May I be in your bunker?

A quick update: I’ve been busy in my little garage shop practicing skills I’ve learned, making things like key hook and coat hook boards, bookmarks, mini charcuterie boards. At Dad’s shop, he showed me how to glue up miter joints to make big, sturdy legs, 3 1/2” square, out of Spalted Maple (photo of one chunk of lumber below). My mentor is teaching me how to bend wood.

And I’m trying to write compelling stuff for a grant. Clearly hitting a wall with that task. So instead I’m going to play tug of war with my dog.

My essay is below. Any important projects you’re avoiding? Tell me about it and we can commiserate together.

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Last week, I was at the bandsaw cutting long curved pieces out of four-foot long 2 x 4s. This was my mentor’s shop. I was at one end of the room and she was on the other side taking the pieces I’d cut and assembling them into a half-moon arch.

This is me, at the end of the project.

She is building playground structures for a local outdoors organization (these pieces would become a roughly 3-foot high climbing arch) and I had just gotten my first lesson about figuring out how to calculate the radius and angles and lengths of curved boards.

Don’t worry—most of what she said has scarpered from my brain, so no lengthy math segue here. What I remember is the full-scale drawing she made on her floor; pencil lines and numbers marking the inside and outside of the curved arch, its middle, and where the pieces would need to be cut.

I liked how the floor was more than a place for our feet or the wheels of worktables and shop equipment: it was a canvas, a giant sketchpad, a place for sitting and thinking and calculating.

I asked her why it was important to do a full-scale drawing versus a smaller one on paper and she told me that it’s easy to be off by a tiny amount, which can have big implications for the pieces all coming together in the way you want. With a full-scale drawing, you can measure more accurately.

With woodworking, you move close up and then step back, to see the details clearly and then to take in the whole that is to become.

She made a template and we used that to transfer cut lines onto 2 x 4s. This is how I ended up at the bandsaw, cutting curves. Thinking about accuracy, mentally stumbling over the steps to measure midpoints and angles and radiuses (radii?).

Once the cuts were complete, I’d bring the boards over and she would put in pocket holes and screw the pieces together.

She is so very competent with all manner of tools and materials. This was not nice wood we were using. This was not fine woodworking we were doing. This was heavy pretreated lumber. Filled with the kind of chemicals that gum up blades. But she was as sure and steady as I’ve seen her be when marking and double checking the cuts to be made for the precise joints in a custom cabinet or table.

She possesses an ease in the shop; it is clearly her element.

And I realized that part of my desire to learn woodworking is to gain similar mastery. Not only for building fine furniture, though I do enjoy that, but more of a general ability to get things done. Handy things.

In essence, I want to be someone worthy of inclusion in a bunker. Like in the apocalypse, say you have a bunker and it only fits 10 people, on the off chance I don’t have my own bunker, then I want to be one of the nine you invite into yours.

The idea comes from a movie Josiah and I watched years ago. I don’t remember what it was called and barely recall the plot. Honestly, this story wouldn’t be helped if I did. Suffice to say that it was likely a terrible movie (that’s our cinematic bread and butter) but the whole premise was that if some cataclysmic event happened and you had to go into a bunker that could only accommodate 10 people, who would you choose to join you?

This inspired years of conversation about who we’d invite into our bunker, then the realization that we weren’t on the same page at all and so we’d have to have our own separate bunkers, and then fights over who would get our family doctor.

I hadn’t thought about the bunker in awhile, but carting wood from the bandsaw to the other side of the shop, it came back to me. Building beautiful, functional furniture is great, but deep down I think my desire is to be competent and useful. What my dad calls an ability to find your ass with your own two hands.

And to up the odds on getting invited into someone’s bunker, should the need arise. I’m certainly not getting in on my ability to save lives or my personality (what could be described as charmingly mercurial). So really I’ve got to be handy.

Handy and multipurpose, good at (good for) more than just one thing. Figuring how to do that, to be that, takes a bit of stepping in closely and then stepping back.

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Thanks for reading!