During the first summer of the Covid-19 pandemic, I started a hobby project: a cedar strip canoe. You may have seen actor Nick Offerman (self-described as the world’s only celebrity canoe builder) paddling one on screen. This canoe style has become iconic in the fast-growing “maker” social media sphere, featured in YouTube how-to videos and glamorous Instagram photos.
I wanted my canoe to be local and ecologically-friendly. I harvested timber from emerald ash-borer victims. Salvaged paneling from a demolished cottage provided red cedar strips for the hull. Sugar maple, an abundant managed timber species in my region, provided additional bits.
Building with wood was fun, but the result was a wobbly, leaky boat-shaped object. It still needed layers of fiberglass and epoxy to stiffen and waterproof it, to make it a canoe. As I wiped up globs of sticky resin, scraped away itchy shreds of fiberglass, and brushed sanding dust off every surface, breathing through arespirator, it finally struck me: this wasn’t woodworking anymore. My canoe was plastic.
A brief history of home fiberglas(s)
You won’t find titles like “Plastic Boats” or “Fine Fiberglassing” in magazine racks, selling—as wood-themed publications of similar names do—fantasies of craftmanship and recreation. Wood is organic, natural, honest. Plastic is artificial, mass-produced.
I finished and paddled the boat, but I spent several summers afterwards trying to understand why anyone thought do-it-yourself plastic was a good idea. As historian Rebecca Altman documents, plastics have been around for more than a century, but nearly all of the plastics we encounter are manufactured, not hand-crafted.
What brought plastic out of the factory and into the garage was another synthetic material: glass fiber. First marketed by Owens-Corning as “fiberglas” in 1936, glass fibers woven into sheets served as a substrate for a new resin developed around the same time by Dupont. While early plastics like Bakelite were shaped on complex forms under high heat and pressure, a worker could drape fiberglas over a wood or plaster mold and brush on resin to make any shape imaginable.
Fiberglass gained widespread popularity (and that extra “s”) after the Second World War. Small companies used skills honed in making aircraft and naval parts to churn out inexpensive fiberglass boats, along with campers, surfboards, sportscar kits and more.
According to historian Jeffrey Meikle, chemical companies were ambivalent about the spread of fiberglass: they didn’t like associating their products with often-amateurish projects, but small shops and DIY builders provided a fast-growing market for resins.1 The simplicity of the fiberglass and resin combination made plastic manufacturing accessible to anyone with a few tools and a willingness to make a mess.
Judging from the venues where DIY plastics were advertised in North America, “anyone” mostly meant white men and boys. The back pages of magazines like Popular Mechanics, Motor Boating, and Boy’s Life were stuffed with ads for mail-order resins, fiberglass cloth, and designs for all sorts of recreational objects.
The new “wooden” canoe
The first golden age of recreational canoeing in North America (ca. 1880-1920) relied on relatively cheap canvas-covered boats built by Canadian and US workshops. The canvas canoe was pivotal in what Jessica Dunkin calls the “whitening” of the canoe, as settler builders replaced Indigenous birchbark styles with machine-sawn planks and factory-woven canvas.2
The canoe had lost much its cachet in leisure culture by the time fiberglass arrived. While magazines like Boy’s Life printed how-to guides for building canoes with fiberglass, most postwar hobbyists had little reason to build a canoe at home. The aluminum canoe, another product of postwar retooling for the recreational market, was cheap and effective. Factory fiberglass canoes arrived in an array of bright colors by the late 1950s. Deane Gray, owner of the famed Old Town Canoe Co., in Maine, reportedly had a sign on his desk complaining, “If God wanted fiberglass canoes, he would have made fiberglass trees.” But even Old Town started making fiberglass models in the 1960s.
The modern strip canoe emerged in the late 1960s as canoe racers combined fiberglass with an older method of construction that used wooden strips. The aesthetics of the new design, which was often finished “clear” to let the natural grain of the wood shine through, resonated with builders and paddlers. The look recalled the beautiful—but expensive—varnished strip canoes that had first replaced birchbark, only to be replaced themselves by cheaper canvas canoes. Ted Moores, the doyen of strip canoe builders, stressed in his book Canoecraft that the wood and fiberglass hybrid “retains the unquestionable beauty of wooden boats, while eliminating many drawbacks of the [natural] material.”3
Crafting sustainability
I enjoyed the woodworking part of building my canoe, and this is what the DIY media I consulted emphasized: hand tools and natural materials coming together to make a beautiful project. Dealing with sticky resin and itchy fiberglass was annoying, but remorse set in when I considered the billions of microplastic particles I had created while sanding and polishing my “wooden” canoe. What happens to those microplastics, or to my plastic-saturated pile of wood when it’s no longer useful? The DIY literature was silent on this. David Hazen, author of one the first DIY guidebooks for modern strip canoes, recommended a “cremation” party around a bonfire to wish the boat’s incinerated molecules “an even better assembly next time.”4 There is no way to unmake resin-infused wood and fiberglass. Wind turbine blades pose the same problem.
Plastic is everywhere in contemporary craft culture, from hot glue to 3d printing. It’s useful stuff, and I’ve turned my attention from guilt over the plastic itself, toward critical reflection about the processes that led me to build something in the first place. My own desire for a useful, eco-friendly project had turned into an exercise in what historian Steven Gelber calls “domestic masculinity,” an expression of identity through the acquisition and use of new tools and new skills.5 In a recent study, Hofverberg, Kronlid, and Ostman compared groups self-identified as “woodworkers” and “makers” with “craftivists.” While all three represented cultural movements promising liberation from mainstream consumerism, the authors found that woodworkers and makers—mostly identifying as men—used craft for self-empowerment. The craftivists, mostly identifying as women, understood crafting as community-building and political activism, creating things for community out of shared resources.
I don’t know what a “craftivist canoe” would look like yet, but I don’t think it’s going to be the one I built. As lovely as it is to look it, it’s a fiberglass canoe that, quite fittingly, only seats one.
Notes
[1] Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 196.
[2] Jessica Dunkin, Canoe and Canvas: Life at the Encampments of the American Canoe Association, 1880−1910 (University of Toronto Press, 2019), 12–13.
[3] Ted Moores, Canoecraft: A Harrowsmith Illustrated Guide to Fine Woodstrip Construction, Harrowsmith Illustrated Guide to Fine Woodstrip Construction (Camden East: Camden House Pub, 1983), 17.
[4] David Hazen, The Stripper’s Guide to Canoe-Building, 4th ed., rev (Larkspur, Calif: Tamal Vista Publications, 1976), 87.
[5] Steven M. Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 217.
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