Methow Craftsman

Chevy Step-side

2010-05-09T18:12:00.000-07:00

Well, the house is in good order with no major projects slated for this year. We enjoyed the studio and we got to make some built-in furniture in the space. The fire and southern light through the windows made it a lovely space to work in. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's masterpiece, "Team of Rivals", about Abraham Lincoln's cabinet, while sitting in the old rust-colored hand-me-down chair, feet propped on the kindling splitting log.

We get restless with the idea of no projects of our own. Because we had to sell the quite new Silverado to get through the winter after a difficult year last year Cicely was left without transportation of her own when I had the big Ford on a job. Her father is a mechanic and a Jeep racer so she has a good dose of that love for four-wheeled things in her blood. This spring we snapped up an '84 Chevy step-side in fair shape and in need of some sweat, love, and craftsmanship. I have never been accused of being a mechanic, so when the motor checked out we thought we could all pitch in and give the pick-up it's due over time.

Cicely and I pulled into the drive late one evening and it was immediately more beloved than the newer model that preceded it. Veronika's favorite feature was the rust on the body, particularly the doors. This comes as no surpise because at eleven she loves clothes from "The Red Hen" second hand store more than any of the commercial clothing stores. Noble, at thirteen, had driven the family pick-ups around the neighborhood from time to time, and without seeking permission he turned the key and peeled out in reverse into the street. He and Veronika disappeard for a few minutes on a test drive. They came back safe and sound with smiles stretched from the corners of their face. Then they put on safety glasses and started to rip up the rotted wood bed, and then to clean the windows and to go over each inch assessing projects for later days.

It has never been on my list to restore a vehicle but I have really started to understand the appeal, in the same way dilapidated buildings appeal to me. Since then we have gotten the pickup more road worthy and have spent many times the hours on shaping up an old commercial building in Twisp. Versus buying a new vehicle, this Chevy is already so much more fun at a mere fraction of the cost. I suppose that by the time Noble and Veronika are able to drive legally they will have a true sense of ownership of it, as they should.

Geppetto: The Creator's Dilemma

2010-03-22T08:39:00.000-07:00

I have very recently published a book to most e-reader devices entitled, "Geppetto: The Creator's Dilemma". It is an allegorical novella intended, through familiar characters from folklore, to provoke philosophical questions about quality, purpose, and meaning. The archetypal artisan by his qualified hands has created a perfectly crafted son. Pinocchio is uncommonly good but unruly and paradoxical, and possibly more wise than his fashioner. Geppetto, with the assisatance of his skeptical friend Leonard, must explore to the tragic depths whether the creator can love or even understand his creation, as the two are made of totally different material.

You may sample or purchase the book by clicking here.

The Smiling Pulverizer

2010-03-18T18:01:00.000-07:00

Whatever this valley has been called before, I have to submit after much consideration that Sally Portman was right to describe the Methow as “The Smiling Country”. But the smile is tricky like a coyote’s and as complex as the face of a woman keeping her thoughts to herself. The smile is often that of a friend, familiar and comfortable, or too often full of pain and empathy like a fellow mourner’s for the transition of a great soul into death. The smoker jumper smiles at his paycheck, and there is a smile in the October snow that lights on an evergreen bough, the August sun jangling on a river swimming hole, the myriad faces of Balsam Root in springtime, the tan bare arms and shoulders of a gardener, the determined grin of a novice builder driving home a pickup load of nice dimensional lumber, and there is a smile in the long curved shape of the first of a thousand zucchinis in autumn.

There is something about the smiling country that makes one smile where elsewhere, with the same trials, concerns, and obsessions he might grimace. The Methow Valley is too small to have enemies, and narrow enough to have scores of them. It is full of independence and willfulness, and this pervasive individuation, made of yoginis and Christian fundamentalists, spouses and lovers, farmers and ranchers, rednecks and socialists, man and woman and child, volunteers and profiteers shape itself into a community imperative. Instead of coming to blows or berating with profanities, the people sometimes smile instead, to survive as individuals, and for the community imperative that somehow, somewhere along the way was foisted by trickery on the unsuspecting rugged individual and stubborn intellectual. Perhaps the Valley herself teaches it, smiling to survive a human effect by magnanimously carrying her people along in spite of us.

From my narrow and puny narcissistic viewpoint, the Methow Valley is still doing what it always did, even to become. It is a grinding stone with hard rock on either side, and up and down the myriad drainages. Everything in the middle is ground down. Any of us here live in the action end of the pulverizer. Everything angular is rounded. Everything hard is converted into moon dust. Elsewhere in the West one can stand on the looming edge of a basalt plateau, or place the feet squarely on the high point of a sandstone column and be untouched except by wind. Mighty. Conqueror. Godly and majestic. Small yet engulfing. But take that same hearty soul, this epitome of evolutionary mind and excellent body, and put her in this valley, and the memory of ice will curl her into a ball and grind her competence into flour that mixes with the last independent man that came here because he thought government would never find him. Bodies, minds and souls don’t die, but rather they are ground into meal and eaten by their neighbors as nutritious and energizing hand-patted cakes, sacramental like the body of God, a god that says, “I” and “Am”, and “Here”, and I think that when he thinks it he smiles, and I feel grateful.

Flawfulness

2010-02-04T11:26:00.000-08:00

My good friend Orson built some lovely upper cabinets for the kitchen of one of my long-standing clients, the ones whose Methow vacation property is guarded by Kitsune, the fox. Orson's work is characterized by care, love, patience, and precision. To the left of his gorgeous work a foot-wide space remained to be artfully filled. I was invited to provide some sabi to Orson's wabi, some yang to his yin. I made the cabinet's decorative shell out of a sheet of hot-pressed steel that had been hanging about the owner's property without purpose for numerous years. Some of the steel I ground down past the mill scale to the shiny steel hidden under blackness. The cuts were deliberatley out of perfect square. I intentionally accelerated the arrival of rust in places, and highlighted with red paint. Cicely's eye for detail and her steady and smooth hand accomplished the kanjis in the original mill scale on the left side. The idea is that years of patina will continue to beautify the piece by rusty degradadition in contrast to the very fine carpentry elsewhere in the house. It suits me, and I am not offended at all to be called in to balance things out a bit with my propensity to flawfulness.

Unimprovable Land

2010-01-17T17:39:00.000-08:00

Work has been slow but just enough opportunity has remained to pay numerous bills and to continue to eat well. Winter promises a slow down that allows time to think more about work than to do it. With the wood stove glowing and putting off bone warmth, it’s been nice to work contemplatively for a client out of the finished studio, making some built-in dressers of fir and their twenty-four drawers. Slow-downs are nicer every winter and after seventeen of them as a craftsman I have found a way to enjoy.

I approach cross-country skiing on the Methow Valley Sports Trails Association’s machine groomed trails more like a meditation and necessary physical therapy, counteractive to years of bad habits at work on my poor ankles, than the way the fitter get to use the trails for recreation. From the tracks of the Rendezvous that ties Winthrop to Mazama by a higher route there appears to be miles and miles of endlessly exploitable land for human purposes, still untapped. But the best craftsmanship one will see on these trails is the perfect herringbone pattern made by the skate skiers that charge up the elevations, leaving me and Gypsy the dog in the quiet again of rhythmic scraping in the classic tracks. The craftsmanship will live a shorter life than a may fly, and if the skier is better, a perfect pattern will be accomplished thoughtlessly. My still injured left shoulder, though sore, feels better after a ski and I take particular care not to crash onto it when zooming down the black diamond leg of the Cedar Creek trail that leaves Gypsy’s muzzle in a cake of frost.

Silence, the untouchable, and solitude, true loves of mine, cannot be improved by any example of permanent purpose. I am only one degree less inspired by the architecture of sociality: cathedrals, skyscrapers, opera houses, and the order and practicality of a nicely designed and executed family home. There is a misnomer in our capital-driven culture, and it is the idea that when we touch the earth with industry, temples, and homes we have improved upon it. County records should call it altered. It might be altered in a very pleasing way or ravaged for resources, but from the perspective of the rest of pantheistic introspection, humans don’t improve land. We have learned to change it and to convert it for our purposes but only two species of millions could, if they could all consider it, call it improved. The narcissism is available only to us, the willful converters, the craftspeople of materials and souls, and in the case of the Cougar Bait side of the trails, joy is also available to the accomplice: the family dog that would rather skim atop the grooming than break a virgin trail.

