Books to Consider. . . (Part 1)
Contractors, long-haul moving truckers, bark canoes and poetic carvers
One of the goals of our project here at The Savage Collective is to review and promote books we find relevant and interesting, books that have touched our lives in some way. While this current selection is far from exhaustive, we hope to put a few important writers on your radar that you may have missed up to this point. We will continue to do more in-depth reviews in the future and would love if you left any more recommendations in the comments. Today’s books are largely focused on the trades and the value of practical work. A few more parts to follow. . .
In his book Making Things Right, the Norwegian master carpenter Ole Thorstensen discusses the experience of running a one man carpentry firm. “My company is a one-man business,” writes Thorstensen. “There is no clear distinction between my private and professional life. I am in physical contact with the tools and materials I use and am likewise bound to the finances and consequences of my labor.” Thorstensen traces the process he goes through to complete a loft conversion for a family in Oslo including all the official paperwork, bidding the job, correspondence with architect and inspectors, all the way through to the finished product. But this process is messy—something people who are detached from the actual work often fail to understand. “We shield ourselves from noise and dirt, and our attitude toward practical work is another example of this distance,” laments Thorstensen. “We do not want dirty work; we want a simple and cheap end product.”
Thorstensen also discusses differences in the way that tradesman and among academic types understand the nature of work. “Whenever I have cause to carry out practical work with academic types, the divergence in working practice is made clear to me. It seems as if they are trained in a culture of debate where the outcome, the conclusion, does not weigh as heavily.” For Thorstensen, no matter how many drawings or plans are drafted up away from the job site, at the end of the day the work has to get done and that involves a lot of thinking on the fly, reckoning with the unexpected and making mistakes. This is all part of what it means to be a tradesman. “The most important thing experience teaches you is that you have deficiencies, holes in your knowledge. . .Making mistakes is the best way to learn about what you do not know, what you are not capable of. Through mistakes you learn how important it is to understand what you are doing.”
At the end of the day, while millennia might separate tradesman, many tools have been used forever and are still in use today. Thorstensen notes his mason friend Johannes who works with the same tools they used to build the Tower of Babel: a stonemason’s hammer and plumb bob. Even in fields in which tools have changed considerably, “our most basic tools are the same: our bodies.”
Thorstensen’s account of the working life of a modern day carpenter in Norway is a great account of a master tradesman who values building beautiful and robust structures in the midst of a throwaway society. In the midst of cheap goods and craftsmanship, “I am glad. . .I represent the other side,” Thorstensen writes, “an alternative with an understandable, intrinsic value.”
You don’t have to stick to the mechanical arts of carpentry and homebuilding to hear a similar account of the quality of modern labor, however. In The Long Haul, over-the-road truck driver and professional mover, Finn Murphy, traces the story of his working life and the changes he has seen in the trucking and moving industries over the last several decades. Murphy begins by charting his path as a “gas jockey”, pumping fuel as a gas station attendant, to his foray into the wild world of movers. “My eighteenth birthday was May 22nd, 1976,” writes Murphy. “That afternoon, after school, I walked into Callahan Bros. office, filled out an application, and was hired.” This began his long and arduous journey into moving and trucking.
We often hear that our nations lack people who really want to work. However, many young adults lacked the opportunity at a young age to even attempt heavy work. Murphy was fortunate to have that chance. Murphy recalls his first days in the moving trade as an almost zen experience: “I discovered that moving suited me perfectly because I could lose myself inside the work. Many young male neurotics find out early that hard labor is salve for an overactive mind. . .Running up and down staircases for hours on end, carrying dressers and refrigerators and pianos, was to me a relief from stress.” I wonder how many younger guys would say the same thing today if they tried their hand at some heavy lifting.
In the midst of his story, Murphy reminds us the practical worthlessness of many of our material things. He argues that moving all this junk for a living makes movers allergic to forming collections or growing sentimental attachments to objects. “After more than three thousand moves I know that everyone has almost the exact same stuff and I certainly know where it’s all going to end up. It’s going to end up in a yard sale or in a dumpster. . .This is not anecdotal. I know because I’m the guy who puts it all into the dumpster.” I can’t think of a more front row seat to our modern consumerism than that of a professional mover.
Murphy also has an interesting critique on modern laborers in the US. He recounts memories of being able to find movers in almost every town he visited across the country. A day or two of work and cash pay could still entice. Today, however, workers are harder to find and if you do find them, they’re probably not from here. “One place you won’t find poor whites anymore is on a moving truck,” writes Murphy. “Nowadays most moving is done by Hispanics. . .The simple truth is, your latter-day Hispanic laborer, wallowing in the refuse-laden cesspit that constitutes the dregs of the American Dream is more dependable, works harder, and is more truth-worthy than man native-born Anglos. . .You’ve pretty much reached the muddy, filth-strewn, windblown end of the American cesspit when you can’t find a white guy who can amass the rudimentary requirements needed to be hired as a local mover.”
