Woodshop Diary

August 12, 2024

This new project is solid wood: a conductor’s podium and music stand for the symphony orchestra in a nearby city. It’s my first day back in the shop after six weeks in New England. C. gives me a hug on the way in. He shows me what I’ll be working on that day: enormous slabs of cherrywood, rough-sawn around the edges.

C.’s shop is on the smaller side: a single lot in a residential area. There’s a lot of natural light: thanks to an architect C. used to work with, the ceiling is spotted with circular skylights that magnify the sun’s light while muting its heat. Usually for carpentry jobs, I’m on a crew: between gigs as a boatbuilder and then as a house carpenter in Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, I’ve worked on teams of as few as three and as many as thirty, both in shops and out on jobsites. In C.’s shop, it’s just the two of us all day between the machines, save for deliveries of wood, or C.’s wife popping in, and breaks for coffee and lunch in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston.

I met C. through my sponsor, and though C. wasn’t in recovery, he’d lost his brother to drugs. It was immediately clear we’d get along. C. is smart and kind with equal intensity, dark-haired, in his mid-forties, a self-taught furniture maker, trained as a classical guitarist. He doesn’t dress like your stereotypical tradesman: he wears casual pants rather than double-kneed dungarees, prefers sneakers to boots. He has an eye for beauty and a brain for processes. He’s precise, exacting, like any good furniture maker must be.

A milling day for me. Four legs made of three thirteen-by-seven-inch blocks, each two and a quarter inches thick. Taking rough-cut wood and milling it down is one of the most immediately satisfying tasks in a shop: using a jointer, a thickness planer, and various saws, you take an unwieldy, shaggy slab of wood and flatten it into squared blocks of workable beauty.

In the afternoon, we draw a sketch of the rest of the stand: a roughly four-by-four-foot platform made of four legs with interior and exterior bevels, connected by four skirt pieces, and a frame-style platform for the conductor to stand on. A piece of carpeted plywood will prevent the conductor’s feet from making too much noise on the podium. We’re also building a matching music stand for the sheet music to sit on. Drawing it, we kept asking each other, Does that angle look good to you? Don’t measure: It looks good, right? Draw it and use it, C. says, with his slight Texas twang.

August 14

Before cutting angles into the glued-up legs, we need to get them trimmed and squared. Because they’re so thick, we put the big blade on the sliding table saw—the biggest I’ve ever seen. When I kick it on, I can feel a breeze coming off it.

I have to use my hand to push the glued legs past the spinning blade—I’m afraid it’s going to cut my fingers off. Fear is a funny thing in a woodshop. It’s good to be afraid, to be aware of where your hand is in relation to the blade, but being too afraid is dangerous: your grip and push need to be steady. I breathe deep and move slow, listening to the wood push through the saw. There’s thinking involved: every face of each leg will have an angle cut into it, which is a challenge because you need a flat square edge to make these cuts. It’s a sort of puzzle. I make a jig to run the blocks through the table saw, cut off one inner face, take the offcut, tape it back to where it had been removed, flip the block, and cut the other inner face at the same angle.

Meanwhile, C. works on other projects. Goes into the yard behind the shop to throw peanuts and pecans to squirrels.

August 16

A mortise and tenon is simple: negative space and positive space coming together to hold two pieces in place. A slot is cut into one piece of material, the mortise: the negative space. Then material is shaped to fit into that hole: the tenon. This is how we’re going to join the skirt pieces of the stand to its legs. C.’s shop has a mortiser, a big, powerful piece of Italian machinery, like a horizontal drill press that cuts slots in the ends of the skirts and in the faces of the legs. Once it’s set up, I can clamp each of the pieces to the table and slowly run the spinning bit into the angled end-grain of the skirts and the angled interior faces of the legs. It’s slow going. I listen to all of the Cure’s Disintegration, Charli xcx’s Brat, and Outkast’s ATLiens on my headphones.

