Makers

The prison woodshop was my refuge.  In creating something, I left the reality of incarceration behind.  To build something - anything really - was to set aside a captive present for a liberated future.  The projects weren’t much; an oak-handled shiv, a plywood nightstand for the bunk, a meticulously (if not accurately) carved mahogany boomerang and other small items.  Nonetheless, crafting them released me from the fixed regimen of the orphanage.  Orphanage.  Prison.  If they come after you when you escape, there’s not much difference.

We take our respites where we can find them, and I’ve long found mine in sawdust.  The refuge became craft, and the craft became enterprise as I funded part of college by making things others couldn’t while trying to retain all of my fingers.  A semi-joke in the household is I should have been a high school woods teacher and varsity baseball coach.  That would have been the life. 

That’s not a complaint.  It’s an admission.  Why didn’t I think of that thirty years ago?  Because that’s not the way life works.

It is the life in the wood that attracts me to it.  It was an acorn.  It became a tree.  It stored carbon and produced oxygen.  It enlivened the landscape before meeting its fate.  Cleared for a development?  Struck by lightning?  Attacked by a foreign bug?  Harvested?  You often don’t know, but that you’re going to do something with it is the whole gambit.  It is not firewood.  It is not mulch.  It is what you make of it.  What you make of it … that’s life, in a nutshell.

Woodworkers pick their planks with the care of brides choosing their wedding dress.  Too big?  Too small?  Too flashy?  Just right?  It can take the better part of a day.  Johnson Creek Hardwoods in Mount Carroll, Illinois is deserving of a shout-out.  They grow it, cut it and dry it onsite.  It’s a veritable candy store, and we came back with a beautiful slice of elm.        

Colin’s dorm will come with a desk, but that desk will neither have a roll of butcher paper to scribble on nor a “live edge”.  So we’ll bring one crafted of elm that does, and store the one that came with the room for the year.  In woodworking, a live edge is the edge of a plank that retains where the wood met the tree’s bark.  It’s not square.  It’s not uniform.  It’s the living, organic edge of the tree.  We found a plank with just the right curve to make you want to sit at the desk a little longer, and make that term paper a little bit better.  At least, that’s my hope.  It will also look cool, and that’s not to be dismissed. 

The making of something “just so” runs deep with me, for better and for worse.  A piece of furniture.  An essay.  A subdivision plat.  A game plan.  A city.  Most anything that is tangible.  How much of that traces back to the orphanage woodshop, where I was carving out some identity in a place where identity was obliterated on the way in, is a question with an imprecise answer.  How much of it traces back to the practicality of crafting something from nothing to help pay my way through college?  Again, there’s no precise answer, but I’m guessing every “maker” out there has personality building blocks which compel them to create.          

You can live with furniture (or anything else) built in some factory, or you can make it yourself.  The former is more efficient and eliminates all the risk.  The latter is more personally engaging and - done well - transforms risk into generation-spanning reward.  Life in a nutshell, again.  The more of your life you make, the more of your life is yours.  And the more you can give to others.