Published in the Seattle Times Pacific Northwest Sunday Magazine

May 2, 2010

Once you have built a wooden boat, or even are contemplating one, it is impossible to walk through a forest and not see boats in the trees. If you are a committed  conservationist, the adult flank of your brain will scold you for these immature and appalling thoughts—killing trees for a self-indulgent toy, the idea!

The guilt stings acutely in the old-growth rain forests of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where Sitka spruce can soar nearly 200 feet and the current record Doug-fir tops out at 281. Your internal Rationalization Department retorts that wooden boats are living things, too, as magnificent and worthy as the trees they come from. This is, of course, poetic romanticization, and may or may not hold water on Judgment Day. Depends on the weight finally given to our conduct within the relationships of life on earth.

I’ve just emerged from a rainforest hike, and I’m picking my way across the logs piled just above tideline on Ruby Beach. This stunningly remote coastline, 90 miles west of Seattle, sees 120 inches of rain in an average year. Routinely overflowing rivers undermine trees and sluice them to the beach, where monster winter surf strips and collates them into surprisingly orderly queues. I’m hardly expecting to see boats in these colossal matchsticks, but one practically leaps at me. A bare, sun-bleached log fragment about the thickness of a human thigh sports a graceful wishbone bend where a large branch had once cantilevered itself off the trunk. The poise of the curve, the graceful rhythm of the grain, even the stringy grass rigging around it, form a perfect abstraction of the 26-foot spidsgatter I admired just yesterday at the Port Townsend marina.

Did a chunk of driftwood like this, three-quarters of a century back, suggest the spidsgatter’s shapely rump to Aage Utzon, its designer? Probably not consciously. Physics provides no direct connection between the hydrodynamics of a hull shape and the cantilevering of a tree branch. But  the human brain seems to supply such  linkages instinctively. The geometry of  nature has prodigious suggestive  power, and frequently we mimic it in  human-designed objects for aesthetic delight or functional advantage, or sometimes both.

There’s something about that name Utzon that’s suggestive, too, but I can’t quite pull it up from darkened memory. When I get home I google it, and another connection between the natural and built environments clicks in. Naval architect Aage Utzon was the father of architect Jørn Utzon, who designed the Sydney Opera House. Little  question that Jørn had seen buildings in his father’s boats.

Wooden boats learn from nature, and if we’re receptive, they pass on the teachings to us. We’re first seduced by what we see simply as grace and elegance in their fluid lines, and in the resplendent tones of well-varnished brightwork. But then, if we look deeply enough, this beauty becomes something more powerful. Something we might call capital-T Truth.

Stay with me; I’m not dipping into the philosophy of aesthetics. I’ve struggled through Kant and Santayana, and I’ll save you the trouble. Those waters are chilly and lifeless. The questions What is beauty? and Why do we need it? are too real and vivid to hand off to theoreticians.

I plucked my stem of understanding from the modern writing of Scott Russell Sanders, a heartland essayist who weaves threads of science, culture and spirit together with dazzling insight. In a piece simply titled “Beauty” Sanders suggested that we find certain objects beautiful because they give us a glimpse of the underlying order of things. “The swirl of a galaxy and the swirl of a [bridal] gown resemble one another not merely by accident, but because they follow the grain of the universe.” Keep going: a bighorn sheep’s horn, a moonsnail’s shell, an ocean whirlpool—these all live in a geometric family headed by that spiral galaxy, a continuous curve of gradually increasing radius. The underlying order is a tough nut even for science to crack, because the density waves that sift stars into a spiral appear to have nothing to do with the cellular growth pattern of a mollusc’s shell. But we instinctively sense their unity, even though it eludes explanation. And we have a craving for order, for forms that fall into  patterns, because they’re reassuring. They tell us that chaos is not the universe’s default mode, that nature is understandable, and we can make a safe and sustainable home within it.

