The Year of the Boat

by Lawrence W. Cheek

  It might explain why the neighborhood had adopted my boat, however. The conventions of suburban life can seem pretty strict, especially in a subdivision like this where the lots are small and the houses are as blandly conformist as sparrows on a wire (forcibly kept that way by the neighborhood association’s architectural controls). There isn’t much physical space for anyone to outwardly express a large-scale passion such as the one I’d undertaken. Yet those passions exist, as does a remarkable cultural diversity that didn’t exist in suburbs a generation ago. On this block alone there are families from India, China, Korea, Bulgaria, and Ireland (and America). Further confounding the old stereotypes, we know each other and respect our cultural and political differences. The neighbors seemed deeply intrigued with this sudden boatbuilding character in their midst—not quite a nut, but someone whose values had taken a visible tack away from the mainstream, breaking out, pushing the personal envelope. It’s something everyone yearns to do in some form, but routine and inertia conspire to subvert it—work, the kids, the insatiable demands of all the conventional chores of home and family life. How can one justify building a boat when the fence needs repairing?

  Well, it’s easy. You simply declare that a boat has greater value in your life than a fence.

  Maybe that is an adult decision. A few years ago Michael Pollan observed in The New York Times Magazine that a majority of Americans now live in the suburbs, and used the occasion for a revisit to the Long Island ’burb in which he had grown up thirty years earlier. What he found there and elsewhere was that the generalizations we used to hold (and cherish) about suburbs no longer apply. They aren’t monolithic bastions of monotony and conformity, there is life on the sidewalks and the streets, and increasingly, the ideas that are reorienting the grain of our entire culture are being generated in the suburbs. Think about it: Microsoft, Google, and Apple are suburban companies, and their people mostly live in the ’burbs.

  For a few days in June the work on the Zephyr suddenly became much more public as it moved out to the sidewalk. I made the mast, twelve feet high and slightly tapered toward both ends, out of Sitka spruce—the Cadillac of woods for use in sailboat spars and piano soundboards because of its tight, straight grain and high strength-to-weight ratio. Feeding a twelve-foot stick into a bandsaw to rough out the tapering profile requires extra bodies, and I drafted Mark, George, or Ava’s mother, Elena, at various times to hold the protruding end. When it came time to test-plant the mast in the boat, I decided I needed Mark and his math skills. I had to install an oak wedge near the bow to receive the bottom of the mast, then cut a precise square hole in it so the mast would rake back at Devlin’s specified five degrees. I felt embarrassed to ask; I worried that Mark would think I slept through high school geometry forty years ago. I didn’t want him to project this onto his contemporary teaching, and start feeling useless and dejected. After mulling this for a week I finally decided it was a ridiculous worry, and on a sunny Saturday morning, I rang Mark’s doorbell and explained what I needed. “Sounds like a simple trig issue,” he said. “I’ll be right over.”

  He practically bounded into my garage. His wife, Claudia, followed with her camera. “I’m going to turn this into a math problem for the kids,” he said. He’s teaching trig to seventh graders? Now I’m grossly embarrassed. But after I showed him the plan, he said all we needed to do was drop a plumb bob from the mast and measure the five degrees with a protractor. It wasn’t not even a problem, it was a measurement.

  We trundled the boat out to the sidewalk so we’d have the sky for headroom, leveled the hull with foam blocks, and raised the mast. Mark climbed up on a stepladder and dropped the bob on a thread. I jiggled the mast until he said we’d hit the specified five degrees, then I outlined the position of the mast’s heel where I’d need to cut the hole. Claudia darted around, taking pictures from assorted angles. “I’ll have to juice up the problem a little for the kids,” Mark said.

  I would have felt like a complete and utter bozo, only Mark was having an obvious good time, and a tight knot of neighbors had gathered around to watch the procedure and pepper me with boat questions. It was a vignette that seemed to suggest an optimistic observation: Apart from the mind-numbing architecture and lawn obsessions, American suburbs are becoming what we’d always hoped our cities would be. Here on the sidewalk in front of my house we had community, street life, diversity, and creativity. And, of prime importance to me, enough space to build a boat. Just around the corner was a lake. How much more could one ask?