I feel profoundly blessed to be the son of a man of character and principle. My work ethic that I inherited from him is similar but lesser than his seemingly tireless and dedicated energy. His life of expertise and leadership is at this moment an immediate and direct offering of love and compassion to his neighbors devastated by a very recent and cataclysmic natural and human disaster. The prolific prosperity of his church enables the giving of monumental gifts. Beyond my birth and rearing, and some very hard years and trials, I feel even more blessed to have a deep and loving relationship with this man even while we disagree thoroughly on many matters of conscience and ideology. Our differences seem every year to come more into focus because of world events, as does our mutual appreciation. My parents intentionally brought half a dozen children into a world they thought would be mostly destroyed before their offspring reached old age by the eagerly awaited Second Coming of their Savior. I call it plain old violent, antisocial thinking to look forward to the end of the world, but I am immeasurably grateful to have been born. I tend to feel guilt easily, and for more and different things than two decades of ideological indoctrination intended.

Foundational and fundamental to my father’s religion, and one aspect of my own religion for that matter, is the belief in an eternal battle for freedom. We were convinced at church and at home that our most important civic responsibility on earth was to defend and protect the liberty of all people to freely choose their salvation. We believed that the freedom to thrive and to worship the God that loves prosperity was to fulfill our eternal and foreordained duty to subdue and hold righteous dominion over the earth and its resources for the greatest of all rights: to bring as many waiting unborn souls as possible into the loving embrace of a righteous and secure Christian home. I have retained some of the things I was taught as a child and rejected others.

Humans are made of the energy of converted food, and that is all. The energy from those kernels of grain or a potato is converted into walking and talking and being productive, and the rest is recycled as fertilizer. But to create potential human energy, the fertilizer, whether human or chicken or fish or bovine or oil, has had an enormous proportion of energy already extracted from it, just from the breathing, not to mention the energy required to produce the food in the first place. Because of arrogant dominion over resources the soil has been irrevocably depleted by stages, every time it is tilled and harvested, for more people all the time. No matter how much fertilizer is applied to formerly arable land there is a net loss of energy because to keep the ideas of how to conserve and preserve energy, however brilliant, take a lot of energy. When the resources available to make food become unequal to the energy required for us to breathe, billions will still prosper, but billions will have to eat something besides food, and die, and then He can no longer be named Providence, except by the eaters. The non-eaters will have to give Him another name.

While Dad was trying to sharpen my view into a narrowly prescribed way that included success for all of eternity, I was going broad with less thought for the eternal and more for this dirty and wet world, this sometimes snow covered Giver, and I realized at the same time that other nations and cultures had beautiful ideas, too, even if irreconcilable to the dogmas of benevolent exceptionalism I inherited. I hope that these societies will have access to food too, for generations more while somehow preserving ethnic and cultural identity, because the prosperous and righteous have considered that those first of God’s commandments, to multiply and to accomplish dominion over all exploitable things, could now be improved by restraint and the more difficult commandment to love, even to love what is instead of what can be changed into the familiar.

When winter is over I hope to work again with fervor at altering this beautiful place, because I am a man and it is what a good lover of the trades does, and people close to me hope to have food to eat and an ample home to live in. But love is not simple and it is full of conflict. I feel incomparably blessed to be able to consider how best to love while others in the world have no choice. Perhaps for them the only thing left to love is the idea of mere survival, partly because of what I love and because of my freedom.

Garbage Can Noah

2009-11-01T16:01:00.000-08:00

I had this old galvanized garbage can that I almost took to the dump to get it out of the way. Now it hangs on a wall and this is better. I am perplexed by Noah, the builder archetype, and his story fills my imagination. Does he ever raise his arms in frustration, or is this an image of religious ecstasy as the first drop of rain hits his face, vindicating his madness, or if his faith has been justified is he pleading for the flood to stop before most everything is destroyed, despite his obedience? The body is in copper and used diamond blades. Noble suggested some wood so that this copper-age man of faith could be a little more animated by earthiness.

Thinking of Samoa

2009-10-05T19:58:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking of Samoa all the time for the last few days. I lived in Samoa and American Samoa for 18 months when at twenty, quite presumptuously and wrongly I hoped to convert Samoans on their lands and in their villages to my birth family's idea of God. Though I ultimately disavowed the faith I was sent to promote, the people of Samoa touched and changed my life forever. My deepest hope is that they will survive this terrible natural disaster with greater strength and peacefulness than ever before. Let no one imagine that this event had anything to do with the intentional will of a god. The following is extracted from the daily journal I kept at the time:

The village invited me to be the assistant trainer for the boxing team when I went running alone for miles on the paved road at 4 a.m. in the morning, then did it again the next day. By the third morning there was a crowd of us young men running up and down the road, all of us harboring the idea of being better boxers. I longed to box with them in the muddy pen formerly owned by pigs, but mission rules prohibited me. While training, a blow to an unprotected nose would drop the boxer’s opponent like a rag doll, and ten hands would slap and cajole until the young man was able to move out of the ring to make room for two new teammates to pummel each other in the head. Sometimes they fought until they were so exhausted that I thought in a last effort of animal strength to preserve his own life, a boxer could rise up and make that one killing blow just to end the fight.

Every night every soul in the village would sing church hymns at the top of our lungs. I’ve never heard anything as beautiful as various families singing, as if in a round, all at the same time in praise and effortless unrefined harmonies, and every night I wrote in my journal by candle or storm lantern. One night my intention to get down my impressions of the day was distracted by a little dark-brown-skinned girl with curly blonde hair who scratched restlessly at the floor of the hut with her fingers, waiting half-patiently for my attention. That night Uigi (pronounced Wingie) sat at the edge of the hut I shared with my companion while hundreds of moths gathered to the single source of light, a kerosene lantern that hung from the rafters above my head. I had counted more than twenty strikes with a stick that she endured before she stretched her tough bruised legs to the edge of the hut where I slept.

I put down my pen and went to sling my legs over the rough-hewn boards of the floor. Uigi stood back in a posture of defense as she looked at me with luminous eyes. She stepped back again, bowing in submission to my will, but I gently followed her to the openness of the compound.

She stared into the sky and said, “The moon is bright.”
“Yes.”
“God lives there, on the moon, when it is bright.”
“I like to think God isn’t so far. The moon is far away.”

She fled from me, ashamed of her impertinence. I was ashamed of my insensitive reaction to her expression of faith. I hollered out to her across the compound, repentantly, “The moon is bright! God lights our steps tonight! Come back!”

And I became a Samoan at heart when I chose Uigi’s language over mine. From that day forward, wherever I went on the compound she was holding my right hand while my left held an axe for chopping firewood for the umu. With the simplicity of her sincerity, a sense of doom came hard over my whole body and sapped my strength. I had to let a part of me tingle away like a sleeping limb before I could make room in my heart for a new way to perceive a wholly other place. I would try to comprehend Uigi’s God instead of indoctrinating her with mine.

In my travels between villages I found an old cassette tape and player in a drawer in the church building. I slept that night on the church grounds, opting to sleep alone in a small food preparation hut behind the church. As darkness came I strung up my mosquito net from the rafters. I settled onto my portable bed, a thin woven mat intended to soften the irregularity of the two-inch lava rocks between my shoulder blades and against my spine, and I lit an incense coil. The blue smoke spun before me like the burning of a cigarette with a lonely aroma like tobacco, and I let the depression in to do its thing; to wear itself down by my lack of resistance. Despite the incense, the mosquitoes filed in through holes in my net faster than I could squish them. I turned on the cassette player and Anne Murray sang to me personally, “I want to sing you a love song. Want to rock you in my arms all night long…” I was in love on my mission, with a land and a people who sometimes hated me, often misunderstood me, and who gave me every opportunity to see if I could be human. The only sound when the music was over was a subtle hissing from the burning incense. I understood very slowly again that my god resides in silence, not words, and that it was a different god than the one I acknowledged in my promise to serve the Lord. I fell asleep with my sheet pulled up over my chin. Tiny animals took my blood to share with my hosts, and the blood of my hosts mixed with mine. I woke to hundreds of mosquito bites on my swollen red knuckles and fattened fingers.

The following day I submitted to what my hosts wanted from me, against what I was trained to turn them into. When I listened to their desire, hoping to accept more graciously their food, I became the teacher they wanted me to be, and love was reciprocated back.

I sat in a very humble rock-floored fale. Woven mats were laid out in layers over the lava rocks and though rare, this family had a low table positioned in the center of the floor. We sat with legs crossed. It is the greatest offense to straighten a leg toward any other while sitting, and thus we sat for a long time, hours past when the legs go numb from keeping them still and tight. As bats flew by one side of the fale I stared at the baby that lay on the center of the rough-hewn table. Flies gathered to dozens of open sores on the tiny male’s skin, and the flies dug at the crusty food that congealed in the corners of his eyes and between his legs. The infant’s hands lazily grazed at the skin of his face, like a cat’s washing its face with a paw.

