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appreciating a stool
Sunday, May 25 2008
When I was a kid, my father went through a phase similar to the one I've been going through recently. He was trying to be self-sufficient by growing lots of different crops in the garden, harvesting firewood, and making his own repairs and building his own useful artifacts. He generally contracted the trickier things to professionals, particularly electrical work, plumbing, and car maintenance. With regard to the plumbing system, this made sense: it was unusually complicated, with three parallel systems (hot cistern water, cold cistern water, and stream water), a roof-and-gutter water gathering system for the cistern, and even an elevated septic field requiring a "shit pump." But for the most part my father's decisions regarding what to contract-out were based on his Luddite inclinations. He didn't want to have to use power tools, or to maintain a kit of specialized tools.
A generation removed, I am no Luddite, though I do have an interest in the accounting of the energy expenditures associated with the decisions I make. I have no problem with power tools or specialized tools, since they have enabled me to single-handedly do many of the things I would have otherwise had to raise a family of helpers to achieve, something that would figure poorly in the thermodynamic accounting of my life (indeed, it's fair to add half the impact of my non-Luddite life to my father's accounting, Luddite though it was).
The earliest artifacts my father built included a saw buck, a couple of wooden hay rakes, and a pair of beautifully-crude Black Walnut foot stools. It's difficult to put a figure on the value of a foot stool, but I know that the ones my father made have had many years of use yet are essentially unchanged from the day they were made. They're nothing more than four long walnut pegs stuck in the corners of a thick slab of bloodclot-colored walnut heartwood. They have been sat upon thousands of times, had feet rested on them just as often, and served as both expedient work benches and temporary storage solutions. My father was always very proud of them, and only today did I realize quite why.
Today, you see, I built a stool of my own. I used dimensional framing lumber as the raw material and power tools as assistants, but the idea was the same. I needed a stool to keep in the boiler room to give me access to the many things that are near its ceiling, and I was tired of relying on either a chair borrowed from Gretchen's library or a low step ladder that I normally keep on the solar deck. In the end I had a perfectly-stable little stool that was so simple and appropriate that it made me want to make another. Indeed, Gretchen was a little sad that it was destined to live out the rest of its days in the boiler room, which is the closest thing in our house to a dungeon.
The bench I made today, already in its boiler room habitat between the antifreeze supply and the boiler.
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