More on Wood and Men

Blowing the sweat-lodge fire to life at Ironwood Hollow

In my last post I speculated about some kind of workshop that would bring men and boys together to learn/share/grow in their experience with wood. I don't think gender is a defining point in this, but my own experience is based in being first a boy and then a man, so that's coloring my thinking. After I wrote that piece, I found this photo in my camera, and there's so much in it. Please allow me to ramble.

On its face, what's happening is that the boys have decided to build a sweat-lodge. They found saplings that they could bend into shape, hunted down an assortment of tarps, old blankets, and plastic sheeting, and scoured the area for rocks to build a fire-pit. In the picture they are nursing a fire to life, to heat rocks and see if their sweat-lodge can be made sweaty and smoky. Right there, just that, is the kind of thing that I know in my heart is more good for them than a thousand hours of TV or computer time.

My own personal overlay of this picture adds so much more. That hammock in the foreground? I put that up last summer, thinking that, with my Honey and the kids moving in, I would surely need to wander out there with a frosty beer and a good book more than once in a while. You know...still my mind, commune with nature, let the kid-thing fade for a few minutes a week...

I've lain on that hammock exactly twice. For no more than ten minutes each time. The reason I bring it up is that the reason is so great; I don't ever have the impulse to go hide from this new life of having the house filled with my Honey and the kids. If I'm out there lost in a book, pretending there isn't a handful of lives closely connected to mine within a frisbee-throw, then I'm missing so much that is incredibly important. Those kids will grow up and move out into their own lives before we know it, and while they are here, I'm not going to miss it! Also, back to the picture, I find a sweetness in the way the boys thought that right next to my getaway hammock would be a great place for their sweatlodge. How cool is that?

Okay, there are even more layers to why this is such a rich photo. Just to the right, out of the frame, is where I have my shrine to the spirits of place, the magical energy that is unique to our little patch of forest. When I made it, years ago, I envisioned a life before me of settling quietly into an increasingly solitary life, mellowing under the aging trees that I know well, fondly remembering my youth of climbing those trees...I'm reaching for, and can't find to my satisfaction, the words to express how incredible it is to me that I had that vision all wrong. That saplings growing under the protection of my limbs would grow right there, reaching for the sun, that another generation of boys would scrape their knuckles wrestling chunks of stone out of the ground and dragging logs around, finding a niche of their own in the forest that provided my own growing-up space not so long ago. The spirits of this place have new ears to whisper into.

The more I realize how insidious the influence of technology in our lives has become, the more I want to listen to the trees, the soil, and my own heart, the more convinced I am that "Go out and play" may have been the wisest thing our parents ever said to us. Let's say it more often, to our kids and to ourselves.

Men and Wood

If you have been reading right along, you already know that I have an affinity for wood. Trees are metaphor-rich, and I love metaphors. Some of my best childhood memories are about wood, from watching Dad build first a gunning float, and then a sailing dory, in our suburban basement when I was little, to building my teenage muscle by carrying anything I could of the trees he cut down for firewood, to earning minimum wage splitting enormous elm trunks by hand during one long and memorable summer. The memories are many, and powerful. 

Half your wood, and half your hay...

This winter, having a newly-enlarged family in the house, We've been going through more firewood, and that means cutting more firewood. That work has been lightened by having boys to help, and I am so very conscious that this work is my chance to help them gain similar memories, metaphors, and strengths of their own. Just as I remember my father teaching me how to spot cherry in a woodpile by the orange color of the heartwood as it seasons, how to measure out four feet quickly by waving the chainsaw over the log a certain way, how to bring down a snagged tree safely, I hope they remember decades from now these days of learning some of the same "guy-stuff" knowledge.

Don't get me wrong; I'm all on board with women doing heavy lifting and using power tools. It's just that working with wood is one of those few remaining arenas where men can almost always find common ground and a sense of shared humanity. In the last week three different men have stalled at the store, clearly not wanting to get back to their work or errands, because we got to talking about wood. Just today I spent a full hour talking about thermal mass, drafts, recirculating masonry-stove heat, and the relative merits of pellet stoves, with a man who obviously was thrilled to talk shop with another guy. Last Friday I spent a similar hour with a man who shares an interest in music with me, but who had never stayed so long to talk about guitars even though he is in the store nearly every week.

An ironwood sprig on the woodshed when it was new.

Last summer I spent one day with friends helping them cut and carry cedar logs for their planned cordwood masonry building project. It was gasping, back-wrenching, sweat-soaking work, and I felt like a dishrag afterward. But those few hours of grinning at each other through the flying wood-chips and mixed-gas smoke, joking while carrying logs too big to be exactly good for our backs, conferring about which way to drop a particularly tricky tree, all brought Ben and me much closer than we had been before. I eagerly await a next time, even as hard a day as that was. 

I wonder if there's something to the idea of a wood-centered workshop for men and boys, where those who know, share what they know, and those who are new to tools, trees, even to varieties of wood, can learn, and build their connection to nature and to their own manliness, which is really just one of the kinds of humanity if you think about it. Cut down a few trees, learn what it is to carry a tree-length log through the woods, get the smell of bar-and-chain oil in your hair, split a bit of firewood by hand, learn to identify the most common trees in your area, and then bask in the afterglow of all that work, leaning on the result of your work, still talking wood, trees, and stoves with the guys.