The day after Thanksgiving I was listening to “Morning Edition” on NPR. Host David Greene was following up with Matt and Susan Simonds, a couple they reported on in the summer. Matt owned an Albuquerque, New Mexico, distillery and tap room, Broken Trail Spirits & Brew. Over the summer, like so many small business owners impacted by COVID-19, Matt was struggling to keep the bar open. In the follow-up, Matt tearfully revealed they had to shut down. You can listen to the full interview here.
As hard as it was to listen to, what struck me, though, was something his wife said about healing: Matt was building a canoe.
” … I’ve spent my time trying to give Matt the space that he needs,” she says in the interview. “He’s building a canoe in our garage. And my first thought was all the things we don’t have done in this house and you’re building a canoe. But at the same time, I understand it. It is – he likes to work with his hands. He’s good at woodworking. And this is something he can build. And you – I mean, as it gets built, you see progress. There’s a lot there. And it’s something that he can look at and say, I did this, and it was successful. He has a piece that is working for him.”
And after some back and forth Matt adds, “I think there’s a sense of control. Don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty of mistakes and plenty of screw-ups on it. But I know that they’re my mistakes. And with woodworking, with working with your hands, crafting, working in the garden outside, there’s a sense that this is mine.”
It reminded me of so many of the essays Charles Hayward wrote during World War II (many of which are featured in “Honest Labour“). It was a time of great uncertainty, loss of business, loss of life, and for many, more time than usual at home.
The following excerpt is from an essay called “A Help to Healing.” Hayward wrote it in 1944, a year in which raids targeted greater London for months.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
“… Let things go wrong for us during the day and immediately our minds will fasten on these incidents to the exclusion of all else, exciting ourselves, hurting ourselves and bolstering up our own conceit. It is a poor world when we fill it with ourselves. But the world that has real things in it is a very different story, a world with real jobs to be done that will leave us feeling refreshed and renewed instead of gloomy and discouraged. The man who finds occupation in woodwork, for instance, finds something to be done that will absorb both hands and brain, and this is work in its most curative form. The men in prison camps know the value of such work. They know only too well the huge blank boredom, the deadlines of the mind preying on itself, and they learn from stark reality what a blessing work can be.
“The rest of us cannot complain of the lack of it at the present time. But it is all the more important, as our antidote, that we shall do the right kind of self-directed work in our leisure to counteract war weariness, anxiety, and mental strain. A zest for life is something that has to earned, especially in war-time. A passive attitude is fatal, and modern conditions do undoubtedly foster passivity. All the more reason to fight the thing, and the best kinds of weapons are tools. For when we have tools in our hands we are down to fundamentals, to the primeval urge to make things. We become in our own way man the builder, man the creator, fulfilling our own deepest instincts, and the long-forgotten skill of our ancestors tingles in our veins. For, whatever the tool, men have acquired the necessary skill to use it, from the polished flint to the mediaeval carpenter’s axe, which chopped out many a piece of rustic beauty. That is the one thing that cannot be taken from us while hands and brains are nimble, the one indestructible thing that can live beyond the wreckage of a world and build another.”
As a young child, David Finck, author of “Making & Mastering Wood Planes,” took ceramics classes through Pittsburgh’s parks and recreation department and loved it. At UC Berkeley he discovered a pot shop that was open to anybody to use. And so, for a second time in his life, he started to get really into ceramics. During his junior year David was regularly showing up to class spattered in mud and clay. A woman sitting next to him noticed, as she was also interested in ceramics. She told him about some summer workshops she had taken in Mendocino, and how she discovered she liked making the carved wooden implements and tools more so than the ceramics. While in Mendocino she inquired about a woodworking school and was told one had recently started up, in Fort Bragg, run by a guy named James Krenov.
David was intrigued. He recognized Krenov’s name from his father’s bookshelves. And because David was a California resident and the school was run through a community college, the program was essentially free.
“Now my plan at that point was to get through one last year at Berkeley and then go back to West Virginia and hang out in the woods with my folks and make guitars,” David says.
But now his head was spinning. Krenov was a well-known woodworker and David knew he’d be better off learning some new woodworking skills. It never occurred to him at the time to go to guitar-making school. But even if it had, it wouldn’t have been practical. Few existed, and the ones that did were expensive. So David bummed a car and drove up to Krenov’s school.
“I was swept up in what was happening,” he says. “There was so much amazing work being built. I hung out for a full day and talked to people. The atmosphere there was really good. There was a lot of energy and Krenov was there all the time and I just remember feeling so magnetically drawn to the whole atmosphere. I was blown away by the quality of the students’ work. But at that point I just had one kind of half-assed guitar that I made on the seat of my pants, so I had no idea how I was going to get into that school.”
Turns out Krenov took the community college part seriously and always kept a few spaces open for someone who was retired and someone who was young and promising.
“And then the other 20 spots were going to people who were, you know, amazing,” David says. “Krenov had created this pent-up demand for his teaching through his books so you had people that were steeped in his writing who had been hard at it for 10, 15, 20 years. People would come from all over the world to study with him. So I was very anxious to go to school there.”
David put together a portfolio. “It was one photograph of my crummy guitar sitting on rumpled blankets on my bed,” he says. “And I wrote a pretty maudlin letter about why I should get in.”
David visited a second time and spoke with Krenov. This time, he brought his guitar and showed it to Krenov in the parking lot.
“That turned out to be lucky because he had a soft spot for guitar making,” David says.
David was placed on the waitlist, but pretty quickly got a spot. “I was over the moon,” he says.
Back in West Virginia, in between Berkeley and Krenov’s school, David panicked. “I remember thinking, Oh my god. I don’t know anything about furniture making. I’ve never cut a dovetail in my life.”
But, it turns out, the structure of the class was good. After spending four to six weeks on fundamentals, students were given the freedom to continue with fundamentals or move on to more sophisticated projects. David thrived. And at the end of the first year, he wanted to stay.
Two pieces David made as a first-year student at James Krenov’s school, displayed at a show held in San Francisco in 1985.
“I was very lucky to come for another year,” he says. “That was an incredibly talented class and there ended up being six people that wanted to stay – and at that point they had never taken more than four. Everyone is just so real and good-hearted there. They couldn’t be bureaucratic about it. They had to bring us all in and we were having a roundtable and discussing, and I remember sitting there and talking with my bench mate who had come from north of the Arctic circle. And we were like, ‘Oh, Dave, you should be the one’ (his name was David, too) and he was like, ‘no, Dave, you should’ and finally they were like, ‘Oh, we’ll just keep everybody.’ It was really sweet. But of course that meant two other students couldn’t come for their first year. But at any rate, it was such a great class. It was very much a highlight of my life – being exposed to a lot of incredibly unique people and Krenov himself and associate teachers.”
