Читать книгу From Tree to Table - Alan Garbers - Страница 7

There are many reasons why folks love rustic and log furniture.

For some of us, the deep earthy colors of a hickory chair or table is a visual reminder of a family vacation to the wilderness of the Northwoods, of the wild open western United States, of one of the many gorgeous National Park lodges, like those at the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, or Yosemite. If you paid attention, you’d recognize the familiar basket-weave pattern of hickory used by Old Hickory Furniture. Old Hickory Furniture was manufactured in Martinsville, Indiana, for generations, and Martinsville has been my home for over two decades.

Others may have fallen in love with a piece of locally handcrafted furniture while at a remote hunting or fishing lodge. I think about the clatter of golden aspen leaves in a light breeze while hunting up north when I think about rustic settings. I think of our adventures in the mountains in Arizona, or of bear hunting and muskie fishing in Canada every time I use a piece of aspen.

Some may want to commemorate an old house, shed, or barn from a family homestead by using recycled material from them. For example, I have a bookshelf I made from wood I had been squirreling away from various locations in which we lived over the decades. Some of the wood came from an old shed on a ranch we lived on in Mancos, Colorado. I had used the shed as a blind when hunting for mule deer.

Some of the weathered planks came from an old dump near Hillside, Arizona, that I scavenged from as I drove back and forth from Prescott to a large copper mine in the middle of nowhere.

This bookshelf is a visual compilation of my woodworking life. Pieces of it came from shed, barns, and dumps in Colorado, Arizona, and Indiana. The back is rusted corrugated roofing.

Other boards came from an old shed that I used to make maple syrup in here in Indiana. Along with spending hundreds of hours boiling down syrup, I also learned to play guitar while tending the fire under the evaporator in that shed.

The back is rusted brown corrugated sheet metal from an old hog shed that was tumbling down at another place where we lived, where deer and turkey walked through our yard and coyotes serenaded us at night.

I’d intended to give the bookshelf away, but as I built it, and pulled piece after piece down out of the storage in the rafters, I realized I was making a visual reminder of all the places I had fond memories of. The bookcase was a piece of me, and I of it. I realized I couldn’t part with it. The bookcase sits next to me now as I write this.