Bear with me. It’s been like a steamroller. What started as a mild curiosity has become my current life’s passion. Wood. I’m up to my ears in exploration.
Backstory: The year I retired all my friends had the same question, “What are your plans?”
My response was always the same, “I dunno.” Intentionally my plan was no plan. It would have pleased the Zen heads. The planless plan.
Sure, I would travel, visit friends and family, go to events and such, but the occupation of my waking mind and remaining time was left undefined. I didn’t want to pick something on a given day and then proceed to devote time and energy to a possible whim. The occupation would have to find me.
As a sidebar to this tangent, I completed my exposure to nothingness as a hobby with great success. I invented my own Samadhi tank, or sensory-deprivation environment. I wanted to know if I could tolerate, come to terms with, and perhaps enjoy doing absolutely nothing. That is, after all, eventual.
An old friend once bought me a coupon for a Samadhi tank immersion in Berkeley, long ago, and I never cashed it in. I was afraid to be deprived of all my senses. What if I freaked out? For all these years, that expired coupon has haunted me. What was I afraid of? Myself?
A Zen-head friend gave me solace at the time. “Samadhi comes at the end of the Noble Eight-Fold Path of the Buddha. You were not ready. You must first achieve right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, and right mindfulness. You might have freaked out.”
Anyhow, to get back to the sidebar, I took a tent and a chair into the woods last summer and sat for four days facing the trees, listening to the Carson River. That’s more Siddhartha than Samadi. I fished for an hour each morning, ate what I caught, and sat all day, with a campfire until bed. No books. No notebooks. No phones. No lights. No motor cars. Not a single luxury. Like Robinson Caruso, I wondered how long I could just be.
I thought I would grow increasingly fidgety, stimulus starved and eager for change. Truth told, it got easier each day. Serenity enveloped me. On my last day about a hundred Clampers showed up for a wild raging annual party.
So, wood. It all started a year ago. Old story. We had robins build a nest in our porch rafters and raise three chicks. We protected them from stray cats with a constructed ring-of-nails barrier on the post. The chicks grew. The family flew away. That’s when the idle notion hit me. If you build a birdhouse, they will come.
With an eight-foot piece of pine and some Internet instructions, I built two birdhouses. It was fun. I built two more, then two more. I shall decorate them into Christmas presents, thought I.
That’s when I reached the base of the wood learning curve, which trailed upward. What goes best on a birdhouse? What is toxic? What has repulsive odors? What gives the best protection? Should the houses be brilliant and colorful or camouflaged? What size hole? Perch or no perch?
I had to read and read to learn. Along the way I picked up other interesting wood and paint facts. The birdhouses ended up camouflaged and perched with water-based acrylic paintings of leaves and tree limbs in green and brown. I ended up interested in wood, and what goes on it.
Back to present: I’m full tilt into creating slab tables and chairs. Wrestling with fickle epoxy coatings has me enchanted. Problem is, the tables are piling up. I like making them. Then what? Go into business? Ha.*    We already have two slab tables and our kids have one. I have two more finished, two more almost done, and slabs for six more tables stacked in the backyard. Yesterday I built an eight-foot shade-bin for storing and drying my collected slabs.
It’s hard to tell if live-edge slab tables are a booming trend, or if I’ve just boomed into it, but slab sources surround us. I compiled a list of 13 commercial slab outlets within a few hours drive. If you include the private slabbers, I know two in town, and it seems a trend.
Role reversal is providing me with human resources, as both are former students, Ben Seput and Mark Keller. Mark’s got a Mizer saw, collects logs, and makes his own epoxy tables. His Bruehol taproom is fully furnished with Mark Mizered wood. He came to my house. He examined my shop. He gave me habit-changing tips. He took me on a tour around Mankus Corners of slab builders and a massive downed oak tree, five-feet tall on its side, that he plans to partner with in slabbing.*   Susan claims my wood interest goes back further. “All your Pennsylvania buddies are wood carvers, or carving buyers. You’ve flown back there five times for the Chainsaw Rendezvous. So, you can’t carve bears, but you make a heck of nice coffee table.
Bear with me.

Steve Gibbs is a retired Benicia High School teacher who has written a column for The Herald since 1985.

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