Last month, I met journalist Lawrence W. Cheek, who is on the faculty of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts low-residency MFA program on Whidbey Island. He is at work on a boat he has named Nil Desperandum (never despair) as well as a new book about boatbuilding as character building. He has generously shared an excerpt with Writing It Real subscribers.  –ed.

A boat, any boat, is a bazaar of entropy, a theme festival built around Yeats’ epic summation, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Stored on land, the deterioration is rapid, with the concerted ravages of moss and critters and ultraviolet and dry rot; stored in the water, it is the same only the rot is wet and still more rapid. We are told that in the blessed vacuum of deep space an inert thing will essentially last forever unless it runs into something, but this has not been confirmed by a test with an orbiting boat. I am certain a boat will biodegrade even where there is no bio.

Not surprisingly, when working on Nil Desperandum my thoughts often slop over into contemplation of my personal entropy. Yesterday, for example, I had to fold and pretzel myself into the pointy area under the foredeck, a converging tunnel with just under 21 inches of headroom, to cut a hole in the forward bulkhead and install a waterproof deck plate. Wedged in this triangular coffin, I wielded jigsaw, drill, sander, and assorted pots of toxic chemicals for three hours. By the end my body felt like it had been processed through a wine press, and the next day, despite massive Advil infusions, I was a geography of aches. I found myself reflecting on a dismaying irony involving boatbuilding and mortality: If I were building a substantially larger boat, there would be more room in its corners and crannies, and tasks like this wouldn’t hurt so much. But if I were building a substantially larger boat, the actuarial risk that I might not be around long enough to finish it would rise alarmingly.

An ambitious man on a neighboring island in Puget Sound began building a 40-plus-foot schooner in 1974. He was then 43 years old. He launched the boat in 2009 at the age of 78. Although still in good enough health to sail, he had to relinquish his dream of world cruising. The boat was capable, but not his body. 

Things fall apart: Physiologists tell us that our peak athletic years fall into the narrow band from about age 20 to 35. After 35 comes a linear deterioration to about 70, after which the rate of decline becomes exponential. The mind cannot hold, either: Recent research at the University of Virginia has demonstrated that the average brain’s peak performance occurs at 22. Decays in speed, reasoning and puzzle-solving ability first appear at 27, and memory begins to unravel at 37. Mental performance on tests of vocabulary or accumulated knowledge increase until 60, then these too veer south. This is a painful chronicle. “Among the cruelest tricks life plays,” lamented the essayist Ian Frazier, “is the way it puts the complicated part at the end, when the brain is declining into simplicity, and the simplest part at the beginning, when the brain is fresh and has memory to spare.”

Neither the physical nor mental deterioration can be blamed on a Designer with a mean streak. If you look at it with the ruthless objectivity of biological evolution, Nature is finished with us as soon as we’ve reproduced and shepherded children to the point where they can make spears and hunt mammoth for themselves. Over nearly all the long run of human history, anyone much over 35 has been just so much tribal baggage. The wisdom of village elders was not greatly needed until complicated stuff arose so recently, like constitutional law and calculus, so natural selection did not favor the unusual individuals whose genes kept them sharp until the bitter end. Maybe it does now — I would like to think so — but does a genetic predisposition to sexagenarian alertness somehow kick in when you’re still programmed to reproduce at 30? I don’t know, and the question is too complicated for me to figure out.

Having recently passed 60, I am intimately aware of this inexorable spiral. Among many other things, I worry that my writing has lost its edge. John Updike, in a piquant essay titled “The Writer in Winter,” observed that “Among the rivals besetting an aging writer is his younger, nimbler self, when he was the cocky new thing.” As a cocky new journalist in my 20s, I occasionally conducted half-hour interviews without taking notes; I could recall the key points later with startling verbatim accuracy. In the following decade that talent evaporated, but I was a good note-taker and could still fill in the blanks between phrases from memory. Today I scribble madly throughout interviews, but have noticed an alarming trend for vital quotes to dribble off in midsentence, the thought incomplete and incoherent; and when I review my notes a day after writing them they appear as alien as if someone else had written them. As much as I hate depending on technology I don’t understand, I’ve bought one of these digital pens that records conversation, then plays back selected portions when you touch a keyword in your notes: a prosthetic memory. There’s no technological fix, though, when in the actual writing process I begin a sentence of my own, pause for a reflective second to consider how to shape the rest of it, then watch helplessly as the train of thought plunges into the black canyon of nothingness.

Building a boat requires as much thinking as doing. There’s math to be committed, conceptual physics to be grasped, and future consequences of present engineering to be predicted. Boat designer and builder Sam Devlin once told me he thinks there’s no other occupation that demands so much mental agility in concert with so much physical craft. I believe it, because I feel the stress of things falling apart in both arenas. There are days when I stare blankly at a boat piece I’ve just fabricated, unable to decide whether it wants beveling three degrees to the right or to the left so it will fit properly. Then how to attach it? If it’s permanently affixed with epoxy there is one cascade of consequences; if impermanently with screws there ensues an entirely different one. The farther ahead I try to look, the thicker blooms the fog.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the measure of a first-rate intellect is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at once. Fitzgerald died at 44. If he had lived longer, he would have softened his standard, accepting that at a certain age it’s a hell of an accomplishment just to keep the implications of one idea in working order.

As I’m writing this — and it’s taking days; I’m no longer the sure-footed 25-year-old reporter who could kick out a 750-word election-night story on a 45-minute deadline — I’m on the brink of a depressing conclusion. Isn’t age discrimination justified, at least in the workplace? Shouldn’t a prospective employer legally be allowed to reject the whole pile of over-45 applicants on the objective evidence that we simply aren’t as capable, and will only continue our slide as the years stack up? Yes, there’s an obvious societal benefit in ensuring that older people — I wince as I write the term — have a fair shot at employment, but doesn’t that make the United States less competitive?

Would the iPhone exist if Apple’s engineers were all fifty-something?

At this point I should launch into the predictable exaltation of accumulated wisdom and insight and neatly wrap things up on the optimistic note that such qualities more than balance the agility of a young and eager mind. But that is a complicated big-picture equation, and I’m not sure my cooling skillet of neurons is up to it. There is at least one modest advantage of age, though, that seems important not only to the quality of work but also to how I feel about myself as I proceed with it. The simplest word for it is courage, and it plays out in several ways.

There is the courage to try things without concern for whether the results will impress people. The courage to ask for help without worrying that it might signal weakness or indecision. The courage to dismiss convention and question basic assumptions.

When you don’t feel like you have to be right all the time in order to look cool, or appear in control of everything, new possibilities bloom.

I’m finding that making decisions on the boat increasingly involve just two considerations: What will work? And what’s consistent with my values? The aging boat builder, or writer or teacher or mechanic or physician, enjoys a clarity in these two considerations that people half his age might well envy. And that clarity might be guiding him through the best work he’s ever done.