The first piece of furniture that I ever made was a table that should have been steering my newly acquired boat, across the azure blue waters of the Caribbean.  It had been doing so a couple of years earlier, but had somehow found itself dried out, split apart and forgotten in the hot sand, below the bow of Quicksilver.  As a I struggled against the flow to steer my destiny back toward the open sea, the abandoned rudder contrived with the tired wooden sloop, to move me ever further from the water and as the months turned into years in the shade beneath the hull, to guide me toward a yet unnoticed path that lay buried beneath the growing Woodpile that was once my home.

I still have the Rudder table and in so many ways, I will always have the boat. I don’t know how long the rudder had been calling me before I listened. As with huge ships out on the ocean some changes in direction are gradual, imperceptible yet irresistible. Quicksilver new that I wasn’t to be a Mariner. I spent 8 years on the same Caribbean island, working on my boat, trying to get her back to the sea, as she repeatedly teased me into  thinking that I was close to the prize only to playfully  push me away once more.

As I struggled to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to rebuild her, she gradually revealed herself to me always staying one step away and as the pile of discarded fragments grew alongside the hull, so, eventually, did the realization that I was becoming a woodworker and a boat builder. On the day that I finally saw beneath the sun-bleached oak of the dehydrated rudder for the first time I also truly saw what my relationship with Quicksilver was. And when I then saw the pile of twisted mahogany planks, cracked oak frames, and sawn off Sitka spas, as beautiful wood looking for a second chance, I knew that beneath it lay my path and that it didn’t lead to the sea.