During his second year there, David also met his wife, Marie Hoepfl.
Marie Hoepfl and James Krenov
“She was a student in the class and I could gaze longingly at her while at the workbenches,” he says, laughing. “We hung out and got together pretty quickly.”
At the end of David’s second year he moved back to West Virginia and Marie began her second year at Krenov’s school. They ended up spending that year apart, then Marie moved to West Virginia to be with David.
Galleries & Shows
Marie was a middle-school shop teacher at the time, and one of her motivations in going to Krenov’s school was to be a better woodworking teacher. After moving to West Virginia she taught shop for several years across the river, in a rural high school in Woodsfield, Ohio. But as the population dwindled and students moved away, the woodworking program was shut down. Marie took that opportunity to go to graduate school, get her doctorate and eventually provide teacher training in technology education.
While Marie was teaching and in school, David worked as a speculative woodworker (you can view examples of his work here). Krenov had set him up with a gallery in Long Island.
“It was pretty exclusive and an awesome place to have represent you at that time,” David says. “But instinctively, I don’t have a great flair for design. I think to make it as a speculative woodworker you’ve got to have so many things lined up in your alley and that was probably my major weakness. So I was batting like 500 with speculative gallery sales, which ain’t good enough. You’re spending half your time not getting paid and after three years I was getting kind of desperate.”
David’s dad, Henry Finck, in the shop they built together. This photo was taken years after David left home, but reflects the aesthetic.
David shared a shop with his dad, and for a while David and Marie were living in the woods on David’s parents’ property in a 10’ x 25’ garage-type structure lined with books on both sides, with a woodstove. They lived there for about five months then moved to New Martinsville, West Virginia, living halfway between Woodsfield, Ohio, where Marie taught, and the shop David shared with his dad. Once Marie lost her job and started grad school in Morgantown, West Virginia, they rented a house two miles away from David’s parents’ place, where David lived during the week, and they rented an apartment in Morgantown, where Marie lived during the week. For four or five years they made this living arrangement work, coming together on the weekends.
One of David’s lanterns.
Needing to find other outlets to sell his work, David started exhibiting at American Craft Council shows, selling what wasn’t selling in the galleries, and in the process earning himself some nice commissions. He also developed a wholesale item, a limited production run of an Asian-looking lantern – a good bread-and-butter item, he says. He was becoming more well-known, with more commissions coming from around the state, including a substantial commission to design and build seven major pieces for a Roman Catholic church undergoing renovations in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The job, which included an altar, presider’s chair, lectern and more, took more than 18 months to complete.
Diane Lane held this box, which David made, in the movie “Nights in Rodanthe.”
By this time Marie had finished her doctorate and was job hunting. Their first daughter, Ledah, was born. Marie found a job in Pittsburg, Kansas, and in 1994, when Ledah was three months old, the newly made family of three moved.
Writing ‘Making & Mastering Wood Planes’ While Parenting
Marie loved her new job and David became a stay-at-home dad. Marie would get home from work fairly early and the two would switch. Marie would watch Ledah while David worked in his basement shop.
This continued for three years, during which Willa, their second daughter, was born in 1996. But Kansas did not feel like home. David and Marie missed the mountains. Marie got a job at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and they moved back east.
Now with two kids in tow, David was struggling to keep his hand in the craft while also caring for a baby and a toddler. By now he had been teaching the Krenov approach to woodworking in adult education classes at colleges and through craft centers for 11 years. He had gained a lot of experience teaching planemaking, specifically. It was always a popular course and folks were encouraging him to do a more in-depth study of the topic.
“So I just hatched a plan to basically give my weekend workshop in book form with as much detail as I could muster. Whenever the kids were napping or being quiet that was something I could do in the basement shop,” he says. I think it took a better part of a year to do the writing and all the documentation and photography and sketches, and then I ran through five different proof readings with what I call my egghead woodworker friends, just educated people that had either all gone through the Krenov program or were just woodworkers and highly educated. So I got a lot of great feedback from them as well and distilled all that.”
Sterling bought the book. He sent it and, outside of style, his editor had one edit regarding a comma that turned out to be a misinterpretation.
“It was pretty amazing,” David says. “It was already very well vetted when it went off. They took care of it for seven or eight years. And then they finally decided that everyone who wanted to make a wooden plane in the world had done that and their sales were declining so they just gave it back to me.”
David started getting emails from people asking how they could get the book and when was it going to go back in print. Because he had all the computer files, layout, artwork – everything – David decided to self-publish, working directly with a printer in Ashland, Ohio.
“And that worked well for years until I got tired of it,” he says. “Just dealing with the printer and then dealing with boxes and boxes of books and stuff around, and then just filling orders kind of on a daily basis – it’s not primarily where I wanted to be spending my time. So when the final printing dwindled down it struck me that Lost Art Press might be interested in it. I mean, after all, Chris provided the blurb for the back cover. And he showed no hesitation. It was just really wonderful. And I really appreciate the hardcover version, and the nicer-quality aspects of the book as well.”
The Suzuki Method & The Forget-Me-Nots
During this time David was still woodworking in Krenov’s spirit, as he describes it, and building about one guitar a year. Once or twice a year he’d have a booth at a show. He kept teaching, eventually hosting classes at his home shop, which meant more pay and no travel.
Once he finished “Making & Mastering Wood Planes,” David began searching for things to do with his daughters, now 2 and 4. He found a woman, Nan Stricklen, who taught Suzuki violin lessons and so they started taking lessons, along with a 3-year-old friend, on a weekly basis. Ms. Nan did a marvelous job with the younger kids and had a total knack of making it fun while getting information across, David says.
David’s daughters learned to play violin through the Suzuki method.
“I really did enjoy working with them on stuff and the Suzuki violin philosophy encourages that quite a bit where the parent acts as a teacher, especially in the younger stages,” David says. “So it was very much just quality time together, playing with the instrument and trying to get across the concepts the teacher was working on. And we were just consistent. We never pushed it hard or anything like that, but we got our 10 or 15 minutes in most every day for years.”
Four or five years in, David began introducing the girls to regional folk music, “just kind of the heart of Appalachia Old-Time music,” he says. “There was just music everywhere, especially at all the folk festivals all throughout the summer. So they had a lot of exposure to that, especially when they were little. And then, somehow or another, before I knew it we had a family band.” David backed up his daughters and their friend on his guitar. The Forget-Me-Nots played Celtic music throughout western North Carolina.
