When I visited, Wells had an eighteen-foot all-cypress canoe well under way. He estimated that, in all, it would take him at least one hundred hours to finish. As the music constantly changed in the barn, Wells told me that he never builds the same boat twice. There are familiar riffs, but then he improvises. He also had a cypress strip kayak going, and the forms he’d made for that one—a design new to him that he’d modified—were lined up vertically on a workbench like whale vertebrae, each one held in place with a vise and marked with his handwritten numbering system. He’d align the wood strips soon, he explained, and staple the thin fresh-cut cypress along the forms.

“Some guys, they build without staples or nails—everyone has their own ways of doing things,” he said. Some of Wells’s particulars are to work mostly with cypress instead of cedar, which is often used in the Northeast. He also cuts the strips thinner than others do—to keep the boats as light as possible—and he regularly makes a solid cypress nose. That idea came about after he “crunched” countless noses of his wooden and plastic kayaks on the rocky limestone shoals that dot the region’s creeks and rivers.

The summer storm still hadn’t hit, and Wells asked if I’d like to see the sinkhole in the front of the property, part of the acreage where his parents once raised sheep and hogs. With his Weimaraner, Isabella, bounding along, he pointed out the forty or more waist-high and head-high seedlings he’d planted lately, including cypress, sweet gum, oak, and walnut. He has a tradition of planting several trees each time he completes a kayak or a canoe, he said. We looked at the gaping sinkhole and then stopped by the stacks of cherry boards curing under a sheet of tin roofing. Wells said that last winter he hired a local tree cutter to mill five cherry trees on the property. “Once the wood is seasoned and ready,” he said, holding up one of the red-tinged boards, “I’ll start working some cherry into my boats.” With that, the raindrops finally started, and Wells headed back to his workshop, already formulating the plan for his next creation.