The parents sat wearing a constant smile, that I would honor them by eating their specially prepared boiled turkey tails. After a meal it would be appropriate for me to show my thanks with an admonition from the scriptures. Instead, putting my scriptures deliberately behind me, I held my hand up with my fingers spread. I tilted my hand horizontally, and I slowly rotated it clockwise:

“Tonight, My Lord and Her Highness, look up into the night sky, and I promise you that there you will see the mirror of the place we share in the universe.” I slowly waved my hand to the children and eldest son who now clamored to have a view of my hands. “The universe is like the shape of my hand; it is dense in the center and spreads into tendrils like the octopus.

“We are here, on the edge of this finger, and when we look out from our place in Creation, we can see across infinity to the next tendril that hides the next arm behind it, and so on, and so on for eternity. In time, after millions of years, we experience the whole universe as we rotate around, until we arrive back where we started, looking out into infinity. Wherever we are, we are part of infinity. This is how I think of God.”

“Our Teacher, we are humbled that you would honor us with the secrets of God. Tell us please also about the trip to the moon.”

And I did, for hours and hours, day after day to groups that grew after each meal in a great variety of homes, homes predominantly without electricity or running water. They called these the “Beautiful Stories” and the stories grew to include plate tectonics, hydropower dams, and I bluffed my way through explaining how jumbo jets can possibly fly. I’d explain some of these while farmers taught me how to hunt for and how best to eat grub worms, and the proper depth to replant the cropped head of a taro plant. It taught me the sacredness of food, and sharing it. “Eat me; drink me” was the god’s silent commandment. The constant sacraments left precious little time to discuss the superior points of one religious dogma over another.

Fox Delivery

2009-09-15T16:47:00.000-07:00

As you can see, the property dwarfs this large piece, as it should. Prior to taking the Fox to the Griswolds the City of Twisp allowed me to display it publicly in the Commons for a few days. I enjoyed that the Fox got to be climbed on by children and to have a few photo opportunities with passersby. My thanks to Roger at Cascade Concrete in Winthrop for his excellent ability with the boom truck, and for his good humor and company. It was very nice to have my friends Brian Drye and Kristen Smith in tow. The photographs are Kristen's. My favorite photograph of the Methow Valley is Kristen's and headlines her website. After taking scores of photographs Kristen and Brian spontaneously trekked off into some first rate hiking from the Griswolds' special spot.

New Website

2009-09-08T18:28:00.000-07:00

I have set up a new website to feature photography of the work I have enjoyed doing most over the years. It is set up as a slideshow that allows for easier updating, commentary and criticism. I don't anticipate contributing any of my own commentary to this site. It can ve viewed from here. Thanks so much for your interest.

Shinto Fox Sculpture

2009-09-07T20:27:00.000-07:00

Eight months ago I was asked to create an outdoor sculpture for a property I have mentioned previously in this blog: the home of Dave and Brenda Griswold, my dear friends. I began working on the majestic mountainous Methow property several years ago as a stonemason and since then I have been invited to do all kinds of things. The sculpture stumped me a bit because the property has very extreme weather both in summer and winter. I was challenged also to make the piece as inexpensive as possible, which really comes down to the choice of material. The project: A Kitsune Fox. This archetypical life form guards the Shrine of Inari in the Japanese Shinto religion. In its mouth the fox carries a scroll: possibly the Lotus Sutra. Kitsune protects the way through the gates of the imagination, and sometimes leads the way. I beg pardon to any who might be offended by this oversimplification, with my admission that I am not expert at all on the subject. I have always had a strong, personal, and deeply spiritual identification with the coyote of North America and so the fox was something that excited me to consider, and to wonder if I could appropriately convey a feeling of religious significance, even with humbling practical concerns.

Just over a week ago when I was walking Brenda and Dave's property and I passed under the Tori Gate made of merely pressure-treated dimensional lumber I was struck by how well the material has held up under environmental pressure, and how surprisingly beautiful it is, even closer up. After eight months of having the project in the back of my mind I thought pressure-treated lumber as a medium might be just right.

The reason pressure-treated lumber holds up well is because it is toxic to pests, humans, and groundwater alike. It is known for readily warping into perfectly useless shapes for conventional building practices. Any lumber yard has stacks of this twisted up material that should not be burned for the poisonous gases released during combustion so it often ends up in the landfills. The sculpting method I thought of would need just short pieces, so maybe the wonky wood could be made use of and saved from the usual waste. I think it worked out fine and it was very gratifying to have the fox made primarily out of salvage and waste material at far less cost to the patrons. My son and daughter thoroughly enjoyed watching the piece take shape daily in the driveway and they helped all along the way. I'll put up a picture when it finds its resting spot on the intended property next week.

Pizza Oven

2009-07-17T11:40:00.000-07:00

Cicely and I put this little oven together in the last couple of weeks out at Wolf Creek, near Winthrop. I suppose the idea begins with an Italian-styled inner dome, but the finish is decidedly Methow, with the galvanized metal roof and exposed boards. The stone is Montana Cabinet Gorge. If you want to know where to go for a truly Italian oven fired pizza, I have to recommend Tappi in Twisp, Washington, just down the road. John ought to know how to cook Italian. He makes a killer anchovie and calamata olives pizza that hits the spot on hot days for some salt restoration after drinking a couple gallons of well water. The bucks love the manicured yard which is a fairly rare commodity around here.

Cement Shower

2009-06-08T14:42:00.000-07:00

In the Garden

2009-04-26T18:40:00.000-07:00

Last year was the first in the time that I have known Cicely that she didn’t have a garden. We all paid a dear price for it, most of all Cicely who up to that time had seemed to be the only truly sane person, all the time, that I ever knew. She grew up in a very large garden with a terrorizing rooster, a milk cow, a beef cow, and a greenhouse. The week after I met her fourteen years ago she was planting things in the neglected flower beds in front of the cabin I was renting in her home town, the site a few months later of our wedding among blooming flowers. A certain lily traveled with us from that cabin to the Waterville Plateau where we spent eight years renovating a Catholic church into a home and bearing together two hearty children. There on four feet of fertile topsoil her gardens and flowerbeds flourished with sunflowers and corn, peas, tomatoes, and Walla Walla sweet onions.

When we moved next to Winthrop we bought a home in a very good location to protect our deposit in the cash from the sale of the church house, unsure that we’d be able to afford it the long term; an investment that might buy us some time to find a piece of land in the Methow Valley with better gardening potential. In the meantime we have been beguiled by fantastic neighbors and work prospects as good as any craftsman can hope for. The lot our home is situated on is covered with pine trees. This is where a long debate began with how many trees we had the right to cut down to get more sun, to make existing trees healthier as a primary justification.

Cicely had an easier time than I did in choosing to take down quite a few of the trees. It was a simple choice to cut down scragglers with just a few branches and mere traces of green. In their absence sunlight hit the ground for the first time in decades. Then a year later some bigger ones were dropped resulting in more sun, more native grasses springing, serviceberry bushes and balsam root stretching. Some sixty felled trees later there were still as many robust pines remaining on two-thirds of an acre with one hard choice left to go. The biggest of all of the trees was directly in the front yard craning heavily toward the open space over the house, bleeding pitch from wounds made by the previous owners’ satellite dish bolted high up on its trunk. It may never have fallen on the house, its tap root diving deep past glacial till and moon dust into the Methow River’s aquifer. But after three years of argument with our neighbors as spectators, a professional pulled the tree in the opposite direction of its lean to fell it to the ground with a mighty thump. An astonishing area of earth was now fully sunlit: a potential garden spot.

Over the winter that followed the last of the tree cutting Cicely struggled with her first ever serious depression. She was one that was never really touched by this deep blue that so many of us know, or deal with, or are conquered by. I made it my priority to be sure she had a garden again, her own, because although tending to others’ flowerbeds for hire in the first two years since our move had done her some good, there is nothing in the world for her like stepping out onto her porch and then inspecting any overnight changes or bidding the summer evening goodnight with the last of the weeds pulled and the delicate starts watered by hand.

Cicely saved clippings from Mother Earth News of every type of garden and we agreed that raised beds with imported dirt would do best for our situation. At the last minute we adopted an “E” shape, fattened by twice in the middle to facilitate two gates into the hollow spaces. The best looking available dirt came from five miles down Valley and we used 24 yards of it mixed with organic steer manure, peat moss, and compost. I had bought a truckload of cull dimensional lumber for the floor of our garage-to-studio conversion and the boards that were poor for the floor made great laminated deer fence posts and rails and raised bed sides. This city lot unfriendly to a garden should now be ample for a garden that feeds its family and beyond. More than that, it serves already to rejuvenate an earthy soul as Cicely handles this good dirt with experienced and loving fingers. She and her daughter have already, within hours of completion of the structure, tucked soaked peas two inches down and built string and ladder trellises for the stems to climb, sown carrot seeds and onion starts, and fertilized mother/daughter companionship.