The Forget-Me-Nots perform in North Carolina.
“I never had a performing gene and this was definitely not a case of stage parents, but rather we’d just play in the park and people would see us and the next thing you know we’re giving a little concert in the park, and then somebody asks and before you know it we were doing 30 or 40 gigs every summer. These girls had a full-fledged band.”
The girls continued to play through middle and high school, with both daughters attending University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) their senior year – a pivotal time for both of them.
“All the way through they were kind of standouts for music for what they did, but as far as classical music goes, which is their primary focus, it’s like, OK, you’re in the top 1 percent – that’s wonderful, but that doesn’t get you a job. You’ve got to be in the top .001 percent to win an audition and be in a symphony, and be even better than that to be a soloist. But that takes the tiger mom or dad and long hours of practice, and none of us were willing to do that. But when they got down to UNCSA, and really perceived all that in a visceral way, they made that decision on their own. That was the year that both of them started practicing three to four, five to six hours a day. They just skyrocketed. And they had great teachers.”
David’s First Violin
In 2011, David’s dad passed away. A year later, Ledah, still in high school, won a collegiate violin competition, giving her the use of a really fine, contemporary-made instrument on loan for a couple years. Now those years were ending and Ledah needed another good instrument.
“I didn’t have the arrogance or naivety to think that my first violin would fit the bill because it’s just an incredibly sophisticated craft in so many various ways,” David says. “But it was just something I wanted to do at that time and see what happened. My dad having passed, and having access to all the information he had put together, mostly in books and clippings, and all the wood and tools, it just seemed like kind of a neat memorial for him.”
David’s dad, by the way, finished that first guitar and had even begun working on his viola da gamba.
“I never really got a clear answer on why he didn’t complete that instrument other than the fact that he was into a million different things on their homestead. And then his health deteriorated and it was never completed. So my memorial to him was going to be to finish that instrument, and then make a violin, maybe for each girl. We were very close, and it was just kind of an extended grieving period and it just felt right to do that. But my wife, who’s very practical, gave me one of her looks and told me to just skip the gamba and go straight to the violin. Because ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘You might get lucky.’”
So David built a violin.
“It was really remarkable,” he says. “It was kind of like the same experience I had with the guitar but here it was, more than 20 years later, and I had a much better understanding of woodworking but also the kind of energy and passion that the guitar building ignited within me to begin with. I was just really feeling that with this first foray into violin building.”
David’s first violin for his oldest daughter, Ledah. He named this violin “Gelibt” (beloved) and his second violin, which he made for his daughter Willa, “Neshomeh” (soul). Both names are in honor of his father.
At the time, Ledah was studying at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, still using the violin she had won. She had won another competition to be a soloist with the Durham Symphony, and David had just finished his violin. David and Marie traveled to Durham to show it to Ledah, to see if she liked it.
“We went into a big room and she tried it,” he says. “At first she played her other one and then she picked up mine and played it. And we’re just gasping in disbelief at each other because the sound coming out of that violin was un-freaking-believable! Oh, it was just like my heart stopped. And just to see her play so beautifully. It was just immediately evident this was a special-sounding instrument. So she had no hesitation to give the other one back and a week later she was playing my violin as a soloist with the orchestra. It was just a phenomenal way to get introduced to the craft. And truly inspirational for me and just so wonderful on so many levels.”
Of course, having another daughter dedicated to violin playing meant that David had to try his hand at violin making again. He finished his second violin a couple months later.
“Interestingly, Willa’s violin didn’t have the same immediate reception,” David says. “Ledah had no hesitation, she just loved every aspect of it. And I don’t think of Ledah as a capricious person. Willa, she’s a studied person. And, of course, she’s only 15 or 16 at the time. She took it and said, ‘Yeah, I like it. I’ll try it for a couple days.’ And two or three days later, just out of the blue she came to me beaming and says, ‘I love it.’ So that suited her just fine, too. And within that year she also started winning competitions, really significant ones. She had a great run of performances, auditions for these concerto competitions. So it was all the encouragement I needed to drop furniture and dive on in to violin making.”
That was 8 years ago, and violin and viola making is all David has done since.
“I know a lot more now and I’m more confused than ever,” he says, laughing. “It’s such an expansive field and there are so many different ways to do things and the acoustics are this crazy thing and then there’s the finishing and it’s just endlessly absorbing for me.”
And while it’s one thing to please your daughters – even when they’re serious musicians and critics – it’s an entirely different thing for a stranger to plunk down a big chunk of change and walk away with one of your instruments, David says. And yet, that’s exactly what musicians are doing. And they’re thrilled.
The pandemic, as it has for many craftspeople, has put a damper on sales. Folks are no longer coming by David’s shop to try his violins, and direct marketing at schools and with symphony players isn’t happening. So David has gotten creative, offering home trials, sanitizing instruments before shipping them out and giving them rest periods upon their return and before shipping them out again. He’s also donating 10 percent of sales to musicians’ charities for the duration of the pandemic.
Layers of Understanding
These days David is in his home shop whenever he’s not having dinner with his wife or tending to other chores. The shop is lovely, a basement walk-out with plenty of windows, and a short commute.
David’s home shop.
“One thing about violin making, there are certain tasks, especially shaping, doing the final carving, shaping the back and top and even the scroll, when it really helps to have a completely darkened shop and then just a single harsh light to really highlight the shadows. And I find, as my eyes are getting older, it’s just harder and harder to see those contrasts that really tell you how good a job you’ve done shaping. So it’s definitely a task I like to do late at night.”
David says probably half the time both he and Marie are working on Saturdays and Sundays. “But, at least in my case, it never really feels like work,” he says. “I just feel so incredibly lucky, incredibly lucky but it’s an obsession I guess, whether it’s magnificent or miserable, I don’t know. But it definitely works for me and just to have something that keeps drawing you in and keeps revealing different layers of understanding. And I feel like I’m just kind of scratching the surface at this point. A lot of the technical stuff I’m pretty comfortable with though violin making is pretty distinctive from other types of woodworking. I’m definitely still picking things up there, kind of putting it all together acoustically. Finishes are a challenge for me.”
David says he was definitely in the right vein as a Krenov-influenced woodworker because the Krenov finishing philosophy is very minimal.
