Wooden Bookmarks

For my upcoming Kickstarter campaign, I was brainstorming with James Adams, La Honda's master wood craftsman, about incentive rewards that I could offer to people who make Kickstarter donations.  We were talking in his woodshop, setting our beer bottles on top of his table saw, when I had the idea: "How thin can you cut a piece of wood on that table saw?  Could we make a bookmark?" 

James cut some samples.  A bit of sanding, a bit of finish, an experiment with freehand writing using a router, and — wow:

James has salvaged all kinds of local La Honda timber.  When a tree falls, James is there.  He has black acacia, dark walnut, fir, maple, redwood (of course).  Maybe that redwood came from Ken Kesey's old cabin.  James even has a cypress tree from Neil Young's ranch.

So I'll be offering bookmarks as incentive rewards on Kickstarter, starting next week.  Put a little lumber between your pages.  Own a piece of legendary La Honda timber.

George Nakashima: The Soul of a Tree

In preparing my profile of James Adams, James mentioned that he was trying to follow in the path of George Nakashima.  Naturally, I had to get my hands on a copy of Nakashima's The Soul of a Tree.  I've just read it, and it's changed my life.

What an inspiring man — both for the life he lived and the works he created.  I've written before that the Shakers were a source for my woodwork and for my method of writing.  Now I add George Nakashima as a spiritual guide, a man who once joked: "I am a Japanese Shaker."

He is best known for his tables made of large wood slabs joined by butterfly joints.  The tops are smooth while one or more edges are the natural rough edge of the tree.

I'm fascinated by his two-legged, leverage-defying conoid chairs, which must have fantastically tight joints:
As with poetry, a reviewer can best let the book speak for itself, in word and image.  Here is George Nakashima:

"Resurrection"

On resurrection: "This slab was cut from one of the great trees of England...  A deep furrow remains, giving its surface a sculptured look.  The usual market for fine timber would not find much use for such a slab, practically a reject of nature.  I have sometimes rescued these great slabs from the dump heap and sometimes, with luck, seem to give them a second chance at life as good furniture.  The natural forms with all their bumps and 'warts' survive.  To fashion such a piece of wood into fine furniture is almost an act of resurrection."

On cutting: "Usually, cutting across the crotch produces the finest figuring [on left].  This cut also provides the greatest usable width.  Cutting along the crotch [on right] results in a somewhat triangular piece of lumber with less surface area to work with.  The figuring is less intense, too.  At the point where a tree branches freely, three or more crotches may be found.  The result in the lumber can be truly extravagant figuring."

"I make any number of preliminary drawings in chalk to get a feeling for the proportion of the object we are creating.  It's easier to make a final decision where to cut if there is something to see on the board." 

"There is drama in the opening of a log — to uncover for the first time the beauty in the bole, or trunk, of a tree hidden for centuries, waiting to be given this second life."

"The key man in the process of cutting logs is the sawyer, one of the great craftsmen of our age with steady nerves and experienced judgment.  It is necessary to have an almost silent dialogue with this sawyer.  Few words are spoken, but thickness, the direction of the cut, the positioning of the log — all must be decided with precision."

On the soul of a tree: "When trees mature, it is fair and moral that they are cut for man's use, as they would soon decay and return to the earth.  Trees have a yearning to live again, perhaps to provide the beauty, strength and utility to serve man, even to become an object of great artistic worth."

 "Each flitch, each board, each plank can have only one ideal use.  The woodworker, applying a thousand skills, must find that ideal use and then shape the wood to realize its true potential."

Rough design, bookmatched walnut root

Finished bookmatched walnut root table

"The object is to make as fine a piece of furniture as is humanly possible.  The purpose is usefulness, but with a lyric quality — this is the basis of all my designs."

On hand versus power tools: "Our approach is to realize a synthesis between the hand and the machine working as a small unit."

"As much as man controls the end product, there is no disadvantage in the use of modern machinery and there is no need for embarrassment...  A power plane can do in a few minutes what might require a day or more by hand.  In a creative craft, it becomes a question of responsibility, whether it is a man or the machine that controls the work's progress."

A butterfly key of rosewood joining two pieces of walnut.