Final nails driven, my son and I threw the baseball around while the girls bantered about hopes and dreams and quietly concentrated on organic precision. Now I get to watch, enjoying the garden more and more as the days get hotter and the sun touches more of Cicely’s exposed skin. Then in the fall there will be slices of warm tomatoes with slabs of Walla Walla sweet onions and a pinch of basil in a shallow bath of balsamic vinaigrette dressing, cornmeal fried zucchini medallions on the side. I suppose it is just the right time to sprinkle the first plantings with a bit of the last of this bottle of beer, just as we attended the Christening of the neighbors’ garden a few days ago, where she spared a few drops of wine into her very first garden.

Natural Selction and Wasting Limbs

2009-03-04T10:40:00.000-08:00

Without evolution my attempt to make a concrete countertop in the shape of the front of a horse would have been disastrous. Without evolution, even after building more than a hundred countertops, none would have improved beyond my first attempt in my first home. In that case I chose concrete before I had ever heard of it being used for a countertop, simply and only because it was very cheap in material costs.

I am a lover of evolution. I find it to be an immeasurably beautiful expression of truth, a theory that asks in vain to be disproved, just because its simple beauty is so profound. Evolution is a friend to my work and experience. It may be a friend to the economy. While terms like capitalism and socialism are being tossed about by the partisans, I am interested in seeing if this overfed monster called speculative greed can mutate into a gentler beast that has more to give to those under its obesity than its proud evacuations. Whether or not the Obama Administration is a skilled genetic engineer or a Dr. Frankenstein has yet to be seen, but one thing is certain, evolution will have its way unexpectedly and uncontrollably, and a new economic creature, one that has never quite been identified before, will now exist on the list of peculiar species.

My recent pondering of the subject was prompted by the billboard advertising the latest wisdom of the local Baptist church. “If evolution were true mothers would have three hands.” This is a follow-up insult directed at the local atheists who were singled-out for celebration on its signage on April Fool’s Day a year ago. This type of animosity for seeing the world through skeptical, informed eyes makes me very grateful for secular education and evolution from Bronze Age patriarchy to rational democracy informed by the scientific method and social humanitarian concern. To address the absurdity of the minister’s cleverness, his rejection of evolution because women typically do not have three hands does nothing to advance his presumptive argument that God created men and women from a perfect design.

The billboard is unhelpful to a substantive dialogue concerning the relationship between faith and reality. While I expect the state to uphold its duty to secularism and human rights I have tried here to convey a bit of my personal faith, which I consider to be an entirely separate imperative than the collective trust put in the government. My personal faith is continually informed by beauty that often comes as an unexpected surprise. Years ago, sixteen years ago when I was still a missionary for the LDS church, a deep and profound impact was made upon my soul by Sufism, sometimes called the mystical side of Islam. I am unable to even approach describing this element of my faith without oversimplifying and insulting the tradition and place of mind that exists in others, explored and felt for generations. I have been profoundly touched by a blessing from an elder whose ancestors occupied this continent earlier than my European ancestors, a connection hoped for in the depth of my soul since as a child I kicked around the deserts of New Mexico, chasing lizards and horned-toads. I can only say that a secular enlightenment society affords the individual the opportunity to discover without threat of violence or oppression a world full of astonishing humane expression.

That the world is able to discover itself through its billions of individuals sharing chaotically and almost at random is also a blessing of evolution. I have faith that narrow, blind ideologies will be one of those appendages proved by evolution to be of no more use.

Almost Skiing Into the Nearly Divine

2009-01-01T20:40:00.000-08:00

In the beginning, God was an acronym. A short series of abbreviated words that each carried a meaning, none of which could be left out, or God would be inadequately expressed. When the Creator was being created, it took some time, thousands of years even, for the word “God” to mean just about everything important and good, preferably male and nothing bad, the Creator of all things created except for those things created by the creations of the Creator. There are some that think that God is nature, and some that think nature worship is idolatrous. God means something different to everyone, and this is why God is one of the world’s most useless and divisive all-important Words.

Today I discovered an idea that so far is just an acronym, except to those who have special knowledge. This acronym took on a transcendental significance to me, so that it means something much more: community, beauty, neighborliness, gentle action, and peace. And more: sustainable sanity, purity, and whiteness. The acronym, MVSTA, for Methow Valley Sport Trails Association, even looks like the Methow Valley, with peaks and valleys, a windy river in the middle. I am still trying to figure out what sort of terrain the “T” might represent that doesn’t force my comparative observation too far into the absurd, even for me.

When we moved here to the Methow Valley three years ago, it wasn’t for the long snowy winter and the world-class cross-country ski system. When we chose our particular house it was not because it was very close to the trailhead, so people asked why we moved here at all, thinking we were nuts. They have found out by now that, yes, there is a certain degree of nuttiness and anti-sociality, especially on my part, but the move has not been regrettable. I have always thought that building a society around an annually replenishing fresh water source with locally proportionate agriculture is a very good idea, as much as I love the deserts.

I have been hounded into skiing by nearly everyone I know, that I should be planning ahead to don skis, even in the heat, when the prices on used equipment are best. I’ve even seen people taking their autumn walks in robotic movements, ski poles tied to their wrists. The friendly harassment to ski had to be worse than the number of times a good suburban Utah Catholic might be invited to church by their Mormon neighbors. Like a Utah non-Mormon, there was nothing in their offer that appealed to me. Then why in the hell, I mean heck, do you live in Utah? Same story, for other reasons, among which might be downhill skiing and the southern deserts, or even for the same reason that we chose the Methow Valley in Washington State: because we thought the work might turn out to be just right. Up to this morning I really preferred the idea of texturing the sheet rock of our budding studio’s ceiling, one of the least interesting chores currently facing me, than pretending to glide across the snow with fiberglass and plastic sticks adhered to the tip of a pair of silly boots that are absolutely useless for every other situation. I realistically pictured myself falling down, getting up, focusing on the ground in front of me unable to even look around at white on white, the off-white of birch trunks, the stained white clinging to the top side of pine and fir boughs. Last year while Cicely and the kids were skiing, I walked along the side of the trails in my boots so I could see with my full attention the things going on around me.

As I took the last drag from my cigarette on my front porch, I have to admit that I was pretty excited about the thought of my first cross-country skiing adventure. My family and a host of friends met up with Allison Delong, persistent friend and volunteer coach to me for a day in Mazama at the Big Valley conservancy and skier with dog trail. Big Valley is a small part of a grand system of a variety of trails operated by the MVSTA. As a group we chose this trail because it is broad and fairly flat, a stunningly beautiful riparian ecosystem and snow-covered farm land, and free. I spent all I was going to spend on skiing so far, having started from scratch down to my wicking long underwear. It didn’t take long for me to wonder at how this, THIS!, could be free. The beauty of this place takes my breath away. Shoulders forward, knees bent, extending my hands further behind me in a long reach behind, feet stepping far forward, every so often even gliding, I covered a hard first mile, then several more genuinely enjoyable ones. On the trail I paused to suck water out of my camel back water pouch thing, and I read about aspens and cottonwoods, and the animals sharing space with the trail for the homo-sapiens-skiers through the trees along the river’s edge.

I found out last night at our neighborhood New Year’s Eve bonfire that my good friend Kristen Smith writes the MVSTA blog http://www.mvsta.blogspot.com/ . I checked it out for inspiration and watched a cool video of grace and folly, and figured I could fit in that mix somewhere on the lower end with some toddlers’ first time on skis. You may want to watch out for me if you see me coming, too large in the torso with Popsicle-stick ankles and size seven shoes. I will probably be sweating profusely, red in the face, but smiling, and probably naively dangerous in a collision. Son and daughter will either be holding back sympathetically and visiting, or a quarter mile ahead. Cicely may be a hundred or so yards back taking it slower like a stroll instead of a recreational activity, choosing the quiet of no company and no discussion.

I met another of my friends on the trail, Rick, a man I had built a shower and interior stone fireplace for, a friend that for two years now had wagged his head while he urged me to ski in the winter. As he stood there, his dog on a leash, we paused for breath and to consider there in a grove of aspens the perfection of his advice. Powder dropped from branches intermittently, his dog sniffing at the dog associating with another skier that passed beside us with a warm hello and a good day wish. I’m feeling pretty sentimental about it all. A little bit religious. If this newly discovered acronym becomes to me like a religion, as it seems to be for many others, it is one that I could come to wrap my head around. I got everything I wanted from it and some surprises that were touching, instructive, generous, and then there were the good people that I shared the trail with. I like a way of perceiving the divine that recommends holding the head up, eyes wide open, with the hope of temporary weightless gliding.