There are many more stories and anecdotes than I could begin to touch on here but if you have ever wondered what a long haul trucker’s life was like, let alone a professional mover, this book is for you.
The Survival of the Bark Canoe was one of those random books I can never remember how I ended up with, but it was well worth the $3 spent. In this book, first published in 1975, author John McPhee follows canoe builder and carver Henri Vaillancourt to observe the amazing art of crafting a birch bark canoe, a skill even only practices by three or four people in the world at that time. “With a singleness of purpose that defeats distraction, Henri Vaillancourt has appointed himself the keeper of this art. He has visited almost all other living bark-canoe makers, and he has learned certain things from the Indians. He has returned home believing, though, that he is the most skilled of them all.” Vaillancourt is almost entirely self taught in his trade, mainly using books, diagrams and trial and error. It’s a long process. He makes only seven canoes a year. Once they leave his shop, he often travels to see how they are doing and is pleased to get one back for repair so he can touch it up or repair it.
Before discovering this book, I knew next to nothing about bark canoes but in learning more about them, I was blow away by how amazing they really are, even when compared to canoes built from modern materials. Vaillancourt once made a nine-foot canoe that weighed only twenty pounds for a woman in New Jersey who wanted to use it for hunting . Not everything that is new is better. “Bark canoes were actually so strong and flexible that Indians had used them not only in heavy rapids but also on the ocean.” Vaillancourt does not recommend taking a bark canoe in the white water, however. Not for the sake of the people in the boat but for the sake of the canoe: “I fully trust the canoes to go down white water. I don’t trust the people who are paddling them. Bark canoes are so rare. There’s no sense in wrecking even one.”
McPhee follows Vaillancourt into the woods and on a canoe trip to gather supplies and see his methods. It’s a fascinating journey through deep Maine wilderness as McPhee learns more about the art of building a birch bark canoe as well as the lives of the native peoples expert in this craft. Perhaps most fascinating, however, is that the final part of the book is dedicated to an Edwin Tappan Adney who lived in the late 1800’s and died the year Vaillancourt was born (1950). It was Adney who built a birch bark canoe with a Malecite native person and came to deeply document the variety of techniques and styles among the different native peoples. Almost all of this record was left unpublished by the time Adney died but in 1964, the Smithsonian Institution published Adney’s work in a volume entitled The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. This book “became Henri Vaillancourt’s vocational college,” writes McPhee.
Vaillancourt has given his life to this work and is still building these canoes today. You can even send him a letter if you would like:
PO Box 142
Greenville, New Hampshire, 03048
In The Lost Carving, woodcarver David Esterly recounts his year spent at Hampton Court Palace in Britain replacing a woodcarving by the great Grinling Gibbons. The carving had been destroyed in a fire. Much like Henri Vaillancourt, who learned from books and photographs, Esterly writes, “I was apprenticed to a phantom, you could say, and lived among mysteries.” Having studied and replicated Gibbons work for some time, seeing Gibbons’s work first hand was an overwhelming experience for Esterly. “When I passed through that towered entrance gate and came face-to-face with Gibbon’s work, fifteen years at my workbench melted to nothing. I saw that I’d understood as a child, thought as a child, carved as a child. Then Gibbons did what masters do, even from the grave. He made me put away childish things.”
Esterly reveals his expertise not only in carving but in the English language as he often references Yeats or Plotinus or Blake or some other philosopher in the most poetic ways. He commends taking up a craft even if only for what it does to the person who is practicing it, knowing that creating is never a one-way street. “I’d always supposed, idly, that when you work with a hand tool your goal is to make the tool part of your hand, make it a part of you. Just now it felt the other way around, as if the body were being turned into part of the tool. . .my arm had become a component of the chisel. . .To carve is to be shaped by the wood even as you’re shaping it.”
Much of this work is going away as CNC (computer numerical controlled) machines take over even the carving trade. For Esterly, though, CNC pieces contain no life. “Someone once showed me a picture of an acanthus-scrolled relief panel, unmistakably produced by CAD/CAM, and asked me to carve it by hand. . .But it would have been easier to raise Lazarus. The thing had been drained of blood. It was one of the undead. And on what circle of hell would I be placing my workbench if I’d accepted?” How is a carver to carry on in this current technological sprawl? Esterly sees two options: “They can throw away their chisels and ply a new digital trade in front of a computer screen. Or they can start where the CNC machines leave off. What makes handwork inimitable is what will allow it to survive. Nothing else. . .easy rote work is gone forever.”
The Lost Carving’s subtitle is A Journey to the Heart of Making, and beyond the mere details of producing a Gibbons replica, Esterly really does take you on that journey. I found it a joy to read and it would make a worthy addition to anyone’s shelf.
This is very useful. Thanks!