My Father, the Artist
Sep. 1st, 2004 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icarusMy dad describes three days at Lake Kasshabog:
Shooting Crows
A liquid silver streak scribes a line straight from the muzzle of my gun to the black body in the tree and he jumps, drops a few feet, and circles the tree, bursting through the leaves with the rest of the flock squ-wa-a-a-cking behind. At a range of over 60 feet my Daisy Red Ryder carbine would be losing velocity fast but there’d still be enough hitting power left to pierce a beer can or sting a crow.
I don’t like crows, they eat the eggs of song birds and drive off the swallows that used to be here. And their noise is nasty. They’re the rapper home-boys of the bird world and they move in and out of the neighbourhood with about the same effect. We have no more swallows and the song sparrows go quiet and hide in the bushes when the crows move in. The crow population has got out of hand on Lake Kashabog and the surrounding areas.
So when I hear them I’m out with the toy gun hoping to put a hole in some feathers. I don’t usually hit them, they’re too quick, and crows are smart. They see you empty-handed and they’ll hang around all day. Step out with a gun and they’re off. I imagine a lot of people shoot things at them. If I cared just a little more I’d get a more powerful pellet gun. That’s still no match for a crow, you really need a twelve-guage if you’re serious about killing them, but I’m not, I just want them to think of Rebels Isle as a dangerous place. Off limits to any bird with a bad attitude.
The gun sits ready by the door.
I’m way too pleased with myself. I’m nearly finished with my first piece of rustic furniture, a coffee table made in part from the bones of many meals the beavers have made of the understory that once grew on Rebel’s Isle.
This table was not born of happy circumstances. Beavers have always been a nuisance here but one year they were a major problem. A family of beavers can and will strip bare a small island like Rebel if you let ‘em. Small pines, juneberry trees, willows, alders, birch, small oaks, stripped of their bark and left to rot.
My seventeen-year war with the beavers is an endless conflict, and please don’t bug me with your city notions of the poor woodland creatures roaming free on god’s green earth. Cruel though it may sound to you, it takes a lot longer to grow a tree than it takes to grow a beaver.
It’s no fault of the beavers; it’s us. We screwed up the balance of nature long ago and we’re stuck with the consequences. We turned the woods into a park when we created Cottage Country and if we insist on using the North as a playground we’ve got to be gardeners and game wardens.
I accept the responsibility but I hired a trapper to do the dirty work. So as far as I know the beavers are now hats and cunning fur accessories somewhere. Of course the trapper waited for prime season, securing the doom of several more trees, before he did his evil work. And we still have beaver, but not so many and the thinning they do is acceptable for now.
Proof that I’m slightly conflicted in all this is the concept of the table. For some reason I wanted it to act as a kind of totem to the beavers. I thought I’d take this lacy tangle of small sticks and create a useful work of art that would evoke the presence of the beaver and memorialize the trees that had been destroyed. The teeth marks on the sticks seemed very important and worth preserving, integral to the overall design.
All winter long I sketched and imagined my table. The many sticks would weave a complex pattern, a wooden bone yard, an engineering marvel of interwoven pieces of beaver chewed wood. One fine morning in July the work began. It nearly ended the same day.
That was three years ago. I won’t try to describe the first version; it was way too complex. It defies description. Totem it was, table it wasn’t. Even I, in my mad fog of creativity could see that no glass would stand for long on its artful surface. Nor would you enjoy cleaning it. I pulled it apart and set it aside.
Year two was a fit of trial and error. The legs looked right, cut from a downed juneberry and screwed to a plywood base. The top was level and nothing wobbled. I can work a tape measure with the best of them. But the top, the whole point of it all lived only in my head. Where my vision met reality a tangled mess of sticks spoke of limited skills and the futile conceit of a hobby wood worker. I tore it apart once again.