“It’s never been a strong suit of mine so that suited me well,” he says. “But that is definitely not the case when it comes to violin finishing. It can be a very complicated process to end up with something both very beautiful and with the right appearance to it, and also acoustically appropriate to the instrument as well. So there’s a lot of artistic instinct to really pull it off beautifully. And that’s a challenge for me. It’s definitely been an area I’ve put a lot of effort into but still see that I’ve got a long way to go. So if things will allow me to do so, I definitely will continue pushing that area especially hard.”
David talks a lot about luck, and areas he needs to improve.
“I don’t know what it is. I think I just have a feel for wood through long exposure maybe and the guitar influence, but I just had really, really good luck with the acoustic side of the instruments.”
But any outsider looking in would not describe David’s success as the result of luck. Instead, they would point to the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours he has spent in his shop, his dedication – near obsession – with the craft, and an artistic instinct he sometimes claims to not have, but clearly does.
Some proof: Today, Willa, 24, and Ledah, 26, both professional violinists, prefer his violins over any others.
David and his family, 2014
A 2018 graduate of Eastman School of Music, Willa joined the first violin section of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra during her junior year in 2017. In addition to playing with RPO, she is the founding member of Copper Hill, a Rochester folk-art band, and in November 2019 she released a solo album called “Ask Me Why” with jazz pianist Sterling Cozza and jazz trumpet player Nathan Kay.
Ledah recently earned her master’s degree in violin performance from The Peabody Conservatory and is currently a member of the Mannes School of Music’s Graduate String Quartet in Residence, Bergamot Quartet, in New York City. She is also a member of the jazz quintet Atlantic Extraction, led by Nick Dunston, and earspace ensemble.
For David, the best compliment is to overhear one of his daughters say, “My dad made it,” when another musician asks about their violin.
Earned Praise
“I’m not an overly confident person, especially in something that has such a grand tradition,” David says. “My goal is simply to make really high-quality instruments for classical players.”
David’s home shop is out in the woods in the mountains of North Carolina – not a lot of high-end players waltz in and out every day. In addition, not having much contact with other makers makes it sometimes difficult for David to figure out where to position himself. But to understand the quality of work, one just needs to listen.
A few years ago, David attended workshops presented by The Violin Society of America at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. The workshops, quite famous in the violin-making world, David says, serve as a way to get excellent instruction and also “kind of just be with your people.” People come from all over the world to attend. One of the workshops was on acoustics.
“Some makers are interested in that but a lot are not,” he says. “They just kind of go with shop practices that are handed down and end up building fine violins but they don’t necessarily need to know the frequencies that something is vibrating at.”
David brings up a blind study that was done pitting instruments by Stradivari, Guarneri and other famous names against more contemporary ones. The results showed that the contemporary instruments were, actually, slightly favored. The study appeared in a peer-reviewed journal on acoustics and received some flak for its design. So two years later the study was repeated, this time in a more rigorous manner. The results were the same – well-known and talented players and listeners slightly preferred the contemporary instruments.
Back to the workshop: For educational purposes they did double-blind listening tests with musicians and luthiers serving as judges. Players wore dark welding glasses and played behind a screen so the audience couldn’t see what they were playing. In the mix were violins from makers like David, who make a handful a year, and violins from world-famous luthiers.
“There were maybe 30 people in the room and when the violinist played this one opening everybody kind of gasped,” David says. “This was a stand-out sound.”
What David didn’t know was that the violinist was playing his violin.
“I was in a state of shock, as were most of the people there,” he says. “It really was just an incredible shot in the arm. A boost, to say, you’re doing alright.”
David says he doesn’t know why he’s having this luck, thinking maybe it’s a combination of knowing how to work with wood, a long association with it and just really caring about it. Whatever it is, “it’s producing some good results,” he says.
Now 59, David says he never wants to retire. “I just want to do this until I drop over,” he says. Ever since he began woodworking at Krenov’s school, David says he feels like he skipped the work part and just went straight to retirement, spending his life doing what he wants to do with his hours. He thinks back to when he strayed from environmental science, choosing a path of woodworking instead. He credits being able to string woodworking along for all these years in large part, he says, “to my ever-patient and supportive wife. We make a really good team. She understands my motivations having been through that experience herself. So we definitely support each other.”
In the March 2019 issue of Fine Woodworking, David wrote a From the Bench column titled “The Family Violin.” It includes a short video filled with wonderful old photos called “My Father’s Dream.” In the column, David writes: “My personal story is about endings and beginnings, father, son, and daughters, completing one circle and starting another.” And, as David recently discovered reading his grandmother’s memoir, those circles go generations deep and will continue generations on, an interconnectedness much like the beginning and ending of a song.
It’s mid-July and David Finck has just finished reading his maternal grandmother’s memoir. The youngest of 13 children, she grew up in Czarist Russia and was a pianist and top student at St. Petersburg State Conservatory. She gave recitals to Czar Nicholas II and Czarina Alexandra, hung out in the Winter Palace, met Rasputin and walked hand-in-hand with Grand Duchess Anastasia.
“It’s stunning,” he says.
David’s aunt, a gerontologist, helped write the first-person memoir. It reads like historical fiction, David says. Which is interesting, because after spending a couple hours talking with David, and seeing the circles and ties to generations past, present and future, one could almost say the same about his life, too.
Many know David as author of “Making & Mastering Wood Planes,” a classic in woodworking circles first published by Sterling and now sold under the Lost Art Press imprint. But since David first wrote that book he finds himself in a different place entirely, making violins and violas beloved by musicians. He talks a lot about luck but between his words is a lot of time, talent and skill. It’s a story that begins with his grandparents and now rests with his daughters. It’s about paths chosen and paths neglected, finishing what was left behind and following passions, all interconnecting to form a beautiful tale.
A Childhood Filled with Art & Music
David’s paternal grandfather, a paint chemist by trade, was a hobbyist woodworker. His grandfather also wrote, acted and directed Yiddish theater, and was founder of the Vagabond Theater in Baltimore, Maryland, the nation’s oldest continuously running community theater. His paternal grandmother was a trained sculptor. David has a couple little dovetailed boxes his grandfather made, with chip carving on them by his grandmother. David’s maternal grandfather, a doctor, was trained in St. Petersburg and cared for immigrant families in Baltimore’s Canton neighborhood.
David Finck and his father, Henry Finck, on a hike about 50 years ago.
David grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father, Henry Finck, had a small woodshop in their basement and his mother, Paula, had an art studio in their home. David’s dad, academically gifted, was a professor of anatomy at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, although academia didn’t suit him.
