The Year of the Boat

by Lawrence W. Cheek

  There is something fundamentally, terribly wrong with the very idea of a human being voluntarily walking backward off a hundred-foot cliff and dangling from a scrawny rope over the stony jaws of eternity. I did it, but only because completing the two previous rappels had made it impossible to return to the starting point. On this third rappel my rope widget jammed halfway down and it took five agonizing minutes to weasel the last fifty feet. I interviewed Wilkes in the van on the way back. He said he’d shepherded students from four to eighty-five years old through his course. Some, he said, would avidly rent gear and tackle a nearby canyon on their own the next day; some would never attempt canyoneering again. I was reasonably certain I would be among the latter. Wilkes said, “But you know what? I’ve never had anyone finish the day feeling less self-esteem.” He was at least right about that.

  A month after starting work on the Zephyr, I was about to paddle 130 miles of the Columbia River in a kayak. Research had suggested that October, the least windy month, would be the best slot for the expedition. Summer’s notorious winds hadn’t sounded encouraging. When Pacific westerlies funnel into the Columbia Gorge, they collide with the downstream current flow to kick up steep, unpredictable waves. The October trip would interrupt work on the boat, it would undoubtedly rain on us, and mid-autumn dark would come early, but these seemed like the least of the Columbia’s quiver of evils.

  I was afraid of the river. I knew too little about its currents, weather patterns, and geography. I’d read stories about kayakers blithely paddling along when a monster container ship would silently materialize behind them, its approach masked by fog or riparian traffic noise. Commercial skippers refer to kayakers as “speed bumps.” I was particularly concerned about the last twenty miles, where the river yawns into a four-mile-wide estuary that amplifies whatever meteorological mayhem the Pacific brews up. Overall, I was simply worried about the gross mismatch between the river’s physical power and me—a channel of inexorably moving water, a quarter- to a half-mile across, versus a man in a fifty-five-pound fiberglass banana. (I would be taking my factory-built expedition kayak; Plankton and Sea Major are too small to carry a week’s camping provisions.)

  Some time back I pawed through Gail Sheehy’s New Passages in search of something that could explain these midlife urges to push the envelope. My parents didn’t suddenly turn adventurous in their forties or fifties, nor did any of their contemporaries that I knew of. If they felt restless and unfulfilled—and who doesn’t, at times?—they didn’t talk about it or do anything radical to try to fix it. Sheehy writes darkly about “the dissonance between the real self and the made-to-order self that the world has endorsed.” I had come to believe that accepting that dissonance as a natural condition of life, not trying things because of fear of failure or disapproval, is a self-imposed prison. Trying, in contrast, gives us heart. A life vividly lived is its own reward.

  I also think that not believing in the God, heaven, or hell of my parents’ faith has, ironically, brewed up some late-coming courage. If one doesn’t look forward to a purported life in paradise, then there’s a powerful incentive to make the most of this one. At the same time, though, as I contemplated being kicked around on that almighty river, I thought: might be a lot less scary out there if I had a trusty angel to watch my ass.

  My only companion on the Columbia would be an adventurous friend, Howard Greene, whom I’d met several years earlier on a kayak expedition on Lake Powell in Arizona and Utah. If you could fabricate the ideal hiking/kayaking/sailing buddy out of spare molecules, Howard is exactly what you’d come up with: knows what he’s doing outdoors but doesn’t hotdog it, has a wide range of interests with which to fashion good conversation, and—best of all—seems utterly imperturbable out there. The previous year we had paddled up Puget Sound from Olympia to Seattle, a five-day, sixty-five-mile trip. On the fourth day I concocted a one-hundred-yard portage across an isthmus connecting two islands, neglecting to consider the tide. We arrived at low tide. The portage had sprawled to a quarter-mile. We unpacked our kayaks and under a blazing August afternoon sun undertook four round trips to schlep all our gear and boats across mud flats that felt like walking across brown yogurt. Howard never once muttered, “Moron!”