When I put the pieces together to see if they fit, the frame of the stand holds together, a skeleton version of what it will eventually become—a moment of genuine joy. But pulling the frame apart is another story: The tenons are just a little too thick, meaning we have to sand some material off them, if we can get them out of the mortises. Though C. and I both use all the muscle we have, we still can’t get a couple of them out of one of the skirts. We spend an hour with vise grips, hammers, clamps, and compressed air, trying to wiggle and bang the tenons out of place. When we finally get it clear, C. shows me his hand. His muscles have cramped so much that his fingers are stuck in a claw.

August 19

We load up our respective pickup trucks and drive to a museum a couple blocks away to deliver the desk we built for their entryway last spring. The door to an enormous loading dock opens. There’s a freight elevator at one end, a couple of offices on the other, space for us to assemble the desk, and about a dozen crates, ranging from large to very large.

It occurs to me later that the crates are full of art, likely millions of dollars’ worth, which is why there is another man in the corridor with us, not speaking, just watching us put the desk together. It’s Monday, so the museum is closed. When we’re done, the man watching finally speaks: You two will be able to come pull this thing apart and put it back together in the other building if we can’t get it over there in one piece, right? C. and I both wait for the cracked smile or the “I’m just busting your balls” wave-off, which never comes. After a couple beats, C. says, Well sure, yeah.

August 21

The hottest day of the year. At the lumberyard, we wander between separate hangars categorized by hardwoods, softwoods, sheet woods, and exotics. Men in polos pull up in big, clean F-150s and pick what they need or ask workers wearing hoodies in the hundred-degree heat to grab things for them. We end up with wenge, a dark, exotic hardwood from south-central Africa, and a sheet of pale Russian birch plywood. Both are difficult to source ethically—the latter in particular, since the invasion of Ukraine—but they’re the only options available within our time frame.

The cherry skirts, which we’ve cut into long trapezoids, will have an inlaid wenge border. Once the inlay channels are cut, I start milling the wenge. It turns out to have bright yellow streaks, not what we were looking for: most likely an issue due to storage in the lumberyard. After a lot of head-scratching, we decide to use them anyway. We’ll just have to dye them black.

August 23

I think about my father, who died by suicide thirteen years ago this week. Wonder about how he felt in the kitchens where he worked. The stories he told over the sound of steel pounding wooden cutting boards.

August 28

I start school again this week, so I’m coming in only on Wednesdays and Fridays. I find myself missing the work, feeling disappointed returning to the shop and seeing that little things have moved forward without me moving them. C. is always careful to show me exactly what he’s done and exactly how he did it, to tell me about his failures and confusions and fuckups.

Today: lots of hand-tooling, very few machines, hand-planing, sanding. Then lots of taping and gluing. After a while, some more hand-planing and sanding. We’re making slow but important progress, fine-tuning.

Today, we talk about anger. I tell him about an old boss who threw a chop saw off a roof in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two coworkers who got into a fistfight at a client’s house after one sneezed in the other’s face. C. tells me about someone at work saying, full of rage, “Unfortunately, we’ve been lamenting the tamale situation lately.” We laugh. Somehow the conversation shifts, and I’m asking C. about how his brother died, what led to his overdose. He answers my questions, tells me the story. I explain how my father relapsed—first on booze, then on pills after a car accident—before he died. Because we’re sanding and making such fine dust, we turn off the big fans. Just the sound of high grit on hardwood and our voices.

September 4

Almost every carpenter and woodworker I’ve ever worked with was a skater at some point in their life. I don’t know if it’s because the mentality of skateboarding is similar to the one needed for working with wood: comfort in solitude and pleasure in like-minded groups, fierce perfectionism and self-criticism, a pull toward things that can hurt you, an attention to beauty and procedure. C. and I tell each other stories about slams we’ve seen and taken, talk about the up-and-coming skaters who are doing things beyond belief.

I miss Friday work to give a poetry reading in Austin. When I get back, C. tells me the conductor stand came together easily. We still have to make the music stand. Another milling day, which is a relief after the complicated cutting of the previous weeks. I find that if I miss a whole week of work, I come into the shop with a little more fear, which is probably good: I want to keep all my fingers.