On nature: "Once I was pulling a fairly large branch and it suddenly gave way, knocking me breathless to the ground.  As it fell, two long shards of wood broke off, each fifteen to twenty inches long and as sharp as a spear.  I was wearing heavy rubber boots with leather tops.  One of the shards pierced one boot's heel, while the other slashed through it.  Lying on the ground, I waited for the pain to start, for it seemed as if I'd been crucified.  But as my senses returned, I realized the wood had gone through the boot, but not my foot: all I had were scrapes on my sole and heel.  Nature is compassionate."

Part of my feeling of kinship with the man comes from the remarkable facial resemblance between him and my own father, who was neither Japanese nor a woodcrafter.

George Nakashima

On personal history:  "Then Pearl Harbor broke, and all of us of Japanese descent were put in concentration camps.  My wife and I and our newly born daughter were sent to a camp in Idaho.  This I felt at the time was a stupid, insensitive act, one by which my country could only hurt itself.  It was a policy of unthinking racism.  Even Eskimos with only a small percentage of Japanese blood were sent to the Western desert to die."

After relocating to New Hope, Pennsylvania: "After a year of doing general farm work, it was quite clear to me that chickens and I were not compatible."
 
On building his house in New Hope:  "At no time did we have more than fifty dollars in cash, but by scrounging materials, gathering stones off the property, digging foundation by hand, and working evenings and weekends, I was able to build a rough structure by Thanksgiving. …  Our first winter in the house was bitterly cold, and the faucet froze in the kitchen."

"We built, quite literally, on the principle of laying stone upon stone.  We had considerable stone on our land, and it was simply a question of hauling it by wheelbarrow to the building site."

On architecture:  "There is a wonderful feeling to be had in erecting a stone wall.  There is a sense of order and permanence.  A good wall will last for generations and even millenia."

"The decline in quality of modern furniture is probably due in part to the use of the quick, easy and cheap dowel joint.  The decline of modern domestic architecture can be traced to the popularity of the stud wall put together with hammer and nails, a type of construction calling for no joinery at all.  By contrast, the early American house and barn with their excellent joinery still represent the best we have produced and will greatly outlast contemporary buildings."

Nakashima built several innovative structures at New Hope, blending traditional Japanese and American styles with modern materials.  This photo shows the interior of the Minguren Museum, which has a roof that is a hyperbolic parabaloid.  "The span of the room is thirty-six-by-thirty-six feet, but note that there are no trusses or beams." 

Ceiling, stairs, Minguren Museum

"The stairway is made of three-inch thick oak planks cantilevered twelve inches into a fieldstone wall."  I wonder: With one end anchored in stone and the other hanging in free air, how much do they bounce?

The reception house

On local salvage:  "I call our reception house a sanso, or 'mountain villa,' in Japanese.  I built it … entirely with materials cast off from my workshop.  Castoff though the building materials were, they were quite unique since the rich and rare woods that I normally use are not generally obtainable.  The floor, for example, is made of red birch and walnut boards with extraordinary figuring.  Most of the outside construction was done with a single dead elm.  This elm, about five feet in diameter, could not be lifted by one huge forklift, but required two.  The elm had been cut into two-and-a-half-inch-thick boards.  Once cut, there seemed to be no client demand since the wood was light in color and not unusually grained.  So, we happily used it in the reception house."

There's so much more:  Drawings by Nakashima's own hand.  Chapters about species of trees, their spiritual and practical uses.  Pages about where to cut, and why.  Architectural commentary.  Gorgeous photos of Nakashima's stunning original designs that are so lovely, you'll want to run your fingertips over the paper.  Slabs of trees that make a woodworker's heart race.  A genius of a man who enriched our lives, even if we never knew him.  


The original edition of the book is out of print (I borrowed mine from the library).  Used copies are fetching enormous prices (as are his furniture), but a new edition of the book has been released by Kodansha.  I've just bought the Kodansha version and am pleased to report that it's of excellent quality.  The man deserves no less.  


Note:  If you're interested, here's a link to the Kodansha edition at amazon.com:
The Soul of a Tree: A Master Woodworkers Reflections.

