It strikes me that the difference between good and bad craftsmanship is not unlike the one between good and bad religion. It is not the discrepancy between the simplicity of a Shaker chair or the elegance and beauty of a Restoration cabinet, but between a shoddy piece of work and one that has integrity. We need saints, whether of the spirit or the craft, to remind us of that difference and that there are still mountains to climb. But, as you would remind me, we can’t all be saints, and there is forgiveness for failures; in fact, a mistake at the workbench can often lead to an exciting new creation. Woodworking, after all, is meant to bring happiness and delight, not sadness and despair. Knowing that helps when you get tired and cut your fingers, when lovely wood is butchered or sawdust overwhelms the soul, or when tempted to throw in the towel and confine our failures to the firewood pile. Writer’s block and woodworker’s frustration are much the same. When the joy goes out of what you are doing, shut up shop for a while, watch a movie or go for a walk. But get back to the laptop and bench as soon as you can.
One of the joys in “retiring” to Volmoed, a Christian retreat centre nestling among the hills and vineyards of the Hemel en Aarde Valley near Hermanus, is that we were able to build our own house—designed by Julian Cooke, a great architect and friend over the years—and include in it plans for a large workshop. This has become a wonderful sanctuary over the past decade. Not only is it big enough to include all my tools and machines, but also large enough for at least two people to work together in it on various projects such as you and I have undertaken. In it, Ron has taught me to turn segmented bowls and Anton helped me build the staircase banisters in our house and the extensive bookshelves in my library. To share such a passion with friends, relatives, or children is very special and I still look forward to more opportunities to come.
Serghay has been a more frequent companion in the workshop. He is a younger member of the maintenance staff on Volmoed who has taken a special interest in woodworking and has become my unofficial “apprentice” during periods in his schedule when he is able to join me. I learn as much from him as he does from me. After all, he has built his own house! He also has no compunction in reminding me about the safety rules we have established, on measuring twice before cutting, and striving for perfection when tempted to cut a few corners.
My life in writing and woodworking! How fulfilling this has all been. But it is also an expression of something deeper that has to do with the work of the spirit of creativity, inspiration, empowering, and aesthetic awareness. The truth is, my life-long journey in the church, academy, and public life have become inseparable from the workshop, giving my life added meaning, enjoyment, nourishment, and direction. This is, I have come to believe, the work of the Spirit, whose activity is not confined to religion or to the soul (understood as some rarefied ghost in the machine we call the body), but embraces life in all its dimensions, relationships, joys, and sorrows, and crosses boundaries of time and space. In the process, sawdust flies in all directions, but the soul also takes wings.
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Bill’s Story
Ah, John, the chips and sawdust are inspiring you to poetry! There are so many similarities in our stories, but also some different paths as well. Unlike you I grew up among trees, but not among woodworkers. Washington, DC was filled with trees among its low buildings. Living on its edge, I roamed an abandoned farm at the end of our street, trapping squirrels (don’t ask), ripping out the surveyors’ stakes (yes, I have a criminal past), and constructing lean-tos and tree platforms from the branches available on the ground. At one point I built an underground fort (being a youth, I called it a fort), only to discover that it flooded in heavy rains. Stick to tree houses, at least till lightning hits.
At most, wood was a construction material for the barns, fence-posts, and houses on the family’s dairy farm in Virginia where I spent all my non-school time. I got to know wood as locust, oak, pine, and maple. My father (a William Jr., with me being a third) was a businessman, and at best a tinkerer and repairman. In those days being the “third” meant you would follow in your ancestors’ footprints, but obviously I didn’t. Through wood I first learned what it was to repair things. A farm, I came to say, is a repair waiting to happen, whether it is a broken fence or a hole in the shed roof.
But there was one exception to this strictly utilitarian view of wood. When I was thirteen I too was introduced to the world of woodcraft through my school’s Shop Class. That it was strictly offered for boys did not strike me as strange either. Boys were supposed to work with heavy materials. Girls were supposed to sew, cook, and run the household. That we would soon live in a world where this made no sense was an unacknowledged corrosive that finally did away with shop and home economics. Only recently have these enterprises begun to reappear in the schools as tools for living that are open to both girls and boys. Like you, I have seen the emergence of fine woodworkers and turners like Laura Mays at the College of the Redwoods, Dixie Biggs, or Betty Scarpino, who is also editor of American Woodturner, by the way. And there are many others.
It was in Shop Class that I discovered sophisticated tools (for that era) like the router, the lathe, and the metal press. I don’t remember the teacher’s name, a man with gruff demeanor and sure hands, intent on passing on his skills to boys who didn’t really know what shop skills were for, but who loved the chance to take some wood and change it into bookends, bowls, and magazine racks.
My magazine rack was made of mahogany or something close to it. After residing for some decades with my parents, it returned to me upon their deaths. A few years ago I coaxed it apart—we used water-soluble hide glue then, no fancy aliphatic glues—and repaired some damaged joints. There were the old mortises I had made with a router that must have sounded like a freight train. Cleaned out, some edges repaired, and the rack stood ready once again to house the magazines I can’t bear to throw out after they are read. It held a lot of National Geographics until I started giving them to my son Eric.
The magazine rack reminds me that wood is a potent vehicle of memory. It is like an ancient ancestor who remains among us, reminding us of stories that are the backbone of our own development. Objects of wood also remind us as human beings that we are people of the trees, primordial workers of wood, creatures whose unity of hand and mind make us what we are.
While I went on to live increasingly through my world of ideas, language, and speech, the intense satisfaction of my experience in those shop classes remained with me, tugging at me as I emerged into a career of teaching, writing, and public speech. I had little awareness that many of the craft values realized in shop were also guiding the way I wrote, thought, and engaged in the administration of academic affairs.
My only effort in woodwork took place in my mid-twenties, when I constructed an elaborate stand for the sound equipment and records that had accumulated in my collegiate and graduate school years. Made of numerous slats and threaded rods, with one diagonal bracer board, it was designed to be taken apart for the many moves of a scholar’s early life. Needless to say, it was so intricate I only disassembled it under dire need. I finally passed it on to a friend and it disappeared from my life, a fleeting testimony to ingenuity and the paucity of tools, space, and resources at my disposal. But I was helping raise three kids, too, who have reminded me that I engaged in enough woodworking during those years to pass on some skills and attitudes.
Eric, a Star Trek fan at age seven, remembers how we built a small closet in his bedroom that was the base of a rocket ship, with a painted façade, a control room, and all sorts of Wizard-of-Oz controls. It was, he says, his first stage set. He went on to major in theater in college and has spent much of his career designing and building stage sets. Of course, he says, “I don’t have to be as concerned about how