The October 9, 2014, obituary for Wesley W. Anderson describes him as “a highly respected Christian gentleman and mentor to many men.” Uncle Wes surely was that, but I remember him as a maker. A man who could imagine a house or a barn, a device or a machine, and then – remarkably – build it.
I
In the mid-70s Uncle Wes erected a sawmill on his farm. A maker myself and eager to see it in use, in September I traveled to Carney, Michigan to spend an afternoon with Wes’s son, my cousin Don. That trip returned me to a special pace, one known to me since boyhood. Enroute, I passed by a string of towns and unincorporated municipalities with familiar names like Carbondale, Wallace, Ingalls, Stephenson, Daggett, and Talbot. On reaching Carney, I exited Highway 41 and headed east toward Uncle Wes and Aunt Marion’s place. Now deceased, the farm now belongs to Elaine Anderson, their daughter. When you arrive, you have reached the end of the road. Literally so, for the privately held forties and tracts of the Escanaba River State Forest that lie beyond it can only be reached by dirt logging roads or trails.
The day is warm and clear and the autumn leaves, though not at peak, are taking on fall’s hued brilliance. When I arrive, Don is already at work and I am delighted to discover that another cousin, his brother Bob, has traveled up from Green Bay to join us.
The sawmill sits inside a pole barn sheathed in galvanized steel that Wes and Don built to protect it from heavy weather. It is powered by a 180 hp six-cylinder Hercules diesel engine Wes bought at auction. A wide belt drive transfers Hercules’ power to a 48” carbide tipped blade weighing more than 100 pounds that spins aggressively at 500 to 600 rpms. The whole setup is a beast!
My cousins and I catch up a bit, then they get to work. Box end wrench in hand, Bob snugs a lead clamp to the pole of a 12 volt battery, makes sure that diesel is flowing from the tank to the carburetor, and tops off the radiator with water. He sends a shot of starter fluid into the air intake, then Don hits the ignition and the pistons fire with a loud chatter. In short order the engine hums smoothly and when the pressure gauge indicates sufficient power, Don engages a clutch and sends the carriage, holding a poplar log, along its track toward the spinning stationary blade. The engine pulls only slightly and the smell of sawdust tinged with exhaust fills the air. Don’s first cut slabs the rough edge of the log then in a sequence of studied moves; he rotates the log 90°, slabs a second edge, and proceeds to slice the wood into 4/4 and 8/4 boards. In flow, Bob grabs the freshly cut boards and stacks neatly on a drying pile. With little effort, it seems, they’ve sawn up four logs, including one sweet piece of cherry.
Sawyers who operate small mills watch for early rewards. The opening of each log exposes long-hidden grains and figures. Finer woods suggest cabinets, tables, bookcases, and bowls.
In first light, each reveal becomes a page in Creation’s Book of Wonders, a witness to the sublime order.
II
When Matthew Crawford’s publisher released Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work in 2009, I doubt that Penguin expected to sell out the first printing of 25,000 copies in a few months. Sixteen years after publication the book still ranks #1 in Amazon’s subcategory of “Philosophy Aesthetics.” It seems that Crawford, a political philosopher cum motorcycle mechanic, had named a growing worry: in the information age, the possibility of meaningful employment was slipping away. “This book,” wrote Crawford, “advances a nestled set of arguments on behalf of work that is meaningful because it is genuinely useful.” He goes on to say that he wants “to rehabilitate the honor of the trades, as being choice-worthy work. . .”[1] To Crawford’s point, most of us lack any visceral connection to the gears, pulleys, belts, clutches, and brakes that run the world. Consider two lament-like stanzas from B. H. Fairchild’s poem “Work”:
Beneath the rotary table the man reaches up to remove the huge bearings, and oil winds down his arm like a black rope. He places each bearing big as a pendulum in the sun where it shines, swathed in grease. It is the heart of the day, and he feels the long breeze cool his face and forearms, wet now with the good sweat of hard work.[2]
III
For millennia humankind has relied on beams and boards for shelter and protection. But for man and beast, felling trees, pulling them from the forest, and turning them to good use was demanding work, dependent entirely on hand tools like the axe and adze. Metal handsaws first appeared in Egypt around 3,200 BCE and with advances in metallurgy, steel was refined and hardened, saw teeth evenly set and distributed along a blade. The first circular saw blade was patented in 1777.