  Later that same day, Patty and I mounted an expedition to a hardwood supplier in Redmond, our neighboring ’burb. The retailer is in an industrial park whose nondescript architecture completely disguises the exotic delights within (just like our residential street). Inside the store, an enticingly rich bouillabaisse of aroma arose from the stacks of oak, ash, cherry, maple, and mahogany. I pawed through a few dozen boards, not really knowing what I was looking for aside from the dimensions. At Patty’s prodding, I finally asked for help. The man at the counter didn’t know much about boats, but after I explained what a centerboard does, he recommended ash—heavy, strong, stands up well to lateral loads.

  We looked through the ash bins together and failed to find a piece fifteen inches wide—we’re just not letting many trees grow to that size before harvesting them today—but I told him I could join two narrower pieces together if he could bevel their edges at forty-five-degree angles for me. I still didn’t have a table saw, and doing that kind of precise, straight-line work with a bandsaw is impossible. “No problem,” he said, and took a long board into a vast, back-room workshop to cut and mill it for me on the spot. In fifteen minutes a slightly warped, rough slab of ash became two immaculately straight boards, planed to my specified ¾-inch thickness and beveled on one edge each for joining. He charged me $40 for the board and $15 for the instant millwork—a world-class bargain in the context of what I’d gotten used to paying for boat parts.

  I spent two weeks building the new centerboard. It was a preposterously complicated process for what is, after all, nothing but a slab of wood that slices through the water. First I mated the two pieces with dowels and epoxy, then cut it to shape. Then, because I wasn’t very confident of my joinery, I fiberglassed the whole assembly to reinforce it. Then I cut my six-by-nine-inch hole—being careful this time not to align any cuts with the grain—and poured in thirteen pounds of Sam’s lead shot, locked it in place with epoxy, and sanded it smooth with the surface. By the time I finished, it all looked so smooth and lovely, the sleek blond grain of the ash gleaming through the transparent glass sheath, that I realized it would be a travesty to paint it. Except that early in the process I had scribbled the words LEADING EDGE in red pencil to remind myself which end was which, so they were now immortalized under glass.

  I hammered myself for yet another amateur’s screwup, failing to think through the process a few steps ahead. But then a conversation with an old friend bubbled to the surface. Bill Herring is my one childhood friend who inexplicably stayed in El Paso, and I sometimes visit him when I fly in to visit my dad. He’s now a renowned artist, and, against the towering odds anyone would have laid down during our high school years, a thinker of considerable depth. Last time I was at his house, I was surveying the piles of junked and half-finished canvases in his studio, and a wisecrack seemed in order. “So, Bill—still clueless and directionless after all these years.”

  He responded, “Once an artist truly embraces waste and mistakes, he’s free.”

  That scrap of wisdom suddenly burst through to embrace my project—the amateur-quality joinery of the hull pieces, the mismatched grain of the stem, and now the LEADING EDGE notice that would slice proudly through the water, in full view of every trout that cares to read it. Of course one can embrace mistakes too readily and wholeheartedly. If Bill were to let his big ones out into the world’s light he’d quickly kill his reputation as an artist; and if I let my big ones compromise the integrity of the boat
I could kill . . . well, myself and anyone else with the dumb luck to be along for the ride.

  The more I considered it, the more I began to believe there is a kind of moral universe of mistakes, and a hierarchy of error existing within it. We have to correct the big ones—those that have the potential to do real damage to ourselves and others. We can embrace the small ones as affirmations of our humanity; they’re only embarrassments if we choose to believe they are. But we have to be willing to gamble, within reason, on mistakes of all sizes. Without that willingness, as Bill pointed out, we have no freedom to create. And no one who didn’t already know how to build a boat would ever build a boat. Think about the implications.

  The centerboard trunk went together easily. It’s just a box, the first piece of the Zephyr to be composed of actual straight lines and right angles. I fiberglassed the insides before I assembled it to protect against scrapes and water damage, then I did a trial assembly with the centerboard in place, rotating on its axle. It seemed to work perfectly, although I still anticipated a nagging leak where the axle would burst through the sides of the trunk. I took the centerboard out and set it aside for the time—I didn’t want its weight in the boat during construction since I would have to keep turning the hull over.