For more about George Nakashima, here are some links:

George Nakashima web site

Tour George Nakashima's "Handmade House"

Links to some other books I've reviewed:

A Carpenter's Life by Larry Haum

House by Tracy Kidder

Toil: Building Yourself by Jody Procter

Religion in Wood: A book of Shaker Furniture by Edward Deming Andrews and Faith Andrews

With our Hands: The Story of Carpenters in Massachusetts by Mark Erlich

The Mind at Work by Mark Rose

Tools of the Trade: The Art and Craft of Carpentry by Jeff Taylor

A Splintered History of Wood by Spike Carlsen

Reverence for Wood by Eric Sloane
Cabin: Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine by Lou Ureneck

James Adams: Local Salvage

James Adams, cabinetmaker, has been accumulating trees for a while.  Not entire trees, exactly, but the rough-sawn lumber milled by woodcutters around La Honda.  From Con Law, there was a walnut tree.  From Orril Fluharty, a pine.  From Neil Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch, a cypress.  Here and there, a bay laurel, a black acacia.  Trees that were sick or in the way or felled by a landslide.  Some of the wood, such as the black acacia, was of questionable value.  The lumber was salvage, and local, and would need to dry out for a few years.  “It was pure speculation,” James said.  “I had no idea.”

One day James, needing a new guide for his table saw, grabbed a rough scrap of  black acacia.  First he sanded it.  What he saw made him sand more, then apply a coat of finish.  “It just popped,” he said.  “It looked like koa, only better.”  (Koa is a highly valued hardwood from Hawaii and is a member of the acacia genus.)

What began as speculation became fine furniture, such as a cabinet James made for Russ Haines, a La Honda resident.  In this detail, the top is claro walnut while the support is black acacia:

“I’m a big fan of James’ work,” Russ says.

In a recent project, James built the kitchen cabinets for Maggie Foard, the well-known goat farmer and cookbook author.  Maggie already knew she wanted to use salvage.  Architect Lori Hsu drew the layout.  James chose details of how to integrate.  

 

Some of the wood, such as the panels of these cabinets, came from an ancient fence on the Driscoll Ranch:

Befitting their origin at a working cattle ranch, the fence boards included a few bullet holes (apparently not employed in the cabinet panels).

Under the big kitchen sink, James placed posts on which he carved bun feet and fleur-de-lis:

Working on a smaller scale, James makes sets of coasters from hard and softwoods obtained locally.  From left to right, on top are walnut and bay laurel (with a few insect holes to assure authenticity); on the bottom are black acacia and pine:

For another project, James is gathering driftwood at San Gregorio Beach.  Speaking of his finds, he can joke or wax poetic:  “Many pieces have spalting, a network of black lace-like patterns randomly suffusing the grain, acquired as the fallen wood lay on the forest floor before having been washed to the sea.  There’s one piece of redwood with stunning reds and blacks like shaded fire and smoke, and harder than Chinese algebra.  I never knew redwood could be that hard.”

Like many craftsmen, James’ language belies the popular image of the uneducated woodworker.  His father taught English at Palo Alto High and College of San Mateo.  From a childhood in Menlo Park, James came to the Haight Ashbury.  He says, “I bummed around, did my hippy thing.”  One day, he pursued a job listing for a cabinetmaker’s helper, which turned out not as expected:  The cabinetmaker wanted somebody to paint his house.  Needing the money, James took the housepainting job and eventually eased his way into various cabinet shops.  From “bang bang” shops turning out a cabinet every fifteen minutes to classical mortise and tenon work, from the Hard Rock Cafe to roulette wheels for the East Palo Alto mafia, from the Atomic Energy Commission to NASA (he built a cabinet to display a moon rock), “I had kind of a history working for somebody six to twelve months, catching up on the technology, then moving on.”

Along the way, James moved to the relative peace and quiet of La Honda, where he has lived for three and a half decades.  For many of those years, he was the town’s long-running multi-league soccer coach.  With age, he says, “I’ve hung up my cleats.” 

James is an astronomy freak who owns a collection of telescopes, including a home-assembled refractor.  On occasional nights he has set up the eight foot long telescope in the school parking lot and shared it with anybody in town who wanted to drop by.  A lifetime enjoyment of science fiction has encouraged his viewing of planets and deep space nebulae.  He is also something of a raconteur, telling tales of riding a Vincent Black Lightning motorcycle or participating in psychedelic "research."

James lost his house in the recent financial meltdown.  Feeling snookered by his mortgage company, James became a picketer outside Chase Bank, much to the institution’s displeasure.  Partly disabled by arthritis, he is engaged in salvage of the most local sort: his own life.  Currently he lives in a trailer and engages in part-time cabinetry.

In spite of financial hardship, James says, “I love the fun of woodworking.  Things fun don’t pay as well.” 

These days, he seeks creative challenges.  Inspired by legendary craftsman George Nakashima (and Nakashima's book The Soul of a Tree), James seeks a natural style that gives an idea of what the original tree was like.

