Watch Cypress, a video directed by Tim Sutton that follows boat builder Aaron Wells from his kayak workshop to a Florida river.

Thunder was rumbling across the fields when I turned down a sand lane in North Florida to see Aaron Wells. I found him at the far end of a farmhouse yard, working in his open-air barn surrounded by floating sawdust and shelves of acetone and teak oil. A Neil Young song was playing as I walked over, and Wells wiped his hands on his Carhartts. We talked for a while as the summer sky roiled (but no rain, yet), and he told me he’d just finished cutting a hundred ten-foot-long strips of cypress, each an inch wide and 3/16 inch thick.

The twenty-six-year-old from Live Oak is a boat builder who bends thin wood strips into the lean shapes of kayaks and canoes. He’s not exactly sure what led to his watercraft pursuit. “Around here it’s cattle, pine, peanuts, and corn,” Wells said. He doesn’t know any other wooden boat makers nearby, and his parents were farmers and teachers. But as he talked, it was clear that wood and water have always figured large in Wells’s life.

As a student at Suwannee High School, he said he often went “creek jumping,” since, besides sports, there wasn’t much to do in Live Oak. There wasn’t even a movie theater. “My friends and I would follow a creek for a while into the woods, jumping from side to side—or we’d go snorkeling at a sinkhole, with a flashlight for the caves.” He got to know the rivers and springs, learned good stretches for paddling on the Withlacoochee or the Santa Fe, the places on the Suwannee River that aren’t crowded with motorboats. When Wells graduated from Florida State University and was hired to map wetlands up around White Springs, he couldn’t shake the idea that what he really wanted to do was to build boats. He eventually left that steady employment to begin something less certain—a full-time one-man boat-making enterprise that he named Cypress Kayaks.

Ever since, his handcrafted boats (which start at $2,500) have drawn plenty of attention. He said a recent buyer was a man from Georgia who was so impressed when he saw one of the nearly finished kayaks that he purchased it within minutes of visiting the farmyard workshop. Wells said, “He didn’t even want to wait for a seat to be installed. I think his idea was to keep the kayak inside.”