Spoonwood (15 page)

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SPOONWOOD DOCUMENTATION

D
ad and I spend five years touring America. We avoid cities, national parks, festivals, shopping centers, concerts, anyplace where large numbers of people gather. We hitchhike the two-lane roads, hop freight trains, take the bus. Dad's routes bring us to the Forgot Places. Everywhere we go Dad makes spoons from the local woods. He trades some for food and lodging, gives some away, and turns the rest over to Brewster Wiley for greenbacks only. By the end of the second year Dad has enough money to support the cash purchase of a used Dodge van, which he converts into a home for us.

I finally learn speech recognition and to walk in a straight line. Sorry, ants, but I've left you behind. However, I must confess some disappointment. Foot mobility is nice but I was hoping for a more liberating experience. What really surprises me is how boring straight-line walking is. I prefer running because it's more exhilarating. Speech recognition, too, is disappointing. People rarely say what they feel or think. Words projectile-vomit out of their mouths. Like everybody else, I can't really think and talk at the same time, and my speech rarely meets the standards of my imagination. But I try. I'm careful what I say. Dad and I sometimes
meet strangers in our travels, and they're always amazed that I don't speak like a child.

In year four Dad officially changes our names. Frederick Elman becomes F. Spoonwood Latour. I become Birch Spoonwood Latour.

We drink a lot of Ovaltine.

Dad makes spoons commemorating American trails—the Mormon Trail, the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the Appalachian Trail, the Underground Railroad, the Lewis and Clark Trail, the train trail taken by Sister Carrie in the book of the same title, the trail of John Steinbeck in
Travels with Charley
and later William Least Heat Moon in
Blue Highways.
Dad also makes spoons commemorating places where certain people treated him kindly. In no particular order (since Dad travels in no particular order), here are some of the spoon places: Grand Isle, Louisiana; Vernona, Wisconsin; Window Rock, Arizona; Tabernacle, New Jersey; Lincoln City, Oregon; Fort MaKavett, Texas. I fall asleep every night to the
sip, sip, sip
music of Dad's knives.

Other people tie down canoes or kayaks or bicycles or four-wheelers onto their vans. Dad ties down our shaving horses, his and mine. You see, Mother, by this time I am making spoons, some of them good enough for Dad to sell through Brewster Wiley. When Dad starts me off he doesn't do anything to correct me so I often cut myself. Eventually I learn and do not cut myself and make good spoons. It is pleasant work. Some things you learn by thinking, others by experiences, but spoonmaking is learned by touch. Dad sells my best spoons with his own. I don't think the average person can tell our spoons apart, but we can.

Every time Dad makes a spoon he writes up a “documentation,” as he calls it. Some go on for pages and others just for a few lines. He spends many hours copying over the documentation. He wants the handwriting to be as well made as the spoon.

SPOONWOOD DOCUMENT: Black Spoon

The story of this spoon began beside a bayou in South Louisiana. For miles the main view was delta prairie grass, the most
distinguishing feature a single dead tree way in the distance. Running parallel to the narrow two-lane road was a bayou not much wider than the road, but it must have been deeply dredged because shrimp boats chugged up and down its waters. It was quite a sight to look ahead at the optical illusion of blacktop melting into the horizon, only to see a real boat appear on waves of heat.

I pulled off and parked my van to get a closer look at the water. With me was my three-year-old son. We walked through the grass to a narrow spit of sand. My son remained on the shore, while I kicked off my shoes and stepped into the water. I tasted the water. It was slightly brackish.

The water over the sand was clear to greenish, but it quickly darkened to black as it fell off into the channel. I imagined myself diving in, following an outgoing tide into the Gulf of Mexico, past Florida, in the Atlantic, catch a ride on the Gulf Stream, ending perhaps in Ireland to start a new life in another country of stone walls surprisingly similar to those in my native New England.

Something streaked from near my feet into the deep. I imagined it was a fish, but it was probably reflected light. The unanswerable question—what did I see?—troubled me.

