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.

Finding an answer to rough seas
Published in The New York Times, Jan. 10, 2010

The digital revolution recently snuffed the life of the 146-year-old Seattle newspaper for which I wrote a column, and the recession has neatly disposed of most of the rest of my income-producing work. This has not been entirely bad, as it has liberated considerable time for work on the 19-foot sailboat taking shape in my shop.

I’m turning to the boat earlier and earlier every day, like a growing drinking problem,

and I’m now suffering work-ethic guilt hangovers: the nagging feeling that I ought to be doing more productive things with my time. Even though the tasks associated with boatbuilding, the sawing, sanding, planing, painting and worrying, look and ache very much like real work, modern culture defines work as labor that produces a paycheck. My strictly amateur boatbuilding doesn’t qualify. [More]