Right now, among James’ projects are a commission to build a trestle table without hardware but with a leaf.  He’s also  designing a steampunk guitar. 

Creative challenges, local salvage.  As James wrote:  “Discoveries.  In found pieces of trees, beauty in flotsam littering a beach, in the jetsam of discarded pieces of wood.  If only there was some way to apply this principle to our day-to-day experiences…”  Which of course, there is.

(The photos of the Foard kitchen are used by permission of Lori Hsu, architect, who retains all rights.)

365 Jobs: Storms (Three) Like a Moody God

Saturday, December 3, 1983

From a deep sleep I awake in darkness.  The power has gone out.  I don't know why, but whenever the electricity stops flowing in the night, I immediately wake up.  Maybe it's the sudden complete lack of light.  Or of background hum.  Or of magnetic force fields, to which we are subconsciously tuned.  Me, I'm betting on the force field theory, but when I say so, my friends always roll their eyes.

Through blackness I hear trees bending in the wind.  In the redwood forest, the sound is a rush: Rush-h-h.  Rush-h-h.  I throw on a bathrobe and step outside, barefoot, with a flashlight.  Rush-h-h.  Rush-h-h.  Groan…  

Yikes.  In the dark a tree is falling — that sickening sliding accelerating sound of branch against branch— and I'm standing out here.  Where is it?  Desperately I whip the flashlight beam in a circle above me.

WHUMP. 

Below the house, across the street.  An old redwood, diseased, damaged long ago by roadwork.  It brought down a utility pole.  A live wire dances, sparking.

Inside I call PG&E and the Fire Brigade, then return outside and place orange cones that I'd collected for soccer practice.  I stand in the road, flashlight bobbing, until the fire crew arrives.

Dawn finds me sitting at the table with two lit candles and a cup of steaming coffee, surrounded outside the window by sequoia, dozens thrusting at the sky.  My hand still shakes as I write:

Like a Moody God

Last night
when you threatened to kill me
I realized how much
I love you.
To you I am just another little beast
among the chipmunks and chickadees
who you nourish with seed
as you feed my spirit.
In your height you create the fog
and then drink it.
You are a lesson in forgiveness
as you shrug off abuse
for centuries;
in wrath
as you will finally drop devastation
with a final groan,
no apology.

Flossing the Deck

Today's job is cleaning out the cracks between the boards of my deck.  Since I have about a thousand square feet of decking with a dozen giant redwood trees dropping duff all over, flossing is a big task.  For 30 years I've done it on my knees with a screwdriver or a putty knife or by running my power saw with an old blade.

This year, I googled "flossing the deck" and found this wonderful tool.  

Deckhand tool

I called up the guy who invented it, placed an order (he'll talk your ear off), and I'm pleased to report that the Deckhand tool is worth every penny of the $35 I paid for it ($25 plus shipping).  It works fast and handles well.  It saves your knees.  What used to be a multi-day job I can now do in a few hours.  Fantastic!

Flossing the deck

And hey — Santa!  If you're stumped for a holiday gift for the somebody-who-has-everything, I bet your somebody doesn't have a deck flossing tool. 

(I paid for the tool.  I get nothing for endorsing it here.)

365 Jobs: Autopsy of a Douglas Fir

Tuesday, August 16, 1983

Autopsy of a Douglas Fir

In your bleeding cross-section I count
a century and a half of ripples
from that mother cone dropping,
startling a jay perhaps, when
my Great Great Grampa was a baby crawling
a dirt floor, log cabin, Kentucky homestead.

For a hundred and thirty-four years
you grew like a child.
Great Great Grampa migrated West
clearing forests, founding a town.
He lost his shirt (and his farm) in
the California gold rush, then was lynched
in Missouri for speaking out
against slavery.  Surviving the rope,
(rescued by friends)
he fled north and started again,
unbroken, a lifetime of accumulating
nothing.  Five children.

Great Grampa, still a child like you,
fought Rebel Bushwhackers in Arkansas
before settling to a lifetime of farming.
He wed a strong-minded German
one-room schoolteacher, happily
growing children and his beloved vegetables
to age ninety-three when he collapsed
one bright afternoon
while hoeing the garden.

I count forty-three rings of adolescence,
strong growth, vigor, healthy appetite
and I imagine spreading seeds
while Grampa grew to a man
who I never met
a high school principal
small town Missouri
who peers prim and austere from a photograph
and died at his desk. 

