Choice and follow through
The desire to build and preserve are binary stars orbiting each other.
A little update: I’ve finished creating materials for a project I’m doing with students in my oldest child’s classroom and they are sitting in 28 tidily organized piles of wood. Not the kids, the materials. What I’m most chuffed about is that I did this work alone—finding lumber, planing it to 3/4” thick, cutting straight edges, cutting it to width, and then into its final lengths. That’s a lot of math. Which is the whole point of the project—to give the kids a hands-on lesson about measuring and building, putting into practice the beautiful art of adding and subtracting fractions to the 1/16th of an inch. Gorgeous. And something I do every day. Which makes me a subject matter expert. Admittedly, this is compared to kids with an average age of 10, but I’m still marking it down in the “win” column for the week.
Are you in the midst of a project or just wrapping one up? I’d love to hear about it.
My essay is below. I hope you’re having a good week!
Working on the sawmill with Dad—the saw takes a subtle amount of pressure—got to learn the feel of the machine and what it needs to get going but not so much it gallups away through the wood—not so fast that the blade doesn’t have a chance to truly cut the wood—don’t want it tearing through. —Notes from the sawmill
I’m sitting on a wobbly stack of 2” thick Soft Maple boards just beyond the lip of the sawmill shed yawning a good 20 feet above me, particles of sawdust floating through the crisp air. The big machine is quiet, cooling from its exertions cutting straight edges on three boards that will eventually make their way into my clients’ dining room and lay flat together as a table top should.
The stack under my rump are the end pieces, the cut offs, wide-flaring like ballerinas’ toes in first position. Several have curly-cue knots cutting a sign in their middle; all have cracks. All are cut offs on the ground now because, when placed on the sawmill, they made the boards stick out too much on one end, defying our intention to cut straight edges.
I might muse and dive deeply into the brilliance, beauty, and personality of wood, but not so deeply I’ll drown—ultimately, this lumber is a means to an end I have foretold and am working steadily to bring about.
Yet. Wood is not inert. Not passive. It still responds to its environment by absorbing moisture from the air and swelling in the summers and drying out by shrinking in the winter. It holds twists and tension within its grains that I’d do well to recognize, lest they pull my careful construction apart.
So each cut matters, even at the earliest stages of the building process.
Today is my first day working the sawmill. There’s working at the sawmill, which is helping load and shift logs, grabbing and stacking cut offs and boards, keeping an eye on the path of the blade, keeping a hungry view on the boards that clunk down to see what new figure is revealed. That’s my usual role. Plus squirreling away the odd cut off or two. And helping with sharpening the blade.
Then there is working the sawmill, which means moving the big wheel to push the board out into the path of the five-foot diameter round blade and operating the two-foot-long handle that moves the machine forward to make the cut.
As with other tools in woodworking, using the sawmill requires learning its quirks, training my hands and arms to feel more accurately, assessing when to push harder, when to pull back so that the blade cuts carefully, accurately. As it moves through the wood, it wants to pick up speed. I need to learn to keep it steady without stopping in the midst of the cut, which could burn the wood.
Each cut produces the adrenaline of anxiety because it is a choice made that can’t be undone. On Dad’s farm, we are surrounded by veritable hills of lumber, all created at this sawmill. Certainly there is other Soft Maple.
But the lumber for this project is coming from one specific tree—from the mighty branch that fell unexpectedly last year, coming within inches of crushing my car, during lunch. Our family’s conversation was interrupted by a reverberating crack followed by a breathy thump. We caught each other’s eyes, then looked at the lawn.
In all the years I have known this farm, a massive Maple tree has sat watch on that lawn, reaching up higher than the roof of the three-story house, providing shade in the summer, ensuring the home stays cool even on sweltering days, providing a branch for a swing with a wide, delicious arc that would make your heart soar when you got to its limits.
This beloved family tree is dying. And the branch that came down, huge in its own right—about 16-18 inches across at the widest—is the harbinger of that.
Dad and I cleaned up the wood debris from that crash and brought the branch to the sawmill. We cut it through and through, giving us natural edges on each board. We ended up with about several 10-foot long boards that were a little over 2 inches thick. They have been air drying in a barn since, until this past spring, when this wood became the prime candidate for making a big, sturdy farm table for my clients.
So all this to say, I only have this one log, with its six or so boards, with which to make the top, aprons, and legs of the dining table. My material feels painfully finite when we are cutting up the lumber.
While mistakes are part of this craft (and fixing and hiding them is a skill I am learning), if I cut these boards too short or too narrow, there is no invisible fix that will allow such a mistake to stay hidden from my clients. Or me, for that matter. With every project I make, my eyes are immediately pulled to the mistakes that I know are there, even if they are tucked from view. (I really do need to write more on this topic, but another day!)
The main problem we faced today was how to get a relatively consistent table width out of these boards while keeping the natural edges. The natural edge of a piece of lumber does not conform to the whims of a woodworker’s design. As with parenting and other relationships, it’s a negotiation.
Hence the wobbly cut offs on which I perched, removed so the wood would lie on the sawmill in a straight line instead of an angle. Funny how with writing you can start in one place—rocking in the sawdust midst of the mill—and end in another—picking through the memories of that day to reveal what was learned.
I wrote extensive notes about each step Dad and I took at the sawmill, but my sweet counterpart in life and parenting, Josiah, has gently advised me to pare these missives down. Admittedly, those are not the most riveting paragraphs I’ve produced, but I love thinking through the solutions to all the little problems one confronts when woodworking. (Josiah loves spreadsheets, so ask yourself: Which would you prefer to get emailed—insights about the ardent path of becoming an artisan or a spreadsheet?)
At their essence though, all my notes were about choice. To cut here or there? To remove these inches now or wait, trying to preserve more options for the future?
The desire to build and preserve are binary stars orbiting each other. Ultimately I can’t have both, a choice has to be made, but perhaps there’s a way to step back and encompass both? To muddle through with something approaching skill and perhaps grace so that I will be able to preserve as much of the beauty, joy, and comfort that Maple tree provided our family in the table that becomes part of my clients’ home.