Hasta La Ideas

Editor: Here in Part 2 of “Accidental Designer’s” story, he engages in one of the more unconventional design/build educations we’ve ever heard of—and unwittingly lays the foundation for a big next step on his way to starting his own company.

If you’re behind on this tale, you’ll want to catch up with Part 1 first.

It amazes me that those of you in design school learn your craft in four years. Since I had no plan, I spent well over a decade building up my skillset and learned a lot of things the hard way, though I don’t regret a day of it.

After graduating high school I had no notion of design as a career, and more immediately I knew college wasn’t for me. Neither was staying in my mom’s house. So at 18 I moved out, and started living on a derelict wooden sailboat that my brother and I had bought with money we’d saved up working for my dad.

With every dollar we had spent on the boat, there wasn’t anything left over for paying for a space to dock the boat. So my brother and I became experts at “the slip-around,” where you’d find a slip someone had recently vacated, then dock the boat there. Eventually Harbor Patrol would realize your boat was in a slip that someone had stopped renting, then you’d get towed to the impound dock. But it didn’t take a genius to figure out that paying a $35 fine a couple times a month was a helluva lot cheaper than the $300 monthly rental fee.

I supported myself using the skills I’d learned under Mr. Barkington in that hellish Shop class, particularly that last big boat restoration job. I had also taught myself some new tricks through trial and error, and I talked some folks into hiring me to restore their boats. With the money I saved I was able to buy some boats of my own, real junkers, but I’d live in them, restore them, flip them, then buy another, rinse and repeat. That worked out pretty good.

People got to know my face around the marina, and I got hired to do odd jobs around the place. Instead of the Harbor Police writing me tickets, I became the guy they’d call if a boat was sinking in the harbor, and I’d go pump it out. If someone showed up in the middle of the night for an early-morning haul, I’d help them get set up. Because I was there practically 24-7, I became the boatyard’s de facto security.

Eventually I caught the attention of the local boatyard. They had this old-school shipwright, a really crusty old-timer who wanted to retire, and he needed an apprentice who could keep the work up. I’ll call him Mr. Wright, and I’ll tell you that this guy made Mr. Barkington look like a kind, nurturing soul.

But I wasn’t there for praise, and apprenticing under an old-school guy like that, who really knew his business, was one of the best educations I could get. Soon I was living in the boatyard with my own, legal, slip. And for the next eight years Mr. Wright taught me proper process and procedure, along with a system of wood joinery that was centuries old. He taught me how to balance following tradition with thinking on your feet. I got to use all kinds of unusual shipwright’s tools, like a handplane with a bowed, springy bottom so you could plane concave surfaces, tools the likes of which I never saw before or since. He had this special kind of adjustable “story stick” that he used to measure windows, he called it a “Preacher stick.” I asked him why and he looked at me like I was an idiot and said “Because it never lies.”

(more…)