hunting

got to spend most of the day in the studio today. Beautiful. My hands are dry from the dust that is particular to Southern Heart Pine. It makes a dust that is at once wet and pitchy and at the same time dry with the dryness of a hundred years or more spent in a building. And it smells just like heaven.

Being that I came up in theater, most of the wood that I used for eighteen years was pine. It has a sweet, sharp smell when you cut it that is irrevocably the smell of making things for me. It is the smell of being sixteen and wearing all black and dangling my keys off of a carabiner as I strutted around backstage in combat boots. It is the smell that mingled with the smell of the perfume that my first girlfriend wore. It is the smell of the first set I designed at sixteen.

Powerfully loaded smell.

So as I was milling some of it this morning, I was wrapped in a smell that felt so old and so comforting that I couldn't help smiling. There is an undercurrent to the smell that is also the smell of the history of the lumber, too. Like a wine, really. A lot of notes, a lot of layers, and it is my job to work with this stuff. Magic.

And it is southern heart pine. Sent up north with the cotton the slaves picked down where I grew up. The Northern Industrial Complex was built on the backs of slave labor, as I like to remind Yankees who try to tell me that their side was blameless in the importation, exploitation, and massacer of so many Africans. The mills that these beams came from would not have been needed had not the Southern plantations produced so much cotton that something had to be done with it.

So the smell of the lumber milling and the feel of this hard (harder than maple), pitchy, sharp lumber in my hands sends me on all of these flights, taking me to my own youth, so recent, and to the history of this lumbering, wonderful, terrible country.

Wood is so magical.

These discarded beams will be a conference table around which artists from all over the country and all over the world will sit and dream up new plans and new concoctions and new solutions. Rather than rotting in a landfill, this lumber, which smells simultaneously of a first kiss in a high school auditorium and a ship creaking her way up on the Gulf stream a hundred and fifty years ago to bring it to Rhode Island, will have a slightly longer life. It is too solid and too stable not to keep being used.

This tree was likely felled by hand. Two men and a long saw brought it down, and a water (probably) powered sawmill reduced it to boards, long before Edison had figured out how to harness electricity, and long before that electricity had been worked into power tools. I am releasing cells in this tree that have not seen fresh air since well before young boys donned blue and grey and went out to shoot at each other. This lumber was already long-seasoned when Armstrong climbed down his ladder on another planet.

My hands are dry with the dust from milling this piece of lumber. I can still taste it in the back of my throat. I am incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to ask it to live a little longer. I love being in the studio and working with this stuff, listening close to try to catch what it is saying to me, coaxing it into new shapes so that it can continue to tell its story to a new set of people.