. Psychologists have actually coined a term for it, “the imposter syndrome,” and have discovered that it haunts even some of the most obviously successful people. I once plugged the phrase “felt I was a fraud” into the Lexis-Nexis search engine and turned up hundreds of hits—people who had used these exact words in published autobiographies or interviews. Two names particularly jumped out at me: Lena Horne and Mike Wallace.
I can’t remember the exact point at which my youthful arrogance—figuring I knew everything—tipped the other way and I started to feel like I knew hardly anything, but it was sometime in my mid- to late thirties. That’s an interesting coincidence with the onset of alcoholic drinking, if coincidence is what it was. All my life I’ve had a vast curiosity and an enormous range of interests, but when this pivot occurred I began to feel not at all like a polymath, but a dilettante. I had skimmed a bit of superficial knowledge about a lot of things, and was barely holding together this gridwork of pretenses.
There came one moment of relief when I learned I wasn’t alone. I was running a magazine at the time, a job that presented a dozen management problems every day that I wasn’t qualified to handle. Yet I was making the decisions—had to; the staff was too small to delegate. At the end of one particularly exhausting day I confided my feelings of ineptitude to a friend on the staff.
“That’s exactly how I feel as a single mom,” she said. “Every day I make decisions about a young human life that I’m not even remotely qualified to do. I keep thinking any day now, the Adult Police are going to come and take me away.”
I began toying with recovery in 1996. I would take it seriously for weeks or months at a time, then treat myself to a relapse. I went to AA meetings regularly, occasionally even led them, but for years I couldn’t fully accept the program. The concept of relying on a Higher Power seemed to be a permanent stumbling block. After years in the program I was more devoutly agnostic than ever; I found it impossible to believe in any kind of God that listened to human prayers and answered them—or not. What sense does a capricious God make, and what’s the point of trusting it? The breakthrough came with a remarkably simple turnaround. I realized that Nature could serve perfectly well as my God if I accepted a baseline moral obligation
to play a useful role in the network of life on earth—being an active steward of the environment and being useful to my fellow humans however possible. This meant staying fully conscious, not blurring my interaction with the world through the fog of alcohol. It may have been a philosophical contrivance, but what the hell: it worked.
I’ve brought up my history with alcohol because it’s inextricably linked to the undertaking of building a boat. It’s easy for a drinker to hatch a plan to build a sailboat—hell, let’s make it a forty-foot schooner. Grandiose plans litter the dreamscapes of drunks. Actually doing it requires sobriety—not only for the physical coordination and judgment and sharp-tool handling, but also, at least in my case, for the courage to try it. I had to stop drinking to stop being paralyzed by the fear of failure.
The Year of the Boat Page 3