There was a day when, as a small boy, I found a day-bed mattress at the top of the stairs. With great effort I maneuvered it off the landing until it started to descend the green carpeted steps on its own. I hadn’t thought any further ahead than that moment, and delight flashed to fear as the mattress rapidly gained momentum and, abruptly, punched a hole in the wall opposite the bottom landing. Then – amazing! – broken chunks of granular white plaster, jagged splinters of rough wood lathe, and, most impressive of all, a dry, empty cavity behind the wall, a secret world. It had never occurred to me that there might be anything behind the painted surface. This was my mental state growing up: life was all surface. The discovery of depth, when it came during my college years, did not have the drama of a mattress smashing through a wall. Rather, a capacity for reflection seemed to emerge as gradually and fitfully as a child learns to walk.
One of the first tiny steps occurred the summer before my senior year at Germantown Friends School, when I participated in an American Friends Service Committee work camp in Owatonna, Minnesota. Our group of student volunteers lived in a bat-infested barn housing a Salvation Army store in one corner of the ground floor. It was 1968 and three of us were fledgling hippies who hung out together. There was Larry, with whom I would laugh until we collapsed to the floor, and Fred, who was moody, ironic, and intense as a Janis Ian song. What I found particularly incomprehensible about Fred was that he was in analysis. I wasn’t unfamiliar with Freud, but I simply couldn’t imagine what Fred found to be so miserable about. And, while I remained mystified, the simple fact of Fred, and his disdain for my own reflexive cheerfulness, was a chink in the smooth surface of life. Now I knew there was a cavity behind the wall, even if I didn’t have a clue what might be inside.
Three summers later, my nineteen-year-old self lay sprawled on a bed, reading a book on social activism. Not that I had become a committed social activist – I was a college student working as a gardener on Nantucket. An antiwar, longhaired, pot-smoking, pro–civil rights student who had marched on Washington and been tear-gassed at Fort Dix for peace and justice, but a self-absorbed student nonetheless. That summer, the full extent of my daily activism consisted of choosing the colored elastic with which I would tie back my ponytail. Black symbolized Bakunin and anarchy, red was for Trotsky and socialism, blue matched my eyes.
The name of the book I was reading is lost to memory, but the gist of its message was that working to improve people’s material circumstances isn’t enough. Even if you manage to relieve their hunger and physical discomfort, you will not have touched their spiritual needs, which are what really matter. Better to be hungry and cold, but spiritually nourished, than to feast by a blazing hearth with spiritual emptiness gnawing away from inside.
Although I strongly suspected that no starving person would agree with the author’s contention, I detected a certain truth in his words. Having attended a Quaker secondary school, I had seen many generous people – teachers, social workers, philanthropists, psychologists, Peace Corps volunteers, political activists – trying to help others through life’s difficulties. Unfortunately, to my young eyes, the helpers didn’t appear to be particularly happy or fulfilled themselves. There had to be more to life. The phrase “Physician, heal thyself!” came to mind, and it occurred to me that I should find out how to live my own life well before I presumed to help others. If I had to date my journey into craft, this was the moment it began.
A year later, having spent the summer in Mexico learning Spanish, I moved to Nantucket Island in search of “real life.” My intent was to earn the remainder of my college credits through independent study. I didn’t know what real life was. I just knew that in school I seemed to be experiencing life secondhand.
Nantucket was not then the wealthy enclave it is now; the ghosts of the nineteenth century were still in possession – and I mean this fairly literally. The Nantucket I knew as a child, starting with family vacations in the 1950s, was an isolated backwater of deteriorating old houses furnished with the hundred-year-old salvage of the island’s whaling heyday. At the time I moved there, in 1972, there were only three thousand year-round residents, almost all of whom were island-born except for fifty or sixty hippie immigrants like myself. A mild collision of cultures ensued that one could stereotype as hippie-meets-redneck, but it was not particularly antagonistic. For a twenty-year-old it was a magical time and place.
I arrived on the island with three years of college behind me, a low draft number, and a box full of Marvel comic books. The low draft number argued for staying in college at the University of Pennsylvania. When my student deferment ran out, I intended to serve time in jail as a conscientious objector rather than report to basic training. The box full of comic books was research material for one of the three independent study courses I took that fall – a sociological evaluation of comic-book readership through story content, graphics, and advertisements.
But what I really did that fall was begin my own life, to the extent that one can while one’s father (my parents now being divorced) is still paying the rent. I was free to do what I wanted, when I wanted, as long as I wrote those papers. Admittedly, what I wanted to do was pretty simple stuff. Walks over the moors. Walks on the beaches. Walks through town. Pick rose hips and plums and grapes as each came in season and learn to make jelly. Cook pies and stir-fries and bake bread. And, every evening, get stoned with my buddy Al and listen to Incredible String Band records for hours on end.
In December, I sealed my final term paper into a manila envelope and dropped it in the mail. I had accumulated enough credits to graduate, so right before Christmas I started looking for a job. A temporary job, since it couldn’t be more than a few months until a summons arrived from the draft board in Philadelphia.
I had no specific career ambitions, although it was now time to earn a living. What I did have was the desire to discover a better way to live than my parents’ generation appeared to have found. In this I was very much a representative of my own generation. We grew up in a prosperous, postwar America where, despite every sign of worldly success, adult life looked shallow and, in the twin shadows of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, morally bankrupt. Today we would use the word unfulfilled instead of shallow, but the concept of fulfillment as a life goal was not current in the sixties. Our parents were children of the Great Depression. For them, the bottom-line measure was economic security. In any case, I looked at the grown-up world and said, All this for what? My life and those of many of my contemporaries may be seen as attempts to answer that question – not theoretically, but in practice.
The search for a good life was not the relatively simple matter of getting from point A to point B over difficult terrain (which better describes the path to success in an established profession like medicine or law). It was more like being a fifteenth-century European explorer navigating with maps on which a known, finely detailed world is bordered by sketchy depictions of legendary continents and fabled cities – a voyage over uncharted seas to find out what really lay beyond.
We were all looking for accurate maps of the world, my friends and I. My best friend from high school, Scott, was studying Buddhism under Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. A close friend from college, Tom, was learning to organize strikes and boycotts under Cesar Chavez. I was too skeptical of gurus, politics, and office work to journey alongside either one. Thinking of this now, a Jackson Browne lyric of that era comes to mind: “Together we went traveling, as we received the call / His destination India, and I had none at all.”
Although I may not have known where I was going, I had at least figured out that the work I chose would continue to shape me, so I knew I had to choose carefully. Obvious as that may seem today, at the time it was a major realization. I grew up in a world where, as characterized by physician and author Abigail Zuger, “the adult brain was considered an immutable machine, as wonderfully precise as a clock in a locked case. Every part had a specific purpose, none could be replaced or repaired, and the machine was destined to tick in unchanging rhythm until its gears corroded with age.”3 As a child I had assumed that the process of growing up ended when you finished college, after which you stayed the same person for the rest of your life. Only as I approached adulthood did I realize that life is a process of continual becoming.
Carpentry