As a child David recognized his parents were unique. His mother, a substitute art teacher, always had projects for him and his two older sisters. He laughs, remembering how they used to melt packing peanuts with candles, creating all sorts of things with long strings of burnt plastic in the basement of their old house, a dungeon-like space with low ceilings and thick cut-stone walls. They would play with clay and origami. With a friend, David would use cardstock from old computer programs to create taped-and-glued-together cars for play.
“I was into making stuff as a kid but it was just a part of life, something you didn’t even really think about,” he says.
In high school, he took a woodshop class taught by “a very nice man who didn’t know a lot about woodworking.” While his teacher spent much of the class dealing with discipline issues, David managed to build a few projects.
“They were laughably bad, really bad,” he says. “No portent of the future came out of that shop class.”
David’s first foray into music was the recorder. At the time, his parents were secular Jews. While his mom was still interested in some of the Jewish traditions, his family didn’t belong to a temple. When David’s friends began attending Hebrew School, his mom gave him a choice: He could go to Hebrew school or learn to play an instrument. Hebrew School was a three-day-a-week proposition, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., following full days of school.
“Guess which one I did?” he says, laughing.
He took recorder lessons for about a year – then something introduced him to the world of string instruments, which would become a significant part of his life ever after. That something? The movie “Deliverance.”
“I don’t know why my folks let me see it but I had watched ‘Deliverance’ with my dad when I was about 11, which is pretty intense, but you know the scene in the beginning where the Appalachian kid is sitting on the porch playing banjo and one of the characters starts backing him up on the guitar? Well, I just thought that was the most incredible thing I had ever heard.”
Later, David learned there were issues with that scene: While the music you hear is Scruggs-style three-finger bluegrass picking, the kid on the porch is playing a totally different style. What David did know at the time was that he wanted to play that tune. “It totally inspired me,” he says.
So his folks bought him an inexpensive plastic banjo that sounded, actually, pretty good, he says. It was the early 1970s and Pittsburgh was experiencing a folk revival – in fact, his sister, Tina, was playing guitar, mandolin and accordion in one of the city’s first old-time string bands. David began taking banjo lessons at a local music shop. Six months into them he realized there were different styles of banjo playing, and that he was never going to learn dueling banjos from his teacher, from whom he’d been learning a style called frailing (also called clawhammer). David was disappointed. And he probably would have found a new teacher and kept up with banjo had his dad not taken a sabbatical that resulted in his entire family moving – to New Zealand.
Dunedin’s Star Basketball Player (For a Short While)
Watergate and the Vietnam War filled the news. David’s parents, who were pretty liberal, wanted to leave the U.S. His father found a part-time job at a university on the South Island of New Zealand, in a town called Dunedin. New Zealand, David thought, offered a kind of paradise. This feeling was dashed a bit when the family arrived only to be greeted by a rare traffic jam caused by, of all things, the opening of a Kentucky Fried Chicken. His parents, believing they had left U.S. culture behind, were chagrined. They also were unsure about New Zealand’s political future.
Years later, David came across a passage in one of his father’s many notebooks about their time in New Zealand. His dad was a prodigious collector of clippings, pasting hundreds of them into dozens and dozens of composition notebooks, along with his own comments.
“There were a series of newspaper clippings related to Watergate that he had clipped out of the New Zealand newspaper,” David says. “And he was teaching anatomy at this university and he’s writing, ‘I can’t wait to be done with this. I want to do things with my hands. I want to make things that are tangible.’” (Eventually, he would.)
Grades were organized differently in New Zealand, by forms. The form David was initially placed in proved to be a little too easy; they moved him to the high school, which proved to be a little too hard. But there was a bright spot: For a short time, David was Dunedin’s star high school basketball player.
“I think basketball had been introduced in New Zealand three or four years earlier and I was one of the few people in the nation, it seemed, that knew how to dribble,” he says. “They put me on the varsity basketball team. I was like 100 pounds, 5’2”, 11 years old or something. But I could dribble circles around all these people. No one else really had any kind of dribbling skills at that point, but I quickly got beat up pretty bad by these much older kids and they put me in JV. But for a little while there, I was reveling in my athletic prowess. It was pretty thrilling.”
David’s true athletic passion had always been baseball. It was the early 1970s, the heyday for Pittsburgh teams. And in Pittsburgh, David lived two miles from the old Forbes Field. Like most 11-year-olds he wanted to be a major league baseball player – woodworking wasn’t even a thought. “The only trouble was I wasn’t very good and didn’t know it,” he says.
After a year in New Zealand David’s dad realized his part-time position wasn’t going to become full time anytime soon. So the family moved back to Pittsburgh, where David finished high school.
A Crooked Course Through College
“I hated high school,” David says. “But coming from an intellectual, academic-minded family, I was totally geared to go to college because I didn’t have anything better to do. And I sure wish that was not the case. I wish I had figured something else out.”
At the time Pittsburgh had a scholars program, which essentially meant starting high school in eighth grade if you maintained a B average – and David was a straight B student. He completed his high school courses by 11th grade and, not wanting to spend a year in high school taking AP courses, he graduated. Without a real plan he enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh.
“My parents were really laissez-faire when it came to guidance,” he says. “Either that or I didn’t seek them out and they didn’t impose their will on me. I don’t remember having heart-to-heart talks about this sort of thing at all. I just sort of plotted my own course in a really poor way.”
David, 17, was miserable in his big introductory college classes. But then he met Tom, a guy in his late 20s who had just earned his undergraduate degree in marine biology in Santa Barbara, California. David already had a vague interest in marine biology. Jacques Cousteau was big at the time. And David had spent several summers in Cape Cod, mucking around in estuaries and mud flats, and snorkeling while his dad worked in a lab at the Oceanic Institute. Tom told David he should go to UC Santa Barbara and study marine biology. And so, David did.
He ended up in a house with friends of Tom’s, all in their late 20s. A quarter-mile from campus, the house was two blocks from the beach and half the guys were surfers. It was paradise, David says, really beautiful. But yet again he found himself in huge general science classes. The beach was distracting and he worried he wouldn’t be successful in the environment.
He got in touch with a cousin who lived in Big Pine Key, Florida, about 20 miles from Key West. David’s cousin was taking marine technology classes at a small community college. Instead of sitting in auditorium-style classrooms, students at this college were out on boats doing sampling.
“Man, that sounded like a great idea to me,” David says. “So I took a leave, got myself all the way down to Big Pine Key, Florida, in time for the winter semester.” The problem? He hadn’t read the course catalog – no one was out on boats doing sampling in the winter. Despite this disappointment David continued his studies and spent a nice six months with his aunt, uncle and cousins in Florida.