Productive solid citizen rings you added,
a good provider year after year while
my dad learned science and invented
fabrics, a double-blade razor
and a ballpoint pen.
In Maryland he became father of three,
lost his money to blackmail,
kept dynamite in a dresser drawer
and never explained.
A scientist to the end
loving his work unto death,
a family trait,
he jotted notes on a yellow pad,
observing his own transient
ischemic attacks.

Suddenly in nineteen fifty-eight
when I remember fallout and Elvis,
you slowed down.  You continued
your lumber creation with care,
the caution of age, as I
grew to my full seventy-one inches
reading Kerouac and picture postcards,
migrating west, fleeing normalcy
and the draft board.

Eight years ago you show
pain.  The lines barely move.
Three children were born to me and then
I cut your flesh.  You compressed a trench
two hundred feet long where you lie.
As you fell in your fury
you snapped the top of an oak,
stripped another fir of its branches,
destroyed two buckeyes, one bay,
one and a half alders,
mauled a young redwood.

Better you crush my yard than my house
which did not exist
nor any of this town
when you first advanced
one tender green shoot.
No one owned this soil.
Deer nibbled your buds.
Bear scratched their backs
against your rough bark.
Ohlone passed silent on their path
to the waters of La Honda Creek.
I want to believe that the end
was quick enough
and that the pain of falling was less
than the pain of standing
another winter of wind.

My golden lab (named Oak),
sire to six puppies,
protector of my house,
witness to your fall,
will seek caves,
fear the rush of wind,
the sway of branches for the
remaining dog-years of his life. 
Panting he curls over my feet. 
We both know that
all good fathers must fall.

Your children crowd,
waving,
blocking the light.

My children count rings,
hands sticky
with sap.

365 Jobs, Day 157: A Door with Beveled Glass

Wednesday, June 6, 1979

We're building a house.  We need a kitchen door.  At a garage sale we find a lovely one with beveled glass.  Clear fir, blessedly unvarnished.   The wood glows with a rich patina of hand-rubbed oil, nicely aged.

The seller wants $50.  In 1979, that's a lot of money for a garage sale door, even an antique such as this one.  Possibly I could haggle - as I often do - but somehow dickering seems disrespectful for such a nice old door.  Which is weird, but it's how I feel.   

Driving away, I start berating myself.  Why didn't I at least make an offer?

We've already spent our small savings throwing up the shell of the house.  Now we're finishing it with salvage, recycled wood, and the occasional yard sale bargain.  Fifty dollars seems like a fortune.

I tell my wife, "Whoever built that door had the good sense to choose just the right touch of elegance and restraint.  The molding around the window - did you notice?  It's beautifully crafted and yet it's simple.  It respects the wood.  It's exactly how I'd do it myself."

"So go back and buy it," she says.

"It'll be gone.  People were all over those doors.  Did you notice on one corner of the glass somebody put a little flower decal?  It seems so right."

"So go back and see."

But I don't go back. 

It haunts me.  The one that got away.  I hate it that I have to be so cheap.

Three days later, working into the evening, I install a sink for one of my favorite clients, a jolly man in East Palo Alto.  It's a high-end Kohler sink for his shabby little kitchen.  I ask if he's ready to upgrade the rest of the room.  "One step at a time," he says.  "Unfortunately, I have champagne taste on a beer budget."

So have I.  With the $85 he just paid me in cash, I return to the bungalow where the door was for sale.  It's 9 p.m.  The guy answers my knock wearing pajamas.  He looks annoyed.  "Who are you?  I was just going to bed."

"You had a door for sale last Saturday.  With beveled glass.  By any chance do you still have it?"

"Yep."

"Amazing!"

"I had some low offers, but I just couldn't sell something so nice to somebody who was trying to beat down the price.  It just wouldn't be right."

Sometimes it's not only what you buy.  It's how you buy it.  


For 32 years that wonderful door has been my kitchen entry, a portal for 3 children and 6 dogs who have slammed and scratched and chewed.  One dog in particular has chewed it to smithereens. 

Raising a family can wear out a door.  The flower decal is still there.  So is the karma. 

One day soon, I'll take that door off its hinges and rebuild the molding.  I'll sand and restore the finish.  I owe it that.

