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Skip to content Red Alder Ranch life at the edge of the world, and beyond… stories of special objects I’ve come to appreciate stories over the years, even more than I did when I was younger. Stories about old objects, like tools and books are especially interesting to me, and some of the special objects in my life have accumulated some stories worth telling. Way, way back in a previous lifetime, in about 1997 or so, I bought a handmade knife at the Winter Arts Faire at the Mateel Community Center in Humboldt County. The maker was Michael Hemmer, from Corvallis, OR. He made knives out of old sawmill circle saw blades, and sold them through the mail, and traveled around to arts fairs like the one at the Mateel. I bought a nice medium sized kitchen knife from him, and also traded him some pear boards that I had milled for a small utility kitchen knife. That one was special to me, because the handle was made of Myrtlewood, from Myrtle Point, OR, where my grandparents lived, and where my dad grew up. And also because the pear tree that the boards came from was a very old tree from the original Early Ranch homestead near where we lived at the time, in Salmon Creek, CA. That knife was lost a few years later, but the larger knife was our main kitchen knife for many years. I also still have a few bits of that pear, and it has become part of a couple of small projects that I have made, too. Anyway, when Shannon and the kids moved to Astoria in 2007, that knife went with her, along with a cutting board I had made from a stunning piece of Claro walnut. The piece of wood was actually a kiln sample board from a load of lumber that my friend Dan had dried. A kiln sample board is a board that is measured and weighed as the drying process in a lumber kiln progresses, so as to keep track of how the rest of the kiln pack is doing. It was too short to be useful for much of anything in the cabinet making world, but it made a great cutting board. As some of our friends might remember, a few weeks after Shannon and the kids moved to town in 2007, the house they rented was destroyed in a catastrophic fire that they were lucky to escape from. I spent a couple of days picking through the ashes salvaging what could be saved, and in the ashes of what had been the kitchen, I found that knife, handle scales burned off, sitting on the charred piece of Claro walnut. Of course, I saved it, but it sat in my shop for years because I didn’t have the confidence that I knew how to properly redo the heat treatment, and restore it. Last winter sometime, I dropped it off with my friend Patrick, who said he would take a crack at fixing it. I gave him an assortment of small pieces of lumber of various kinds to use as handles on the knives that he makes. This summer, I dropped by and picked up the knife, all fixed up and restored and even improved over the original. Since this is all about stories, I have to mention also where this handle wood came from. In 1995, we sold our house in NE Portland and moved to …. well, nowhere for a while. We traveled for a bit in California in a 1968 VW van, and then lived for a few months in a school bus outside of Olympia, WA. While we were there, I bought my first sawmill, a 1995 Woodmizer, and started figuring it out as I went. My first real job was milling up the remains of a huge Big Leaf Maple that was removed when the Candlelight and Wine restaurant in Olympia was torn down. Old punk rock associate John Kangas sent that job my way, and it was an enormous undertaking that I was completely unprepared for. However, I and another guy managed to get it all cut up for the owner of the tree, and I kept a bunch of short boards from it, including some with some figure. Here’s a couple of pictures of two year old Alice, standing next to the main trunk of that tree in our log deck, and then on a stack of figured maple boards. (For what it’s worth, the truck that those boards are stacked on is still parked in my pasture today, with tags expired almost 20 years ago, and in constant peril of being overrun by blackberries. It’s got a few stories of its own… ) Alice and big maple log, 1995, Rochester, WA Hippie child Alice, and figured maple lumber, 1996, Olympia, WA Anyway, one board from that tree was in the assortment of wood that I had given Patrick, and that is now the handle of my “new” kitchen knife. Thanks, Patrick! I think I’ll write up a few more stories like this in the future, about special objects and their stories. This was fun to write and dig up pictures for. Posted by mark November 8, 2019 Posted in Uncategorized Leave a comment on stories of special objects “how’s Greenland?” I walked down the hill from the hotel to the harbor this evening, to sit at a picnic table near the docks and relax and have a pipe and a splash of liquor. Dunhill Standard Mixture, picked up in Norway at an exorbitant price, packed into a cheap Falcon Coolway pipe, and a flask filled with Famous Grouse scotch, brought from the Keflavik duty-free store. There’s just the tiniest few drops of rain, harbinger of more to come, later tonight and tomorrow. But for now, it’s the perfect amount of barely damp. Boats all tied up and quiet for the night. Kids out playing all over town, and especially at the container dock, which is pretty empty right now, and makes a good place to ride bikes, and throw balls for dogs. The concert venue made of shipping containers from last weekend has disappeared; many of the containers left on a small ship a few days ago. The sign at the entrance to the dock that indicates that children are not to play on the dock seems to be pretty much ignored. Two boys go past tearing down the hill on a bike with low tires, no helmets, lights, or anything else. Two more boys go past up the hill on a tiny scooter with a bad engine miss. Beautiful evening colors, dimming light, and a relaxed, mid-week evening vibe around town. Pipe done, I came back up to the room after walking around town a bit, for a dinner of some dried capelin fishes, crackers with Danish camembert and some Tuborg Guld lager. People ask, “How’s Greenland”? Which can be pretty hard to answer sometimes. But that’s a little of how it is, right now, right here. Posted by mark September 5, 2019 September 5, 2019 Posted in Uncategorized Leave a comment on “how’s Greenland?” Changes… OK, so what about those big life changes that I vaguely alluded to in the introductory post? OK, then… The “Big D”: My marriage has always been pretty challenging and difficult, as those who are at least sort of close to me know. And, after a long, long time, almost 27 years, it finally came to an official end in early 2018, although it had been functionally over for a while before that. Basically, after years of stubbornness and extreme loyalty, fear of change, and a heavy indulgence in the Sunk Cost Fallacy, I finally stopped fighting to stay married, and just let the chips fall where they may. And where that ended up was in a breakup, followed by a long, sort of awkward co-habitation, and finally separation and divorce. We did manage, in the end, to pull off a fairly non-combative, amicable, DIY divorce, that kept costs and drama to a bare minimum. If you’re friends with Shannon, you’ve known about this since it happened, and probably even before, actually, because she has been much more public about it than I have been. I’m a pretty private person for the most part, and honestly, this wasn’t something I was super excited about. It felt like failure on a grand scale, and not something I really wanted to go around yakking about to just anyone. And I definitely have not been super excited to run around in 2019 announcing myself as “single”. Ugh. I haven’t been “single” since I was younger than my oldest kid is now. The elder George Bush was president, the first Iraq War hadn’t even happened yet, phones were still connected to the wall with wires, and Nirvana had just come out with “Bleach”… lol. But, there you have it. From ...