Return to Ruby Beach with me for a minute. The winter storms aren’t yet rolling in, so the architecture of the surf is more beautiful than frightening. Each breaker is unique, which is what makes the surf endlessly fascinating, but all fall within a predictable range. Who’d ever stroll here, or launch a small boat onto a large body of water, if we couldn’t trust the physics, the underlying order, of wave formation? A swell destabilizes into a breaker when it encounters water depth 1.3 times its height. Trusting these numbers, I’ve ventured my kayak into a modest Pacific surf like this on a couple of occasions. I got dumped, but it wasn’t because physics had capriciously decided to suspend the rules.

Since we owe our lives to nature’s dependability, it’s not surprising that we turn there for inspiration in a vast range of the things we create. Often there’s a physical reason for doing so. Plenty of examples in the constellation of boats: A sail is a wing, rotated to the vertical to supply forward thrust in place of lift. And modern Marconi rigs look like wings, because 150 million years of natural selection had already worked out the ideal shape; all we had to do was copy it. (The square sail forms a perfect illustration of missing the lessons of nature; Vikings could have saved themselves centuries of upwind rowing). A tiller, however, which almost invariably curves in a gentle arc, is something else. There’s no scientific mandate for the curve; it just looks right. A satisfying tiller will have the sense of inevitability, as though it had naturally grown that way. Grown like a branch bending to the tug of gravity.

The esteemed biologist Edward O. Wilson invented a word that explains our attraction to the forms of nature: biophilia, which he defined as “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.” Even as babies, we humans tend to be drawn toward living creatures (or their representations) more than to inanimate objects. We’re more likely to develop a relationship with a stuffed bear than a ball. This tendency is embedded deep in the human-instinct circuitry as a matter of survival and reproduction.

So the wooden boat revival was no anomaly. We willingly pour the considerable labor and love into building, maintaining and restoring wooden boats because they lead us to participating in something greater than ourselves. I have nothing against fiberglass, but a boat made entirely out of synthetic material simply reflects human culture back at us. It is purely a product of technology. A wooden boat is a partnership. It’s not literally a living thing, not quite, but it evinces respect for the life that exists outside the clubby circle of human intelligence.

The first sailboat I built, Sam Devlin’s melonseed-inspired Zephyr, sucked me in by its simple beauty. (I also thought it would be simple to build, which was wrong, but that’s another story.) Devlin’s plans promised a sweetly modest little craft of low freeboard, basic, unadorned lines, and just a suggestion of impertinence in her subtly upswept sheer and authoritative stem. As I researched the Zephyr’s ancestry for my book The Year of the Boat, I uncovered a well of affection for the melonseed, which originated as a New Jersey duck-hunting boat in the 1880s. The praise encompassed both the melonseed’s remarkable sailing ability and its beauty, which seemed to impress commentators out of all proportion to the boat’s diminutive 13½  feet. Historian Howard Chapelle called it “remarkably handsome.” Designer Robert Perry praised it as “a symphony of shapes.” Boatbuilder Roger Crawford, who took the lines off an original melonseed and began making fiberglass reproductions in 1989, wrote that his production decision “was based almost entirely on emotion and passion and very little on economics.” As it should be with boats.

I wanted a signature to make my melonseed distinctively beautiful, but I didn’t yet know enough about boat design to venture any substantive departure from Devlin’s plans. Somewhere in the course of construction, though, the idea of a pair of swooping buttresses flowing off the after end of the coaming and landing on the deck took form in my mind and simmered for months. They were frankly inspired by the Ferrari 308 GTB, unarguably one of the half-dozen most beautiful cars of all time.

After I completed the deck and coaming, I bandsawed a pair of trial swoops from leftover cedar and test-fit them. Then for a long 20 minutes I walked around the boat, contemplating from every possible angle. And then I plucked them off and tossed them into the scrap bin. Instead of a tug of regret I felt a flood of relief. It was as though after a long struggle of conscience, I had decided to not commit a sin.

What sin? Superfluous decoration, something that had no functional value on the boat. And something deeper: the grafting of ego onto an object whose intrinsic beauty flowed out of its function. A Ferrari is all about ego; it screams to be noticed. A small daysailer should go about its business quietly and unobtrusively; that is its nature. Trying to transplant the dharma of either machine into the other creates a fundamental conflict, certain to fail.