I began to brood, thinking that vanity was at the heart of my failures. My father used to say there were three ways to catch trout—offer live bait, give them an imitation of what they're eating off the water at a particular time, and, last, cast a lure that excites or provokes them to attack. “The smaht fisherman fishes all three ways,” he would say. Just to be perverse I searched for a fourth way. I would entice a trout to take the fly I chose. Once I located the fish I wanted I would cast him my fly over and over again. I rarely caught trout, but when I did the satisfaction was great indeed.

I have made the mistake to live the way I fly-fish—do things my way without regard to the real world. The triumphs are rare, the strain palpable, but I persist.

My morbidity vanished in a second flash. Clothes and all I dove under. The water was murky, but I saw something on the bottom. Not a fish. An eel lying in wait perhaps? Or something more malevolent? I grabbed. Not an eel—a stick. I pulled it out
of the suck of mud. It was about the length and thickness of my arm. With my x-ray vision I saw a spoon inside the wood. Like the stick, the spoon was black.

I removed my homemade shaving horse, which was tied to the top of my camper van, and I set it up on the grass. The stick was soaked through from being submerged and the wood shavings parted easily. Following the grain of the wood, I made a spoon about ten inches long, with a narrow handle flaring upward slightly at the end with the grain of the wood. I can't say what kind of wood the spoon was made of, because it had been in mud so long the properties of the wood had undergone a transformation. The mud and minerals of the water were inside the cell structure. I let the spoon dry, thinking that its color might lighten, but it never did. I finished the spoon with my special oil and wax mix and the blackness shone like the flash of a fish in dark waters.

SPOONWOOD DOCUMENT: Dam Spoon

My son and I visit a magical place by a river just below a flood-control dam. A dirt road led downslope a short ways to a spot bulldozed flat. Sticking out of the flattened fill were old beams torn out of houses and whole trees cut up, some buried, some exposed and graying to the weather. Apparently the area served as a dump for wood refuse. Grass and a few wildflowers grew on the fill dirt. Below, through the screen of bushes and small trees, the river tumbled out a chute from the dam, then eased off lazily.

Where the road ended, the ground dipped forty or fifty feet precipitously to the river plain. A crude staircase of stone slabs three to six feet across and a foot thick led to some coarse sand. Carrying my son, I walked down the stairs. With each step something changed. I could no longer hear traffic on the road. I smelled the river, felt the humidity. And finally when I arrived on the gently sloping flood plain of the river, I discovered a heaven for a wood-working man.

Lying before me for hundreds of yards was driftwood, from the size of toothpicks to logs sixty to seventy feet long, all of it stripped of bark and glowing in the sunlight.

My son and I walked among the driftwood in the sand. Here and there trees grew, and they provided another spectacular sight. Every spring some of the surface soil was washed away, revealing the roots of the trees, which now stood on conical tangles of roots two to five feet above ground level. Bark had grown over the roots. Every tree provided what to my eye looked like a home for an ogre, which was what I told my son.

“Ogres eat people, right?” my son said.

“That's correct,” I said.

My son got down on his hands and knees, stuck his head between the roots, and said to the ogre, “Eat me.”

We walked on.

It passed through my mind to camp out here below the dam for a month or so and make spoons out of the driftwood, but some higher power stopped me. Any action by myself could only contaminate this place, since it was heaven to start with. I decided that the spoons in these trees should remain where Nature put them.

While Birch continued to explore, I sat on a log, not thinking, not attempting to account for time passing: I just existed.

When we finally departed from this holy place, I took some spoonwood with me but not from the river. In the wood dump above the stone stairs was the unwanted wood—the diseased, the rotten, the discarded parts of demolished buildings, the troublemaking trees whose roots clogged up septic systems. The stuff suited me, and I made off with a maple branch from a rotted tree. I whittled a soup ladle, the handle of spalted maple.

SPOONWOOD DOCUMENT: Trash Tree

One afternoon my son and I were passing through a little town in that fringe between North and South, Midwest and East, when a thunderstorm rolled in. We pulled off, parking on the street in
a nice old-fashioned neighborhood with modest, single-family houses, big trees, and sidewalks. The storm lasted only half an hour, but it was accompanied by violent winds and machine-gun rain.

