touch actors of Hollywood Boulevard stands a man who goes against the grain—the wood grain. When Nick Offerman is not playing burly and beloved Ron Swanson, his character on the hugely popular NBC television show Parks and Recreation, he is busy inside Offerman Woodshop building cedar-strip canoes and custom furniture. It’s not just comedic prowess and perfect
Amidst
deadpan delivery that has earned the 44-year- old actor a cult following, it’s also his bacon- and-eggs-loving, Paul Bunyan-esque persona; an alter ego he embraces. Late last year Offerman released Paddle
Your Own Canoe: One Man’s Fundamentals for Delicious Living. It’s part-memoir, part tongue-in-cheek guide to leading a better life, including ruminations devoted to meat, manliness and moustaches. Off Parks and Rec, Offerman has starred
in box office hits, including 2014’s We’re The Millers, and off-Broadway productions alongside his comedian wife, Megan Mullally, best known for her role on sitcom Will & Grace. Offerman also tours the country, performing his one-man comedy show, “American Ham.” Though acting is one of his great loves,
Offerman’s time woodworking and paddling are his greatest medicine.
the beautified bombshells and out-of-
“No matter where I am, or how stressful or high-octane my life has become,” Offerman adds, “just getting out in nature and breathing in the smells, sights and sounds is incredibly healthy and therapeutic.” As a struggling actor during his thirties, Of-
ferman used manual labor to pay the bills and discovered he had a natural talent for carpen- try. As his interest in woodworking increased, Offerman was drawn to building a canoe. “The canoe was the Fender Stratocaster of
my young, watersports life. Canoeing down the creeks in my neighborhood was the ultimate escape,” he says. “It was only natural, given the choice of building any boat style, that I would gravitate towards the canoe.” In his book, Offerman gives another reason
for his love for canoes: He lost his virginity in one. “Is it any wonder that I have grown to become obsessed with building wooden canoes and luxuriously running my hands along their hulls?” he writes. With an itch to build a canoe, Offerman
went looking for help. “All the research pointed towards the book Canoecraft by Ted Moores, who runs Bear Mountain Boats with his partner, Joan Barrett,” he says. Moores and Barrett saw Offerman as more than a customer and requested he use his con- fidence in front of the camera to make a how- to video for other would-be boat builders.
“In the middle of this insane business— the entertainment industry is so full of ugly, superficial bullshit—to escape into my shop and build something with my hands, just feels like medicine.”
“Woodworking is an incredibly Zen discipline,” says Offerman. “In the middle of this insane business—the entertainment industry is so full of ugly, superficial bullshit—to escape into my shop and build something with my hands, out of the organic material that trees provide, just feels like medicine. It feels like I’m rubbing Neosporin on the open wounds of my artistic soul.” Born in Joilet, Illinois, Offerman grew up in a family of hardworking farmers, public servants, schoolteachers, nurses, paramedics and firemen. “My whole family learned that to have a good time on a meager income, all we had to do was find a place to experience nature as richly as possible,” he says.
“I felt like Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi were suggesting I make a lightsaber instructional video,” says Offerman. He visited the Bear Mountain Boats
workshop in Peterborough, Ontario, to meet the couple and pick up his materials. Back in New York, Offerman began building a red cedar strip canoe he named Huckleberry while filming the process. The 126-minute Fine Woodstrip Canoe Building with Nick Offerman was released in 2008, and won The Reel Paddling Film Festival’s best instructional film award. Living in Los Angeles, Offerman spends
as much time as he can in his 3,200-square- foot woodshop in between shooting episodes
www.canoerootsmag.com | 45
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