  On the morning we drove down to our Columbia launch site we talked through the conditions we could encounter on the river—headwinds, wind waves, rain, fog, shipping traffic. A helpful Washington State Parks ranger had even informed us that bears swim out to the islands where we planned to camp. “My philosophy is to expect the worst,” I said, “because then I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t happen.”

  “I have that tendency, too,” Howard admitted. “But what I try to do is avoid both optimism and pessimism—just deal with what comes.”

  We launched into the river at Beacon Rock, just downstream from the Columbia’s westernmost dam and about 130 miles from the Pacific, and immediately slammed into a 20-knot headwind left over from summer. It kicked up chop big enough to slap our faces and bitterly resisted forward progress. Since it was early October with no melting snow in the Columbia’s mountain watershed, the downstream current was sluggish. We vectored into the middle of the channel in search of stronger current to help push us along, but all we found was steeper waves. We groaned past anchored fishing boats, whose occupants stared as if they were watching a pair of Sasquatches bobbing by in bathtubs. There were no other kayaks. In seven days on the river we would see no other kayaks or canoes. There must have been a reason.

  We earned just six miles in three hours and landed on a little alder-forested island at dusk to camp for the night. The wind died, the rain started. As ridiculous as it sounds now, I felt as though I should apologize to Howard—I’d worked out the schedule, so the lousy weather was clearly my fault. Just then occurred one of those small miracles of nature that makes it nearly impossible for a bystanding human to wallow in his own self-absorption. A black boomerang of Canada geese swept out of the sky and carved a turn low over the river, its outline soft and fuzzed in the fading gray light and drizzle. The geometric swirl of life was uniquely beautiful because of the lousy weather. I suddenly felt very glad we were there, and no longer afraid.

  Over most of the next six days the Columbia behaved reasonably. It delivered a moving feast of scenery that passing motorists and boaters in faster watercraft never see, including several unadvertised waterfalls and, one morning when we launched at dawn, a kaleidoscope show of pink and orange fingers of light perforating the clouds. Another morning as we were gliding downriver in light fog, the water ahead appeared to elide seamlessly into cloud and sky, and we had the giddy sensation of paddling into infinity. The occasional big ship traffic proved to be no problem because the shipping channel was clearly marked on our chart and we simply stayed away from it.

  The serious challenge was trying to figure out what the current was planning to do. Downstream from Portland the Columbia acquires a tidal flow as the Pacific tries to pour itself back into the river, and for a few hours twice each day the current chugs backward. It’s no fun paddling against it, so each evening I struggled to chart the next day’s itinerary so we would be off the water during peak hours of the reversed current. It proved agonizing to calculate. The farther downriver we moved, the earlier arrived the high tide, and the longer the ebb flow continued after the low tide. Informed guesswork was the best I could manage. Sometimes it didn’t seem informed. On day five we struggled a long thirty miles to keep to the itinerary, and at least five of them were opposing the current. That night in my tent I read an essay by Ian Frazier and encountered a piercing truism that played directly on our expedition: “Among the cruelest tricks life plays is the way it puts the complicated part at the end, when the brain is declining into simplicity, and the simple part at the beginning, when the brain is fresh and has memory power to spare.”

  On the last day we were off before dawn—the current was going to slam us sometime late in the morning, and we had twenty-three miles to go
to Astoria. It was eerily calm, no fog, and in half an hour the first light began to reveal exquisite patterns in the clouds—cats’ pawprints stained red against the awakening sky. Something about that formation stirred a vaguely uneasy memory, but I didn’t turn on the marine radio I kept in my life jacket. I had checked the forecast at ten the night before, and it was nothing unusual—light rain, moderate wind.

  We paddled hard for three hours, the current turned, and there wasn’t anyplace to take refuge except the uninviting sloughs that rake some mucky islands. We kept going. The midday sky darkened and then began to droop like an army tarp. Shifting winds clawed at us from assorted directions, as if probing for vulnerability. Astoria was six miles away, but conditions were looking increasingly ominous, and we saw on the chart that we had a bail-out option—a navigable creek that led to a county park. We ran for it.