2008-12-14T14:30:00.001-08:00

Scaffolding On Her Shoe

2008-12-14T13:24:00.000-08:00

It was a builders’ autumn in the Methow Valley. October may be the most beautiful month of the year, with warm September-like days and crisp, biting nights. October seemed to last until just a few days ago when the snow came to stay and the high temperatures are no longer highs at all. There was still building going on by builders, but appropriate to the Methow, most of it was modest in scale, high in craftsmanship, and low on speculation. Local groups that fight for restraint in land development may have saved the soul of the Methow Valley as well as the construction industry here, considering the way land was greedily misused across the country in the last few years. There are no acres covered by tract homes that have failed to sell. Instead, there are still vast acres of meadows and forests and there is still some really good land still being tended to by family farmers.

Cicely and I spent the last two months of Builders’ Autumn putting together a little building: an East-meets-West sort of concept. I had put this job off until the overnight lows would make stonemasonry complicated, which is about the time I like to get my hands on a hammer and dimensional lumber. The site of the project is astonishing, gently occupied by a discreet timber fame home styled after a Japanese monastery. The property owners desired a “shed” for their stuff that had begun to accumulate on the wrap-around porch. I asked the owner what sheds look like in Japan, and he told me that they look like sheds in America. He showed me pictures from his travels there that were disappointing in accuracy to that description. I went online and typed in “Traditional Japanese Architecture” and this search caused by computer to be taken over by a highly destructive virus. After that, I designed what I thought a Japanese outbuilding might look like, with a bit of a western shed-like commonness. I built this a stick of wood at a time, trying not to think to far ahead, changing my mind from time to time as I went. Now that it is practically done, except for some interior finishing, the owners are trying to decide what to call it: the love shack, the temple, the shed?

We got the roof on three days before the weather changed. There was just time to finish getting the siding on, and we loaded the scraps into the back of the pickup for a celebratory bonfire in the front of our home after the first snowfall. We gathered any other scraps lying around our home from our garage-to-studio conversion. The bonfire was the last opportunity I’d likely take to be bare outside, orange heat on skin, before several months of gray, white, and deep blue.

The door for the shed was my first project in our studio since the garage door was replaced with a wall and wood casement windows. Yesterday we insulated the studio, so with the woodstove we ought to be able to meet the cold with a sense of victory, as this will be the first fully heated and insulated shop I have ever had in fifteen years of being a craftsman.

Our daughter, in her own way of confusing and meshing two incompatible concepts, like the design inspiring the shed, complained that she had “scaffolding stuck to the bottom of her shoe”. Her vocabulary has grown too fast this year for her understanding, and this happens to me sometimes, too. Scaffolding is a portable platform system created for vertical advantage in construction. The material stuck to her shoe was insulation, a glassy material made of strands of air. The nice thing about being ten is that the snow waffles are now sticking to the bottom of her shoe as well. She was prohibited from doing her snow dance until the roof was on, though I am sure she disobeyed me in secret. I hope she did. In a few more days when the Winthrop open-air ice rink opens a quarter-mile away, an ice skate will be stuck to the bottom of her shoe, and alternately a cross-country skate ski. Now that the Builders’ Autumn is over, there is frozen ground to be tread lightly upon, a reprieve to contemplate more than to build, more time to dance, in a father-meets-daughter kind of way.

Love Politics

2008-11-15T18:59:00.000-08:00

I have worked with and for individuals and have friends directly affected by the nature and tone of the social debate and law-making concerning same-sex marriage. I have recently shared space in a shower with a woman that prefers the love of a woman, and I felt perfectly fine about it. The shower was under construction and we discussed mosaic tiles.

All of my five siblings are LDS, as are my parents. Yesterday one of my brothers broached politics to all of us in an e-mail. He proposed that opponents of Proposition 8 are hypocrites for supporting gay marriage, but not polygamy. He indicated that they should have been outraged when the children of FLDS adults were removed from their homes by the State of Texas, because the two groups share nontraditional family ideals in common. He finished his letter by stating that he is against both polygamy and gay marriage.

I responded with a letter to him and I sent it to the rest of my birth family as well. It follows here, with just a bit of editing for some privacy purposes and I have made a couple of minor edits:

I love the opportunity for a reasonable political discussion. I think it is a good topic. I disagree with your take on the subject.

The difference between polygamy and homosexual partnerships is that polygamy is usually a method promoted by a powerful religious hierarchy, from the top down, and often results in underage or inexperienced young women being bound to a marriage without first experiencing the liberty to choose a life for herself outside of religious indoctrination.

Homosexuality on the other hand appears in many cases to be a matter of both adolescent and mature choice resulting sometimes in years or decades of loyalty.

When loyalty and fidelity is a matter of choice instead of coercion, I think it is a big difference. Polygamy has not made the case to me that homosexuality has for this reason. I chose Cicely in two weeks, and I married her in two months. I think several of us would reserve this right to fall in and commit to love. It comes down to free human choice. Thirteen years later I feel that I made a good choice, and it continues to be justified, and surprising. I respect anyone's right to commit to love, crazy as it may be. I can't imagine telling someone whom they could love and whom they can't. But it is an individual's choice, and lucky if the other agrees. Maybe in the end that's all that counts.

Usually in polygamy there is a religious leader that pretends to speak for God about which girl belongs to which man, as if it were God's will, instead of a kinetic mutual commitment between two lovers.

We have legislators that have had numerous wives and more affairs while some homosexual couples have been as steady and cohesive as our own parents. I don't think the legislators are qualified to dictate sexuality to the people. I don't think democracy has the right. Those of us that share a monogamous relationship consider marriage beneficial to such a relationship's sustainability. The relationship is its own proof, and homosexuals are as capable of a life-long love and failure as any of the rest of us. While there are no ceremonies in many churches for this, I think the fact is that many people commit their life to another with or without the blessing of the Church or the State. Marriage, a social contract, not just a religious one, ought to be legally available to those whose spirituality is not defined by any religious dogma but their own.

We have reason to believe in our family that artificial insemination is ok, arguably, not because of divine natural order, but because it is possible. There are homosexual couples that are as bound to God as faithful Mormons, or they might be bound to a different code of time-tried ethics. We don't know. Who should decide? I think it is the couple, not a government.

We have thousands of children that are unloved by their natural parents while capable and loving couples have longed to help. I believe that a team of two dedicated people are better than one. (Cicely has proven this to me over and over.)

Polygamy, from Islam, to Hinduism, to Mormonism, has not proven to elevate women to equals institutionally . Homosexuality without coercion on the other hand is an equalizer. It is a matter of personal sexuality, and I don't know of much else besides sexuality that is so subjective and sacred to an individual. In light of this, for my understanding, I would not have supported Proposition 8.

I am in favor of broadening the civil rights of those who are seeking to accomplish every non-violent right in their power, even if it is not traditional. I feel that an open society is better than a closed one. If an adult chooses homosexuality in an open society, it is better, and should be protected by law. A child forced to submit to polygamy by a coerced marriage in a closed society ought to be able to be rescued. If two informed, non-coerced adults practice polygamy, which I think is rare, then I think it is their right. I guess I would say that polygamy is ok by consenting adults, but not ok where children are coerced into it, which is the model by numerous civilizations that have practiced polygamy, hence the ill reaction many have to it.

Lastly, I find it ironic, if not finally concessionary that the Mormons could put millions of dollars into defining marriage as the union between one man and one woman. I think pragmatism versus divine guidance is a good route for any religion to take, as interconnected and delicate as things are anymore. Thanks for putting me in the loop.

That is the conclusion of my response to my brother. But a very touchy point about polygamy is that it is laid out in the scriptures sacred to both mainstream Latter-day Saints as well as those in the FLDS communities. Plural marriage is described as the will of God for righteous men, and the order of things in the Celestial Kingdom where Mormons hope to reside with God and to become gods in their own right after their earthly life. This revelation given to Joseph Smith is found in The Doctrine and Covenants, SECTION 132. I am glad that Mormons have strongly and emphatically departed from the practice of polygamy during earthly life, but the scriptures and after-life ideologies remain quite antisocial though readily researchable if one wishes to explore the subject further. I will leave it here.

* * *

I'm back. My brother has raised a good point that children in same-sex marriages would be subject to indoctrination that he finds objectionable, and that this is unfair to such children. I think it is a good point that I have spent some time considering. Indoctrination is the way things are. I find aspects of my childhood indoctrination objectionable. A difference in polygamy and same-sex marriage is that sometimes where polygamy is enforced from the top down, the child's whole life is determined by that coercion, where anyone in an open society, when they are able, can refuse their youthful indoctrination if they so choose.

My childhood religion does not favor eqaulity in heaven, but a culture of eternal servitude by the likes of me, to gods the likes of members of my family that have been married in the Temple. Religion is a good place for inequality to be celebrated, but is not the primary goal of American Government to strive for equality for all under the law?

