Banish Misfortune

“You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town.” Anne Lamott

Following a gentle knock at the hospital room door, an indescribably cheerful young woman enters the room bearing a large plastic shopping bag. Her name is Liz, and she is an occupational therapist. She is here to show the 400 pound man in the chair how to make his life easier when he is released to go home.

The bag proves to be full of clever devices. We start with a nice spring loaded plastic and metal claw that will alleviate the need for the immense man to bend over while removing his socks. He smiles ruefully at Miss Liz, who is after all trying to do him a good turn, but there is shame in his eyes.

Who the hell is this fatso, trying so hard to accept this young woman’s help with grace?

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A tenet of all University creative writing programs dictates that the best writing is deeply expository. The great artist reveals all, plumbs the darkness of his or her own soul and illuminates it for all to see. I always aspire to write well, but I have a problem that will likely keep me from ever being hailed as a new Hemingway. I am a late middle age guy from blue collar stock, raised by pretty conservative people who mostly kept their troubles to themselves. As a result, I have decided that some of fatso’s story is none of your fucking business.

But I can tell you some things.

At some level, we are slaves to the things that delight us. That list of things is pretty long and varied. Sex, food, intellectual curiosity, love, professional accomplishment, money, competition, physical exertion, sleep, kids, mind altering substances, and music come to mind and comprise the tiny tip of the iceberg of things that float our boats. This need to be happy and stimulated turns out to be a complicated thing. On one hand, desire keeps us alive and moving forward and is responsible for every great thing our species has done. On the other, desire can carry us away to a place so far and alien that we can barely recognize ourselves.

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Young Liz goes on to explain the wonderful handled sponge that will allow fatso to comfortably wash unreachable places in the shower. There is also the miraculous plastic tube on which sox are fitted. Without needing to bend, a foot is placed in the tube, a plastic handled rope is pulled, and the sock magically threads itself onto the foot.

The big guy in the chair smiles and tries to be cheerful and gracious, but there is a stirring in him now that he has not felt for a long time. His shame is being elbowed aside by something stronger, even a little fierce. It is his dignity.

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We all have plans. We all see the arc of our own lives stretching to the future. We scheme and dream, make preparations, push toward the light. We can see our life’s partners and unborn babies, our successful careers, that cool house we will build, our amazing trip to Venice. We work toward these goals sometimes with single minded intensity, and we’re taught that drive, character, and attention to detail will overcome all obstacles. The world is full of self-help books that will tell you all about it.

Horseshit.

To wit: maybe half of a life is the product of what is put into it. The other half is the part missing from the self-help books. Per the entropy and general randomness that governs the universe, some shit just happens. People you love up and die. Love comes or goes suddenly and unlooked for. Economies and politics change. Storms and car wrecks and other disasters bring wreck and ruin. Opportunities come out of nowhere or are yanked out from under you like a shabby carpet. People we’ve known forever change for good or ill. Any damned thing can happen, and you control none of it. The things you were planning for, the things you wanted most, needed most, can turn into dust before your eyes.

So you must adjust and rethink things. You must roll with the punches. You must invent a new future, see new opportunities for what they are, recognize the good things that surround you and cultivate them. Failure to do so can be a death sentence.

Like fatso, you can walk away from the smoking remains and brood on your mistakes and misfortune and missed opportunities. You can assuage your need for happiness with other things. From this dark country come alcoholics, addicts, suicides, and yes, the morbidly obese. They are all engaged in digging their own graves.

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But Fatso is part of a tiny and very fortunate minority. A combination of sheer unholy terror and the support and love of his family and friends have had the effect of Scrooges ghosts. He understands that it doesn’t have to be this way. The vigorous, happy, 250 pound man turns out to be alive and well inside him. Now, as Liz approaches him with one last helpful device, the Bear suddenly appears.

“Now Mr. Baker, this tool will make it easier to wipe yourself after you go to the bathroom. Would you like to see how it works?”

Fatso in his chair with his backless gown and an I.V. in each arm leans forward until his very large and very serious face is just an inch or two from the smiling young woman’s. The Bear growls deep like distant thunder.

“No. I don’t think so.”

It rattles the poor kid, and he has to apologize and thank her profusely for her kindness. After she leaves, he smiles to himself in his chair. He can’t wait to get out of here.

