I spent all of my summers, until I was 17, in Kennebunkport, staying with my grandmother in her house at the corner of North and Locke streets. I had no heroes then, although, if I had, number one hero would have been Clemmy Clark.

The Perkins Grist Mill property and Clem Clark Boathouse on Mill Lane in Kennebunkport. Dan King / Kennebunk Post

Mr. Clark lived in Kennebunkport and built lobster boats in his boathouse just at the end of Mill Lane, not far from where the old grist mill used to be.

And so, for me, it was a short walk down Locke Street to Oak Street and then to where Oak Street caught the end of West Street, and then just across somebody’s front and side lawn to the boathouse with its piles of lumber and long steam chest for softening up the narrow strips of wood that were destined to line up side by side as hull for some future lobster boat.

Mr. Clark let me keep my 16-foot Old Town two-seater wooden rowboat with two sets of oarlocks and seven-foot oars tied up to a float just in front of the boathouse. In sunny weather, when the tide was in, I spent most of my time rowing up and down the Kennebunk River.

At low tide, the Kennebunk River is mostly mud, and you can’t row a boat in mud, so I spent low tides and rainy weather in the boathouse watching Mr. Clark build a lobster boat. I estimate he built three of four a year and just one at a time, and except for some tasks, such as laying the keel, or hoisting the motor and drive shaft inside the boat, he mostly worked alone and did it all by himself. We didn’t talk much. He worked and I just watched.

Whether talking or not, Clemmy Clark had a permanent grin on his face that clearly said, “This is fun. I really like doing this, and I’m just going to keep on doing it.”

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While he was doing whatever had to be done to make the boat take shape out of the planks and boards, bits and pieces of wood, nails and screws, paint and caulking, his whole body and person was “in it” one-hundred percent. And when a friend would drop in to visit, and they stood and talked while surrounded by the hum of shop machinery, smell of sawdust and paint thinner, as he talked, his hands kept on working.

Now picking up a length of wood, raising it to his eye and sighting along it, now running his hands along the piece, feeling for smoothness or rough spots. His body kept on working even when his attention was elsewhere, and growing up, I’ve seen this habit in other creative people.

A life spent doing what you really like doing, working hard and creating beautiful or useful things, that’s my definition of heroism.

Although he’s been gone for some time now, you can still see Clemmy Clark’s lobster boats in the Kennebunk River as you drive down along Ocean Avenue, or bobbing gracefully up and down at their moorings at Cape Porpoise.

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