On Being a Woodworker
It may yet be a little bit of a stretch to call myself a woodworker, seeing as I know and have done comparatively little to most others who honorably wear that word about their shoulders. I’ve made a few things, and I work in the woodshop at a frame company, but the word implies a capability that I have yet to achieve. A woodworker can build you a sturdy, sightly trestle dining table; join together a bookcase with tight dovetails and wedged-through tenons; raise the timber frame for the house that you and your table and your bookcase will call home. I aspire to such usefulness. On the other hand, Nick Offerman says that if you go out to the backyard and hammer two boards together, you’re on your way. I’ve found that he tends to be right about most–perhaps all–things. Praise be, Saint Nicholas.
My burgeoning skills put me somewhere in between, but more towards the board hammering. If the paragon of good craft is Offerman Woodshop in Los Angeles, I feel a continent away here in New York, a few thousand miles from mastery. But the best part about learning a craft, in my and surely most makers’ opinion, is the learning part (there’s a hot take for you). I made my day as of this writing by relearning, knob by knob, how to change out the blade on my dad’s bandsaw. I recently made my first keepsake box from cutoffs and miscellany at work, using the frame-making techniques I’ve picked up on the job. I can mill up a board straight and square to whatever specifications you require–name a fraction of an inch, I can get you there. Such small moments of usefulness keep me going towards the more complex projects taking form in my sketchbook. In the meantime, I use what I know and have available.
I didn’t always know this is what I wanted to do. Some people do, and I envy them, sort of. They get to cut out the mental chatter, the second-guessing, the lack of surety that you’re cut out for this work–or that if you’re not initially, you have the drive to see it through until you are. For the rest of us, by process of elimination and a little stick-to-itiveness, something may well present itself as the right thing to do, and luckily that is where I find myself now. Frankly, my brain only stopped developing this year at twenty-five, so I’m happy to already have half an idea of how I want to make my living. The drive roots more deeply by the day, and the chatter subsides.
The woodworking gene may be more innate than I thought, though. My dad can fabricate just about anything, over-engineered and (usually) not too hard on the eyes. Utility is paramount, and his ability to achieve it no less dependable than darkening cherry. I have a feeling Mr. Offerman would agree that growing up on a farm lends itself well to cultivating that admirable facility with tools and materials to make the useful implements of a working life. The family, going back four generations to the first of us Williams, ran a native plant nursery in central New Jersey–propagating, growing, and selling trees, and occasionally fashioning things out of them. My dad, No. 4, grew up making things with his grandfather, No. 2, in his shop down the hill from the old stone house we’ve all called home at one time or another. My earliest making experiences took place there too, in my single digits: A World War II airplane halloween costume made from insulation foam, wooden biplanes and toy guns, whittled canoes, a bouzouki case, and myriad projects he made for me and others. A few years ago he constructed a guitar trailer for hauling his band equipment, and when I say guitar trailer, I mean it: an accurate replica of a Martin D-18, down to the strings, frets, tuning pegs, and pickguard. Mounted on a boat trailer chassis, it opens in the rear, with storage inside the hollow body. He ended up selling it to the owner of Dinky’s Blue Belle Diner in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. If you find yourself passing through town on Rt. 70, stop in and see if it’s still there.
The first woodworker among us was William No. 1, and I grew up with a bookcase he made by our front door. As I’m told, sometime in the 1910s a mass of virgin growth African mahogany was set to ship to the U.S., but the outbreak of World War I stalled its progress and the logs stayed floating in their harbor until the end of the war. When they were finally brought over and milled up, they were found to be thoroughly riddled with wormholes and rendered all but useless. My great-great-grandfather, enterprising man that he was, somehow heard about this stuff and purchased a whole mess of it. Initially planning to construct greenhouse benches for the nursery that would drain water through the wormholes, he went on to make all manner of office furniture and millwork out of it. While not strictly “beautiful” in the general sense, that bookshelf stuck with me as a distinctly Flemer object, somewhat funky but useful and well-made. I don’t know the exact provenance of that old growth mahogany, but undoubtedly it should have been left standing, as all old growth should. But nice work lasts, and begets more of the same by the hands of future makers; surely that’s a good thing.
Putting the patriarchy aside, I began my own misadventures with a community college program and a certain tome called Good Clean Fun. Now Saint Nick is one cool slab-flattening, uke-strumming cucumber, but the maker in that book I wish I could be is undoubtedly RH Lee. Heidi Earnshaw, Leslie Webb, Audi Culver and Ivy Siosi of Siosi Design, April Wilkerson, Laura Kampf–the list of non-dude makers whose work I could study all day isn’t long enough, but it’s getting longer. I should include Simone Giertz, because watching someone all but saw their Tesla Model 3 in half makes me want to get in the shop and do something too. And for good measure, should you find yourself with your bluetooth earmuffs on and nothing to listen to, I heartily recommend Dear Nora (We’ll Have a Time), Ohmme (Parts), and The Dove & The Wolf (Conversations) to score your working hours. Extraordinary makers all.
Sometimes I wish I’d thought about all of this sooner, so I could be farther along now, but I suppose there’s no harm in following detours and doing some sightseeing on the way to your chosen career. Then you can be a little more sure that when a random universe found you where you were and put some English on you, you stopped spinning in the right place. I’ve been an aspiring maker for almost three years, but only in the last few months have I thought, I don’t know what else I’d want to do. I have context, a lineage and a community to draw from and give to as I progress, a sense of purpose largely lacking before; a need to be useful, and to do good work. Maybe that’s enough to go ahead and call myself a woodworker.