This is a very difficult discussion. I hope mine is a beneficial contribution to a civil dialogue about a highly complicated issue.

Secular Christianity: Phew!

2008-11-10T19:49:00.000-08:00

A debate occupies the editorial page of the local paper, The Methow Valley News, week after week, month after month, political season or not. One side tries to convince the nonbelievers that because of the Founding Fathers we all have a responsibility to be Christian if only because we have a considerably good government. The other side, which I tend to take, is that the idea of a secular government is what we owe our secular education and prosperity to, not to mention rapid advances in social ethics among which are liberal civil liberties. I think the two extremes are irreconcilable but the associations can be mutually beneficial.

I still get my concrete from the concrete plant, and I get my lumber from the lumber yard, but the hum and buzz from the recent Presidential election suggests that for my astounded feeling of history for the better in the making, the guy that loads 2X10’s into the back of my pickup is afraid his hunting rifles will be taken away by the liberal radical that I voted for. The woman that sells me bagged mortar had a sign up on her horse property for McCain/Palin. It’s still very decent mortar, despite her politics. I know of no car or suicide bombings in the whole history of the Methow Valley, though political opinions and perspectives are polar opposites.

Still, it bothers me when people talk about God, as if any one of us were talking about the same thing at all. Transport the lumberyard or the concrete plant to Istanbul or Salt Lake City, or Nepal, and the idea of God will take on a whole new foreign significance and incomprehensibility. In the rural U.S., I think I know what they mean by God, and I just don’t believe in it, even though Barach Obama, a Christian, won, thank gods.

Idolatry was defined well before Christianity ever existed. Idolatry basically meant: Don’t worship any false gods. I feel fortunate and grateful that today in America and much of the modern world I do not have to resort to desperate measures in order to not commit this long-articulated sin. I am not convinced that Moses and Isaiah would have sympathized with Paul, and I think there are entire civilizations of people that might agree. Even so, I do not feel bound to rely any more on Isaiah than I might appreciate John Steinbeck, Leonard Cohen, or the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.

Even if every one of our Founding Fathers were a Christian, and they weren’t, they set up a new kind of government that prevented the rulers from forcing their idea of God on anyone. The Constitution even prevented democracy from exercising the same sort of tyranny, much like the result of the recent election. The separation of faith and rational prudence, of belief and force, of church and state, is one of the greatest proven wisdoms of our Founders and of ages, for after them came other wise women and men free to express her- or himself, to think, to protest, to work, and to serve. A climate of enlightened rationalism across countries allowed a Darwin to flourish after a General Washington, a Martin Luther King to pulverize the falsehoods of fascist dictators, and un-kept fighting women demanded the right to vote after their refusal of enshrined patriarchy.

I am grateful to rational, humane minds that came before, for centuries and millennia, that have struggled to articulate the divine, wisdom, and humanity, and for our system of inspired government, that while there remains a majority of Christians, I am not forced to commit what in my mind and my experience is idolatry, however appealing and traditional Christianity may appear by some to be. Secular is the stance I prefer and expect from my government to take while I sociably practice my own idea of spirituality. I wish the same joy on believers and nonbelievers alike.

Chores and Work

2008-10-17T21:21:00.000-07:00

It’s been seventeen years more or less since I read it as a high-schooler, but a few sentences by Joseph Conrad in his novel, The Heart of Darkness, have tormented me. I have checked my thoughts against his ever since. He said, and I paraphrase because I would rather convey my memory after all these years because it is the impression of his words that have lasted. It sticks with me that he said, “I don’t like to work. No man does. I like what is in the work: a chance to know myself.”

After thinking about it for many years and evolving to a place where the work is good, I think I have to disagree with a few of the sentences that were formative to my thoughts. I agree in that I have no interest anymore in being a mere manual laborer where my efforts could be traded by anyone and the homeowner would never even have to learn my name in order to have gravel moved by shovel, or a trench dug, or roofing tiles lugged up to the roof. Theses are things that Cicely and I do without hiring anyone because as Conrad said, we like what is in the work. But after thinking about it for many years, I do like the work. I like that with every shovel full of gravel the pile gets smaller and the fill hole shallower.

I have watched with everyone else as an economy built on making money has crashed, perhaps because it is not based on making and doing things, like moving gravel and making a home of 2X6’s and made instead of innovative but shady financial contraptions and an oversimplification of the human experience. America used to make things, like ideas, and food, and cities. When America began making money in trade for individuals, its stock went down.

The over-specialization has led to mere consumerism in many ways, and it is dangerous because it is inhuman, uninspiring, and when things get bad enough, a dead end economically and spiritually, with a feeble solution as the best possible outcome: a so-called rescue by a huge central government that for its pool of experts makes little but leverage between people.

I like what is in the work but I also like doing it, sweat and all. This is why I chose to mix a yard of concrete for the studio stoop with a hoe and wheelbarrow instead of having it delivered by the concrete plant less than a mile away. I like making something I am responsible for, something that may last generations. The sculpting studio is dried in and the wood-burning stove heats up our former garage enough to open the fire door to the house to let in supplemental heat even though the studio has yet to be uninsulated just as the fall is pushing hard to bring winter in. We have all winter to get the space wired, insulated, and sheet rocked. There are storage tables to build and trim to do and a new concrete floor to pour and finish but the windows are in, the siding finished, the porch perch poured.

I like the work. I like to do it even in my spare time though I’d like to have two more months of good weather to catch up on my commitments before winter. I like to pound nails by hand, to mix concrete with a mason’s hoe in a wheelbarrow, and I like to split wood with an axe. When Conrad said that no man likes work, he was too lazy with his absolute. It might have served him well to be doing the right physical work instead of merely writing a masterpiece while chores got in the way.

Protest Notes

2008-09-07T18:01:00.000-07:00

Inscribed in the hearts of women and men are ideas so basic and reasonable that only a religious zealot in power or a tyrant could disagree. Building upon rational and humane ideas of liberty and love, tested by ages, we have pretended or strived to secure these promises to others as much as we hope to have them ourselves. We are told sometimes that we have been secured these rights by US soldiers, but if a member of the US Military thinks that the duty of the US Citizenry is to support him without condition, then that soldier has not thought much or well about the Constitution and people he has sworn to defend.

There are all kinds of soldiers. Numerous members of my family have served their country as US soldiers. I am the beneficiary of an inspiring intellectual relationship with a US Marine interrogator and former Georgetown professor, currently working as a writer, analyst, and advisor on US defense and international policy. Today I stood next to a few former military men in front of the Community Center in Twisp to peaceably protest the ongoing US occupation with violence. Every military man or former soldier I have ever known is a unique individual, and each has his own opinion and reasons for refusal or consent. Driving by us while we were peaceably assembled, another military man held up a starched white sailor’s cap and yelled out of his driver’s side window, “US Navy. Why don’t you all go home!”

Why didn’t we all go home, despite his authoritative tone? I stayed there with my sign because while Presidents talk about freedom, it is still just an idea in many ways, and because thinking and calmness does more for the evolution of freedom than obedience to the people waving guns and arrogance in the name of liberty. If a soldier is fighting for the purpose of universal unquestioning consent then he is fighting for no one’s freedom but his own: a trait of dictators not citizens of a struggling to be free republic.

Old Things Arranged in New Ways

2008-09-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

RIGHT: A recent interior fireplace job using eastern Washington basalt that the homeowner and I gathered into our pickups. Very little mortar is visible as I hoped to replicate the natural stone formation from whose base we gathered the fallen shards. The hearth is Pennsylavania Bluestone.

The logwork is done by a Twisp master of the chainsaw. I will get back with his name should he like to be credited.

I completed the fireplace prior to the sheetrocker's arrival, an unusual order, but in this case the sceduling required it. In the last day or two of the project we worked about the other, negotiating for workspace. The sheetrocker was the first in years to proselyte his religion to me while on the job: something I find highly distracting and interfering with my mind space at work. But for any interested and searching for that one true church, the sheetrocker is certain that if one accepts the Bible as the Word of God, then Seventh-Day Adventism is the one. I made the mistake of saying that I don't accept the premise that the Bible is the Word of God. He couldn't leave the subject alone after that until he was satisfied that I wasn't ready to change my mind, despite his proofs that alternated between reason and faith, from numerology to all of the ways that evolutionary theory had supposedly been debunked by Creationist interpretations of bacterial mechanics.

The Despecialization Imperative

2008-08-31T12:40:00.000-07:00

(Note: "Despecialization" is not in Webster's Dictionary, nor is it in Microsoft Word. However, its antonym, "progress" is in both dictionaries. For more on the subject I highly recommend "A Short History of Progress" by Ronald Wright.)

Cicely and I have always believed in investing in our potential and we have never considered the stock market to make a return for us on any of our extra money or time. To invest in the market would be to trust a corporation to be inventive in our stead, to trade powerfully where we can’t, and wouldn’t. I would have to be willing to be fattened upon expendable, interchangeable workers, for doing nothing.

