Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter

by Nina MacLaughlin

After nearly a decade working at a desk in front of a screen, I longed to engage with the tangible, to do work that resulted in something I could touch. I grew more interested in making a desk than sitting at one.

There is a dullness in all forms of work, a “violence—to the spirit as well as to the body,” as Studs Terkel put it in Working. There are repeated tasks and empty time and moments you wish you were swimming. These are unavoidable, even in jobs we love and feel proud to have; these are natural, even if you’ve found your calling. It’s when those meaningless moments pile and mount, the meaningless moments that chew at your soul, that creep into the crevices of your brain and holler at you until ignoring them is not an option.

The screen exerts an oppressive power, and I am as seduced as anyone by the clips and pics, the news and noise of the Internet. I would rather e-mail than talk on the phone. I have pals I know only online and am grateful for those connections. But there is no other place I can think of where one can consume so much and absorb so little.

Inertia and fear and laziness, the three-headed dog that keeps us from leaving situations that have passed their expiration date, growled around me for months, the way Cerberus allowed souls to enter the realm of the dead, but allowed none of them to leave.

sitting at my desk making sure the number on the list matched the number on the blurb about the man, I felt desperate. It was more than stupid and my brain hollered: You will die and this is an empty way to spend the days.

There is pleasure in watching someone who knows how to use tools, in witnessing skill and nonchalance with basic things.

Walls speak to an emotional need as much as a structural one. They protect us from wind and rain and strangers. They protect our private acts and parts. They protect us from our shortcomings and our fears. A wall broadcasts: I am vulnerable.

Mary showed me, over and over again, how a little time and effort, a little care and thought, can correct almost every ill.

Patience, a little finesse, the ability to stay with something that periodically bored or frustrated you, that periodically drove you to the edge of madness, these were skills necessary too for sharing a life with someone.

If you are able to maintain focus and attention for a piece that will not matter, that will rarely, if ever, be seen, if you are able to get that right, the rest of the work—the stuff that does matter, that will be seen—will be elevated.

Fallow periods are something to savor. Times of low productivity can be one of life’s luxuries. Though there might be no outward proof of action or making—nothing written, nothing built—such time is hardly wasted; puzzles are explored and problems solved in the head. And these quiet times give me a chance to scrape off the emotional muck that accumulates and coats my brain over time. Fields are left fallow, after all, to make the earth fertile in future seasons. Just because we can’t see the cornstalks or the swaying wheat doesn’t mean that nothing valuable is happening there underneath the surface.

But for those fallow periods to feel both purposeful and luxurious, they need to be bookended by accomplishment, by doing and producing.

When tomorrow is always an option, an empty place, the rush to get things done does not press in. Things go undone and undone, days curling off and falling to the floor like wood curls chiseled off a piece of useless pine, swept up into the dustpan and thrown away.

what a relief it can be, not having to worry about the right word, not having to think, over and over, is this the best way to say this? The questions carpentry raises are the same, ultimately—will this work? Will this function as it should, be true and strong? But the answers come from different rooms in my head, and it is good to exit the word room in favor of a less-used realm that deals with space, numbers, tools, and materials.

García Márquez admits a few sentences later that he’d never done any carpentry himself. If he had, he’d know that a piece of wood is not the same as words. A wall is real. A piece of baseboard that hides the gap between the wall and the floor, that’s real, too. There’s a sense of completion with carpentry that doesn’t exist with writing.

The process of building a writing office in his Connecticut backyard reminded Michael Pollan “just how much of reality slips through the net of our words.” Language becomes less useful when you’re building a bookcase.

How do we decide what’s right for our own lives? The question never gets easier to answer. If we’re lucky and we pay attention, pieces here and there will start to fit together. Parts shift into place, feel flush underneath the skin of the fingertip. For a moment, the bubble dips and shifts to show you level, at home with what you are, what you have become, and what you are becoming.

Few things make one more aware of time, and time left, than facing all there is left to learn in a fresh endeavor.

With each table, with each wall and floor, with each set of bookcases built and filled so the shelves are heavy with books, comes the knowledge that all of it will fall apart someday. In our lifetimes, or after, these walls and floors and shelves will no longer do their jobs. The wood will splinter, rot, maybe get used for firewood, maybe get traded for some new model or discarded at the dump, scrap wood, sawdust, dead. This is their fate, and ours, as use and time enact their wearing.