Late each February, I am attracted to the American Association of University Women book sale at the Marcus Whitman Hotel in Walla Walla like a moth to light.

Treasures abound. For instance, for $15 on the last day of the three-day sale, I filled a bag with 10 books by my favorite authors as well as several Northwest classics. Considering some hardcover books run $35 these days, it was a whale of a bargain.

One treasure is Don Berry’s engaging tale of historical fiction “To Build a Ship.”

The book is based in the Tillamook area in the early 1850s. White settlers are trickling into Indian territory seeking abundant land and elusive fortune.

“To Build a Ship” is richly evocative of life on the northern Oregon coast before motels, restaurants and souvenir shops lined the beaches. No crab shacks lined Indian trails. Instead, snarled with vegetation, muddied by elk, the trails tested man and beast alike.

Each fall, the settlers resupply from a ship captained by a New Englander who is as reliable as rain. The captain delivers staples like flour, sugar and coffee, which if rationed carefully last the settlers most of the year. The settlers get through the lean months on the promise of the ship’s next visit.

Then word reaches the settlers: the sea captain has died. No other ship sails to take its place. Out of desperation, the settlers decide to build their own ship.

Spearheaded by the only settler who knows anything about shipbuilding, a fellow prone to bouts of insanity, the shipbuilding commences.

The book’s narrator, Ben, a single man in his early 20s, is a character you care about. You want him to tame his modest piece of wilderness, start a family and succeed. Later, though, Ben’s heroic flaws are revealed as he becomes ensnared in an unpredictable plot twist.

Ben’s obsession with building the ship becomes overheated. A darker side of life emerges as he gets too single-minded in his pursuit of the ultimate goal. Everything else, even his humanity, is sacrificed.

At times, Berry, too, seems obsessed. The story slows as details of ship-building reach the point that non-ship builder’s eyes glaze over. At these points, the plot begins to plod like an overworked mule.

This flaw aside, the author of “Trask” is a master storyteller. Confronted by big trees, swamps and breaking waves, the reader gets a strong sense of living in the Tillamook area before cows were king and ice cream commanded a king’s ransom.

The author is compassionate toward Native Americans then inhabiting this captivating stretch of the north Oregon coast.

Berry shows the nasty side of volunteer militias bent on driving the area’s original inhabitants into the sea. Among whites and Native Americans, Berry draws characters that possess good and bad traits, mirroring what is found in any community.

The book lays out themes of man versus nature, manifest destiny and survival of the craftiest. One has to admire the Oregon pioneers who work in concert with the original inhabitants. Over time, they gain respect for the land and sea, what they provide and the cruel lessons they teach.

The harmony built, though, is on a foundation as solid as the muck of Tillamook Bay at low tide.