Seven years ago we invested as much in a modular fireplace system I created and patented as we had put into the home we built over eight years: a 1915 abandoned Catholic Church situated in the center of eastern Washington's Waterville Plateau. After two years in our Winthrop home I have almost no time for manufacturing my fireplaces. The custom work I am asked to do is more interesting to me and I have struggled at times to keep up with that because I don’t want employees to work in my name. To misquote quote Kurt Cobain, I never wanted to be a manufacturer. An inventor and prototyper, yes, but by the time I did all that I had to make money back. The many good people I have met across Washington State bcause of my fireplaces have been a nice and unexpected surprise.

Through the months of good weather I am almost exclusively a stonemason, though I have a job building a little Japanese-style shed coming up. Wherever possible I defer concrete countertop and shower jobs for the winter. An undesirable combination of oral genetics has forced our two children into orthodontic necessity, though perfectly boring commercial teeth is not the objective. With the volunteered help of my parents and a good year for me, as a team we got this paid for up front by August with the rest of the season to consider winter savings.

I am looking at the first opportunity since I became a husband and a family man to build an art studio again, with the only consideration being savings or risking it to make stuff from clay. That Cicely has herself become a ceramist makes the prospect a soul necessity for both of us instead of calculating our potential comfort about bill-paying. Besides soil, clay might be the most human element outside of us that is able to teach us what we are and what we hope to be. In a climate like ours, when the dirt is under five feet of snow the soul screams for dirt that can become permanent, maybe lasting hundreds or thousands of years. Clay is communal, like a garden’s produce, but fashioned into vases, cups, bowls, and figures, ceramics are emblematic as they are useful to the humanity that we have always been.

After thinking it over for years and procrastinating the apparent impracticality of making art for its own sake when there are other more utilitarian things to do, my old favorite medium is calling me back. I would like to sculpt in a way that is more readily accessible and humble than bronze, and less corporate and common than art ironically borrowed from the Pre-Raphaelites, stamped out for sale on the super-cheap. Fired clay holds the place in my heart it has held for thousands of years of human experience since food was first served ceremonially: something precious to see and ponder for its individuality, or immediately durable and functional for the pouring of wine and water in every house in the community.

Though once I made a mold to reproduce a single mammoth pot, I like the idea of doing only one-of-a-kinds like my career as a mason has forced me to do with results that have been good for me as well as my clients. The people I work for appreciate that what I have done for them is exclusive to them and their specific idea of what they hope to live with in their home.

As a sculptor I will make what I want to see. It could be that I end up with a warehouse worth of unique pieces that only I enjoy, but that is something I am prepared to deal with, even if it means that my space is so crowded that I have to turn the fruit of my mind and hands into clean broken-up clay landfill to save space. I have figures, vases, and combinations of both in mind, but I will not be matching what I sculpt to our town’s tourist aesthetic: an old west town with wooden boardwalks. From me there will be no cowboy art. I almost never like it and I don’t want to give any energy to making it. I don’t care if I am being unreceptive to a ready market established by excellent craftspeople in their own right.

Winthrop’s style against mountain peaks and a fertile valley brings tourists in, but local master artists are creating things of greater purpose and humanistic appeal than items made in a Chinese factory and sold on Winthrop’s Main Street, only a few feet from rarified excellence by local masters. In a storefront in town Don Ashford is making gorgeous ceramic bells, masks, and huge, beautifully colorful thrown plates. Up and down the Main Street and the entire Methow Valley, world class artists are sculpting in every medium from the heart, whatever comes to mind and hand. I am a fan of every item done by a variety of sculptors found at the Peligro metal works studio in Twisp. It seems for them as it is for me, a personal imperative to create mere art in addition to their work in homebuilding, teaching, gardening, farming, theatre, political activism, and food serving. I’ll be sculpting textures and emotions of my experiences up to now hardened in a personal crucible at 2,200 degrees, in between pounding nails, writing, and setting stone, and dinner at the huge dining room table Cicely plans to build this winter out of second-sawn reclaimed timbers, immovable on her wide-plank face-nailed floor the four of us installed with more audacity than expertise.

Cicely gets our vegetables from local growers at the farmers’ market until she can supplement this with her own produce from what she likes to think of as her own piece of ground, the only spot on our lot that gets enough sun, currently occupied by a very large and very curved pine tree that any day now might fall on our house. We get milk from the Methow Creamery that makes the usual manufactured milk taste like a used bath towel in comparison. Bread flour comes from Bluebird Grain Farms to make rolls with a lovely texture and flavor. The Old Schoolhouse Brewery in Winthrop brews a very nice "Hop Along" unfiltered amber beer. Meat and goat cheese comes from local herds and butchers. After testing the validated claims of sustainable local agriculture, I intend to buy only what is worth buying, while I try to sell only what is my best effort at a worthy trade.

I used to think, “What I’d give for a sense of authenticated community, where people want the best they can get, and they give it back.” For fifteen years, beginning with my final refusal of the Mormon culture I grew away from, I have been giving my eyes, my lungs, my back, and my ankles for a short term participation in an experiment that preceded all of the pyramids, capitol buildings, churches, and office buildings, and the violence done to the soul by the construction of huge gods: a human scheme called local trade with love. So far the trade has been good and might get better.

Bob the Builder's Pearly Gates

2008-06-23T18:57:00.000-07:00

A right is something innate, inborn, and then continually won again, by democracy, revolution, or war, by genuine religious and humanitarian compassion, or freethinking in a variety of chaotic combinations. If it's not a human right, it is just a well-intentioned program, subject to delivery by coercion and blunder, as demonstrated at the local lumberyard:

I was standing in line holding a single roll of blue tape and sixty 5/16 bolts, washers, and nuts that would contribute to steel countertop forms in the shape of the front half of a horse. There are mornings that a guy can wait in line for a long time, especially if someone in front says parenthetically, just before the total of his purchase of lumber is tallied, “Oh yeah, and what do you have in the way of stovepipe?”

Bob will say, “Well, we have everything you need probably. What size of pipe? Cathedral or flat ceiling? Roof pitch?” And the line gets twenty minutes longer. But we all stand there because his title of Bob the Builder, though kind of funny to us, did not come undeserved and carries a lot of respect.

By the time sections of stovepipe are hauled down from the storage area above the store and the customer is on his way, the topic has been shifted by the next in line. I can’t honestly recall what brought Bob to respond with, “…Put me on a boat and send me out on a lake, one with a far shore. And don’t come to get me when I have been out too long. Just leave me alone to die.”

The customer at the counter added, “I know. He spent his whole life, and all he wanted to leave was a home he built and owned, and then there was nothing left after he spent everything on healthcare. Still he died.” I had no idea which previous individual they were talking about, but I understood the gist of the conversation.

Another man in line said, “I’ll be damned if they’re going to get everything I’ve tried to do if I get sick. My wife and I have already agreed, and I’ll keep doing it until I sleep forever and my hammer has to be pried from my hand.”

One by one each of us were contributing to the Tuesday morning church service officiated by Bob the Builder: The Varieties of Builder Experience. There was a, “I’m finally going to track down all the illegal psychedelic drugs I can find, and I’m going to try each one until I find one I like, then I’m going to buy more of it.”

Fourth in line contributed, “I’d like to build something very tall. And then close off the floor and tell them I’m not coming down for anything.”

Then Bob, as I arrived at the counter with my hardware, “Have you given the subject any thought?”

KC: “Too much a long time ago. I don’t know. I don’t want to go lying down. Not indoors I hope. A beer in one hand, a chisel in the other, and maybe just stand me up near a rock and pray for a minor earthquake to bury me quick, without ceremony.”

Bob: “You’re going to need another hand for that chisel to be effective.”

KC: “Then I’d better make it a two-pound sledge instead. I hope by then to build a home myself, from scratch, something modest with some timber beams, and then I’ll think more about the reasons that I won’t collateralize it for prolonged health. But ‘yes’ to those before me. I intend to leave something behind that can be lived in, even if it means that I won’t live as long as possible.”

To call a program like "universal healthcare", however humane the intention, a right is to cheapen the meaning of something sacred. It sounded as though all of us in line would like very much to have a viable, affordable opportunity for excellent healthcare, and it could be a very good thing for the US economy and the human race in general for people to live well. Yet we were most prepared to acknowledge and assert our right to die, if possible on our own terms of what we consider the quality and purpose of life. I’d hate to have a well-meaning bureaucrat from either party managing the Pearly Gates.

