My First Shop
Great Odin's Beard
I can relive my entire woodworking life by recalling the shops in my past. With great accuracy can I see the five of them that I furnished for myself and my quirks, tools and sawdust and for my wits, half, dim, and nit.
My first woodworking space I carved out of the wilderness of my vast ignorance at my scientist/ friend/ Joel’s house. In his garage he tinkered with a metal lathe. He let me build a bench, made of 2x4’s and plywood, attached to the inside wall of this garage. I was so proud of my bench and I developed a technique there to test out my work. I got up. I stood on it and I jumped with my steel toed boots to see if it would survive. Such a big smile beamed from me for the simple fact that I had actually built something. I was so new to this world.
[Note to reader: I currently use different if equally rigorous standards for testing my work].
Joel moved some months later to become an astronomer in Hawaii. My sweetie, Jane, and I inherited his tiny place and its basement space. My first shop.
The little house was built as an old style Portland servant’s quarters with three small rooms in it in a closely packed railroad neighborhood. Out the kitchen window you could touch the neighbor’s house. From the yards we could hear the rail cars smash into one another like great coupling beasts in the night. To my classically trained ear this could have been the sound of some stumbling sightless gods blinded by Odin for their hubris.
‘By great Odin’s beard! You chose to do what? You dared turn from tradition, from your training, from your family and their careful tutoring to tinker around with tools, to toy with craft, to travel this unknown path as your life? You’re better than this.’
It was rather noisy I must point out. The sounds didn’t bother me.
A glass enclosed front porch faced to the sunset over the West Hills. There were front steps but also a stairway that led down to the basement. One turn and you descended into the half buried room with a small north facing window. For ventilation, perhaps for deliveries, it remained a mystery why it existed, there was a kitchen cabinet door that opened and, if one were limber enough, let you crawl up and through the cabinets just to the left of the kitchen sink.
This basement shop was so small that I never even bothered to measure it. Maybe it stretched to 10’ x 15’. Behind a short wall sat the giant octopus furnace that warmed us, with a sink and a washing machine, and Joel’s old office desk where I tried to design my first pieces of furniture. A beautiful wooden rack sat down there that I turned into wood storage, and I put Joel’s grinder next to the octopus to teach myself how to hollow grind a chisel.
I spent four years in that basement training myself with my few woodworking books and a burning desire to learn something other than the back biting world of academics. What’s the statement about college politics? ‘The fights are so large because the stakes are so small.’ I wanted to avoid that. This world of woodworking grew larger and more challenging with each new technique I learned on my own. My apprenticeship tied itself to a broad lack of patience as it was slow going being self-taught. I could agree with Ben Jonson that the self-taught student has only a fool for a master, but my finances permitted no further schooling and the mentors I could find were more interested in profits than benefits.
[Read Thoreau on profits. A good walk in the woods offers no profit but benefits the soul immeasurably. The worker straight from a walk returns to the bench refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready. The bench I think can offer both small profits and benefits.]
What I discovered down those stairs was a love for shaping wood, putting my hands on tools, and getting to build things that I had imagined. I also became, and this was a gift, a very skilled user of swear words. Ah what opportunities for this rich vocabulary to develop!
But even as I made my mistakes, I would pinch myself and say: ‘Look at what you’re doing!’ It was like nothing I had ever tried before. I wasn’t shackled to a tome, leaning on a shovel, or studying law. This was work that made me labor hard both mentally and physically. It caused me to remember the beauty of geometry and forced me to think about Quality without regard for critics and their fatuous statements. I was making my own way in the world. Nothing more exciting than that.
What it felt like was the start of an immense journey. Here my literary training aided me. This is an excerpt from a poem called ‘Ithaka’, by C.P. Cavafy that I found back then.
‘Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.’
What good fortune and hard times ensued from my stepping into that first shop. I got lucky when I stumbled into that world. It has never let me down. Well except for the fortune part of a fortune. That’s still elusive and perhaps illusive. Fortune has been a tardy mistress. But the benefit has reaped innumerable dividends each day and to this one.
My first shop, and all the others after it, resembled the worker. It projected my personality out into the world so anyone could walk in and smell the aroma I bathed in, sense the excitement of the ideas that surrounded me, and marvel at the volume of shapes that decorated my walls and floor. How, they might have wondered, did I find anything at all in this jungle of tools and templates and wood? I marvel I can find anything in my shop some days. And yet it is said that a marvelously cluttered desk/ bench indicates a superior intelligence.
A woodworking shop takes on the personality of its maker. It is a calling card like no print shop can ever duplicate. It is always open for business, closed to rubber-neckers, and the one place where I feel comfortable in an insane world.
I learned and designed and delivered what I could out of the first small space that I occupied. Down there I taught myself how to make large pieces of wood into precious smaller ones. Down there I worked on my stance in the world. Down there I tried, as I still try, to learn forgiveness.
Get thee to a bench. The benefits will grow with your practice. NWS
