My first job out of college was with the Horsley Witten Group , a civil engineering firm doing some really cool work with environmental sustainability. The only catch was that they were based on Cape Cod in Sandwich, Massachusetts. As a kid from Maine I figured I could have fun down there. But it turned out that there was a big difference between going to high school in a small town and living in one as a 22-year-old. Occasionally my friends would come down from Boston to hang out on the beach and try our hand at surfing. But most of the time I was very, very bored.

So, I took to walking along the beaches and taking advantage of the natural scenary. It was beautiful, for sure. And as I walked I tended to find a lot of interesting driftwood. I had started to get into furniture making after taking a few related art classes in college and decided that I would furnish my new studio apartment with items made from wood I found on the beach. That led to a quest for reclaimed planks that stretched from Town Neck to Sandy Neck Beach and some truly interesting finds. I nabbed a piece of a dock with some an array of holes in it for a very large rope, and a piece of a boardwalk with a name engraved in it. Most notably, I salvaged the back of a wooden skiff that my neighbor told me had been sitting in the marsh since Hurricane Bob in ‘91. I put all of this together into a giant structure that included two bookcases, a bed hung between them, and an attached desk made from the boat. I never got a picture of the entire thing, but I do have one of the bookcase / desk assembly.

After 9 months in Sandwich the winter set in and I decided that enough was enough. I packed my things (including the entire bed / bookcase / desk structure) and moved to Cambridge, where I began to do a crazy commute from Central Square to Cape Cod. I kept that up for another year and a half before moving onto the next stage in my career. And while I never got good enough at surfing to keep at it, I still have the desk!