This story comes from a few different places. I don’t really know where to start, so here’s this:
The boards are stored in the loft of the old stable at my family’s farm. The topmost ones are covered with bat and pigeon shit. When you turn one over, the unweathered side is the tawny gold of old, unfinished oak. They are rough, ready for the planing mill; the tracks of the saw blade are clearly visible on the splintery surface. Dad picked them up at an auction somewhere and nobody remembers now just where they came from.
The farm (in our family since the 1920s) sits literally on the edge of the Sand Counties (of Aldo Leopold/Sand County Almanac fame) region of central Wisconsin, a few miles north of Portage.
My sister ran across the Leopold bench while visiting the Aldo Leopold Center. You’ve seen one, somewhere.
From the Aldo Leopold Foundation web pages: “Aldo never wrote down the plans for them [the benches], so everyone that has developed plans just bases them on an existing bench. None of the original benches built by Aldo were still around by the time the bench idea caught on. No wood preservative means they all eventually decayed-- Aldo's daughter Nina told us the benches at the Leopold Shack are about 3rd or 4th generation. They don't last forever! So we have photos to go on, but that's about it. Even with photos, it's difficult to determine a universal design since Aldo just used scrap wood or whatever he had available as materials, and not all his benches were identical.“
The idea of using the old oak boards, which were likely milled by a portable sawmill from trees in some of the neighboring townships, appealed to me, as did the “use-what-you-find” ethic of Aldo’s approach. It’s a farmer/rancher thing: If something breaks and you need it now, you use whatever you have to get it back working. If you need a place to park your ass, you use whatever you have to build it. A large part of my childhood revolved around that idea. It’s called “thinking outside the box” sometimes. My Dad’s family didn’t call it anything, just kind of did it.
*
The day I met Mom at the farm to pick out some of the lumber, it was hot. While she took on an onslaught of Japanese beetles in the unoccupied house, I climbed up into the dim hay mow above the old stable. As I started picking through the pile, a dry stink of bats, birds, mice, and old, old wood filled my nostrils. When I was 11 and had my first pony in a stall below, it smelled exactly the same.
The stable also housed a pair of workhorses (not big ones like Clydesdales, probably Morgans). Grandpa kept them for his hired hand. Tom had suffered a spine-twisting injury as a young man, never learned to drive either a tractor or a car. He did all his field work behind a team of horses. (I have been blessed with horses most of my life. Another story.)
*
The smell of red oak when you cut or split it is sweet-sour like a melon-rind pickle, but not quite. It will forever be linked in my mind to the 2-cycle reek of a chainsaw. As I started to cut the boards for the bench, the aroma wafted up from the saw blade. As old as the lumber was, it still smelled like oak.
It only takes six pieces to make a Leopold bench. This one came together quickly, with a minimum of cussing, no slivers, and no amputations. And it only wobbled a nano when it was done.
I didn’t realize as I was cutting the wood and putting it together that I was constructing not just a thing to sit down on, but a place to look out from. The first time I sat down and looked out across the road at the neighbor’s bean field I was not just “on the bench,” I was in it. The design sort of wraps around you and creates its own sense of place wherever it is.
*
When I started, there were a bunch of old boards, me, and an idea. Now there is a tangible thing that creates its own port in the storm wherever you set it down.
Putting good into the world is the only real job humans have. I’m not the best at that job, not the worst. In a society where corporations have become people and people are referred to as consumers, there would seem to be scant chance for something as insignificant as my rustic bench to make a difference.
Yet it does. It makes a difference because God (or whichever euphemism you prefer) does not talk to corporations. It makes a difference because God talks to people. He speaks to me in a language made of things like this Leopold bench.
Because, really, it isn’t just a bench.
Brooklyn, Wisconsin
June 10, 2015
2:46 PM PT: This diary has been edited to fix some boo-boos.