Handmade: Creative Focus in the Age of Distraction

ACT ONE:

DISCOVERY AND SURPRISE

1

The Smell of Sawdust

I was no woodworker as a youth. It never entered my mind. Grandpa was a carpenter, a coal miner, a bartender. We called him Dziadz. He lived with us for a time between jobs or wives. His first wife died, his second left him. I adored him because he always treated me with a mixture of great love and caution. Maybe he was afraid he would break me if he held me too hard with his iron grip. When I was small I remember him pointing out the western sun one dusk and telling me how it would move in the sky throughout the seasons. What other secrets did he know?

He could move anything with his pry bar, hammer, and shovel. He found work where he could, like any immigrant in the early twentieth century. He always worked with his hands. I couldn’t help but see that one thumb of his was as wide as three of mine. He must have hit it with a hammer so many times that it just spread out in submission. Or maybe he nailed it just once really hard when he was drunk. Didn’t he notice where he was putting it?

I remember him working at our farmhouse in Illinois for a time. He had built the saltbox-style house on farmland outside of Chicago, finding this small parcel on his way to go fishing at Lake Geneva. My family had moved from the city and taken it over from him when I was small. It was all country then, flat fields dotted with a few homes huddled together every few dozen acres so the tornados would have easier targets to blow down. There was always something for him to fix there, more carpentry needed for the house, or a chore for my dad.

As a young teenager I wasn’t concerned with celestial movement but in keeping up with other kids. One day I was lifting weights behind the house on our concrete patio, trying to get as strong as my older brother. I was out in the sunshine grunting with an iron bar. Dziadz saw me and smiled. He walked past me over to where he had been working. He reached down to the ground and grabbed a 4x4 timber. He walked back to me, holding it by its end in one of his hands, and said, Lift this.

Good guy. Polish sense of humor.

My father was a more-than-capable handyman. He knew tools and how to use them. He could mix and pour concrete, do electrical work. He transformed the old attached garage on our house into a living room. He made furniture for the new church, and built me a desk to study at. My brother and I did a list of chores for him around the house. We were also enlisted to carry his tools to fix the tractor, or to hold the light as he fixed the sump pump in the basement. He was always yelling at me for something. Or he would throw his tools down in disgust and scream at me for not paying attention to what he was doing. Hold the ladder still, dummy.

It was easy to hate being around him working on things. If I complained, one of his favorite sayings to me as I grew older and could understand its significance was this bit of homespun warmth: You know where you can find sympathy? Between shit and syphilis in the dictionary. As my friend Vinny used to say about people: he was a piece of work.

My dad, I realized later, was a three-year-old in the body of an abusive alcoholic. He could erupt over how someone passed the food. Spitting, sputtering, furious with the transgression. It’s not how to act and yet this is what we learned to expect, the exploding father. He constantly proved that he could control the room with his anger. Maybe he learned it from his father, although I never saw that type of anger from Dziadz. Maybe he learned it in World War II or from the failures in his own life. It’s no way to act—except maybe in battle—screaming your needs, your disappointments, your standards to the person across the table.

He of course had standards for me and my brother. His standards were simple and impossible to reach: nothing we did was ever good enough. Do it better. My mother couldn’t stand up to him and my brother tried to follow his example of disdain toward me, just without the surprise explosions. Not surprisingly, I tended to shrink inside myself a bit. I developed an interior world to live within. I don’t remember having any interest in how furniture was made. At that time I was more interested in throwing paper balls at the trash can than wondering how my father had built my desk. I sat at it doing homework, studying to avoid his belt, or worse, the verbal abuse. Punishment is quite an interesting mentor to a kid.

I have been asked by many people over the years, Did you take shop class as a kid? My response is yes. I didn’t like it. I remember that my required talk in sixth-grade shop class, replete with visuals, was on wood screws. I do not remember being fascinated by my lecture. My mahogany bookends for class were nailed together and had the hasty grace of all my work then. It never occurred to me growing up that building furniture could be a choice in life. That being at the bench could be an act of forgiveness for me as much as a career choice.

I could look at all the lumber and smell the wood. Sawdust smells like nothing else. I did not know until years later how hooked I was by this experience, how intoxicating this was to me at the time.

