When I was a boy, growing up in Massachusetts on Cape Cod, I lived for a couple of years in Truro, way down the Cape next to Provincetown. It was a tiny town then, no more than a couple hundred people year round, perhaps 500 or so in the summer, and a general store and a post office and a boatyard down at the mouth of the Pamet River where it emptied into Cape Cod Bay.

There wasn't much for a boy to do. To break the boredom I used to hitchhike into Provincetown and hang around the fish pier, or hunt for Indian arrowheads on Corn Hill, or help a friend who lived on a farm shoot rats in the chicken barn, or, when really desperate, lay pennies on the railroad tracks and wait for the single freight of the week to pass by and flatten them out. But my favorite pastime was to go down to the Pamet and poke around the boatyard.

One day when skylarking through the yard and coincidentally suffering from a near-terminal case of I-gotta-have-a-boat, I saw a rowing punt by the door of a shed, carrying a for-sale sign. It was an unremarkable boat: a couple of side planks, a cross-planked bottom, flat transoms at both ends, and lots of peeling paint, but it reminded me of the punt that Walt Kelley's cartoon character Pogo used to row around the Swamp with his friends. Pogo's punt would start out in the first frame of a comic strip with a simple name like Frenchie with no hailing port, and in the next frame it would become something like Shikuma, and then Henry Shikuma from Hilo, and then Henry and Ellen from Oahu, and then Missie B from Dubuque, and later the S.S. Helen Barrow from Spokane, and so on. Only primordial boat junkies paid any attention to this running gag. Straight folk were too busy trying to figure out whether Pogo was a Republican or a Democrat or a socialist verging on a pinko Commie fellow traveler.

One of the carpenters at the Pamet River boatyard told me that the asking price for the punt was $35, which doesn't sound like much now and probably wasn't much then, but it might as well have been a thousand dollars as far as I was concerned. My family wasn't living on easy street in those days; I wasn't old enough to have a paying job.

Broke or not, I was at once a rowboat nut and a Pogo fan, and I had to have that boat. So I decided to build a copy of it, even though I had never built a boat before, or anything else more complicated than a tree house lashed together from planks and an old door or two. I ran back home and got a ruler and ran back to the boatyard and took off a few rough dimensions, and then when nobody was looking liberated some boards from a deconstructed barn down the road.

I built that punt in a day, caulking the seams with strips of cloth cut from an old flannel shirt, painted it the next day, and launched it the third. It wasn't fancy and it was the butt of a lot of jokes, but it was good enough for mucking around in the salt marshes and for fishing in a nearby freshwater pond, and it was stable and it didn't leak and it didn't cost $35 and it was mine.

I was then, and am to this day, a certifiable rowboat junkie, and that little punt, my first rowing craft, couldn't have come at a better time. At least my old man probably thought so. A couple of weeks earlier, I had been collared for stealing someone else's rowboat. I protested that I had merely borrowed it, that I was simply testing it out to see how she rowed, but the town constable who ran me in for Grand Theft, Watercraft failed to appreciate the distinction.