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.

Published in WoodenBoat magazine #203, July/August 2008

 wooden boat will take every bit of perfectionism you can throw at it,” warned  the owner of a 33-foot sloop. “You’ve got to be very dedicated and very anal,” said a man detailing a classic lobster boat converted to cruising. And there was the skipper of a stunning 78-foot schooner, deflecting questions on how the crew could possibly keep up with her maintenance: “I say, how can you not keep up with it? How can you ignore the responsibility of maintaining a thing of such beauty, 52 tons of the finest wood ever grown?”

I was absorbing all this five years ago, my first time wandering the docks at a wooden boat festival, casually interviewing owners. It wasn’t an auspicious introduction for a recovering perfectionist beginning to consider buying or building a wooden boat. I’d wrestled with the perfectionist demon in my writing for decades, finally realizing that it had led to creative paralysis and chronic dissatisfaction—and alcohol to blunt the pain—and had reached a reasonable balance in most corners of my life. Taking on a wooden boat threatened the peace.

The demon dwells in the culture of wooden boats. Building, restoring or just maintaining one can bring into bloom a latent inclination to obsession. In Building Small Boats, Greg Rössel argues sensibly for a middle ground: “Don’t look for perfection,” he advises. “We’re not building a Steinway piano. The goal is just good old-fashioned clean workmanship—a job that fits well and looks good.” The perfectionist’s automatically obsessive mind will take these very words and grow an argument for monomaniacal attention to detail. “’Good old-fashioned clean workmanship’ is perfection,” he’ll argue. “Why shouldn’t a boat have the same level of craftsmanship as a Steinway—or better? Nobody’s life depends on a piano.”

How good, then, is good enough? If we settle on a middling level of quality merely because it falls into a personal comfort zone, how then does humanity make progress?

n the broad sweep of human affairs, perfectionism is not a bad thing. Voltaire famously wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good,” but the observation is equally valid if we spin it around: The good is the enemy of the best. In many arenas, pushing for perfection is clearly the right thing, the moral thing, to do. Where would air travel be if Boeing weren’t continually striving to make the perfectly safe airliner? Fifty years ago, commercial flight was vastly more hazardous than it is today. Look at Brahms, the classic self-torturing perfectionist. He relentlessly burned scores that didn’t meet his own standards, and once told a protégé (whose music we’ve forgotten) that “…you seem to me too easily satisfied … I never cool down over a work, once begun, until it’s perfected, unassailable.”

Brahms’ perfect music has enriched humanity beyond measure, but my reading of his life is that his temperament also extracted an enormous price in personal misery. He sought perfection in love and friendship, but because human behavior, unlike his musical creation, was beyond his control, he failed in relationships again and again.

We seem to be confronting a perfect dilemma. For the individual, striving for perfection, or even objective excellence, is often personally destructive. But for the sake of humanity, it’s essential. Without this push, we don’t enrich the quality of life on earth.

I was eight months into the construction of a Sam Devlin-designed daysailer before I mustered the nerve to introduce myself to the designer and ask some questions. We ended up talking for two hours in his waterfront office at the southern tip of Puget Sound, and part of it turned to a discussion of the demon. “As you’ve learned, you can work on these things forever,” he said. “There’s no end to how far you can take it. The place we stop is the place where it’s better than what we did on the boat just before.”

That sounded like a satisfying solution—for a professional builder. I didn’t have a benchmark, aside from Devlin’s plans and a mental vision of what the boat should be. Another of the hazards of wooden boatbuilding is that the physical process takes a long time, which means that the vision also has time to solidify and assume a lustrous and seductive aura. When one doesn’t have great boatbuilding chops, that vision progressively dies, leaving a residue that feels very much like grief.

I took another fact-finding expedition to Gabriola Island, British Columbia, where Peter Gron, who I’d met online through his blog, was building a 22’ 8” full-keel sloop to another Devlin design. Like me, Gron was an amateur building his first boat; unlike me, he started with a full array of carpentry skills and the patience to think through problems and even build mockups before throttling ahead. Gron’s craftsmanship was and is exquisite. He was also building his boat to a vision, part of which was that this boat will define him, demonstrate what he’s capable of doing, and more importantly, show what he believes in. Click here for Peter Gron’s blog     Excellent as his skills are, he’s occasionally stalled short of his ideal, and it’s caused him plenty of grief—as his blog candidly admits. His friends think he’s a perfectionist. He insists not, then adds, “Maybe I’m in denial.” He does follow a rule-of-thumb on detail work: “If you have to use a dental mirror and flashlight to see it, you’re going too far.”

Gron headlined his November 2007 report: “I’m In Hell” and recounted an agonizing month of varnishing, sanding, and endlessly revarnishing the cabin interior. First it was too glossy—“like a funhouse, reflections everywhere”—then jaundiced yellow. “Someone probably could point to that and call it perfectionism,” he told me. “I really don’t think perfection was the issue. I had a vision of the interior as something warm, honest, not ostentatious. This environment was pretty high up on the scale of importance to me. I spent a few days, as always, asking: can I modify the  picture? Can I see myself being happy in there the way it is? I couldn’t, so I had to keep at it.”

Here’s the difference, I think, between Gron and the helplessly obsessive  perfectionist: Peter hasn’t lost sight of the core goal, which is to build a boat that gives pleasure—not one that fulfills an abstract ideal. “If I look back on what I’ve made and I’m able to see the care that was put into it, even if the result isn’t perfect, that makes me happy.”