Michael Ruhlman wrote in Wooden Boats that “The science and beauty were inextricably linked, were perhaps the same thing.” That’s the central teaching of wooden boats: that there is an underlying order, and it should be honored. Materials should not be tortured into forms contrary to their nature (wood generally refuses, anyway). Beauty grows best from the inner character of the object, rather than being imposed on it.

This is why I respond mainly to sail- or human-powered watercraft. Occasionally I see a power boat that strikes me as beautiful, but these are never production sport boats or luxury yachts. The availability of easy horsepower, and too much of it, has corrupted their designs. They’re calculated to impress human sensibility, not nature, and the former is itself corrupt, conditioned by our consumer culture to respond to excess size, power, and bling. A beautiful power boat holds to the same principles as a beautiful sailboat: its form grows out of a desire, if not a physical mandate, to cooperate with nature rather than overwhelm it with brute force.

Beauty resides innately in that desire, and that’s when it becomes the Truth.

I live on a mostly rural island, so my environment comprises mainly natural forms: rocks, trees, deer, great blue heron, water. A quarter-mile from my house is a high bluff where I can look over a strait in Puget Sound. On occasion a certain sun angle coincides with just the right point in the tidal cycle, and a vast curving line appears in the water, the scribble of a mild rip. As simple as it is, it’s strikingly beautiful. It looks like a calligraphic flourish underlining the North Cascades, rising in the distance. One morning as I watched, a sailboat glided into the picture and bisected the line. And it occurred to me that there’s one human-crafted object that will always enhance, rather than spoil, a beautiful natural setting.

In my work as an architecture and urban design critic, I frequently have to leave my island  to visit human-crafted objects, often forty or sixty stories high, in Seattle and other cities. Because my reference is now an island, I’ve become more suspicious of these things, harder to impress even when their design is undeniably expressive and dramatic. It’s not that I want everything to look like sailboats—there’s probably room for only one Sydney Opera House in the world—but that I’m looking for some of that honoring of the natural world in some thoughtful way. And rarely finding it.

What cities are now doing is celebrating our mastery of technology rather than our partnership with nature. Modern office buildings cocoon their occupants in environments where everything from the enclosure of space to the lighting spectrum is artificially controlled. It may be comfortable, but it’s not necessarily healthy or conducive to creativity. I was once standing in the drafting room of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, with its translucent ceiling, when a cloud drifted overhead. The mood of the room suddenly and dramatically changed—and what was wrong with that? When we work in an environment that remains connected to nature, we’re more likely to make creative decisions that respect those connections.

In A Sand County Almanac, the book that sixty years ago finally spilled the word “ecology” into everyday kitchen conversation, Aldo Leopold pleaded eloquently for his fellow humans to return to thinking of ourselves as part of the community of life, rather than as its masters. This requires an acceptance of nature and an appreciation of how the parts all fit together, rather than tireless efforts to manage and transform it. I expect Leopold, who died just before his book was published, would not be encouraged by what he’d observe in the world today: species blinking into extinction at the rate of 72 every day, suburbs oozing carelessly into forest and farmland, energy and natural resources being squandered. Frankly, if he were to paw the burgeoning scrap bin in my boat shop, heaped high with mistakes and misjudgments, he might be appalled at my waste, too.

But when I consider what wooden boats have taught me, the waste seems tolerable. I’ve grown a sharper eye for the beauty of underlying order. A deeper respect for the intrinsic nature of materials. More ability to pare away the self-indulgent and the superfluous to get down to essentials. A willingness to enjoy what’s freely offered—wind and current—rather than craving the power to overcome them. All of these point not just toward more skillful boatbuilding or sailing, but toward better citizenship in the natural world.

Arizona Highways, February 2008

 

 

s crime scenes go, Lake Powell is so staggeringly beautiful that it is hard to hold in the lock of your mind that you are supposed to be appalled by it. Even Edward Abbey got himself grudgingly seduced: “Though not a lake, [it] may well be as its defenders assert the most beautiful reservoir in the world.” The Sierra Club’s David Brower likewise slipped during a boat trip staged by writer John McPhee: “You can’t duplicate this experience—this lake—anywhere else,” Brower admitted.