376

Solstice

 

“It's very difficult to look at the World
and into your heart at the same time.
In between, a life has passed.” Jim Harrison

In the hospital room, a few hours out of intensive care, somebody asked me “What will you do about this?”

Linda Reis (bless her heart) said “I know what you’ll do. You’ll write about it.”

Linda, as usual, was right. The problem is: a whisker close brush with the hereafter (actually two of them five days apart) is a big piece of landscape, and a fair treatment could grow easily into a dreary and self-absorbed tome, so let’s nip that crap in the bud, shall we? A summary is in order…

A years-long combination of self-abuse and the well documented failings of what passes for health care in this country reduced my ability to absorb oxygen to less than half that of a normal person. I managed to wreck a car after falling asleep at the wheel, stuffing myself beneath an 18-wheeler. I opened the door and walked away with a quarter sized bruise on my shoulder. Five days later, I became incoherent, was rushed to a hospital, and went into pulmonary arrest. I don’t remember most of it thank God. I awoke two days later intubated. When they yanked out the tube (something I do not wish on any of you) I was informed that miraculously, there was no damage to my heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, etc., that I had in fact stepped out of the way of another bullet.

There are the basics.

At some point, I want to talk about how a constitutionally vigorous physically tough person who has been an outdoorsman throughout his adult life gets to weigh nearly 400 pounds. Not now. The story is surprisingly complex, and is woven warp-and-weft with how we understand love and how we see ourselves. For now, just know that however you see yourself and your place in this world, you are at least partially deceived: maybe a whole lot. Examination is always worthwhile. Be careful.

Here is the real heart of this week’s story. My room filled with people who loved me. My text list and social media filled with messages that astonished me. My phone rang off the hook. People said things to me that moved me to tears. My family and friends entered my house, cleaned it, and prepared it in every way for my return. Kindnesses large and small rained on me, and they have not stopped yet. I remain humbled, bewildered, deeply and profoundly thankful.

As we enter the end-of-the-year festivities, I have something to tell you. I know now, in ways I did not ever fully comprehend, that I am beloved. I will not ever forget it. I hope you are too.

It is my intention to try to stick around and pay back what I owe for as long as I can. This is easier said than done, but I have a hard head and some experience in these matters. I also have many shoulders to lean on. Wish me luck.

Merry…Happy…

399

Conference

I’m in Philly, attending and helping to run Forum 2014

I’d like to convey a few mostly unrelated generalities, and then turn to the subject of why we hold and attend professional conferences. First those generalities…

- Philly is a lot younger, hipper, cleaner, and more energized than it was let’s say a decade ago, when I last spent any substantial time here.

- If anyone should ever ask you to organize and run a substantial professional conference, the right answer is “no thank you”. All other answers are incorrect.

- It is gratifying to be in a city with good public transportation.

- Kids in their 20’s can drink a good deal of whiskey, get up into all kinds of mischief until the wee hours, and still show up for work at 7:30 looking refreshed and happy.

- No matter how carefully scripted and planned, large conferences generate heaping doses of entropy. One must adapt or be broken on the wheel.

- Preservationists are a wine crowd, archaeologists a beer crowd.

- “I’m so sorry, may I get you a cup of coffee?” can be a euphemism for “I wish you’d stop yelling at me, I don’t think you’re smart enough to find your own backside…with both hands…in the shower.”

These gatherings are useful because they allow you to talk with and listen to smart and exceptional people. That includes brilliant and famous practitioners at the very top of their game, and also those just starting out. I watched a young friend stand tall and do a brilliant and brave public presentation just a scant couple months after a heartbreaking death in her family. I was pressed into moderating a session for young scholars and professionals; a series of papers by students in their 20’s. They blew me away! It’s gratifying to know that old greybacks like me will be handing over the keys to people with so much talent, energy and smarts. I listened to an old friend weave a magical tale about a silver dollar her father carried through 60 years of war, work, and family to his deathbed. Her dad got the coin from his dad. She carries it now. It moved me literally to tears, and it illustrated with great clarity how a small object can connect us across time and miles to other lives and to the taproots of our own heritage.