Still unsure about his path in life, he decided to pursue a liberal arts education, and he transferred to UC Berkeley. Unfortunately, his guidance counselor told him a liberal arts degree didn’t exist. Together they came up with environmental science, and despite all the jogging around, David graduated with an environmental science degree four years after starting college.
David’s First Guitar
Before David and his family moved to New Zealand, his father had started – and stopped – building a classical guitar. The guitar was intended to be a stepping stone. After completing it his father wanted to build a viola da gamba. And if he accomplished that, he’d build his dream project: a violin. The move to New Zealand had interrupted the next step in the guitar, cutting a channel in the edges for inlaying the binding. After returning to Pittsburgh, David’s father, a cautious man with myriad things on his plate, found ways to put that step off for close to 20 years.
“It was during high school when I really started bugging him to finish that guitar because I thought it was good,” David says. “He was very meticulous.”
At the time David was a fan of James Taylor and Cat Stevens. He began playing pop folk on guitar, eventually moving to classical guitar and taking lessons. Another reason David wanted his dad to finish the guitar? He wanted it.
“It would have been way better than the hand-me-down guitar I was playing,” he says.
With a dream to join the back-to-land movement, David’s dad hunted for years for a farm. The family finally found a place in West Virginia, about 110 miles south of Pittsburgh. The plan was to spend six or seven years fixing it up, then move there once David’s dad retired. But a year later, his father had had enough of academia. He quit his job and David’s parents began a new life in West Virginia.
Throughout college David and his sisters would visit and help out on the farm. David and his dad turned one of the outbuildings into a shop and in it sat the unfinished guitar, along with all the forms that had been used to build it, a how-to book and extra wood. Having grown tired of trying to convince his dad – who had plenty of other work to do on the farm –to finish it, David decided to build his own.
“It was nothing I was passionate about,” he says. “Just when we had a little bit of down time it was something to do. But I really think at the heart of it I was still trying to manipulate him to finish his own instrument. I had a lot of confidence that it would be a nice, playable instrument and I thought this might inspire him to get started.”
David says his dad was a good craftsman – the kind who could take construction lumber and build a really nice trestle table with well-fitted joinery. He built a floor loom once, with six harnesses, because one of his interests was weaving. Without a background in fine woodworking, his dad simply figured out how to do stuff, building all sorts of things including small kit sailboats in the family living room. He also suffered from a bad back and spent a lot of time on his back reading – he was incredibly well-read. And busy. David mostly built the guitar on his own.
Turns out, he loved it.
“It was just inspiring for me,” David says. “Really, it was the first time I found something I was as passionate about as baseball. It just really felt like a real love, not just like, ‘Oh, this is kind of interesting.’ It was something like a bonfire, pushing me ahead.”
Comparatively, environmental science offered him little to no passion. He remembers a “horrible” work-study job at UC Berkeley, working with a young hotshot professor.
“He had a gazillion little surf creatures preserved in formaldehyde and I had to peer between the legs of each little one of them and tell him if it was a male or female and I would do that for 10 hours a week and it drove me nuts.”
Fortunately, while at UC Berkeley, a fortuitous meeting with a young woman changed the course of his life.
In Meet the Author: David Finck (Part 2) (coming December 9) you’ll learn about David’s switch from environmental science to woodworking, the birth of ‘Making & Mastering Wood Planes’ (while caring for two young children), his family band and pivot into violin making.
A twisted Ligustrum sinense. This Chinese privet has the status of a Champion Tree in the U.K. It’s found at Thorp Perrow Arboretum, Bedale, North Yorkshire, and gained its Champion status through being the tallest and largest specimen in the country. In addition to these characteristics its status as a champion is surely derived from its most notable feature being the remarkably twisted trunk thought to be caused by a systemic fault.
I first learned about the Twin Oaks Community while working on “Cut & Dried” with Richard Jones. We needed an index. Members of Twin Oaks, an intentional community in rural central Virginia, make their living, in part, by indexing books. Additional income is generated by making hammocks and furniture and tofu, and seed growing. The Twin Oaks Community, comprised of about 90 adults and 15 children, are income-sharing. Members complete about 42 hours of business and domestic work a week, and in return receive housing, food, healthcare and personal spending money.
Rachel Nishan from Twin Oaks responded to my indexing query, and we agreed to work together. Indexing a technical book such as “Cut & Dried” is a rather monumental task, and just thinking about it made my eye twitch. Yet Rachel approached the project without an air of stress, asking detailed questions about tree types, specificity and British spellings. Throughout our correspondence one sentence has stayed with me, years later: “… a more technically-inclined reader could want to look through the index in a variety of different ways, so I have tried to be pretty redundant, which is the kindest for the user of the index.”
“Kindest for the user.” I think that’s the heart of bookmaking, no?
Richard and I sent hundreds of emails to each other while working together to turn his years of work into book form. And all of that correspondence, from image selection to epsilon size, was written with Rachel’s not-yet-said phrase in mind: kindest for the user.
I was nervous to begin work on this book. Honestly, I thought the content would be too technical for me to understand. But then I read it. And realized Richard used his genius to transform his scholarly work into easy reading. And Rachel made topics within the text easy to find. And Meghan designed the book to be easy on the eyes. All with kindness in mind.
Many woodworkers are initially reluctant to study trees in detail fearing the subject is dauntingly heavy. Whilst it’s true the subject can be studied with scientific precision it’s really only necessary to get to grips with the main elements to gain a firm basic knowledge. Wood isn’t created with the needs of the woodworker in mind. The creation of wood is necessary for trees’ survival. We simply use what nature provides. Understanding the original function of wood helps woodworkers use it sympathetically and successfully. One example of useful basic knowledge described earlier is to understand the essentials of Latin scientific classification resulting in precision and clarity in any discussion of the subject.
All trees are members of the plant family. Specifically, they are all spermatophytes meaning they are seed-bearing plants. Trees are generally characterised as being perennial seed-bearing vascular woody plants with a root system and (ordinarily) a single trunk supporting a crown of leaf-bearing branches. With exceptions (see mention of the Arctic willow, Salix arctica, earlier) they normally reach a minimum height at maturity of five m (15′) and survive for at least three years.
This basic classification then breaks trees down into two distinctive types – the angiosperms (covered seeds) and the gymnosperms (naked seeds). Alternative names for these two groups are hardwoods, deciduous or broad-leaved trees (angiosperms), and conifers or softwoods (gymnosperms). The terms hardwood and softwood can be misleading as not all hardwoods produce hard wood, e.g., soft balsa wood is the product of a hardwood tree whereas yew is hard and comes from a softwood tree.
