Inspiration

We went out to the Lummi reservation and found these canoes that would inspire our canoe project. When Lewis and Clark arrived on the Northwest Coast, near present-day Astoria on the Columbia River, they were so taken aback by the canoe-building skills of the Clatsop and Chinook tribes. William Clark, on October 23rd, 1805, wrote:

“I observed on the beach near the Indian Lodges two Canoes butifull of different Shape & Size to what we had Seen above wide in the midde and tapering to each end, on the bow curious figures were Cut in the wood &c. Capt. Lewis went up to the Lodges to See those Canoes and exchanged our Smallest Canoe for one of them by giveing a Hatchet & few trinkets to the owner who informed that he purchased it of a white man below for a horse, these Canoes are neeter made than any I have ever Seen and Calculated to ride the waves, and carry emence burthens, they are dug thin and are suported by cross pieces of about 1 inch diamuter tied with Strong bark thro holes in the Sides.”

Bill Kindler, our friend and mentor in this project, has made the point that in making canoes: Perfection is driven by fear, but beauty is inspired by love. Looking at other wooden boats and seeing the love put into them, we have been inspired.

Getting Our Wood

We went out to the vampire town of Forks (of Twilight fame), where they get some 120 inches of rain every year, to go get boards of beautiful fallen and recovered Old Growth Western Red and Yellow Cedar. The boards were clear of knots and our friend Bill estimated them to be some 400 years old.

Tracing the Plans

To make the forms, you have to trace the plans into poster board and then cut the forms from plywood. Because of my drawing skills, this is a part of the project I am glad that I didn't take part in.

Before and After: Cedar Boards

The cedar boards we acquired go through the long process of beading and coving, making the grooves in the wood that will eventually hold the strips together. Ripping the boards to size and making the beads and coves was a process that took 2 long days with a table saw and a router, courtesy of our friend Bill.

Making hundreds of dollars of sawdust

It’s funny the things we do now like boat making or fishing that our ancestors used to do just to make life easier, and when we do them now they don’t exactly make our lives easier or less expensive. (We probably could by a canoe for a quarter the cost of the building materials and tools or buy a salmon for a small fraction of the price that we pay for fishing gear, fly tying materials and everything else associated with the religion of fly fishing.) But these are the things we do to make our lives more fulfilling, and our forebears fought so hard so that we wouldn’t have to struggle in the arduous task of making a canoe. And yet here we are in the age of convenience struggling to make canoes, for no other reason other than pure pleasure.

With the amount of wood it would take to make one Native American dugout canoe of the type that the Salish coast tribes used to make, you could make six strip canoes.

Making stems

Here you can see the stages of making the stems. With all the clamps, the forms with the inside and outside stems looks like a Medieval torture device. You can also see the stems (which are made from very thin strips of cedar and sapele wood cured in an expoxy solution) before and after the sanding.

Loaded Truck

The first stage of our project is done. With the cedar boards ripped, beaded and coved, we head back to Bellingham with our truck loaded down also with a strongback (upon which we mount the stems and forms to put on the beaded and coved strips).

Healing Waters Boat

Our friend, Bill, led a group of the Olympic Peninsula Fly Fishers Club in the building of this beautiful Rangeley boat for Project Healing Waters, an organization dedicated to the physical and emotional rehabilitation of disabled active military service personnel and veterans through fly fishing and fly tying education and outings. I love this insignia on the bow.

Something to aspire to...

Without a doubt, the prettiest boat we saw at the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend was Joe Greenley's kayak. We watched Joe give a demonstration of how to build a strip kayak (in the same style as our canoe) and he made it look so doable. You can see him seated by this beautiful boat.

Wooden Boat Festival. Port Townsend, WA

The Scenic Route

There’s nothing like a road trip to stir the imagination. The Adventure Buddy crew’s most recent 5000-mile detour through the western United States gave plenty of time and space to contemplate the bigness of life and a finer appreciation of taking the longer routes—the broad horizons of long country highways like the 722 Farm-to-Market in the Texas Panhandle, the traversals up rutted dirt paths in forests and meadows like the road to the Pine Creek Ski Area in Wyoming, and the winding mountain roads like the 139 in western Colorado from Dinosaur to Grand Junction. What follows is an attempt to depict the bigness of what we experienced—the sights and smells, the characters we came across, the music we listened to that stirred our senses, and the books we read to further stimulate our ruminations.

Adventure Crew on the Upper Dungeness River

Movement

Adventure Lu

Leaving Western Washington

We left the dull skies and dreary confines of Western Washington when we took a washboard dirt forest service road up to Suntop Lookout overlooking Mount Rainier. There, looking west, you can see clouds and out to the east, on the other side of the Cascades, you can see clear skies. The division could not be clearer. And it was here that we knew we were leaving Western Washington.

Suntop Lookout

"Lo que quieren es perder tiempo." Sunnyside, Washington

After our run up to view Mt. Rainier, we took a spin through the appropriately named Sunnyside, Washington in search of a taco truck. I just knew that in this part of this very agricultural part of the world, we could find some tacos. After taking a few spins through town, we found Super Tacos, a truck by a liquor store and a little bit of shade from the hot sun beating down on our poor skin made so white by living in Bellingham. We sat down and I ordered a torta de adobada, one of my standards for this sort of an affair. As we were eating, an enormous pick-up pulled up and two Mexicans, who looked like they had been working all day, sauntered out in their alligator skin cowboy boots. The driver looked at what I was eating and said to the lady taking orders that he wanted what I was eating because it was making his mouth water. Not realizing that I understand Spanish, he looked surprised when I laughed at his cavalier order. They sat down with us and we started talking about we did for a living and how we could understand Spanish. He began telling his life story of how some 15 years ago, he left his native Veracruz, a state on the Caribbean, more tropical part of Mexico to go work on a salmon and crab boat in Alaska. When the season ended, he found work with a Russian fishing fleet and did his time on the boats as a self-taught electrician. He did this for a number of years claimed also to have worked on the electronics on Microsoft henchman Paul Allen’s yacht. In Sunnyside, he and his compadre were taking care of cattle and both were complaining about how the calves don’t take holidays, that the calves need their attention even on Sundays. Then one of them asks what we were doing in Sunnyside and we say that we were going to Texas and then Kansas. We explained that we don’t usually take the Interstate, that we were going to make it to Texas without being on the Interstate for more than 50 miles. The first Mexican cowboy says to the other, “Isn’t that just a waste of time? Doesn’t it take longer to go on the smaller roads?” And the other Mexican cowboy looks at the first as if the first didn’t understand us and says, “Pero no entiendes. Lo que quieren es perder tiempo.” And the second cowboy understood us, because that was precisely our goal. To waste time. Or to make good time, which for us, is measured with emphasis on ‘good’ rather than ‘time,’ and this indeed changes our whole approach to things.

Tommy Three Reds in Wallowa National Forest

This is the first road trip that all 4 of us did in Tommy Three Reds and Tommy did brilliantly in his Adventure Buddy road trip debut, taking us on washboard roads with massive ruts that we never would have dreamed of driving with Rocinante.

Eastern Oregon

My Girls

Buddies