  The rain slammed in just after we dragged the kayaks onto the grass. I switched on my cell phone and picked up three overnight messages from Patty back in Seattle, each with an increasingly anxious edge to her voice. The forecast had changed radically through the night; Astoria weather now called for 30- to 40-knot winds and heavy rain. They meant it. By the time we caught a ride into town, the Columbia was olive green and whipped with foam. The vast estuary was sloshing like the bowl of a four-mile-wide Maytag.

  “We just dodged a pretty big bullet,” Howard said.

  We had indeed. I thought back to a trio of duck hunters we’d encountered earlier at a riverbank shack. They were prepping for the season, outfitting their seventy-five-horsepower aluminum skiff with shotguns, ammunition, and a week’s stash of beer. They had peppered us with questions: “Whadd’ya do if those things turn over—swim for shore?” They seemed befuddled why anyone would want to navigate the Columbia in an engineless boat. “Doesn’t sound like fun to me,” one said.

  I told him I’d had moments of doubt myself. And in truth, all the usual reasons one might offer for undertaking such a trip ring flimsy when applied to this one. It wasn’t a pioneering adventure; Lewis and Clark paddled much more river under vastly more challenging conditions (no maps, Gore-Tex jackets, or paddle-up dockside cafés). It wasn’t a great endurance test; any reasonably fit kayaker could have done it. And to my great relief, it turned out to be much more about prudent judgment than courage. Maybe there is an angel of weenies, and she had diligently followed me from the Arizona Trail to the Columbia.

  The real reasons for the trip may sound a little self-conscious and contrived when spelled out on paper, but out there on the river they felt wholly real and vital. One was to understand more about humanity’s proper place in nature. The Columbia is an excellent venue to do this, because it’s a river managed by human engineers while also a very complicated natural ecosystem; and a kayak is the perfect vehicle, because it’s slow and quiet enough to permit contemplation and small enough that it had better make its way with respect and humility—qualities we humans can always use more of. The other reason was to redirect the interior current, the voice inside the head that admonishes: keep your eye on the ball, don’t get distracted, avoid forays into things that may not work out. The river metaphorically suggests another way to live, one that applies to an expedition of no great consequence, or to the building of a sailboat. The river meanders, backs up, forms islands that are of no immediate use for anything. But it keeps moving, forming an essential part of the grand circulatory system of nature. We can do worse than live like that.

  No elves visited the garage during my week on the Columbia to assemble the Zephyr’s hull pieces. They all lay where I left them, propped flat against the garage wall, fuzzed with a dull fog of sawdust. They looked about as substantial as cardboard cutouts awaiting assembly for a Sunday school skit about Noah and the Flood.

  But the pieces were ready to assume a three-dimensional shape, to start becoming my nine-cubit ark. All I needed was a roll of baling wire.

  This is the “stitch” part of stitch-and-glue boatbuilding. It works like this: You lay the two matching pieces of the hull bottom together, drill a series of small holes six inches apart through both pieces near the edges where they are to join, slip a short piece of baling wire through each pair of holes, then twist the ends together. After all these sutures are in, you can spread open the two hull panels like a book and tighten the wires to close the joint snugly. Then you wire the side panels to the bottom in the same way. The wires function like clamps to hold the hull pieces in position for gluing; they’ll later be taken out and the holes filled.

  I made a quick run to Home Depot for baling wire. There wasn’t any on the rope aisle nor the “fastener” aisle. None in the electrical department where they stocked other kinds of wire. When I finally tracked down an attendant, he looked as baffled as if I’d asked for moon rocks. He’d never heard of baling wire, and he said the store didn’t carry anything like what I was describing.

  A three-acre hardware store doesn’t have baling wire? My first reaction was that it’s another marker of our disposable-everything ethic in which the creative fixing of things is a vanished skill. On reflection, that’s not really the case. Household creativity hasn’t evaporated; its texture has changed. Today’s fixit project is more likely to be finding a way to make a snotty computer do something it doesn’t feel like doing.

  I finally located a five-hundred-foot roll of baling wire at a farm supply store, the last of its kind in our no-longer-rural suburb, and I was ready to sew.

