They call him No-feet Pete. For a double amputee that’s an irreverent epithet, but Pete Stein, 36, says he’s not sensitive about it. For nearly a decade and a half he perfected the art of walking on prostheses made of stainless-steel, titanium and carbon fiber with a dexterity that belies the effort it takes. Recently in his workshop he bounded between forklift, planer, table saw, drill press and router to fabricate a memento for a colleague who was injured while extracting a rusty nail from one of the planks of Western Flyer, the fishing vessel featured in John Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez.
Stein, who jokes about himself as being “a little rough around the edges,” takes great pride in his working-class upbringing, his craft and the community engagements that shape his life’s journey, which brought him to Port Townsend, Washington, in 2010 to learn boatbuilding from the bottom up. His first job here was with Dave Thompson, 82, one of the veteran shipwrights in town, helping reframe and replank a 96-foot fishing vessel.
“More experienced people taught me 50 years ago, so I did the same,” says Thompson. “People show up when you need help. It’s pedestrian work, ‘do this like that,’ but Pete is a quick and good learner.”
The late Bob Cunningham taught Stein finish carpentry, which led to a job at the Port Townsend Shipwright’s Co-Op, and work on the Western Flyer project. Next, he joined the Tally Ho program as a paid shipwright, while also building a fan base on YouTube with his authenticity and self-deprecating humor.
The experience motivated him to start his own video channel called Pearl in a Can (“a tuna can” Pete says), featuring boatbuilding and other work projects.
Born and raised as the third-oldest child of seven in St. Louis, Missouri, Pete had exposure to woodworking through his father, a union carpenter, while his mother raised the flock and worked part-time. “When I dropped out of high school, Dad encouraged me to attend trade school, seeing that my trajectory wasn’t going toward a college degree,” Pete remembers. “But I was 18 and wanted to have fun and travel.” He went hitchhiking and train hopping with penniless folks who seek adventure riding the rail and crashing on a stranger’s couch.
Calling a near-death moment “a little accident” or “goof-up,” when he talks about a fateful trip in 2011, is vintage Pete. He was traveling with his puppy Backtrack when he tried to get onto a slow-moving freight train in Portland, Oregon.
“I was knocked over and got hit right at the ankles by the first car, between the tracks, underneath the train. I had to roll out while the train was still moving.” He saved the pooch, but not his feet. When he woke up in the hospital, “the nurse asked, ‘how are your stumps feeling?’” he remembers. That stuck with him, so he had Stumped! tattooed on his knuckles. He also likes the word’s double entendre, for those who are baffled by his agility on artificial limbs.
“I wear tall boots, because with shorter ones, a bunch of junk falls there. I’ll pull out nails, sawdust, shavings,” he educated a YouTube audience. “I found a pencil in there, too.”
He sometimes freaks out unsuspecting folks by turning his feet completely backward. He also calls himself “the luckiest guy who got run over by a freight train,” for not getting killed.
During recovery back home, his father suggested he get a desk job. “I told him, I’m gonna pick up where I left off and keep doing what I was doing. I had fallen in love with the boat yard,” Pete says. “Pretty quickly I was able to do all the things I had been doing—climbing scaffolding, staging and stuff like that. It was probably a year of real adjustment.”
Better still, he sought new challenges: salmon fishing in Alaska, sailing a gaff sloop he co-owns, volunteering on the board of the local marine trade association and cofounding a new co-op with other independent tradespeople.
“I didn’t have anybody to blame. I put myself in that position,” he muses about the accident. “It gave me an identity and made me push harder. I’m happy about it. I’m proud of it, I guess.”
August 2025
