The Year of the Boat - [Excerpt]
Beauty, Imperfection, and the Art of Doing It Yourself
Sasquatch Books 2008

It began as a project to build a wooden sailboat in a suburban garage within a self-imposed deadline of one year. But difficulties—both technical and emotional—made a shambles of the deadline, and Lawrence Cheek’s project to build a boat became an inquiry into the nature of beauty, a struggle with obsession and perfectionism, and finally a question of character. The Year of the Boat is the story of how one man built a boat in spite of himself.

A wooden boat’s beauty lies in its reflection of nature
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. [More]