When my boat was more or less finished, I towed her to Devlin’s shop, using the 90-minute drive to rehearse a  litany of excuses for all the amateurish mistakes. I had butt-joined two lengths of cedar for my port sheer clamp, not realizing that the change in applied torque right at the joint would cause a little kink in the thin 6-mm plywood hull side. My foredeck bowed in the middle, like a Corvette with a suggestive power bulge in its hood. The anxiety was all for nothing. Devlin was inconceivably gracious, poking around the boat with the apparent delight of a boy invited to examine a pile of dinosaur bones. “You made a really nice boat,” he  said. But I felt undeserving, and launched into a list of things I planned to improve, starting with the very amateur finish on the deck. “I wouldn’t bother,” Devlin interrupted right there. “It’s really not important.”

But a couple of months later I bought one more contractor’s pack of sandpaper and spent a week of afternoons in the garage grinding and varnishing, and improved the quality of the deck’s finish by a good 50 percent. It remained obviously an amateur’s effort, but better. It was important, and what I began realizing was that each boatbuilder is entitled to discover his own reasons for the level of quality chosen.

One person might need a boat to generate waves of compliments wherever it docks, although I suspect he or she might not be a lot of fun to be around. Another, like Peter Gron, may need to fulfill a vision—of a boat or of some inner capacity for perseverance and craftsmanship.

For me, the 18-month project gradually had become a matter of looking at my little boat as a larger responsibility.

If a boat is ugly—clunkily proportioned, sloppily detailed, pocked with epoxy leprosy—it’s a form of visual pollution, dishonoring human intelligence and squandering the materials that went into it. If it’s beautiful, it leaves ripples of pleasure in its wake, enhancing life on earth in some small way. The presence of beauty makes a difference in the quality of life for all humanity.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 8, 2008

e humans crave to be in the presence of beauty. It’s a drive as fundamental as hunger or sex, underlying everything from buying flowers for the dinner table to our creation of National Parks. And it’s the only thing that explains the irrational, unconscionable and devastating expense of building, buying and keeping a boat.

Opening Day can look a lot like preening, and there’s a morsel of ostentation around it, but beauty is at its heart—the natural splendor of the lakes and sound, and the human-crafted beauty of boats. So here’s a thought to consider today: the reason we respond so emotionally to boats is their relationship to the natural world.

A boat is an architectural form that pays respect to nature in a direct and honest manner. Its shape is determined by its need to carve as efficiently as possible through water and air. This is particularly true of sailboats, which combine some of the most compelling, elemental forms of the natural world—the curve, the fin, the wing—with just enough outwardly visible mechanical complexity to reassure us that human ingenuity has a rightful place in the gearworks of nature.

I think that at a subconscious level, we compare the forms we know in nature to those we see in man-made objects, and react with instinctive pleasure if the object reveals a relationship to a natural form. Essayist Scott Russell Sanders suggests that we find beauty there “because it gives us a glimpse of the underlying order of things.”

Now step deeper into nature and human history, and contemplate the special case of the wooden boat.

When fiberglass boats first appeared in 1947, the technology democratized boating in a radically new way. Ordinary people had always been able to afford wooden boats, but the unwealthy had to build them themselves. Mass-produced fiberglass boats could be larger but cheaper, and easier to maintain. The swarms of pleasure boats we see on the water today wouldn’t exist without the chemical miracle of glass cloth and resin—which wooden boat enthusiasts call, with no great affection, “glop.”

Wooden boats are decidedly more fetching, but it isn’t just the honey-in-sunlight color and grain of varnished wood. The smart wooden boat owner, unless blessed with infinite time and patience, will paint most of it anyway. It’s a deeper beauty.

A wooden boat forms a retort to the prevailing pattern of intentional obsolescence and throwaway cheapness that has infected practically every other thing we buy and use today, including our houses. The only reason to throw away a well-crafted wooden boat would be if the owner has let it deteriorate beyond a reasonable feasibility of repair—and when that happens, half the time some swooning fool will try an unfeasible restoration anyway.

The shape of the hull and assorted pieces have to consider the nature of the material. Structural integrity and aesthetic integrity are intertwined, which yields  an organic synthesis that we might call spiritual integrity.

And a wooden boat forges a relationship with its builder or owner. This may at first seem far from beautiful, demanding prodigious rallies of patience, tolerance of frustration, and sheer hard work. But whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and there’s no question that wooden boats build character.

Starting in 2005, I built a 13½-foot wooden sailboat in my Issaquah garage, which became an object lesson in letting go of the perfectionist impulse. A vision of flawless beauty shimmered in my head, but I didn’t have the boatbuilding chops to pull it off. The gap between vision and reality yawned, expanded, grew chasmic.

And for a time, near the end of construction last spring, it was emotionally devastating—it felt a lot like failure.

But another beauty of a home-built boat is that the builder is entitled to define, or redefine, success. And near the end of a far-from-perfect job, that’s what I did. This boat didn’t need to generate waves of compliments or feed its owner’s ego; it was enough that it would float and sail and deliver pleasure in the process. And that it had taught its builder many strange new skills, starting with patience and acceptance.

If it sounds as though I’m suggesting that boats have a moral dimension, well, I am. This is their ultimate beauty.

While I can’t speak to million-dollar motor yachts—not my world—I think that a modest sailboat quietly symbolizes an equilibrium where we consume resources at a sustainable pace and respect nature enough to act like members of a community instead of lords of the manor. It suggests a future in which grace, comfort and economy might all be achievable within the package of civilization.

A beautiful thought, particularly for a day on the water.