Indian Summer

Walking through town
in Nederland Colorado at the peak
of Indian Summer at 8500 feet
above sea level, sky clear to the ozone,
aspen trees acid yellow against the
dissolving charcoal/green breaking
moray of tapering evergreen
and purple beetle-kill,
the mundane smells of everyday life
at midday- creosote, food frying,
mingling with wild smells
from just beyond town- snow melt rapids,
pine resin, sweet leaves dropping,
meadow grass seeding, a hint of chill
in the wind at my back, reminds
how small and welcoming and cozy
Town can be as winter approaches
and how generously it opens up
just before.

Tagged: colorado, deep craft, indian summer, nederland, poem, scott Constable

Snyder’s Garage, Nederland, Colorado

I’m excited to be reconnecting with my old pals Mike High and George Elvin over a new project we’re teaming up on in Nederland, Colorado. It’s been 25 years since the three of us worked together as Providence Builders in Alexandria, Virginia, a short-lived design/build company I helped found soon after Mike and I graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago. We loved working together back then, mostly on domestic scale renovations, but our ideas were beyond our capabilities. We’ve all kept on track in our different ways since that time- George earned his PhD in Architecture and is now a tenured professor; Mike is a seasoned real estate broker and craftsman; I’ve realized a range of ambitious projects in the realms of public art and design. Mike’s also invited his friend Carr to join us on our reconnaissance trip, who works internationally in various capacities producing events and staging live music.

Mike fell in love with the town of Nederland during an extended trip last winter and has been in touch with us all since then as he’s developed a strategy for the adaptive reuse of Snyder’s Garage, a well-sited historic building for sale downtown. We’ll spend the next two days in feasibility mode- surveying the building, brainstorming, visiting local sites, and generally devising a plan that capitalizes on our combined knowledge and professional experience.

Tagged: colorado, george elvin, Mike High, nederland, vernacular architecture, wowhaus

Each fall I sweep the dry duff off of our funky barn roof before the Dampness ensues

One of my September rituals has been clearing the corrugated roof of our funky back barn. The rambling, open-air structure is an explosion of three dissimilar building concepts, fused together with the oddball valleys and warped pitches of an under-planned roofline, one that collects piles of fallen duff of the redwood trees overhead each year. Though it’s a bit of an eyesore to most sensibilities, the building is structurally sound, and I’ve enjoyed studying it over the years whenever I clear the roof during the dry season, thinking about how best to put the barn to good use before the Dampness ensues until the next spring. I’ve learned to appreciate the improvised mess of its design with the same happy reluctance I reserve for the work of Frank Gehry.

The barn’s deceptively vast interior spaces are multi-functional and well-suited to our needs: a portion of the building is where I store paints and hardware, metal-working tools and surplus gear; a portion houses one of our wells; a portion we use as an annex to our sculpture studio; a portion is to store large equipment, a boat and other materials. Over the summer I’ve been trying to clear space inside to better support the increasing scope of our wowhaus projects. We recently sold our broken down McCormick-Deering tractor, which got me thinking about using the barn as a drying shed for the wood I’m about to have milled from our land. In conjunction with my new woodshop and a related body of work I have in development, I plan to source and mill more of my own logs, and have just enough room in the barn to air-dry a few thousand board feet. This spring I plan to build a solar kiln for a final kiss of dry heat.

Taking a break from the work, I lie on my back on the roof and stare up into the redwoods

Tagged: california flora, coast redwood, deep craft, vernacular architecture, woodworking, wowhaus

I’ve tried to map the five levels of consciousness detected during lucid dreams

I don’t normally lend much weight to dreams, but for the past couple of years I’ve been having a randomly recurring type of dream, where whatever the action, I suddenly become aware of myself dreaming, and can make things happen, like flying. On occasion, just before I wake up I have the presence of mind within the dream to be a passive observer, and pay attention to the actors and the narrative. The little glimpses I’ve had of this dream state have enabled me to count five levels of consciousness happening simultaneously within and outside of the dream:

1. The sleeping dreamer
2. The character(s) in the dream
3. The director of the action
4. The objective observer
5. The primordial life force

Upon waking, the five separate levels merge back together into one seamless state. It has me thinking that maybe one of the functions of sleep, or of dreaming, is to spread out and tinker with the multiple layers of consciousness so they work more harmoniously in the course of day to day life.

Tagged: consciousness, deep craft, lucid dream

Stored in a cool place, these freshly picked pears will ripen in a few days.

“There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We’ve been harvesting our pears in phases over the past week; the fruit seems to ripen unevenly on our trees, depending upon the amount of sun exposure. I begin to check them for ripeness when I notice one or two fall to the ground, usually in early September. If the fruit detaches easily when tilted sideways, it’s ripe enough to pick. We’ve learned that it’s best not to let the pears ripen fully on the tree- the fruit becomes coarse and bruises easily. Stored in a cool spot or refrigerated, the pears release ethylene and form sugars more slowly, yielding better texture and flavor. It’s still a challenge to know how best to put them to use with such a tiny window of perfect ripeness, especially when we’ve had a bumper crop like this year.

Waverly Root recommended eating ripe pears with a spoon!

Tagged: california flora, deep craft, pear, slow food, waverly root

I love this tiny ‘Carpenter’s Gothic’ cottage along the railroad tracks in St. Helena

Whenever Ene and I are feeling cagey and uninspired, we like to seek out the unexplored edges of where we live, sometimes just to see what’s changed after our last visit, having now lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 20 years this month. We call these journeys ‘wowhaus safaris’, and though we’re mostly in need of a tiny vacation and a change of scenery after spending weeks on end focused on the property and projects, we inevitably seek out cool vernacular architecture and design for inspiration. This past weekend we took advantage of the balmy Indian Summer weather and made two rambling day trips in opposite directions, dogs in tow.

I love the proportions of this adobe house in Sonoma

I love this hand-painted font on an industrial metal shop in Winters

I love everything about this house in the Presidio that now functions as the Ocean Climate Center for the National Marine Sanctuaries

Lucy loved hiking to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge

Tagged: deep craft, scott Constable, vernacular architecture, wowhaus

Front and back of my last box of Blue Band Velevet #5572

As a daily comfort I prefer quality, vintage pencils, which I use in the course of drawing, writing and working with wood. I’m in a bit of a panic, down to my last box of Blue Band Velvets, manufactured by the American Lead Pencil Company in the 1920’s, that I inherited from my grandfathers (not sure which one), along with some drafting tools and hand planes of the same vintage. Luckily, I’ve discovered Bob Truvy’s website dedicated to the historic archive of pencils from around the world. Unfortunately, his collection is not for sale, so I plan to continue my search, knowing that contemporary pencil manufacture is not up to snuff. I’m even considering making my own as we prepare to fell a pair of incense cedar trunks on our property, the best wood for making high quality pencils.

our twin trunk incense cedar, limmed and ready to be felled

Tagged: aesthetics, bob truby, deep craft, furniture design, green woodworking, pencils, woodworking