These things will go home with me. They’ll inform my work and they’ll help me give my best to my job. I have the honor of helping my fellow citizens remember and care for their past. There are days when it’s just a job, but in fact what I do for a living is important and useful. It’s just that it’s easy to forget that without periodic reminders.

Lovely Reed Redux

All I see are the imperfections.

The finish has some runs and is uneven in places. Some of the silk wraps aren’t tight enough. There is a glue line visible where I had to replace a cork ring, a result of boogering-up a $75.00 reelseat. It’s not a rod I could sell or even gift, but it is my first cane rod.

It’s an 8’ 2 piece, 2 tip, 6 weight rod built on one of Jim Payne’s tapers. I haven’t fished it yet, but I’ve cast it. It has decent to very good touch with a WF line up close, and is a real cannon for distance casting, with an exceptionally smooth action evidencing little vibration or wobble. It will be a fabulous rod for smallmouth and larger trout streams.

Most importantly, and with great thanks to George Maxwell, I had a big hand in building it. I made innumerable mistakes and learned from all of them. I kept notes. I bought and made and otherwise acquired new tools. Now I have strips for the second tip to plane. I already know what I’m going to do different and better.

I can’t freekin wait!

And one of these days, this snow is going to melt around here. Then there will be stoneflies, and I’m going to take this rod and go see about them. Stay tuned…

Spindrift

It is snowing again. It has been a winter of single digit cold, fast moving clippers of snow and freezing rain, followed by blasts of arctic air. It has not been above freezing for more than a day here and there in a couple months. And now, a day before Saint Valentine’s Day, in what is late winter in the Mid Atlantic, a foot or so of snow.

People are getting crabby. Back when I lived in Montana, they called this dark-and-cold-induced malaise the “shack nasties”, and people died of it. Some years you’d pick up the paper in March and read about the ranch wife who solved the problem of her husband absent mindedly whistling “Camp Town Races” off key and under his breath literally all day for three months. She buried the kindling axe in his noggin over Cheerios and coffee at the breakfast table. It being too cold to dig a hole, the sheriff found him stacked neatly in the wood shed, next to the kindling.

Doo-Dah, Doo-Dah

While nothing quite so awful seems likely here, the weather is having its effects.

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Cookie, my English Setter, is a bird dog’s bird dog, from a proud lineage. His dignity is important to him. I put him out in the yard this morning, and then started coffee. Presently, I went to the back door to check on him to find him maybe 10 feet from the door immobile and glaring at me with the most baleful expression imaginable. His long legs notwithstanding, this is the deepest drift he has ever encountered, and his you-know-what is dragging in the snow. His hateful grimace conveys that this will never do, and further, that it is somehow my fault. He refuses to relieve himself or to come in until I get a shovel and clear a large enough place for his necessaries. After his ablutions are complete, he returns to his bed and will not look at me all day.

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I spent much of my morning completing and then varnishing the meticulous silk wraps that bind the guides to my cane fly rod, the first one I’ve built myself. This is painstaking, silent, disciplined and indoor work. It’s the antidote. As the storm beats on the window, and the snowplow entombs my little house behind a glacier, the wraps slowly wind on against each other, and the varnish transforms them to a deep translucent emerald tipped with fiery orange. The concentration and attention to detail entrance me, and I depart the storm for a soft green stream bank in early spring.

When I reach that stream, I will have with me a dozen or so freshly tied wetflies with bodies of bright green peacock and dark soft hackle collars. This is a simple and ancient pattern for the little stonefly so effective that the trout will chew them to pieces. They’ll be attached to a hand built leader that I’ll construct over the coming weekend when more snow and single digit temperatures are predicted. Even as I shove more wood in the stove, and prepare to start digging myself out again, the silk wraps and the wetflies confirm for me that death always yields to new life. The snow is water, and will soon enough fill the banks of streams. There will be green grass, and warm breezes, and the rings of feeding trout. The stoneflies will be hatching on the Letort before St Patrick’s Day, and I will be there to meet them, with this beautiful rod in my hand.