{By the way, if you want to work with juneberry you will need specially hardened cutting tools. It is the hardest wood I’ve ever worked with. It is also inconsistently hard, and the grain grows in a random twisting way that deflects drill bits and bends nails. But the grain is lovely, a creamy background with mauve streaks swirling all through it. Worth the chewed drill bits and the odd bit of skin.}
Still a long way from realizing my totem-table concept, after two years of grim effort I had achieved a plywood table top trimmed around with some leftover 1x2 and stained a dirty warm grey. I did that because I thought it would make a good neutral backdrop to bring out the intricacies of the beaver sticks. Having abandoned the intricacy part, I was left with an ugly table that had great legs. I was about ready to give up on the whole thing when we happened to make a pilgrimage to the Petroglyphs Park on the North Shore of Stoney Lake.
The Petroglyphs are an ancient meeting place where the native people held religious ceremonies and carved primitive symbols in this huge white rock. It’s been preserved, restored and turned over to them as the rightful custodians of this sacred spot.
They have an interpretative center that explains a lot of things about life from the original residents perspective. I don’t know that I buy all this spiritualism or not, but I do know I felt a change come over me while watching and listening to an old man making a canoe. With complete humility, and in all seriousness I went back to the table and asked the wood what it wanted me to do with it. And the wood took my hands and began to guide me.
I got out the block plane and shaved all the sharp edges smooth. Some scraps of pine board called from the corner of my shop. Seems they wanted to be the tabletop. They had nice knots. I’d never planned to inlay the beaver sticks into an old board, but the curve of the sticks and the swirl of the grain played nicely together, so I learned to carve grooves in wood and fit crooked sticks into them and then to trim and sand them into one smooth surface.
I’d stopped imagining how I wanted the table to be and accepted instead what it was becoming and the table began to shape itself. In rustic work the materials have a will of their own which is unwise to fight, but very rewarding to follow.
The last bit of fun was carving the sun, birds, fish, beavers and trees into the rim. Yesterday I learned to rub beeswax into the grain and the table is beginning to glow a reddish honey tone. Soon it will be finished, and as I said I’m way too pleased with myself considering all the help I had making it.
One last thing. Just because I’ve made such a big deal about the process, don’t imagine this table is a work of fine art and craftsmanship. If you like, some day I will show you the inept mortise and tennon work; the first one is absurd, the second one merely awful and the rest okay, all part of the learning process. And I’ll show you where I should have mitered the corners of the rim, not butt-joined them with the exposed end grain. And I’d find a way to hide the screw holes somehow. But what the heck, it’s rustic. It’s a rustic table in the true sense of the word. Like so many other projects I’ve done around the cottage it’s good enough. For me anyway.
Every cottage holiday journal has something about the weather. The weather messes with our heads up here and we are compelled to write about it. This lake is right on the edge of a critical fulcrum of weather phenomena. We are located right on the edge of the Canadian Shield, a massive chunk of rock that covers most of Northern Ontario and swings right across Quebec, rising to become the Laurentian Mountains. The Shield reaches high into the cold Northern air and acts as a kind of chute for the currents that flow down from the Arctic, both air and water.
If you drive straight north from here you’ll climb long hills and the terrain will become progressively more rocky and rough. It will be littered with the remains of failed farms, haunted nightmares of past efforts to scratch a living from a short season and shallow soil. The rusting skeletons of ancient farm machinery suggest that few have managed it. And the small cemeteries with their tiny graves.
The cliché’ “harsh country” applies up here. It was beautifully warm two days ago, today we are bundled up and warming our hands with big bowls of oatmeal. Weather shifts are dramatic around here. The westerly breeze of yesterday is a whistling Norther today. It brings clear skies and cold air straight down from the Arctic, gathering momentum as it scours the Shield making one last leap over Blue Mountain before it slams into Lake Kasshabog. Our little island sits out in the open water and takes its full force right in the face.
Rebel’s Isle is tougher than the wind and he lifts his chin to break the waves. The huge pines hiss and bend. The cottage flaps her skirts and shudders but stays more or less solidly on her floating foundation of old logs, boxes full of rocks and timbers from an old dock.