Milling the cherry wood, revealing its gorgeous, watery grain, I remember my friends yelling at one another to “just commit” at the tops of ledges and three sets—back when we were young and couldn’t get hurt.

September 11

I usually zone out when C. talks about finishing: a crucial but unsexy part of woodworking. When I was building boats in coastal Maine, brushing on the coat of oil was always the least interesting part of the process to me. But when C. puts some stain samples on the cherry, he has my attention: with one coat of clear polyurethane, the shimmering grain gains even more depth and sparkle.

When he puts a piss-yellow stain on another piece, it looks horrible, comically bad, but C. tells me to trust the process. An hour later, he sprays the poly over the yellow stain. The cherry grain below pops with a greater contrast than I’d thought possible. It is gorgeous. All the weaving and waving dark grain leaping against the lighter wood, no longer yellow but a deep orange brown.

Not too much machinery running today. We talk a lot. With the gray sky, it’s hard to get going. An old teacher told me the secret to woodworking is simple: make the right line, and cut to it. It’s the kind of day when the pencil line pulls away from the ruler.

September 13

I’m working on another book of poems and a book of prose. Sometimes I feel guilty that, in the middle of a conversation or a moment of beauty in the shop, my impulse is to write it down for a story, for an image. To use it. And then I do or don’t—and I keep working.

September 18

Gluing veneer sheets to the flat plywood face is the most stressful part of a veneer job. Glue, by nature, is both tacky and slick. For the music stand, we’re using hide glue, as opposed to wood glue, because it’s more stable: the piece is less likely to warp. Hide glue is an animal product, and smells an awful lot like roadkill. Rolling it over the cherry veneer and then over the plywood clears the sinuses. It doesn’t feel unpleasant to me—sort of like sniffing Magic Markers, gasoline, or PVC primer, though without the high.

I spend the morning grain-matching thin sheets of cherry veneer, joining their edges flat, and laying them out so that, to the untrained eye, the large plywood sheet will pass for solid wood. The veneering process is precise and relaxing. It’s satisfying as all hell when the seam between two pieces disappears: a little daily magic trick.

September 20

C. texts me a picture of the veneer over the weekend to show me that it dried beautifully.

The last complicated step: adding some wenge inlay and a cherry edge border to hide the plywood edges. The result will be a cherry face, a thin line of dark wenge, another inch or so of cherry bordered by another thin line of wenge, and a final one- inch border of cherry. All the corners are mitered, two forty-five-degree angles coming together to make a square corner. It’s the kind of job that doesn’t feel totally right until suddenly things are done. But when everything comes together glued up and gorgeous, C. and I both smile and run our fingers over the smooth face.

About two hours into the inlay process, C. realizes that the music stand will be used only for rehearsals: only the conductor and the stagehands will see what we’re working on. We laugh in a sort of sad way.

September 25

The stand’s base is built hollow so a piece of wood can be slid up and down to adjust the stand to various heights. We have to fasten the face to that piece so its angle can be adjusted too. For this, we use silver and brass hardware. The gold of the brass blends with the amber orange of the cherry swirl, a little accent of glamour.

October 2

The symphony hall is about three hours away through Texas Hill Country. We take off at 7 A.M., while the Houston sky burns off its orange into the pale yellow that I’ve been waking up to in the summer months. C. and I now have the friendship that comes from this kind of work: it’s more than just enjoying each other’s company and stories but an understanding of how someone’s mind works. It’s something of a mutual flow state, knowing what he’ll need next, what he’ll already have prepared for me. No music on the car ride, just conversation.

At the request of the symphony, we used gold carpet on the podium’s flat platform rather than the normal red. It looked odd in the shop, but in the symphony hall, it makes sense. The hall is grander than I’d expected. Its pale gold walls welcome our amber-burning wood. With the stage manager, we move the stand and the podium into place. The guy laughs at me and C. when we say we’ve never stepped onto the finished podium. So we do, stepping off and on for a few minutes, in front of a few thousand empty seats.