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It takes about 3 hours to shovel myself out. I learned how to do this from my grandfather, Giuseppe. When I knew him he was old, and deeply arthritic, and he moved slowly with his shovel, a narrow, metal flat shovel with a long handle. Younger men in my family laughed at him, at least initially. The measured pace made it possible for him to work for what seemed like forever, long after the younger folks went in for a lunch break. Half way up my mother’s long driveway, he’d stop for a large mug of very sweet tea, then he’d go back out again 20 minutes later. He would finish at the street, then start the sidewalks. He was in his 80’s.

When he was a young man, working for the Pennsylvania Railroad, he led gangs of men who hand cleared excess snow from the Rockville Bridge. The bridge is the longest stone arch structure in the world and is over a mile long. It is open to the north wind along its entire length. He learned from it. Specifically he learned that winter yields to pace, patience and determination, with occasional mugs of hot sweet tea.

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Back in the 80’s I was living in the little town of Libby Montana. Libby is in the northwest corner of the state, hard by the Idaho panhandle. For Montana, its climate is mild and pretty wet, in some ways more Pacific Northwest than Intermountain. Sometimes the big Pacific storms make it over the Cascades and arrive in the Purcells and Cabinets full of water.

One Friday, on Valentines weekend, the sky became so dark that the streetlights came on at about 3:00 PM. It began to snow. There was not a breath of wind. The snow came down in a perfectly vertical torrent, and piled up at a rate of several inches an hour. It snowed like that, without a pause, until Sunday afternoon, leaving in its wake about 50 inches of snow (in town…God knows what it left in the mountains). The storm paralyzed Lincoln County, which has lots of snow plows and is used to big storms. My neighbor’s snow blower threw snow against my house, and the resulting vibration dislodged a chunk of snow the size of a Cadillac which landed on him, knocking him unconscious. It took me until Tuesday to completely excavate my car. Late in the following November came the storm’s most significant result, as tiny Lincoln County hospital was overrun with babies. Babies occupied every cradle and crib, and were even placed in dresser drawers and bassinets lined with blankets.

When I read about the baby boom in the paper, I recalled that my own birthday is in late October. I too may be a child who arrived on a cloud of cold white fire. This pleased me no end.

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The snow picked up again just as I finished shoveling, lowering the ceiling of visibility to treetop level, and beginning to undo all my hard labor. I stood still, breathing hard, leaning on my shovel and letting the large wet flakes kiss me. I heard the geese long before the large V appeared low, right over me, in full cry. There must have been fifty of them. I noted with satisfaction that they were pointed into the weather. Appearances to the contrary, they know that spring is behind them, so they push on into the clouds.

Iron

Note: This post is a sketch of a topic I hope to cover in more detail in a feature-length story. Stay tuned…

One of my oldest friends is the blacksmith Shel Browder. Shel retired a couple years ago from a long career at Colonial Williamsburg, and now does freelance work for a number of individual and institutional clients. Now blacksmithing is an even smaller profession than, say, archaeology…they ALL know each other, so it’s not too surprising that Shel connected with Lee Sauder. Lee is a well known smith and sculptor from southwestern Virginia, and he’s also one of the country’s real experts in the pre-industrial manufacture of iron. At last weekend’s project at the Virginia Museum of Frontier Culture in Staunton , Lee, Shel, Chris Furr the Museum's staff blacksmith, and a few Museum staff and volunteers helped resurrect the craft of bloomery iron.

Blast furnaces, such as those that operated at Pennsylvania’s Cornwall or Carlisle works or many other places in 18th century America, could produce iron continuously (i.e. remain in blast) for months, the liquefied iron pouring from taps at the base of the furnace into prepared sand molds, and hardening into solid bars called “pigs” (i.e. pig iron). Blast furnaces didn’t appear in Europe or anywhere else much before the 16th century. Prior to that, all the way back to the dawn of the Iron Age in Europe, Africa and Asia, iron was made in bloomery furnaces. These small furnaces persisted for centuries after blast technology appeared, and were likely employed in the earliest American colonies during the 17th century, and in out-of-the-way places worldwide.

Typically, these are small chimneys fashioned from clay, and equipped with a bellows. Equal weights of charcoal and roasted iron ore are fed into the top in incremental and alternating layers, and silica impurities (AKA slag) and molten but not-quite-liquid iron (a bloom) appear at the bottom. The process appears deceptively simple, but in fact is fraught with complexities not easily solved since the real experts have been gone for centuries. The scale also seems very limited, until one considers that the armories and all the tools of three continents were amply supplied by these small pre-industrial workhorses for centuries.

