Working with Old Wood

Proenneke photo courtesy Flickr

Sometimes I think that only materials with an even consistency should be worked with machine tools. Metal, plastic, glass, and synthetic fabrics are examples. I caught a few minutes of a This Old House episode that showed the crew salvaging seventeenth-century boards to reuse in a new addition. They were running the old planks through a planer to “clean them up”, and in the process they obliterated the evolution of pit-sawn wood’s grain through many thousands of cycles of changes in humidity and temperature.

The clock spares no one, though, except perhaps historic preservationists. The day after I saw this episode I caught another few minutes of woodworking on the glorious Part Two of Dick Proenneke alone in the wilderness. The footage answered a question I hadn’t known I’d been asking for decades: what is it about old cabins that is so eloquent?

I do believe it’s the expression of the hand of the woodworker, particularly the expression of the hand of the person who sharpens the tools. Body energy and machine energy are two different cats, like acoustic and amplified.

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