  The last step in the centerboard assembly was a big one, the potential for catastrophe—we’re not just talking “mistake” now—frightening. I had to cut a slot in the bottom of my boat, two inches wide and fifty-three inches long. The trunk assembly would perch on top of this, and the centerboard would pivot through it into the water.

  I’d been dreading this for weeks, but now that the time had arrived I made a conscious effort to shove emotion out of the picture. I drew the slot on the inside of the hull, measured it three times, then grabbed the jigsaw and cut. I was surprised—alarmed, almost—at how detached I felt. Just a carpenter following a pencil line with a saw. When the cutout clattered to the floor I felt the first flush of emotion, relief that the operation was over. I lifted the trunk and tested it in the slot. Not perfect, but happily, the slot was slightly too narrow rather than too wide. I could trim it little by little with coarse sandpaper.

  I left the actual installation of the trunk until the next Saturday, when I had a full day to work. It proceeded slowly and literally painfully, as I had to keep corkscrewing my body under the boat to refine the slot and then jiggle the trunk into position on the inside. Finally I glued it in place, snug against the hull on the bottom and two bulkheads on its ends, and planted sheets of fiberglass against its sides and clear across the hull. The boat had now become one integral piece—hull, stem, bulkheads, centerboard trunk, transom—rather than an assembly of parts. It was no longer just a shell, but a machine—a complex device that implies an intelligent management of nature’s forces.

  All through the evening, I found myself going out to the garage every couple of hours just to stare, in goggle-eyed wonderment.

  CHAPTER 11

  FAR FROM PERFECT

  A BOAT MEMORY FROM childhood, buried so deeply that nine months of immersion in boatbuilding and sailing had failed to stir it, surfaced suddenly.

  I am ten years old, and our family—there are just three of us, Dad, Mom, and me—is on its first-ever expedition-scale vacation outside the stifling orbit of relatives in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. We are in the hamlet of Spirit Lake, Idaho, visiting two friends my parents had made during World War II while stationed at nearby Coeur d’Alene. Northern Idaho is the most beautiful place I have ever seen, although when one’s referential baseline is El Paso, a place so desolate that tumbleweeds routinely patrol the city streets, nearly anyplace else qualifies as fetching. I would have been enchanted by a trip to Topeka. Spirit Lake, though, is lovely beyond anything I’ve ever seen in Texas or its neighboring states. And our friends lived in a house right on the forest-rimmed lake, complete with their own dock and two boats.

  One of the boats is a plain little skiff with a small outboard, an everyday fishing boat. The other is a slick red-and-white wooden cabin cruiser about eighteen feet long. I stare hard at these boats, feeling the stir of some sensation so strange and exotic that my ten-year-old vocabulary lacks words to express it. My father’s friend, who doesn’t have a kid of his own, picks up on it. “Would you like to drive a boat?” he asks.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “Which one?”

  I can’t imagine that he would trust me with the cruiser—it must be some kind of an adult joke to offer the choice—so I try to keep the ante low. “The little one.”

  “Why don’t you try the cruiser? It’s a lot more fun.”

  My father turns ashen. He’s about to quash this bizarre experiment in the bud. I live on a shorter leash than any other kid I know, rarely allowed to move outside tightly circumscribed activities. But Dad and his friend have had a beer or two, and their judgment is fogged, each in a different way. The friend thinks it’s a fine idea to send the kid out for a whoopee in his boat. Dad can’t navigate a face-saving way out of the situation. He doesn’t want to look like a sourpuss, a no-fun hard-ass, in the eyes of his old Navy bud, whom he hasn’t seen in twenty years. So in the remarkable vacuum of any real adult supervision, I am installed in the captain’s seat of the cabin cruiser, given three minutes of instruction, and next thing I know I am carving a wake across Spirit Lake, alone, in a miniature universe of ecstasy.