  Wiring the hull together was a two-hour job that took me six hours over two afternoons. I put in several dozen of the stitches the wrong way, and it became apparent that if I persisted in tightening them to make the two hull bottom halves pull together, that I was going to break something—most notably the two halves. I reread a page of Devlin’s book more carefully and discovered the warning was there all the time. I’d skipped over it. It’s an old habit, closely related to never, ever wanting to be told how to do something—a problem with authority even in a benign, helpful form. It was going to cause trouble on this boat if I didn’t start paying more attention.

  Finally the pieces all fit together and almost magically there sprang into being the basic form of a boat: two bottom halves, two side panels, and the transom. In the evening I sneaked out to the garage several times and just stood there rubbing my eyes over it, feeling thoroughly awed—not at the fruit of my shaky craftsmanship but at the emergence of such an essentially beautiful organic shape from a nondescript stack of wood. In detail, of course, the boat-to-be looked awful. The twisted wires poking out every six inches were as elegant as a barbed-wire fence, and there were a couple of ominous air gaps where the transom (almost) met the hull sides and where the pointy ends of the bow (didn’t quite) come together. No casual passerby who sees a stitch-and-glue boat at this stage of construction is likely to want to go for a sail when it’s finished. Like sausage, you don’t want to visit it in the formative stages.

  I commandeered a portable steam gadget we bought for cleaning kitchen grease off appliances and over the next four days periodically huffed steam at the extreme bend of the side panels near the bow. When the wood was hot and saturated, I would quickly pull out half a dozen stitches and slip new ones in, tightening them up. The ¼-inch gap closed by another of an inch each day, and finally the panels kissed at the bow. I had no idea whether this was a constitutional plywood-torture technique, but it seemed to have worked.

  The daylight seeping through the other end of the boat, however, couldn’t be dealt with in the same way. The transom—the flat panel that keeps the pesky sea out of the back of the boat—just didn’t fit. There was a slim triangular gap on one side that widened to of an inch at its worst end. I didn’t get it—if every dimension of every piece was accurate to a tolerance of , what was causing the problem? And should I be worried? (I was.) I considered cutting a shim of scrap plywood to wedge into the gap, which would be structurally sound and invisible once it was epoxied and painted, but that seemed somehow like chea
ting—a kind of corruption of the soul of the boat, if not its functionality or surface beauty. I made a cardboard template and sawed out a new transom, which meant that in a month or two I would have to buy another $81 sheet of okoume plywood. This solution made no rational sense, it just felt like the right thing to do. I was identifying with this boat just as Steinbeck had predicted, building a “man-shaped soul” into it. That soul would not be perfect, but it had to contain some integrity.

  I wedged the three bulkheads into the hull, temporarily tacking them in place with small nails. More air gaps appeared. The bulkheads stuck up as much as ¼ inch over the sides of the hull, which they weren’t supposed to. The fractions-of-an-inch discrepancies seemed to be growing and multiplying like malignant tumors. I made a giant duct-tape bandage to try to pull the hull closer to its prescribed form. It all seemed ominously sloppy, even though it was actually in better shape than when I first gazed rapturously at the newly formed hull a few days back. Patty didn’t seem to understand my worries. She took photos of the hull and e-mailed them to her brother in Dallas, who’s an industrial engineer and a skilled weekend craftsman. He wrote back:Wow, Larry, your boat is looking great. I seem to remember you said this was not a kit—so you cut all those great curves. The baling wire and duct tape are touching. It’s nice to know that deep down inside you’re still a Texan.

  Love, Chris

  We’ve had a decades-long, mostly good-natured battle over our mutual Texas roots, which I ran away from and he still embraces. His jab set me thinking, though, about the improvisatory spirit of the frontier—and vestiges of it do still exist in Texas—as opposed to the obsessive perfectionism that I felt in danger of becoming stuck in. It seemed worth pulling back for some perspective. Is there a level of imperfection in a project like this that’s actually healthy and wise? If so, how do you determine where it is?