We’re not as tough, we’re getting off this place for a drive in the country. There’s corn and tomatoes out there, roads we haven’t tried yet, and its time to get out and gather them. We used to be stoic about this kind of day but we’ve changed in recent years. I used to say, “There’s no such thing as a bad day at the cottage.” No longer do I spout such kant. It’s nonsense, there are miserable days that no amount of starry-eyed denial can change. The Cottage. Rebel’s Isle. Our romantic fantasy of the pristine North, is also a wind-swept rock where on certain days there is nothing to do but squat with your back to the wind and wrap your arms around your head. (A note of thanks to Jean Sheppard for this bit of imagery.)
I realize this is heresy. There are Canadian Cottagers who don their shorts on Victoria Day and wear nothing else until they close up on the Thanksgiving Day weekend. They make their children swim the recently icy waters and wear t-shirts and bathing suits all summer long. Which sounds neat if it wasn’t so far in the face of reality. Last Victoria Day it snowed up where we are and we didn’t stay for twenty minutes. Just long enough to unload the boat and run for it. I could hear the delighted shrieks of the children as they hit the water, the sound was carried on the wind through the flurries. And there was Dad, red-kneed, wading in to lay the water line.
I don’t know if it’s toughness or just a stubborn regard for ritual, but my friends tell of swimming in May and Dad refusing to wear anything but shorts from Victoria Day on. Perhaps it’s blind belief in authority. Who are we to question the calendar? I know it’s summer because the calendar says so. There’s little other evidence of summer this year. Tonight it will go down to 10 Celsius. That’s cold, where I come from we called it March. But this is August. My former friend, who lured me to Toronto twentyfive years ago, declared that Canada has two seasons, Winter and August. Okay, if August is like early Spring what’s Winter? For that matter, what’s Summer? This one is the coldest and wettest on record. I’m not sure we have a Summer anymore. I think we have Summer-like days scattered through the months of July and August, and drastic measures are called for if we are to properly use them.
We need to redefine the workweek to reflect reality. I know it’s tough to redefine anything relating to work in Toronto, the capitol of all that is enterprise, but we must be strong and forward-thinking. I suggest we wait for the weather report before we decide whether we’re going to work or to the cottage. Weekends should have nothing to do with Saturday and Sunday since they have nothing to do with whether it will be nice or not. We should work when the weather is nasty and play when it decides to be nice.
I know this could mean chaos to the scheduling of meetings, but meetings get moved for all kinds of reasons, what’s one more? Productivity will probably go up because we will probably spend even more days working, and happily so, for if the weather is nasty we might as well. Especially when we know that if… IF!-IF!-IF! the jet stream flows from the lower left of the weather map to somewhere North of the Laurentians, we will drop everything, hit the save button and rush to our previously loaded and provisioned cars and set off for the cottage.
And we’ll stay there and revel in summertime bliss for as long as it lasts. We’ll swim, we’ll barbecue, we’ll go tubing, fishing. We’ll swim naked and have open-air sex for as long as the weather holds. Which, unfortunately, won’t be for long. But at least we won’t have missed it. At least we won’t be working when it’s warm and trying to have fun when it’s nearly impossible to do anything but huddle around the old wood-burning stove.
We’re back from our drive now, the Weber is fired up and the evening meal is cooking. It’s a leg of lamb from the butcher of Bridgenorth. He’s a fine butcher who sells his wares well. Say “lamb” and he’ll be sing-songing all the accompaniments: fresh tomatoes, lovely fresh basil, feta cheese. He suggests things, knowing we want them, and we fill our baskets full. We buy the big leg of lamb and slice it round, stuffing the spaces with an herb paste and trussing it up with a whole lot of string. It is spitting on the grill and soon we will dine.
We’re dining. A fire is laid in the wood burning stove and we’re ready to confront the worst the first week of August, the middle of high Summer, may dish out by striking a match.
The sun has dropped beneath the ugly clouds igniting the landscape. All the trees are side-lit with the hot promise of summer. Summer lied to us this year. But the liquid light is soft and the wind is down. It’s neither warm nor cold. We are teased once again into staying for another day.