Kutz Spares a Few Sentences

2008-06-04T22:46:00.000-07:00

The homes built by Mike Kutz exemplify what is meant by a “Methow Home”. I recently attended a town-planning meeting with fifty of my neighbors, and that’s a respectable portion. Two slides of contrasting styles were shown to represent opposing directions our town might go while development expands under careful watch. Accompanied by spontaneous applause, the first slide showed a cluster of Kutz homes: the eaves were close to the ground and there wasn’t a garage door to be seen. A path meanders between the several dwellings through xeriscaped mounds of bunch grasses. The second photograph was of a knot of new homes that belong in just about any tightly packed suburb in America. The second of two slides elicited groans even though the builder efficiently exploited every available square foot of land, with plenty of driveway for vehicles that could be easily gobbled into a two-car garage in the front.

As far as I know, a Methow Home is one to be lived in comfortably and without pretension, one that is in scale to the land, sociable, and one that is naturally warm because of the materials. Such a home is made less of sheetrock and vinyl than earthy products like real wood and stone, concrete and stressed metal. Abundant square feet count less than quality and attention to detail. A home built by Kutz is scarcely visible at all because its log rafters are grayed like the bark on the trees, and the stucco exterior seems to grow up from the ground like a large weather-beaten rock. I think that Kutz builds the kind of home that a lot of craftspeople would enjoy living in, because a metal worker can probably understand that he understands wood, and one comfortable in a nursery would be pleased with the way he makes the most of light and shade. With Kutz, a building is something very personal, a part of the family and not a box to keep treasures and people in.

I readily acknowledge that talking about work means very little in comparison to doing it. It is better for a craftsperson to shrug over the shoulder as if to say, “can’t you tell what I think?” As long as people that talk for a living largely run things, it might be useful for recluses to say something from time to time or everything will be ruined by people with louder means than taste. Hence the locally popular bumper sticker that someone crafted a few years ago asking, “What would Kutz do?”

We moved here two and a half years ago and I didn’t know what Kutz would do then. I had never met him. I still hadn’t met him that I know of, though we might have passed each other at the lumberyard, when I called him a few days ago and left a message for him asking if he’d be interested in contributing to my journal. I had seen his work by now and I felt I knew him in a way.

There are things Kutz wouldn’t do. He wouldn’t take over farmland for a large-scale sub development. Despite current economic conditions, this is a debate that is sure to return to America’s town halls before too long. Kutz would buy rejected lumber because it was crooked and he’d make something beautiful out of it. He’d build modest housing in style. This is why when I saw a Hummer bearing the sticker, “What would Kutz do”, probably because the white letters on a black background matched the paint job on the SUV, I thought that driving that particular rig, with that particular bumper sticker on it, was something Kutz would never do. But I don’t think there are any loyalty oaths to swear before any old body can get a Kutz sticker. His name isn’t a church.

We spoke to each other on the third try by telephone and I asked him if he would write something about why he does what he does.

KUTZ: I’d hope that what I build explains, if it needs to be explained, why I do what I do.

KC: I think it does. That’s why I called.

KUTZ: I’ve written some poetry before, but really, I don’t like to talk about what I do. I mean you can interview me if you want, but I don’t want to write anything. If you asked me in the winter it might be different, but right now I am working and I’m not in the frame of mind for contemplating it. You’re busy as I am, I’d guess.

KC: Yes, but just to say something in your own words, anything at all that might be relevant to you would be valuable. I should point out that the point is not for more work. To describe the reasons we do what we do might do some good, considering the various way things can always go, if you are interested. Can I interest you in talking over a drink?

KUTZ: I don’t drink anymore, but I’ll talk to you about it some more, whenever you want that we both feel able to take the time. We could talk about concrete countertops. We could talk about stone. I've seen some of your work. There’s not much for us to say to the other about it. Everything we do is our religion isn’t it? We just do what we do don’t we, for every one of our reasons put together.

I figured we’d talk more, I hoped we would, but I wonder what else there is to say right now. He mentioned other things, but I think it is best for now that I let him get back to doing what Kutz would do. I wasn’t recording the conversation and I lack experience for interviewing. This is all I can remember and I’ve probably gotten several specifics wrong. Maybe I’ll get back to him when the evenings are long in the winter, and talking is the better way to be sociable. Meantime, consider this an affirmative bumper sticker pasted to my hands.

More Than One Way

2008-05-18T17:54:00.000-07:00

Stonemasonry evokes remembrance in our genes of something old and genuine. The imagination conjures up images of men and women with tough hands clearing fields and stacking rocks in sturdy rows so that farmers can till the ground. Stonemasonry recalls the toil of building cities from scratch and a change in what was meant by tribe and community.

I feel the weight of my trade in my bones in the winter cold. I feel the joy of stonemasonry when the weather is good and the Balsam Root is in bloom around me in the spring. I feel a reverence for my trade when I step over natural rock covered with lichen. When I am outdoors building stairs of stone I try to blend in. I think there is a lot to say for subtlety. It may be a value that has been too long forgotten.

I love to do the heavy work that I do. I’m going to keep doing it for as long as I can. I hope continually to become a craftsman. It is all I ever remember wanting. Well, that’s not really all I ever wanted, but you know what I mean. Strangely perhaps I feel that I have more in common with family farmers than many of my peers in modern masonry, as if rock setters and seed sowers are still natural partners. This is why I felt confident to impulsively marry a gardener. Difficult appreciation for this old partnership is in my blood, in this era of anonymity, cultured stone, generic tract housing, and genetically enhanced dairy, grain and meat products.

My dad is religious for a living, and that’s hard work too, building doctrines and herding the flock, but both of my grandfathers were family farmers. My father’s father, Ben, grew a relative few bushels of hard wheat on dry ground. My mother’s father, Leo, grew handsome "red delicious" apples in his irrigated, scenic orchard. One of my brothers, a really good guy and a chemical salesman, makes the apples even bigger than Leo ever imagined, on a schedule better than nature ever conceived. Success for him is measured in volume, and demand for his expertise is high. I am even closer to the ground than Grandpa Ben was. The more I do what I do, the less I want to project myself into the air. The more I work with heavy stones the less I regard heaven. I am chronically tilted against a wheat field wind, braced and bent the way a dry land farmer lights a cigarette, cupping a little thing that he loves right now while the stalks wane in the same downward direction of his frame.

I wonder why Grandpa Ben farmed, and whether he loved it. I wonder what he thought about at the age I am now. I wonder if he was certain in his Catholicism or whether he had some doubts. I wonder if we were peers, what would he say at age 35 of his wife, my grandmother I never knew. My work is pretty solitary too, though my companion is working with me full-time now. We’ve been together long enough that there isn’t much to say anymore. It’s still pretty quiet at work, but warmer, with some softer things than stones and tool handles to touch sometimes, like those lovely hips that bore our two children, that shake at me all day at work. I think Ben would understand what I just said, and who knows where our conversation would go from there. I’ll never know. I only met him once that I remember.

One story of Grandpa Ben has left a lasting mark on me, the wildfire started by his five children tossing matches into the seasonal creek that leaked across the thirsty wheat fields. As my father tells it, no more than a few words were said that night when Grandpa Ben sat the kids, my uncles and aunts, down on stools in the living room facing a bathtub full of water and handed each child a full box of matches. Gramps told each of them to burn every match in their box, one at a time down to the fingers, and then toss the used matchsticks in the tub. He knew that if you do something you love too much, with no variety, eventually you will hate it. There aren’t a lot of ways to strike and burn a match, but I bet the kids found more ways than would occur to the rest of us. Of all the ways to discipline his children, on this occasion I think Ben chose one of many possible good ways.

Even at that green age my dad pointed his sights not to the ground his father tilled, but to the Church. As he tells it, all he ever wanted was to be a Priest. Well, that’s not all he ever wanted. In fact, he wanted a life while he was at it, and found both Priesthood and marriage in the Mormonism of my mother’s family. Since then, for a full-time career my father explains that there is only one way to be saved in the Kingdom of God: the way he chose. And Salvation is impossible without obedience to Authority, which is half of his official title. Now thousands literally sit at his feet while he assumes his position above the worshippers as one of the seventy-four Elders in the Mormon Pantheon of Permanent Authorities. I find his certainty to be as absurd as pretending there is only one good way to make a concrete countertop or an outdoor fireplace. I am one of those seeds cast into the stones and I like it here.

There are a thousand good ways to make things, tens of thousands, overlapping and intertwining. There’s more than one good way to do everything, but even cement tossers can build a religion with narrow dogmas on what they know. I hope to never be that kind of mason. I hope to offer that imagination can be as good as knowledge. I propose that the mistakes and growth of personal experience are better than reliance on an expert’s description. Breadth with materials saves my mind while I live in this narrow valley that early hunters, gatherers, farmers and rock folk called Methow. I think Methow means beauty that is rugged and precious, delicate and dangerous, a paradox that must be preserved and only reluctantly improved.