  A dozen years later, my new bride Patty was visiting our family home in El Paso for the first time, and Dad dragged out an old box of eight-millimeter home movie reels. We screened a few of them to give Patty an inkling of the boy enclosed in the man she’d just married. In one of them was a brief segment of me in the cabin cruiser backing away from the dock, then planing across Spirit Lake. Dad said, “That was about the scariest hour of my life.”

  I was recalling all this because my father was dying. He was into his nineties, had lived a good, full life, hadn’t had a beer in close to forty years. In this latter bracket of decades he has had excellent judgment, and we’d enjoyed a comfortable, if not particularly close, relationship. But now, nearing the end, I didn’t know what to say to him. Or what to feel.

  Patty and I were drafting a letter to try to reassure him, in writing, that we would take care of his wife, my stepmother, if he happened to die before her. He’d been making himself miserable worrying about her. She was suffering from advancing dementia and was essentially helpless. We reminded him in the note that he had taught me to honor my responsibilities, and that Patty was brought up in the same way. As truthful and well-meaning as we were trying to be, our note seemed inadequate and hollow. Patty said, “Why don’t you put down some happy memory—remind him of a good time the two of you had together?”

  I stared at the keyboard and screen, drifting away, thinking hard. I tried to will a good time into consciousness. Fragments of memory flickered and disappeared, but nothing coalesced into a form solid enough for words.

  “I can’t think of anything,” I said. It sounded terrible and cruelly unfair to this man, this decent, honest, and gentle man, who had devoted a substantial fraction of his life to preparing me for a run at mine. But it was the truth, at least at that moment.

  We sent the letter. The next day I remembered Spirit Lake and the red-and-white cabin cruiser.

  I had been working on the Zephyr almost obsessively since I made a fast run to El Paso two weeks earlier and found Dad in rapidly deteriorating condition, unable to sign his name or sit up for more than a few minutes. He and my stepmother were both now enfolded in hospice care, and we were receiving phone reports every day or two from their nurse. There were around-the-clock caregivers to attend to food, medicine, pain management, and other physical needs. Their assisted-living facility was spotlessly clean, quiet, pleasant, and dignified—one of the best I’d ever seen, and its location in low-cost, low-wage El Paso made it affordable. I felt like I ought to rent an apartment nearby and just be there to offer comfort and friendship. But the sick, hollow feeling th
at arose in my gut every time I returned to my hometown tugged in the opposite direction. I told Patty it was the sheer physical ugliness of the place. She knew better, knew that it was more about the persistent residue of resentment over a stifling childhood.

  “No parent ever gets up in the morning thinking, ‘Now what can I do to screw up my kid’s life today?’ ” she reminded me. “They all want the best for their kids, and they do their best within the limits of what they know how to do. They’re imperfect, so they make mistakes. Just like we do every day.”

  I was falling into a pattern of waking up at 3:30 every morning to ponder her wisdom mixed with my guilt, braided with the usual slate of work-related worries. Within a few minutes it would all be pinballing so furiously in my head that there was no real choice but to get up. So I was starting my day’s writing at three or four in the morning. (One of the dubious blessings of an office in the home is you have a thirty-foot commute to work when you can’t sleep.) By two in the afternoon I’d done plenty of the obligatory work, so I would have a good four hours to spend on the boat. I was chronically fatigued; I practically had to drag myself out to the garage. But once I plunged into the work, I’d get invigorated. The worries didn’t drain away, but they at least retired to the background. I noticed that the attraction of shelving them for a few hours every day seemed even bigger than the eventual prospect of sailing the boat.

  I was finish-sanding the interior in preparation for painting, and fabricating the interior parts. The latter were basic—a crosswise bench seat, which is called a “thwart” in small boats and canoes, and a couple of wooden brackets to position it. They were far from simple, though. Interior boat parts are never easy, because they have to be shaped to fit the curvature and cant of the hull sides. And I wanted to make these fancier than necessary. I had a vision of a gracefully curving cedar thwart that echoed the inflection of the rudder. Much of a boat’s organic beauty is invested in its curves, and the seat promised to be easy to shape on the bandsaw.