Interesting man, isn't he?
That's my daddy.
Shooting Crows
A liquid silver streak scribes a line straight from the muzzle of my gun to the black body in the tree and he jumps, drops a few feet, and circles the tree, bursting through the leaves with the rest of the flock squ-wa-a-a-cking behind. At a range of over 60 feet my Daisy Red Ryder carbine would be losing velocity fast but there’d still be enough hitting power left to pierce a beer can or sting a crow.
I don’t like crows, they eat the eggs of song birds and drive off the swallows that used to be here. And their noise is nasty. They’re the rapper home-boys of the bird world and they move in and out of the neighbourhood with about the same effect. We have no more swallows and the song sparrows go quiet and hide in the bushes when the crows move in. The crow population has got out of hand on Lake Kashabog and the surrounding areas.
So when I hear them I’m out with the toy gun hoping to put a hole in some feathers. I don’t usually hit them, they’re too quick, and crows are smart. They see you empty-handed and they’ll hang around all day. Step out with a gun and they’re off. I imagine a lot of people shoot things at them. If I cared just a little more I’d get a more powerful pellet gun. That’s still no match for a crow, you really need a twelve-guage if you’re serious about killing them, but I’m not, I just want them to think of Rebels Isle as a dangerous place. Off limits to any bird with a bad attitude.
The gun sits ready by the door.
I’m way too pleased with myself. I’m nearly finished with my first piece of rustic furniture, a coffee table made in part from the bones of many meals the beavers have made of the understory that once grew on Rebel’s Isle.
This table was not born of happy circumstances. Beavers have always been a nuisance here but one year they were a major problem. A family of beavers can and will strip bare a small island like Rebel if you let ‘em. Small pines, juneberry trees, willows, alders, birch, small oaks, stripped of their bark and left to rot.
My seventeen-year war with the beavers is an endless conflict, and please don’t bug me with your city notions of the poor woodland creatures roaming free on god’s green earth. Cruel though it may sound to you, it takes a lot longer to grow a tree than it takes to grow a beaver.
It’s no fault of the beavers; it’s us. We screwed up the balance of nature long ago and we’re stuck with the consequences. We turned the woods into a park when we created Cottage Country and if we insist on using the North as a playground we’ve got to be gardeners and game wardens.
I accept the responsibility but I hired a trapper to do the dirty work. So as far as I know the beavers are now hats and cunning fur accessories somewhere. Of course the trapper waited for prime season, securing the doom of several more trees, before he did his evil work. And we still have beaver, but not so many and the thinning they do is acceptable for now.
Proof that I’m slightly conflicted in all this is the concept of the table. For some reason I wanted it to act as a kind of totem to the beavers. I thought I’d take this lacy tangle of small sticks and create a useful work of art that would evoke the presence of the beaver and memorialize the trees that had been destroyed. The teeth marks on the sticks seemed very important and worth preserving, integral to the overall design.
All winter long I sketched and imagined my table. The many sticks would weave a complex pattern, a wooden bone yard, an engineering marvel of interwoven pieces of beaver chewed wood. One fine morning in July the work began. It nearly ended the same day.
That was three years ago. I won’t try to describe the first version; it was way too complex. It defies description. Totem it was, table it wasn’t. Even I, in my mad fog of creativity could see that no glass would stand for long on its artful surface. Nor would you enjoy cleaning it. I pulled it apart and set it aside.
Year two was a fit of trial and error. The legs looked right, cut from a downed juneberry and screwed to a plywood base. The top was level and nothing wobbled. I can work a tape measure with the best of them. But the top, the whole point of it all lived only in my head. Where my vision met reality a tangled mess of sticks spoke of limited skills and the futile conceit of a hobby wood worker. I tore it apart once again.
