Recycling

From Menletter February 2005

By Tim Baehr

The table, about seven by four feet, sat in a sunny room. It was made from pumpkin pine, the reddish heartwood of old-growth pine of the eastern US. As the sun splashed along one corner of the table, the wood began to glow with highlights of red and auburn and yellow. Planing and sanding had not taken away all the roughness of the grain. Although the surface was smooth to the touch, it was also irregular with knots and swirls and saw marks.

The boards for this table were once part of a floor, possibly in a barn, built a hundred years ago or so. The woodworker, Michael Perkins, specializes in recycling old lumber into useful furniture. His love of wood, and of his craft, seemed to rise up shining from the wood and blend with the golden morning sun. Although Perkins's craftsmanship is extremely good - the table is strong and true, with carefully glued joints and a clever way of mounting the top with wooden cleats - he does not try to hide the wood's imperfections. One of the four boards still has square holes where the square-headed nails had secured it to the subfloor. (Perkins will sometimes fill these holes if the table is destined for a family whose kids are likely to mash peas into them; generally, though, he leaves them as they are.) Another board has a small streak of yellow paint embedded in the grain.

As I was appreciating the rough beauty of this table, I began to wonder where the boards had been in their first practical application. Who walked on these floorboards? What abuse had the boards endured from heavy boots, animal hooves, weathering, winters, summers, and more? "Abuse" is a harsh word, and in using it I risk personifying the wood as somehow suffering. After all, the wood had just sat there over the decades, being wood.

One word used by workers in recycled building materials is "salvage." This wood was salvaged, or saved, from a landfill or fire so that it could continue serving a useful life.

Serving a useful life. Oops - I'm personifying again. So let's get personal.

My imagination carried me further as I looked at this table, and I began to wonder about the table as a metaphor for life. At some point we men are put into useful service for our families and society. Sometimes we're the solid floor or foundation on which families and society rest. And we're walked on, stomped on, hammered. Not necessarily by society or our families, but just by life. We get sick. We work too hard. We fail at some things, succeed at others. Mostly, we're supposed to lie there, like a floor, and be level. We just have to take what comes.

We get dusty. We get scraped. We get gouged. Life pokes holes in us. People and animals walk on us - or worse. And a time comes when we are ready to be cast aside.

Or recycled. Salvaged. Saved. Enter our personal, inner Michael Perkins.

Let's look at what Perkins does in converting floorboards to a work of art. He doesn't scrub off all traces of their former life. He offers color, a soft glow, a fitting together of various pieces. Rough spots become smooth. Ugly imperfections become beautiful. The wood rises above ground level and gains a new purpose.

I feel that the difficult, perhaps ugly parts of my life are constantly being recycled. Boyhood shyness and fearfulness. The enforced ordinariness of growing up in small-town Midwest. Failures at work and marriage. Difficulties with health. Prejudices and biases that have at times blinded me to the worth of others. Occasional stone-heartedness. All of these, and more, can become transformed over a long time. The psychic knots and nail holes, the scratches and dents, the coarse grain are all there, being worn smooth, polished, finding new purposes. I begin to feel more salvaged than savaged.

The wood's still in the shop, being worked on, on the way to becoming a work of art. The progress is slow, but every once in a while I think I can feel the smoothness, see the glow.

Time will tell.