 

I am spending five days on Lake Powell in a kayak, nominally to scribble a travel story for another magazine, but I am gnawing on a deeper personal agenda that I haven’t shared with the five other members of our plastic flotilla. In a micro-boycott to honor my environmental ethic, I never came here in the quarter-century that I lived in Arizona. I believed then, and now, that we humans hold a moral responsibility to tread as lightly as possible on the earth. How can anyone reconcile that principle with the colossal bootprint of this desert lake?

 

This is a dilemma that overflows the borders of a travel story, which is why I am finally wringing it out here. It is worth visiting Lake Powell solely to consider the rightness or wrongness of its existence. The conjunctions of nature and civilization are among the most powerful issues of our time, and they are becoming more pressing as the planet grows more crowded and our uses of its resources more daring. Lake Powell, though nearly 50 years old now, is perhaps the most radical and controversial transformation of a landscape ever undertaken by humankind.

 

The idea of man-made lakes first occurred some 4,000 years ago, when small reservoirs for drinking water and irrigation arosefirst appeared in China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. But these were little more than beaver dams that happened to be built by two-legged land mammals. The great reservoir boom had to wait for concrete (huge earthen dams tended to spectacular and lethal failures) and in North America, the advent of the New Deal and its public works ambitions. With the completion of Hoover Dam in 1935, the second of six stoppers along the Colorado River in Arizona, an era of titanic dams—and the vast reservoirs behind them—was in full bloom.

 

Glen Canyon Dam, which created Lake Powell, was unique because the landscape upstream from it was no everyday desert basin. It was a labyrinth of crinkly canyons, some as dark and foreboding as dungeons, others as dramatic as gothic cathedrals, all punctuated with occasional waterfalls and sudden splashes of sunlit Gambel oaks and willows. Abbey, who wrote a chapter of Desert Solitaire about his rubber raft trip through the canyon before the lake backed into it, concluded that “here was an Eden, a portion of the earth’s original paradise.”

 

The dam’s raison d’etre, strangely, is murky. The Bureau of Reclamation sold it to Congress as a means of hoarding Colorado River water for irrigation and a cash cow of hydroelectric power. But Arizona and Utah also saw it as a catalyst for tourism in massive numbers, which Glen Canyon’s wilderness had not encouraged. After the lake arose, its unique beauty seemed to overwrite all other considerations. A  brochure authored by Floyd Dominy, the Bureau’s commissioner from 1959 to 1969, is empurpled with prose likely not matched by any bureaucrat in modern times: “Colors like a symphony of Nature’s music … a front-row seat in an amphitheater of infinity … a oneness with the world and God.”

 

But the lake has not forged a oneness of opinion. Countless writers have seconded Abbey’s alternating heartbreak and fury over the loss of Glen Canyon, and in 1997 a Salt Lake City physician, Dr. Richard Ingebretsen, formed the Glen Canyon Institute with the ultimate goal of draining the lake. Perhaps the most remarkable second thought about the lake came from Arizona’s rock-ribbed Republican senator, who said in 1976 that of all his Senate votes, the one he would most want to change “was a vote I cast to construct Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River.” Goldwater was remembering the river he had visited in 1940, apparently gone forever.

 

rizona is a land of audacious schemes, partly because it is young and open, and also because the outrageous landscape seems to provoke us into competing with it. More than a millenium ago the Hohokam created the largest canal system in prehistoric North America in the valley that now cradles Phoenix. On the modern Colorado Plateau, artist James Turrell has spent more than a quarter-century remaking a volcanic crater into an experiential celestial observatory. Metro Phoenix, an oasis supporting four million people, is an audacious act of faith in a desert basin that enjoys eight inches of rainfall a year.

 

Most of our schemes alter the landscape. Some respectfully: the prehistoric Sinagua pueblo of Tuzigoot crowns a Verde Valley hill so gracefully that Nature herself could have arranged the rock walls. And some not: modern homes perch on the slopes of Phoenix’s Camelback Mountain and Tucson’s Santa Catalinas, each making its personal architectural statement, and the cumulative effect is grandly scaled clutter.