Even through all this, one of my great remembered experiences of when I was little was being shooed out of our kitchen when the cabinetmaker came to build our new cabinets. He set up his sawhorses outside our house and cut up fir and plywood on them to make our cabinets, producing piles of sawdust and shavings that filled the air with the smells of his handiwork. I was entranced by the fragrance of the wood; somehow being around it made me feel good. What he was building made no difference to me. I loved the smell of that wood.

Going to the lumberyard with my dad was also a thrill because the warehouse was mysterious—who knew what happened here?—and cavernous. It was a cathedral to a small kid, with its tall, dim roof, only it was better than church because you didn’t have to be quiet in there. Boards rose up into the dark insides of this timbered building. And there was that resiny aroma again wrapping its charm around me. I could walk around with my dad, which, even for all his yelling at me, always made me feel special when I was small.

I could look at all the lumber and smell the wood. Sawdust smells like nothing else. I did not know until years later how hooked I was by this experience, how intoxicating this was to me at the time. I forgot about it. I was a thinker, a dreamer, lost in my books and scribblings as I grew up. I wasn’t going to work with my hands. I was going to get as far away from the world of my father as I could. Whatever he stood for, I would stand elsewhere. I was going to be a teacher of some kind. Maybe a priest or a scribe or a writer. And so I went to a college to study literature and the great books.

People ask, How did you become a woodworker, then? My reply was simple, It was the scientists. They showed me the way.

Things men have made with wakened hands

And put soft life into

Are awake through years with transferred touch,

And go on glowing

For long years.

And for this reason, some old things are lovely

Warm still with the life of forgotten men

Who made them.

—D. H. Lawrence

ABNER RIDGE

One of the scientists I knew at college was a physics major, Dick Wheaton. He was a motorcycle guy, a motorhead who loved fixing things, and an avid outdoorsman. He was a bit taller than me, just over six feet, and thin with large wire-rimmed glasses. He seemed imperturbable and was always happy facing a problem. His laugh ended on a high note even when laughing at himself. When I moved to the Pacific Northwest to finish up college, I started hiking and rock climbing in the Cascades with Wheaton. These mountains with their carpets of fir and hemlock have a flavor, a sense, a feeling about them that is suited for contemplation.

Hiking in the woods became wrapped up in my life as a woodworker. I never walked alone in these woods. There was always a throng of thoughts marching alongside me in my head. Chattering away, these fragments and ideas, minor revelations and important discoveries, and thoughts about what a life should look like, all strolled with me as I took in the sights and sounds. Walking was a way of both clearing and filling my brain at one and the same time. I needed this movement to break ideas loose inside me, to stir things up, and to let thoughts settle.

Being on a trail, seeing the mist weaving fingers through the tall firs, watching these close clouds rise up off hillsides through the dark canyons, seeing the rocks and treetops—these sights drew me to pathways where I could let my mind wander. In Robert Macfarlane’s lyrical book, The Old Ways, his story is about the concept of the path, the need we humans have for the journey. It is the walk itself, with its effort, its sacrifice, its tedium, or danger that is important because in the walking we get closer to the truths we hold inside ourselves. My own path to Mastery is one taken by many others before me, but like any path, my footsteps make their own mark upon it.

So too did these words of Thomas Clark, from his famous poem In Praise of Walking, suit me:

In the course of a walk, we usually find out something about our companion, and this is true even when we travel alone.

When I spend a day talking I feel exhausted, when I spend it walking I am pleasantly tired.

The pace of the walk will determine the number and variety of things to be encountered, from the broad outlines of a mountain range to a tit’s nest among the lichen, and the quality of attention that will be brought to bear upon them.

Some things in nature have made a lasting impression on me. Rivers, waterfalls, mountains. One such location was a particular trail in the Cascade Mountains that I found with Wheaton: Abner Ridge, a place in the forest that seemed to call me back over time.

Wheaton and I, with my dog Joe Willie and two other hikers whose names are lost in memory, went for a hike up the Abner Ridge trail. We went up it one spring to scale the western face of the mountain as high as we could reach because someone had told us we could get pretty far up this way. We were young and energetic, with our new ice axes in hand, and we thought we could climb up the mountain anywhere. I do not remember the hike. Was it long or short? What did we see along the way? Had Wheaton’s hands recovered enough from his accident to be trustworthy?

