I had a new dog, too, Bear Boy, whom I had saved from execution at the pound when his first owner gave up on him. Bear was a slight, handsome, black Lab mix – an incorrigible mutt who couldn’t have cared less about relating to humans. His only interests were fighting and fornication. When a bitch was in heat anywhere on the island, Bear would be gone for days, enthusiastically brawling with other suitors outside the domicile of his intended, until I finally received the predictable call from Linda Cahoon, the dogcatcher, telling me where to retrieve him.
I also started my first beard that September, partially to keep my face warm through the coming winter’s outdoor work, partially as another step to becoming whoever I might be. So much was changing in my life – I was changing so much – that I half expected, half hoped to see a more seasoned, knowing face emerge from the cocoon of my beard the following spring.
Along with learning to tell one end of a nail from the other, I was discovering new ways to be in the world. In junior high and high school I had been the youngest in my class and slow to reach puberty; I had been small, relatively nonathletic, and occasionally bullied. I had taken refuge in being smart – or, to be more precise, in trying to be smarter than others. But as a carpenter on Nantucket I found that the competitive aspect of my personality separated me from other people. What I wanted, and what was available to me, was community. I had left college looking for real life, and now I had found it. Intuitively, I knew I was on the road to discovering what a good life might be.
First Epiphany
Fast-forward a little more than a year, to November 1974. I have fallen deeply in love and my girlfriend and I are caretaking the Heller estate, a two-hundred-year-old cape on a hundred acres of land halfway out the Hummock Pond Road. I’m still pounding nails for Carl Borchert. My hammer holster is weathered and scarred. Gail works as a cleaning lady for Mrs. Mitchell, a wealthy elderly woman whose house has been frozen in time since the moment her husband died, twenty years before. Not a frayed, monogrammed towel or a threadbare linen sheet has been replaced.
The Hellers are in Florida for the winter. They have left two elderly, incontinent dogs in our care. Pookie is a blind German shorthaired pointer. Pepi is a deaf Weimaraner with senile dementia. Every morning before breakfast our walks to the far end of the property combine pathos with slapstick comedy. Pepi forgets we’re taking a walk, drifts off, and can’t hear me call. Pookie follows the other dogs until she crosses the trail of a deer, at which point she joyously chases down the scent until she runs head-first into a tree. Bear Boy picks up the trail that Pookie has started and is sometimes gone for hours. Meanwhile, back at the house, Gail washes the piss-soaked towels the old dogs use for bedding and mops the concrete floor of the laundry room where they sleep. Aside from the dogs’ room, though, the old house is a special place. On cold weekend mornings I light fires in all three downstairs fireplaces and we have friends over to breakfast. After a few hours, the radiant brick hearths seem to awaken the old house to memories of earlier centuries.
Gail is an aspiring weaver (plate 3). A cherry loom occupies one end of the dining room, and she has applied to Capellagården, a crafts school in Sweden. I am intent on a career designing and building houses on spec, but have applied to the school’s woodworking program so that we can travel to Sweden together.
The design for this cradle, found in a book, was the author’s first furniture project.
It’s almost Thanksgiving, and our friends Nils and Joyce are expecting their first child at any minute. They are the first among our peers to have a child, so this is a major event, mysterious to us all. I decide to make them a cradle, thinking that I might as well get some furniture-making experience now that we’ve applied to school.
Next to the Heller house is a barn with a single rusty table saw in an unheated workshop. Working from a photograph in a book, I buy pine and dowels from the local lumber yard and set to work. Furniture making turns out to be considerably different from carpentry. It requires joinery: bridle joints to assemble the triangular frames that curve like Gothic arches at each end of the cradle, and mortise and tenon joints to secure the aprons that traverse the ends like a suspension bridge. It entails sensitive shaping with a rasp and file to make the wood gentle to the hand and eye. It demands a precision that reveals the slightest gap or flaw.
After three days of intense focus, cold, and solitude, the cradle is complete – a miraculous birth in its own right. I have somehow transformed benign intent into a beautiful, functional object. This is my moment on the road to Damascus. I am overtaken by a most unexpected passion. Within two months of making the cradle I will quit my carpentry job to make furniture full-time in the Heller barn. In the meantime, Gail and I will be turned down by Capellagården.
Back in 1974 one did not routinely meet furniture makers. There were few craft fairs, there was no Fine Woodworking magazine. In the entire nation there was only one small Woodcraft store where you could buy traditional woodworking tools such as mortise gauges, and those had to be imported from England. Out in the barn, fingers numb with cold, I could believe I was rediscovering a lost art. After the cradle I built a ladder-back chair, then started on a rocker. My meager guides were two books that I was given for Christmas by Gail and her sister. (My father gave me a drawing board and drafting equipment, although he was no happier with furniture making than he had been with carpentry.) I also had a friend, Jon, who had spent a few months sanding for a woodworker in New Jersey. Between us, we could usually figure out the sequence of steps for a given project.
As my woodworking horizons slowly expanded, I designed each new project around whatever technique I wanted to learn next. My goal was to become a proficient craftsman; design was a secondary consideration. So began a decade during which the challenges of furniture making consumed me. While my friends would talk and listen to music at a bar, I’d sit there sketching chairs on napkins. I gave little thought to practicalities such as income. I simply inhabited my passion.
CHAPTER 3
The Seductive Ideology of Craft
MY ENTRY INTO CRAFT was an intensely singular experience. But whether I was rinsing mung bean sprouts in the kitchen sink with Joni Mitchell’s captivating soprano on the stereo or out in the barn shaping the arm of a red oak rocking chair with a coarse Nicholson rasp, I was very much a product of the historical moment. It was no accident that a young person in 1974 was searching for a meaningful and fulfilling way to inhabit adulthood, nor that he would turn to craft. The culture of my time and place poured through me like water through a weir. Craft was a concept that lodged in the netting.
In furniture making, beginnings are critical. For a simple frame-and-panel cabinet door to stay flat over the long haul, and not become too tight in summer or overly gapped in winter, success starts with the choice of timber. Not just what species or which plank, but also from which part of the board one saws the stiles and rails, how dry the wood is, the method by which it was dried, and how it was stored and handled. All this before the actual work of milling the timber flat and square, laying out and cutting the joinery, making and fitting the panel, assembling, trimming, fitting, hinging, latching, and finishing. Throughout the entire process, the quality achievable at each stage is utterly dependent on the care with which the craftsman has accomplished every previous step.
Likewise, as someone trying to write about the nature and rewards of craft, it seems important to construct a sound foundation by being precise early on about what I mean by craft. The word is a chameleon. It is both verb and noun. It is used to impute quality to everything from one-of-a-kind handmade objects to mass-produced industrial products. It is closely linked to equally amorphous offshoots such as craftsman, craftsmanship, and the less gracious crafter. A lawyer may be said to craft an agreement with all the grammatical correctness with which a potter is said to craft a teacup. An actor practices his5 craft on the stage as readily as a blacksmith practices his at the forge. There is high craft, low craft, reproduction craft, and conceptual craft. There is craft in