365 Jobs, Day 23: Neil Young, Ken Kesey, Bill Ash

Cross-posted from my new blog, 365 Jobs:

Sunday, January 23, 1983 

Sometimes storms stack up in the Pacific like jets waiting for a runway.  Some days your job is simply to survive with humor and grace.

Today another storm blows in, the fourth one in January.  It's an El Niño winter.  There's a pancake breakfast at the firehouse, a regular benefit for the La Honda Fire Brigade.  I'm gorging myself when a madman wanders into the fire station, no raincoat, black stringy hair dripping water.  He says he's looking for Ken Kesey.  

I tell him Kesey left town many years ago.  

"I mean Neil Young," the madman shouts.  "I'm looking for Neil Young.  Where's he live?" 

There are 30 or 40 people at the tables in the firehouse.  We all exchange glances.  We all know where Neil Young lives.  Nobody says a word.  

Finally, the madman leaves, kick-starting his Harley, roaring off into the rain.  Several of the people at the breakfast are volunteer firefighters.  It's their job to deal with road emergencies.  Pretty soon, they're thinking, we'll get a call to scrape that guy off a tree.  He might be an old friend of Neil, or even of Kesey, after a few too many drugs.  In La Honda, we're pretty familiar with that condition.

After dinner, I walk to Shirley's house for a meeting of the La Honda Poets.  Wind is howling.  From the blackness above, branches are falling.  I should wear my hardhat.  Walking is terrifying, but I'm not going to drive when Shirley lives just three houses from my own.

At any given time there are a few dozen poets living in La Honda.  As I've said:

La Honda is a small town, trying to get by 
with just five hundred people, population very high. 

About ten of those poets are gathered in Shirley's living room when her phone rings.  It's my wife calling.  A branch took out a corner of our roof and knocked out our power.  I leave; Bill Ash comes with me.  Besides writing poetry, Bill has a day job as a nuclear physicist running the Stanford Linear Accelerator.  I've done a lot of work at Bill's house, a dwelling that is slapdash even by the standards of La Honda.  Bill is the man who wrote:

Banana slugs are a fine creation
If you don't believe in reincarnation.

Shining flashlights into the trees, we check for live wires.  It seems safe.  Phones work.  Bill calls PG&E; it will be days before they arrive.  I light Aladdin lamps and build a fire in our fireplace.  

Outside, from the main road I hear sirens.

With Bill Ash, I return to the meeting.  No mere storm will stop the march of Great Art.  Tonight, our job is sharing our poetry, reading aloud.  Bill reads:

Of course I'll come to dinner, she said,
But remember I'm vegetarian.
That's fine, said I with a hungry look,
For I'm a humanitarian.

Here's my contribution:

At the Mercy of Orphans

Spare me, Big Trees.
Spare my house
built of the flesh of your
fathers.

365 Jobs, Day 7 -- The Storm

Cross-posted from my new blog, 365 Jobs:

Saturday, January 7, 1995

Friday night, 10:30 pm, in bed I'm reading by headlamp because the electricity is out.  Every winter we have one killer storm.  This is it.  Up our street a few years back a tree sliced a cabin like a hatchet through a cupcake.  Now rain is pounding; wind rushing; giant redwoods are bending over my house.  We sleep downstairs, hoping the upper floor will act as a cushion.

In La Honda the power is always going out.  The phones, never.  Now it rings.

It's my ex-neighbor, Mark.  He lives in the flatlands now.  He says he just had a dream in which he was in the redwoods in a wild storm.  He thought I should know.

When Mark tells you a dream, you better pay attention.

As I hang up the phone, I hear the snap, the sickening whoosh and crash of a falling tree.  In a bathrobe with a flashlight I go out to inspect - in blackness, in pelting rain and rushing wind - and hear another snap and whoosh - which tree?  Where is it falling?  And which way do I run?  Easy - I run back inside.  My three kids are sleeping.  Oil lamps are flickering and smoking.  I listen to the wind, the branches striking the roof.  I pray for no emergencies so I can stay safe, snug, dry in bed.

Saturday morning, a gentle rain.  I survey the damage.  Redwood branches litter the ground.  An oak has fallen.  My house, okay.  Beside me, Mark's former house, okay.  Below me, Marilyn's house lost another skylight.  The one they sleep under.  Nobody hurt, just freaked out.  Another job.  I don't wish for work among my friends and neighbors, but I'm there when they need it.  I lay a ladder on her A-frame roof, spread a tarp.  I'm lucky.  Protected, somehow, by Mark's dream.