We drove into the Cascade Range on the west side of the mountain to a place called Daisy Plain. From there we walked in three or four miles to Klickitat Falls on a flat trail that was never straight but not hard walking. The falls were pretty enough that I wanted to stop and stare at them for a long time. There’s a lot of worn ground there. Many feet have walked around these blue rivulets that tumble down a series of short rock falls, water rushing in a calm fountain of blue and noise, all hurrying down the rocks in the middle of the forest. It’s glorious. But we had a hike to make, a mountain to climb, and needed to get moving. We’ll see it again on the way back, I thought to myself.

From the falls we hiked four miles up a trail that was so long there were only three switchbacks in a two-thousand-foot elevation gain. It was unmarked on my USGS map but it started from the falls and headed up the long spine of Abner Ridge to the wilderness area. I put pencil marks on my map to indicate where we walked because on my map there was no trail marked out. Not this Abner Ridge trail.

I don’t remember the walk being long or boring or inspiring. I remember only being up top at the tree line where trees cannot grow any higher up the mountain. It was cloudy out so there wasn’t much to see. Occasionally the mountain would peek out at us from above. The trail had disappeared so we wandered around looking for a way up. We hadn’t hit much snow yet, only a few patches. What we had run into finally were rocks. The humans could scale them with some effort, but not Joe Willie. We could push him up a few rock faces, but it was going to be tough getting him down. Even an able-bodied Brittany spaniel like him could not climb here. We tried one section and another. They were all too sheer for him to leap. So we said, that’s enough.

I marked my map to record where we had been, going off-trail like we had. I thought I would be back soon. When I was young, I thought I’d get back to everywhere soon to retrace my steps. What could life possibly throw in the way?

So we gave up our ascent and tried glissading down some icy patches of snow using our ice axes as brakes. We ran along the snow and then jumped onto our backs to slide downhill and practice the arrest of our fall with our axes. Wheaton managed a decent arrest with his ax. With my first go at it, I stuck my landing and hit the icy snow so hard I felt like I had broken a rib. Maybe I did. I could barely breathe without pain so I stopped my ax practice right there. It was one of several accidents that seemed to walk with us on this hike. We returned, me gasping for breath the whole way home. There my memory of the hike stops.

And on my map still are those pencil lines indicating where I thought we had gotten to. On the map, right at its edge, before it disappears into the whiteness of where the next map would begin, it says, View.

2

The Scientists

My first year at college in Portland, I found a house to share with four others in the northeast section of town miles from campus. One housemate, Bill, was a physics/literature major, wrestling with two dissimilar worlds. He had physicist classmates over one afternoon to drink beer. I saw immediately that they thought about the world in an unusual way. My own knowledge of physics began and ended with my deep understanding that the sun is in the sky and it is made up of atoms that are hot. What else did I need to know?

I was fascinated by how these scientists could talk for hours about the universe as a giant whirling mass of gases and then have a different discussion about atoms smashing into each other or galaxies expanding or collapsing. They seemed to talk like they had some knowledge of how the world actually worked. They knew about gravity and astronomy, particle physics, like Bobush, the Russian theoretician (death to the Bolsheviks), and Petros, the suave Greek lover. They knew about solar systems, galactic black holes, and motorcycles, like Joel the astronomer and Wheaton the motorhead. Or how to fix a motorbike that I had dumped. I’m still sorry, Joel. And if they really did not know, then they sure talked a good game, with real joy and interest in the subject. I was very curious about how they approached things. Their chatter was so different from my own. It had nothing whatsoever to do with foreshadowing or imagery or metaphor. Of all the disciplines practiced in my halls of learning, the people with whom I felt the most affinity walked in the halls of the physics labs.

One night four or five of us had gone out to Pine Mountain to view the moonrise. This was a small mountaintop about an hour outside of town up a river gorge. The physicists knew the full moon was upon us that clear night, so we headed out to drink some beer and smoke and discuss important things. We walked out to a promontory, climbed over the outlook’s fence and onto the rocks staring east toward the mountain and the moon-rise. In the course of that night, as we started to shiver, the active brains of the physicists took over in a feat of phenomenal mental