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.

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