Figure 3.1. Trees increase girth by adding growth rings annually. They increase in height by adding new growth at the tips of branches. Roots and root tips grow in the same manner.
Typical of deciduous trees in temperate climates is the loss of leaves during autumn as the tree loses vitality followed by a dormant winter period. As usual there are exceptions where many of the hollies (Ilex spp.) retain their spiky and waxy leaves throughout the year. Spring, with its longer daylight hours and warmer weather, heralds a new period of rapid growth with the emergence of new leaves, flowering and reproduction. This is not true of all hardwoods in all climates. Many equatorial living hardwoods are able to grow all year round and may never lose their leaves en masse. With these trees the cycle is continuous as old leaves reach the end of their useful life to be replaced by new ones.
Figure 3.2 . Dendritic (deliquescent) growth pattern of broad-leaved trees. The main trunk branches and rebranches.Figure 3.3. Excurrent form of coniferous Japanese larch. A single bole or trunk with subordinate branching. Larch is an exception to the rule because it loses its needles in winter. In this managed forest, juvenile Sitka spruce have established themselves between the planted larches. Dalby Forest, North Yorkshire, England.
Angiosperms (deciduous trees) from all climatic conditions have a characteristic growth pattern. Their form is deliquescent or dendritic, meaning there is branching and re-branching of a main trunk.
Gymnosperms (coniferous or evergreen) trees typically retain their leaves throughout the year, with larch being one exception to this trait. Their form is generally excurrent – the main trunk rises singly with lesser sideways branching. Broadleaved trees usually have large, relatively fragile, blade-like leaves and, to prevent dehydration of the tree resulting from their retention, they are lost before winter. Conifers on the other hand typically are able to resist dehydration because of their tough, needle-like waxy leaves, which stay on the tree through all the seasons. As with tropical hardwoods discussed earlier they lose leaves and replace them all year round. However, I’ve noticed even the much-despised fast growing leylandii (Cupressocyparis x leylandii) planted in my back garden by a previous owner loses more leaves in the winter than in the summer. Leylandii are, in truth, a very attractive tree grown where they have space. They grow very swiftly and are really too large in small British gardens – they rapidly exclude light and dominate these small spaces.
Figure 3.4. Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris). Needles (leaves) and seed cone. In common with broad-leaved trees conifers can be identified by a combination of factors – general form, bark, flowers, seeds and leaves. Scots pine needles, for example, occur in pairs, are bluish-green, twisted and about 50 mm (2″) long. They survive about four years before turning brown and dropping as a pair. Cones vary in size between 25 mm to 60 mm (1″ to 2-1/2″) in length and are usually rounded. The bark is distinctive being orange and flaky.
In common with hardwood trees living in cool temperate climates, evergreens have a dormant winter period.
Tree growth occurs in just three places. The first two are the tips of the branches and roots, which increases the tree’s height and the spread of the crown along with the range of the roots. The third place where growth occurs is in the girth of the trunk, branches and roots by the addition of an annual growth ring. Meristem or meristematic tissue refers to the growth tissue in trees. The growing tips of twigs and roots is the apical meristem. The lateral meristem is the cambium layer adding girth to the tree’s structure.
The cells produced by meristematic tissue, whether they are leaves, flowers, bark or wood, are largely of cellulose. Cellulose forms strong and stable long chain molecular structures. This, along with the lignin bonded with, or to it, is what gives wood its strength. Lignin is the “glue” holding wood together and is a complex mixture of polymers of phenolic acids. Lignin forms about 25 percent of wood’s composition and becomes elastic when heated. It is lignin’s flexible plastic property allowing wood cells to rearrange themselves that woodworkers use to their advantage during steam-bending wood into new shapes.
The majority of cells making up a tree’s structure are elongated longitudinal cells. Their long axis runs vertically up the trunk (and along the branches and roots). Some of these cells are short and stumpy and others are long and slender. The vascular function of the newly formed longitudinal cells is to conduct liquid raw essentials up the tree to the leaves and processed sugary food down the tree to nourish it. Spread through the wood are rays or medullary rays. These ray cells are also elongated but their long axis radiates from the centre of the tree toward the bark. They are stacked one upon the other throughout the length of the trunk in slender wavy bands.
In many wood species the rays are invisible to the naked eye but in others, such as numerous oaks and maples, they are usually highly visible because the groups of cells are large. Some ray cells – the parenchyma – store carbohydrates for use in cell development. The other primary purpose of the medullary rays is to transport nourishing sap toward the centre of the tree.
3.1 Log Cross Section From the outside there is the outer bark (see figure 3.6), which is a protective insulating layer against weather, animal, fungal and insect attack. The bark has millions of tiny pores called lenticels through which necessary oxygen passes into the inner living cells beneath. In polluted atmospheres such as cities the lenticels clog with dirt. London plane (Platanus x hispanica) is well suited to city life because it sheds its bark regularly, exposing clear lenticels. The bark of all trees flakes off as the girth gets bigger.
Figure 3.5. Medullary rays in European oak. On the left they are visible as light-coloured flaky patches – the sought-after quartersawn oak figuring or “silver grain.” To the right where the horizontal bands of end grain show the rays are visible as thin, light-coloured vertical lines. The centre of the living tree in this example is toward the bottom of the photograph.
Inside the outer bark is phloem, bast or inner bark. The phloem is produced by the cambium layer and is a soft spongy liquid-conducting vascular tissue that carries processed food – sugary sap – from the leaves to the rest of the tree.
Figure 3.6. End section view of small yew log. Identifying the most significant structures visible to the naked eye.
Beneath this layer is cambium – the lateral meristem (growing tissue) that adds girth to the tree. The cambium is a slimy layer only one cell thick. These cells divide constantly when the tree is active. The cambium produces not only phloem towards the outside but, towards the centre, it produces xylem.
Xylem has two major functions. As sapwood it conducts water and minerals from the roots to the leaves. Sapwood contains both live tissue and dead tissue. Dead xylem, the heartwood, is the trees’ structural support. The longitudinal cells described earlier are organised to form water- and nutrient-conducting tracheids in gymnosperms or conifers, although some hardwoods also contain tracheids. In angiosperms (broad-leaved trees) the order is different. Vessels, which are continuous tubular structures, form a pipeline from the root tips to the leaves rather akin to drinking straws bundled and glued together. (Note, though, the comment I made about some hardwoods also containing tracheids.) In oaks, for example (see figure 3.7), the naked eye easily picks out the initial spring-laid vessels or pores. In other tree types magnification is required. Sapwood is often attacked by food-seeking life forms such as fungi, insect and animal life.