{By the way, if you want to work with juneberry you will need specially hardened cutting tools. It is the hardest wood I’ve ever worked with. It is also inconsistently hard, and the grain grows in a random twisting way that deflects drill bits and bends nails. But the grain is lovely, a creamy background with mauve streaks swirling all through it. Worth the chewed drill bits and the odd bit of skin.}
Still a long way from realizing my totem-table concept, after two years of grim effort I had achieved a plywood table top trimmed around with some leftover 1x2 and stained a dirty warm grey. I did that because I thought it would make a good neutral backdrop to bring out the intricacies of the beaver sticks. Having abandoned the intricacy part, I was left with an ugly table that had great legs. I was about ready to give up on the whole thing when we happened to make a pilgrimage to the Petroglyphs Park on the North Shore of Stoney Lake.
The Petroglyphs are an ancient meeting place where the native people held religious ceremonies and carved primitive symbols in this huge white rock. It’s been preserved, restored and turned over to them as the rightful custodians of this sacred spot.
They have an interpretative center that explains a lot of things about life from the original residents perspective. I don’t know that I buy all this spiritualism or not, but I do know I felt a change come over me while watching and listening to an old man making a canoe. With complete humility, and in all seriousness I went back to the table and asked the wood what it wanted me to do with it. And the wood took my hands and began to guide me.
I got out the block plane and shaved all the sharp edges smooth. Some scraps of pine board called from the corner of my shop. Seems they wanted to be the tabletop. They had nice knots. I’d never planned to inlay the beaver sticks into an old board, but the curve of the sticks and the swirl of the grain played nicely together, so I learned to carve grooves in wood and fit crooked sticks into them and then to trim and sand them into one smooth surface.
I’d stopped imagining how I wanted the table to be and accepted instead what it was becoming and the table began to shape itself. In rustic work the materials have a will of their own which is unwise to fight, but very rewarding to follow.
The last bit of fun was carving the sun, birds, fish, beavers and trees into the rim. Yesterday I learned to rub beeswax into the grain and the table is beginning to glow a reddish honey tone. Soon it will be finished, and as I said I’m way too pleased with myself considering all the help I had making it.
One last thing. Just because I’ve made such a big deal about the process, don’t imagine this table is a work of fine art and craftsmanship. If you like, some day I will show you the inept mortise and tennon work; the first one is absurd, the second one merely awful and the rest okay, all part of the learning process. And I’ll show you where I should have mitered the corners of the rim, not butt-joined them with the exposed end grain. And I’d find a way to hide the screw holes somehow. But what the heck, it’s rustic. It’s a rustic table in the true sense of the word. Like so many other projects I’ve done around the cottage it’s good enough. For me anyway.
Every cottage holiday journal has something about the weather. The weather messes with our heads up here and we are compelled to write about it. This lake is right on the edge of a critical fulcrum of weather phenomena. We are located right on the edge of the Canadian Shield, a massive chunk of rock that covers most of Northern Ontario and swings right across Quebec, rising to become the Laurentian Mountains. The Shield reaches high into the cold Northern air and acts as a kind of chute for the currents that flow down from the Arctic, both air and water.
If you drive straight north from here you’ll climb long hills and the terrain will become progressively more rocky and rough. It will be littered with the remains of failed farms, haunted nightmares of past efforts to scratch a living from a short season and shallow soil. The rusting skeletons of ancient farm machinery suggest that few have managed it. And the small cemeteries with their tiny graves.
The cliché’ “harsh country” applies up here. It was beautifully warm two days ago, today we are bundled up and warming our hands with big bowls of oatmeal. Weather shifts are dramatic around here. The westerly breeze of yesterday is a whistling Norther today. It brings clear skies and cold air straight down from the Arctic, gathering momentum as it scours the Shield making one last leap over Blue Mountain before it slams into Lake Kasshabog. Our little island sits out in the open water and takes its full force right in the face.
Rebel’s Isle is tougher than the wind and he lifts his chin to break the waves. The huge pines hiss and bend. The cottage flaps her skirts and shudders but stays more or less solidly on her floating foundation of old logs, boxes full of rocks and timbers from an old dock.