We heard the thump of a large tree falling nearby, but we could see nothing in the rain. Minutes later the wind died to calm, and the sun came out. I put my son on my shoulders and we went out to look for the inevitable rainbow, and there it was at the end of a driveway far above the garage. Below stood a man with his knuckles on his hips. He was looking at the fallen tree. It had clipped part of the garage and wrecked his flower garden.

My son dismounted from my shoulders and stood gazing at the rainbow while I walked over and told the man about my interest in trees for spoonmaking.

“This one's no good for that,” he said. “It's box elder, grows like a weed around here. It's just a trash tree.”

I remembered reading about box elders, trees that produced a weak, bland-colored wood, barely useful even for the stove. In fact, every time I read something about box elders I always came across the phrase “trash tree.” I wanted to tell this man that no tree is trash, just as no person is trash, but it was not the time to start an argument with one who has just suffered a misfortune.

I asked the man if I could keep a stick three or four inches thick. He agreed, giving me an amused look that suggested he believed I was unbalanced. He was right, of course: I am unbalanced. My goal at that moment was to redeem the value of the box elder as a species, start it on its way toward a more respectable reputation.

Normally, I would walk around the tree, worry over it, until I saw spoons inside the wood, but the homeowner had already become suspicious of us, and I cut the first branch in front of me. By then the rainbow had disappeared.

I hauled our prize to the van, tied it down to the top, and drove off. Later at a campground I cut into the raw wood and it gave off a funky odor I hadn't noticed before, something partaking of compost heap and the morning bedroom smell of sleepers. I traced the odor to a moist, almost scummy layer between the
bark and the sap wood. I was excited by the unknown in the wood. It's always this way: the anticipation of surprises in even so humble a task as making a wooden spoon.

My x-ray vision usually allowed me to see a spoon or spoons in a tree, and I would make my splits based on that knowledge, but this particular branch must have had the equivalent of a lead shield because I could not see into the wood. I assumed that no spoon was inside. This project would fail. Failure was acceptable. I'd failed many times. I burned my failures in my campfire. My failures warmed me, cheered me, and cooked my food.

Since I had no x-rays to go by I decided to split the wood down the middle to see what there was to see. The branch was four and three-quarters inches thick. I started the split with a hatchet ax and finished it with a froe. I saw what I had expected, blond wood, not particularly interesting, though there was a suggestion of curve to the grain a third of the way through and just a faint pinkish tint in a crack. I split the piece again along the line. And was delightfully shocked.

The split revealed a deep, lurid red streak in the light-colored wood. I had seen wood with all kinds of colors, the purple of lilac, burnt umber of laurel, oranges of oaks, pinks of maples, bright yellow in the pitch of pines, somber red of cherry, but never a red this vibrant, like a child's little red wagon under the Christmas tree.

After close inspection I found where the grain cupped sufficiently to suggest the location for the bowl. For the next hour I worked in that blessed state outside normal consciousness.

Box elder was ridiculously easy to shape. I could have cut the wood with a fingernail, and yet it did not splinter. The finished spoon was eleven inches long, with a thick handle and a broad bowl. The red streak looked like a stream that started at the top of the handle and meandered into the bowl. The spoon was so light, it was like holding air. I doubted that the spoon would hold up under use. Even washing would dent it.

My research at a local library confirmed my suspicions. Box elder wood was indeed weak. Moreover, my reading showed that the vivid red color in the wood was caused by a disease and would
fade over time, degraded by exposure to light. The only plus was that the smell would go away as the wood dried. My spoon had limited use and transient beauty. Did that make it trash?

In my craft I seek to create strong, useful objects out of wood, letting the beauty of the material speak for itself. Not in the case of box elder. I hid the spoon in dark green felt to keep the light from it. Unseen, untouched, the spoon will remain beautiful but not useful. On rare occasions one can remove the spoon for handling (for only the hand can appreciate weight and texture) and view it briefly, and then return it to its case.