We humans crave to be in the presence of beauty. It's a drive as fundamental as hunger or sex, underlying everything from buying flowers for the dinner table to our creation of national parks. And it's the only thing that explains the irrational, unconscionable and devastating expense of building, buying and keeping a boat.

Opening Day can look a lot like preening, and there's a morsel of ostentation about, but beauty is at its heart -- the natural splendor of the lakes and Sound, and the human-crafted beauty of boats. So here's a thought to consider today: The reason we respond so emotionally to boats is their relationship to the natural world.

A boat is an architectural form that pays respect to nature in a direct and honest manner. Its shape is determined by its need to carve as efficiently as possible through water and air. This is particularly true of sailboats, which combine some of the most compelling, elemental forms of the natural world -- the curve, the fin, the wing -- with just enough outwardly visible mechanical complexity to reassure us that human ingenuity has a rightful place in the gearworks of nature.

I think that at a subconscious level, we compare the forms we know in nature to those we see in man-made objects and react with instinctive pleasure if the object reveals a relationship to a natural form. Essayist Scott Russell Sanders suggests that we find beauty there "because it gives us a glimpse of the underlying order of things."

Now step deeper into nature and human history, and contemplate the special case of the wooden boat.

When fiberglass boats first appeared in 1947, the technology democratized boating in a radically new way. Ordinary people had always been able to afford wooden boats, but the unwealthy had to build them themselves. Mass-produced fiberglass boats could be larger but cheaper, and easier to maintain. The swarms of pleasure boats we see on the water today wouldn't exist without the chemical miracle of glass cloth and resin -- which wooden boat enthusiasts call, with no great affection, "glop."

Wooden boats are decidedly more fetching, but it isn't just the honey-in-sunlight color and grain of varnished wood. The smart wooden boat owner, unless blessed with infinite time and patience, will paint most of it anyway. It's a deeper beauty.

A wooden boat forms a retort to the prevailing pattern of intentional obsolescence and throwaway cheapness that has infected practically every other thing we buy and use today, including our houses. The only reason to throw away a well-crafted wooden boat would be if the owner has let it deteriorate beyond a reasonable feasibility of repair -- and when that happens, half the time some swooning fool will try an unfeasible restoration anyway.

The shape of the hull and assorted pieces have to consider the nature of the material. Structural integrity and aesthetic integrity are intertwined, which yields an organic synthesis that we might call spiritual integrity.

And a wooden boat forges a relationship with its builder or owner. This may at first seem far from beautiful, demanding prodigious rallies of patience, tolerance of frustration, and sheer hard work. But whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and there's no question that wooden boats build character.

Starting in 2005, I built a 13 1/2-foot wooden sailboat in my Issaquah garage, which became an object lesson in letting go of the perfectionist impulse. A vision of flawless beauty shimmered in my head, but I didn't have the boat-building chops to pull it off. The gap between vision and reality yawned, expanded, grew chasmic.

And for a time, near the end of construction last spring, it was emotionally devastating -- it felt a lot like failure.

But another beauty of a home-built boat is that the builder is entitled to define, or redefine, success for himself. And near the end of a far-from-perfect job, that's what I did. This boat didn't need to generate waves of compliments or feed its owner's ego. It was enough that it would float and sail and deliver pleasure in the process. And that it had taught its builder many strange new skills, starting with patience and acceptance.

If it sounds as though I'm suggesting that boats have a moral dimension, well, I am. This is their ultimate beauty.

While I can't speak to million-dollar motor yachts -- not my world -- I think that a modest sailboat quietly symbolizes an equilibrium where we consume resources at a sustainable pace and respect nature enough to act like members of a community instead of lords of the manor. It suggests a future in which grace, comfort and economy might all be achievable within the package of civilization.

A beautiful thought, particularly for a day on the water.