As sapwood xylem ages it loses its vitality through the loss of the living protoplasm within the cells and turns into heartwood. In some species the transition between living xylem and heartwood is abrupt and clearly visible as seen in the yew cross section at left. With others it is hard to distinguish between sapwood and heartwood. The sapwood can remain as living protoplasmic cells for several years but this period varies from species to species, and even within trees of the same species. The yew sample at left shows newly laid sapwood that took about 8 or 12 years to convert to heartwood.
Figure 3.7. Close-up of European oak end grain showing light-coloured medullary rays and spongy, adsorbent, open-pored spring growth and denser less-porous late growth – European oak is a ring-porous hardwood.
Heartwood is the column of xylem supporting the tree. It is dead because it has lost its active protoplasm. Whilst outer layers of the tree are intact – protecting the heartwood nourished by foodstuffs transported to it by the medullary rays – it will not decay. Heartwood is usually, but not always, distinct in colour from sapwood. Extractives cause the colour change. Extractives are trace elements imparting various combinations of characteristics to heartwood, such as colour, fungal- and bacterial-resistance, reduced permeability of the wood tissue, additional density of heartwood, and abrasive deposits.
Tyloses are bubble-like structures that develop in the tubular vessels of many hardwoods during the changeover from sapwood to heartwood. Tyloses block the previously open vessels, preventing free movement of liquid. Red oaks form very few tyloses whereas white oaks produce many and this explains why white oaks are preferred for barrels. It’s possible to blow through a stick of red oak submerged in water and create bubbles. Whisky distillers are well aware of the “Angels’ Share,” which is the part of the spirit, usually about 2 percent, that evaporates through the wood of the oak barrel (Whisky Magazine, 2008).
Growth rings are the result of the cambium layer adding new tissue year upon year. The cambium layer (in temperate climates) becomes active in spring, reacting to chemical signals produced in the tree brought about by warming temperatures and longer daylight hours. During its active period the cambium layer adds open, fast-grown porous tissue to cope with the rush of water and minerals required of the freshly opened leaves. As the summer approaches and the initial high demand for food subsides, the cambium lays down denser, harder latewood, which adds strength to the trunk and branches.
At the centre of the tree cross section is the pith or medulla. The pith is the small core of soft spongy tissue forming the original trunk or branch.
3.2 Gymnosperms & Angiosperms – Differences 3.2.1 Gymnosperms Gymnosperms (conifers, softwoods) are simpler in structure than angiosperms. Gymnosperms evolved earlier than angiosperms and have some distinct structural characteristics. More than 90 percent of the wood’s volume is made of tracheids. Tracheids are long fibrous cellulosic8 cells approximately 100 times longer than their diameter. They range between about 2 mm and 6 mm (about 1/16″ to 1/4″) in length depending on the species.
The two main functions of tracheids are as structure for the tree and as conductors of sap – nourishment. Tracheids conduct liquid food up the tree after the living protoplasm has left. Water and minerals pass upward to the leaves from one tracheid to the next via osmosis. Osmosis is the process where liquid from a high water (weak) solution passes through a cell wall into a low water (strong) solution. In softwood trees water and minerals move upward from the roots initially through upward root pressure created by soil-borne water migration into the root tracheid cells. Secondly, there is also transpirational pull created by water evaporating from the leaves. This method of conducting foodstuffs is distinctly different to the method used in broad-leaved trees described later.
The cambium layer lays down different forms of tracheids at different times of year. In the spring, the tracheids laid down are thin walled with a large diameter and are lighter in colour. Late-growth tracheids are dark coloured, have thicker walls and a smaller diameter. The early-wood tracheids with their thin walls are better at conducting liquid than the later thick-walled tracheids. Both will conduct water, but a tree needs structure as well as the ability to transport liquid – there is a necessary balance struck between the two functions in tracheid cell structure.
A distinctive characteristic found in some gymnosperms is resin carried in resin canals. Pine, spruce, larch and Douglas fir have resin canals. These timbers have a characteristic scent when worked, and the resin can cause bleeding problems under paint and polishes. One way of setting the resin solid to reduce bleeding problems is to raise the temperature of the wood during kiln drying to 175º F for a sustained period. Genuine gum turpentine is a product of the resin from Southern yellow pine, a tree of the North American continent.
Medullary rays are narrow in conifers and invisible to the naked eye, so to see them it’s necessary to mount thin wood samples on a slide for examination under a microscope.
3.2.2 Angiosperms Hardwoods are more complex than gymnosperms. There are a number of specialised cells present in angiosperms absent from gymnosperms. For instance, the means of conducting liquid foodstuffs up and down the tree in nearly all cases is through the vascular tubular vessels. This is distinctly different to the liquid-conducting tracheids of conifers. The vessels in angiosperms form a bundle of pipes encircling the tree. The fibrous tracheids of hardwoods are much smaller than they are in conifers and because of their thick walls they are not well suited to conduct liquids. Unlike the softwoods, the rays of deciduous trees are often easily visible, e.g., in oaks, sycamore, maple, beech etc. Resin canals are rare in angiosperms, but some tropical plants such as the rubber tree produce gum and have gum ducts.
Dick Proenneke’s cabin, June 1968. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.
Editor’s note: Monroe Robinson and I have been working through edits and securing a few final photos for his book about Dick Proenneke. This week Elin Price sent us her first batch of illustrations, and we were elated. Between Dick’s journal entries and photography; Monroe’s insights, writing and photography; and Elin’s illustrations, this is going to be a beautiful, beautiful book. Following is a journal entry from Dick, dated June 30, 1968.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
Photo developed September 1968. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.
June 30, 1968:
Last evening after supper I decided I would paddle down to the connecting stream and try for a couple trout.
A third of the way down a breeze met me and as time went by it got stronger. Opposite low pass creek it was a battle to keep headway so I headed for the right shore. I finally made Emerson creek… I found several uprooted trees that would make hinges but it would take some carving. Following the beach to the lower end I saw a few in the drift on the beach. I may get some and see what I can do. Steel hinges are better no doubt but it is interesting to see what one can do using only material from the forest.
I had no watch but it must have been midnight when I left the beach. It was a beautiful clear night and a good breeze to help me along. It was one thirty when I got the trout cleaned and already the northeastern sky was getting lighter… Not long till sun up so I sawed a few blocks of wood… Filed a couple handsaws.
Took a walk up the beach towards the base of Crag mountain. Finally Gold mountain caught the first rays of the sun and I turned in for a few hours.