We’re not as tough, we’re getting off this place for a drive in the country. There’s corn and tomatoes out there, roads we haven’t tried yet, and its time to get out and gather them. We used to be stoic about this kind of day but we’ve changed in recent years. I used to say, “There’s no such thing as a bad day at the cottage.” No longer do I spout such kant. It’s nonsense, there are miserable days that no amount of starry-eyed denial can change. The Cottage. Rebel’s Isle. Our romantic fantasy of the pristine North, is also a wind-swept rock where on certain days there is nothing to do but squat with your back to the wind and wrap your arms around your head. (A note of thanks to Jean Sheppard for this bit of imagery.)
I realize this is heresy. There are Canadian Cottagers who don their shorts on Victoria Day and wear nothing else until they close up on the Thanksgiving Day weekend. They make their children swim the recently icy waters and wear t-shirts and bathing suits all summer long. Which sounds neat if it wasn’t so far in the face of reality. Last Victoria Day it snowed up where we are and we didn’t stay for twenty minutes. Just long enough to unload the boat and run for it. I could hear the delighted shrieks of the children as they hit the water, the sound was carried on the wind through the flurries. And there was Dad, red-kneed, wading in to lay the water line.
I don’t know if it’s toughness or just a stubborn regard for ritual, but my friends tell of swimming in May and Dad refusing to wear anything but shorts from Victoria Day on. Perhaps it’s blind belief in authority. Who are we to question the calendar? I know it’s summer because the calendar says so. There’s little other evidence of summer this year. Tonight it will go down to 10 Celsius. That’s cold, where I come from we called it March. But this is August. My former friend, who lured me to Toronto twentyfive years ago, declared that Canada has two seasons, Winter and August. Okay, if August is like early Spring what’s Winter? For that matter, what’s Summer? This one is the coldest and wettest on record. I’m not sure we have a Summer anymore. I think we have Summer-like days scattered through the months of July and August, and drastic measures are called for if we are to properly use them.
We need to redefine the workweek to reflect reality. I know it’s tough to redefine anything relating to work in Toronto, the capitol of all that is enterprise, but we must be strong and forward-thinking. I suggest we wait for the weather report before we decide whether we’re going to work or to the cottage. Weekends should have nothing to do with Saturday and Sunday since they have nothing to do with whether it will be nice or not. We should work when the weather is nasty and play when it decides to be nice.
I know this could mean chaos to the scheduling of meetings, but meetings get moved for all kinds of reasons, what’s one more? Productivity will probably go up because we will probably spend even more days working, and happily so, for if the weather is nasty we might as well. Especially when we know that if… IF!-IF!-IF! the jet stream flows from the lower left of the weather map to somewhere North of the Laurentians, we will drop everything, hit the save button and rush to our previously loaded and provisioned cars and set off for the cottage.
And we’ll stay there and revel in summertime bliss for as long as it lasts. We’ll swim, we’ll barbecue, we’ll go tubing, fishing. We’ll swim naked and have open-air sex for as long as the weather holds. Which, unfortunately, won’t be for long. But at least we won’t have missed it. At least we won’t be working when it’s warm and trying to have fun when it’s nearly impossible to do anything but huddle around the old wood-burning stove.
We’re back from our drive now, the Weber is fired up and the evening meal is cooking. It’s a leg of lamb from the butcher of Bridgenorth. He’s a fine butcher who sells his wares well. Say “lamb” and he’ll be sing-songing all the accompaniments: fresh tomatoes, lovely fresh basil, feta cheese. He suggests things, knowing we want them, and we fill our baskets full. We buy the big leg of lamb and slice it round, stuffing the spaces with an herb paste and trussing it up with a whole lot of string. It is spitting on the grill and soon we will dine.
We’re dining. A fire is laid in the wood burning stove and we’re ready to confront the worst the first week of August, the middle of high Summer, may dish out by striking a match.
The sun has dropped beneath the ugly clouds igniting the landscape. All the trees are side-lit with the hot promise of summer. Summer lied to us this year. But the liquid light is soft and the wind is down. It’s neither warm nor cold. We are teased once again into staying for another day.
Interesting man, isn't he?
That's my daddy.