Leonardo da Vinci drawing of a crank powered sawmill
An early water-powered sawmill, named Hierapolis, surfaced in Asia Minor in the second half of the third-century AD. During the Renaissance Francesco di Giorgio Martini, an Italian architect, engineer, painter, sculptor, and writer further developed the hydro-powered sawmill and based on Martini’s work, Leonardo da Vinci refined these machines.[2] Mention of the Renaissance masters Martini and da Vinci remind us that inventors and entrepreneurs frequently commingle art and science. The form and function of sawmills continued to evolve from water-driven machines to ones powered by steam, then to mills harnessed to combustion engines, like Hercules, and eventually direct drive electric motors.
Uncle Wes left the family farm in his early twenties to work “as a welder at an Airplane Factory in Detroit, MI before being inducted into the Army Air Corps on August 19, 1943, during World War II where he was a pilot and flight instructor for B-25 bombers.” It is easy to see how these early experiences formed a man who understood how to connect a diesel engine to the chassis of a sawmill (parts cannibalized from his first sawmill), how to fashion the brackets and connecting pieces he needed from wood and steel, how to wire electrical circuits, tune an engine, and above all, make it go. But there is more. Uncle Wes knew the species of trees that grew on his land, when to harvest them, how to turn those logs into dimensional lumber, and then use it to construct a house.
IV
If Shop Class as Soulcraft revealed the growing fault line between the demands of the new information economy and its diminishment of skilled tradesman, it only foreshadowed a larger, looming change: the digital ages would radically reorient late modern minds so that the artificial would displace the real and the virtual supplant the actual. German sociologist Hartmut Rosa observes:
Not only are all of our friends and acquaintances, our loved ones and our not so loved ones, now always just a “click” away, but we also have all of the knowledge of the world—every song, every film, every image, every bit of data that has been digitized—in close proximity at all times. We literally carry it on our person. The world is at our fingertips in a historically unprecedented way.[4]
The result? We are always “on.” We are ever seeing but not always perceiving. Less and less our feet touch real ground. This is because the digital marketing engine that powers consumer capitalism supplies endless spectacle. While staggering caches of data now pose as knowledge, they cannot lead us to the kind of knowing that resides in the senses or in human relations and surely not to the deeper nature of things, the true condition of our hearts, the mercies of God. And there are the darker addictions: gaming, pornography, shopping, gambling, and news feeds. If the real world has become altogether strange, the dissonance is so facile we barely notice.
And so it was, watching Don and Bob operate Uncle Wes’s sawmill caused me to think afresh about knowledge. An epistemologist worth her salt crafts fine-tuned arguments that outline what can be known and how it is that we can know anything at all. As much as possible, her goal is to muster as much certainty about reality as possible. Other disciplines like mathematics and physics, education and musical performance feature parallel operations, proofs, pedagogies, scales, and scores. My interest here is not to pit the demands of one discipline against another. The philosopher’s mind is no more agile than the sawyer’s. Rather, I want to note the difference between engaged minds and dull ones, between those who understand how the world works, and those who have ceased to notice
Before leaving Wes and Marion’s place, Don invited me to pick out a few pieces of cherry and white ash and I gladly loaded them onto my truck. The next afternoon, curious to see what patterns and figures might emerge from the boards, I sent them through my planer. The morning that followed, with thoughts and images filling my head, I put pen to paper hoping to examine the grain of my own being.
Notes:
[1] Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Penguin, 2009), 6, 8.
[2] B. H. Fairchild, “Work,” The Art of the Lathe (Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 1998), 41-44.
[3] Chaim Shulman, “Water-Powered Sawmills. Francesco Di Giorgio Martini and Leonardo Da Vinci’s Roles: Who Innovated?” n.d. doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.18251.71209.
[4] Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (Cambridge, UK: 2020), 12.