Redwoods and Wires

We live in a forest, but we're wired. This is Highway 84 taken in front of Apple Jack's.

Living with wood

It might look like an insurance claim, but actually the garage was built this way. The oaks have kept right on growing. It's time for an adjustment - of the roof, not the trees. In La Honda, there's no law requiring such accommodation, but people live here because they love the forest. And they try to fit in.

Applejack's, Apple Jack's, AJ's

Apple Jack's in La Honda has a beer sign in the window, which somebody put there, and ferns growing above the window, which nobody intended but nobody minds, either. It's all part of living in a redwood forest.

I've posted about Apple Jack's before: here
and here.

Applejack's, Apple Jack's, AJ's.

Bars come and go in La Honda, but Apple Jack's endures like the redwoods that tower over it. Sometimes it's spelled Applejack's, sometimes we just call it AJ's. I posted another photo here.

Living With Wood

Never argue with a redwood tree. Just build around it - and leave a little space. This is the rear of Apple Jack's Saloon in La Honda, California.

Living with Wood: The Art of Compromise

In the previous post I showed several projects that Aidan and I had built, including a shelf unit built of melamine with oak edging, hanging above a work table with an oak top and melamine cabinets. So just who am I to praise "natural" and "authentic" and "time-tested" craftsmanship? Am I a hypocrite?

I love wood. I hate to waste good wood. And it's in an office, not a crafts museum. It would pain me to see good oak wasted on shelving that, one day later, looked like this:

Offices mutate to meet rapidly changing business conditions and to accommodate rapidly changing technology. The shelf and work table may, a year from now, need to be moved or modified. Those cabinets under the work table are 3 separate units, each on casters, which can be wheeled to new locations. That was always the plan. The work table surface is the size of a single bed. At times we use the office as a guest room. For guests, we wheel the base cabinets out of the way, lower the table surface onto some short legs, lay a mattress on it, and - it's a bed.

The oak trim on the shelves brings them into the theme of the office, which has oak floors and a gigantic oak desk on the opposite side of the room. Too much oak would be overkill. Sometimes, you appreciate a little oak trim more than you would an entire wall of oak. It's a matter of accents, of proportions. And, I suppose, it's a matter of compromise.
In my living room, I built a shelf unit entirely out of oak. It's meant to be permanent, and the oak is a statement of permanence - and of values.

When I started out as a carpenter, I hated drywall. I hated Formica, plastic, Masonite, linoleum, fiberglass, particle board. I guess I've mellowed. That oak bookshelf in my living room would look worse, not better, if the wall behind it were paneled in wood. The painted gypsum wall is gentler on the environment and serves to make the oak stand out.
My younger self would say I've "sold out." My older self says I've grown up. My practical self says, "If I sold out, where's the money?"

Meanwhile, I'm just doing what I think is right. Sell-out? Practical man? Hypocrite? I'll let you decide.

The Turtle Life

What makes me so fond of turtles? Not their witty conversation. Not their glamour. Not their speed or elegant lifestyle or great works of art.

They like to lie in the sun. Loll in the water. Hang out in cool spots by lakes.

They seem to get along with each other. And with ducks.

Most of life's problems just roll off their backs.

They find their own food. They don't bother anybody.

To spend all day hanging out on a log, telling stories, cracking jokes, maybe nuzzling a bit, or cuddling with somebody cute.

You could do worse with your life.

Living With Wood

Turtles, hot day in my little town. The tree is lying over the pond, but still... how do they climb up a tree trunk?

I took the photo today. A year ago, about 20 feet from this scene, I took the Turtle Crossing photo (the sign has since disappeared, though the turtles are still crossing...)

Living With Wood

Back in 1978 when I made a down payment on my little cabin in La Honda, it came with a garage that was falling down. Fifty years earlier, in 1928, the garage had been framed with beams of Douglas fir. Now the termites and beetles and ants and bees had turned the beams to powder.

The siding, though, was redwood. Rough heart redwood. Old growth redwood, I suspect, though not the prime cuts.

Bugs hadn't touched the siding, but weather had. After 50 rainy winters and 50 summers of blasting sunshine, the surface looked like garbage:
I was relatively new to the construction business, and sometimes weeks would go by when I had no work. And no money. I had two little children with a third on the way and I was trying to expand a 500 square foot cabin into a 1800 square foot house. We were living in the shell of the newly framed addition, camping out, cooking on a camp stove, no furnace, no water heater, no doors, washing dishes in an old clawfoot bathtub with cold water, burning construction scraps in the fireplace for warmth.