 

It’s wrong to imagine that prehistoric Native Americans were more enlightened custodians of the land than we are. Pueblo architecture flows with the mood and shape of the land only because of its builders’ limitations. They couldn’t truck in materials from distant places; they had to fashion their architecture out of whatever the site provided: sandstone, clay, pine. Tuzigoot and similar pueblos probably assumed their tight, clustered forms from the necessity of defense. Modern hillside homes, widely separated on acre-sized lots, grow out of a different human need—the yearning for privacy.

 

Whatever the reasons behind it, transforming landscape is what our species does. At whatever level the technology of the moment allows, we build roads, bridges, dams, canals, fences, fortifications and houses. The Hohokam built vast earthen mounds and scooped out ball courts; we move dirt likewise to sculpt golf courses and level parking lots.

 

These ambitions are as legitimate a part of our nature as building nests is for eagles or burrowing is for ground squirrels. Every living organism’s biological imperative is to exploit its environment, to maximize opportunity. For better or worse, we humans are equipped to make more of this mandate than any other species.

 

We are also uniquely equipped to predict the consequences of what we’re considering doing, and we haven’t used this feature of our brains very well. That, I think, is the unspoken issue at the heart of the Lake Powell trouble. John McPhee poked at it in Encounters with the Archdruid: “possibly the reaction to dams is so violent because rivers are the ultimate metaphors of existence, and dams destroy rivers.” Lake Powell is more than a metaphor. It is a summary of modern technology’s nearly unlimited power to revise nature, and its opponents fear that it stands as a precedent. Draining the lake, on the other hand, would become an equally monumental but opposite symbol: a scaling back of human aspirations, a recognition that the human species is only part of a much larger community of life on earth, over which opposible thumbs do not automatically give us dominion.

 

That’s a seductive idea for someone who believes that our species needs a booster shot of humility, which I do. The problem is that when applied to Lake Powell, it would disregard the human capacity for creating beauty, which is another part of our biological uniqueness. We are rearranging nature whenever we design a garden, build a house, sculpt a figure out of stone or wood, or even make a painting (canvas is a rearrangement of tree fibers and pigments derive from minerals). If Lake Powell is, as Abbey thought, “the most beautiful reservoir in the world,” then it also serves as a stunning example of success. Most of our meddling with nature, from suburban lawns to other man-made lakes, is not as meritorious.

 

Of course, Lake Powell’s beauty is based on what was there before: the spectacular canyons and slickrock shelves. The spectacle that transfixes us today is the starkly dramatic juxtaposition of pink stone, sapphire sky and turquoise water, all on a scale never before seen in a desert. And yes, a place precious and irreplaceable has been drowned underneath it. How to weigh the value of each against the other?

 

One of my fellow kayakers throws out a provocative thought as we fabricate a camp in a stony half-bowl embracing a bay. “If this were natural,” he says, “no one would ever think anything other than that it’s fabulous.” Why, then, condemn it for its human-engineered origins? Or to ask the question one step deeper: why is a lake unnatural when it was created by creatures who are, unquestionably, part of nature?

 

Behind our camp, the moon rides over a ring of serrated bluffs. Its white light, cold and sharp as ice, renders the red mountains into silhouettes that glow with vague menace, like charcoal hoarding a secret fire. Then intimations of lightning begin flashing on the southern horizon, and for the next two hours we watch—warily—as a late-summer thunderstorm scribes a half-circle around us. Faint orange virgas scratch the sky, but the rain never finds the ground—a reminder that despite the 27 million acre-feet of water beside us, we are in the desert.

 

Possibly we humans have a legitimate role to play in this grand scene, or possibly we have already improvised beyond what the desert’s script will tolerate. Lake Powell eventually will prove to be a dramatic example of what we should or should not do. All I know for sure is that in this flicker of geologic time, I am in one of the most beautiful places on earth, no longer appalled.