Lee has thrown himself at this process. He has read everything there is to read, talked with archaeologists, metallurgists, and other smiths, and even traveled to Africa to work with smiths who are trying to reconstruct their ancestor’s methods from traditions that may not have died out there until the 1950’s. He has failed spectacularly many times, but he has learned from all of them. He and Shel were kind enough to invite me down to observe last weekend’s demonstration (Lee’s 167th ) and I took some photos and video that will hopefully explain the basics of this nearly vanished industry.

Friday the 18th: Building and Hardening the Furnace

The furnace is constructed of clay tempered with sand and coiled around a wooden form. Each course of clay is bound with twine to help delay slumping and keep it generally in place.

Building the Furnace

When it’s complete, a perforation for the tuyere (a copper tube that will carry air into the furnace) and the mouth of the furnace are scribed in the wet clay, as is a small perforation near the top. Lee learned to put in this perforation from his African friends who explained that it was put there “so God can see”. When Lee asked if it was so God could see out or in, they looked at him like he was a stupid and crazy American (which, he opined, might have been true). A small fire is then built around the outside of the furnace, drying the clay a bit, and helping to keep it from slumping. The mouth of the furnace is then cut open, and the fire is introduced into the interior where it consumes the wooden form. After several hours of burning, the clay is hard enough to begin its life as a furnace.

Completed Furnace

Burning and Hardening the Exterior

Opening the Base and Burning the Interior

Burning and Hardening Friday Night

Mouth of the Furnace

Saturday the 19th : The Bloom

In the morning, preparations are made to actually smelt the iron. The bellows, in our case an electric blower that connects to a copper tuyere, is set in its receptacle at the proper angle. A hand operated bellows can be used, but once the 5 hour long smelt begins, it can never stop pumping or the tuyere will melt. A team of many bellows operators, or a water powered wheel, would be necessary. A preheating fire is kindled, and the mouth of the furnace is sealed with a clay patch. The patch is built in sections that can be removed in sections, first at the very bottom to drain off the slag, and later the rest will be removed to extract the ball of hot iron or bloom.

Setting the Tuyere

After preheating for an hour or so, the process begins. Alternating additions of wood charcoal and roasted iron ore are added at the top of the furnace. The ore is from a local source near Lee’s home, and it’s simply roasted in a wood fire to drive off excess water and make it easier to break into smaller fragments to facilitate melting. Lee also makes his own charcoal in a home-made contraption that, apparently, used to be a dumpster! Equal weights of ore and charcoal (I forget how much) are used in the smelt.

Charcoal

Roasted Iron Ore

The smelt proceeds for five hours or so. The internal temperature of the furnace reaches approximately 2800 degrees Fahrenheit! It sounds like a rocket ship. Longitudinal cracks appear releasing flames and hot gasses, but it holds together, and in fact, can be reused several times.

At about four hours, Lee breaks out the base of the mouth and hot slag pours out and puddles in front of the furnace. The slag is mostly silica with some iron and other inclusions. It flows around and puddles beneath the bloom now formed in the base of the furnace. Apparently there was so much bloomery slag laying around parts of Italy from Roman times, that Mussolini mined it and used it to produce iron and steel in modern blast furnaces during the Second World War. 

Preheating

Charging the Furnace

In Full Blast

Tapping the Slag

At about 5 hours all the ore and charcoal have been added, and the bloom is ready to extract.

Once out of the furnace, the roughly 20 lb bloom is carried to a nearby wet section of log for hammering and consolidation. The log is used because the red hot iron will burn its way into the wood creating a cradle for itself, making it much safer to hammer than it would be on a flat anvil. The hammering consolidates and aligns the bloom, and also eliminates some impurities.

  It’s then cut with an axe and hammers, and the smaller pieces can be reheated in a forge, and hammered into bars on an anvil.

These bars were what a bloomsmith produced and sold to blacksmiths, armorers, and other craftsmen, who then forged them into a variety of good and useful things.




Many thanks to Lee, Shel, and the good folks at the Virginia Frontier Culture Museum for allowing me the privilege of seeing one of the world’s oldest crafts preserved for the future!