That garbage heap of a garage looked like gold to me. Having more time than money, I invested in a few sanding belts and set to work. I de-nailed, sanded, ripped, sanded again, and started testing stains. If you oiled the old redwood without any stain, it turned nearly black. Through trial and error, I created a mixture of stain that was partly white and partly red which seemed to restore the redwood to its original color.

I trimmed all the interior doors and window frames with that old wood. Now, 30 years later, here's how they look:

There's flat grain, vertical grain, and weird grain, sometimes all in the same board.

I used every scrap, for better or worse:


Using the same wood, I also built some bookshelves.


I could do better now.

I've got better tools, and I've got better skills.

I also have more money and less time.

Faced with the same situation today, I'd probably buy new wood.

We tend to be self-critical.

And it's intimidating to compare your own work to the gorgeous pieces people are posting on their woodworking blogs.

With this set of photos, though, people are probably thinking, "I could do better."

Well, so could I - now. But back then I did the best I could with the tools and the money I had.

I'm proud of what I did.

It's funky, but it's unique.

It's part of the house I built, the house I've raised my kids in, the house I hope to die in.

When I'm gone, somebody can rip it out and replace it with clean, uniform, nice new trim.

But not yet.

Not, I hope, for a long time.

My Top Ten (or Five, actually, or maybe Six...): A Splintered History of Wood

I've had this book for 6 weeks now. I'm on page 66, so I'm progressing at a rate of about 11 pages a week. Not that it's dense - far from it. It's incredibly engaging. And it's already one of my all time favorite books. At this rate, I look forward to 31 more weeks of enjoyment - and then I bet I go back to the beginning and start all over again.

The reason it's taking me so long is that everything he talks about makes me want to set the book down and tell somebody, usually my wife who isn't even interested in woodworking, about 50,000-year-old logs salvaged from New Zealand bogs. They're ancient kauri trees, and there's a photo of one slab that's 20 feet long, 5 1/2 feet wide, 4 1/2 inches thick, contains over 500 board feet of wood - and has zero knots! How can I keep reading? You just have to stop and share this with somebody. And it happens again and again, page after page.

I've just finished reading the section about blind woodworkers. Once again, I had to stop and tell my wife - and at least this time it's relevant to her work as an Occupational Therapist. She was interested in how they measure with something called a Click Ruler - a tape measure that clicks with each 1/16th of an inch that you withdraw. It sounds like something she could use in her therapy practice.

Before that, I read about a guy who chainsaws designs onto wooden pencils, and another guy who carves Ferraris out of wood, Ferraris you can drive and that also float on water. I mean, you can't just read this stuff. You have to go out and grab somebody by the collar and say, "Did you know that there's a guy in England who as a hobby has collected over 7,000 species of wood? And that's only 1/10th of the species in the world?"

The book is very reader-friendly, with easy writing and a warm personality behind the words, lots of photos. For instance, did you know that cork comes from oak trees? And have you ever wondered how cork is harvested?

My Top Ten (or Five, actually, or maybe Six...): Eric Sloane

I have this fantasy in which I'm a fly on the wall at a meeting between Stephen Shepherd and Eric Sloane. Together, you would have the sum of all knowledge about early American woodwork.

In A Reverence for Wood, Sloane appreciates both the practical details and the philosophy behind the design. Opening the book at random, here he is talking about doors: "In the pioneer days, doors were often symbols. Just as girls filled hope chests, young men planned doors for the houses they would someday build. A house might be built of local pine and chestnut, but the door was considered something special and the wood was often sassafras panels, apple or cherry, or even mahogany brought from the West Indies or Central America. A godly man might prefer a Christian door with stiles and rails that formed a Christian cross. A superstitious person might put a Maltese cross in the lower section and thereby make a 'witch door' to keep out the evil spirits, or frame the door with ash to make the spell more potent. (The ash tree was thought to have special magic to ward off sickness and evil spirits. No snake would cross a barrier of ash leaves.)"

Then, being a marvelous artist, he gives you this illustration:
I bought this book at a garage sale over 30 years ago, and I still learn new things when I go back to it. Let's put it this way: If Eric Sloane were alive today, we'd all be reading his blog. Imagine daily updates with this kind of detail: