Gumption (24 page)

Part of it, for Nat, is simply knowing that he and his shop mates do things in the best possible way they can be done. Their techniques may be centuries old, but they are becoming largely lost to us in this modern era of mass-production and computer-generated 3-D printing. On top of which, he told us that, with old boats, it was just worth it to some people to maintain a masterfully built classic rather than spend that fortune on something new. His theory is not at all unlike the way Thomas Lie-Nielsen makes his tools. It is the adherence to the importance of quality in all parts of life, I feel, that protects us from the creeping tentacles of consumerist thought.

Nat described to us the technique of steaming wood so that large planks can be bent around the curves of a hull. In a long box, large enough to encompass the plank, steam is pumped from any primitive kettle arrangement (steam is easy to make), and the wood is steamed for one hour per inch of thickness. Nat was talking about a clipper ship, the
Charles W. Morgan
, which had recently taken skilled wrights seven years to rebuild at Mystic Seaport. The planks on her were three and a half inches thick and forty feet long, which means they would require three and a half hours in the steam box. “So many skills have been totally lost,” he went on. “I mean, they used to build clipper ships much bigger than that up and down the coast here; in every backwater creek they used to crank those things out in ninety to a hundred days, from lofting to launching, finished. What people do these days is a joke compared to the work Herreshoff did on his yachts.”

We spoke further of the dearth of valuation for hand skills in today’s society, and what a destructive and dangerous attitude that is. Nat described the joyful sight of seeing the native children in third world situations strip a palm leaf of its fronds (leaving a paddle-shaped stem), jump into a dugout canoe crafted by their fathers, and paddle into the ocean with aplomb, as happy as clams at high tide. One of the most inspiring books I’ve read on the topic of such lost skills is John McPhee’s
The Survival of the Bark Canoe
, which details a young Maine man’s quest to keep alive the noble Native American craft of building a perfect canoe with only ingenuity, a knife, a match, and products that one can glean from the woods.

I think that part of what defines
gumption
involves a willingness,
even a hunger, for one’s mettle to be challenged. Just like Wendell Berry, Nat finds no use for a computer in his work, especially when it comes to designing and lofting, even though most modern designers have switched to CAD programs. The familiar note here seems to be that people with gumption will bristle when
less
is required of them. A part of human nature tends toward laziness and comfort, which is the part being so lucratively exploited by corporations, but there is a more noble part: the portion of the human spirit that revels, not in ease, but in having
its capabilities tested.
These estimable characters know the profoundest, bone-deep satisfaction of having themselves challenged by the world, and, relying only upon their human capabilities—their gumption—they not only win the contest, but they infuse those around them with the inspiration to shine as well.

Nat pilots sail-powered boats across the ocean, navigating primarily with the celestial bodies and a sextant. He and Ross and their boatyard have produced more than sixty substantial vessels, most of them born of his pencil, not to mention a veritable fleet of smaller craft. He holds a license from the US Coast Guard to captain a ship up to a weight of one hundred tons. Standing in his chilly shop in December, surrounded by all the tools and sawdust, Nat Benjamin said to me with a slight grin, “I find that I have friends that are retiring, and I think, ‘Gosh, have they had such lousy work that they want to retire?’ . . . If they told me I couldn’t go to work, I would be pretty upset.”

Echoing the subjects of so many previous chapters—Wendell Berry, Eleanor Roosevelt, Benny Frankles: If you don’t love your work enough to have a good time doing it, then maybe you’re showing up at the wrong job. Nat Benjamin, most assuredly, is not.

GEORGE NAKASHIMA

H
ey, look, it’s a Japanese American! And his redoubtable daughter Mira—that’s a Japanese American woman!

Talk about the American dream. George Nakashima was born in 1905 in Spokane, Washington (home of the best boot company, White’s Boots. Made in America! [The 100 percent kind!]), to a newspaper reporter descended from samurai lineage named Katsuharu Nakashima, and his wife, Suzu, qualifying him from the get-go as an heroic American citizen. Boom.

A bright young pisser, George graduated from the University of Washington with a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1929, then went on to earn his master’s degree from MIT in 1931. He moved to New York City and worked as a mural painter and architectural designer. Bingo.

Feeling pretty tall, he hopped a ship to France, where he undoubtedly ate the hell out of some crepes and snails while kicking about the country for a year like a hotshot young American architect. His tour continued to North Africa, and finally Japan, where he got a job with
an American architect, Antonin Raymond. In 1937 George volunteered to design and supervise the construction of a religious sanctuary in Pondicherry, India, where he underwent “a deep transformation of consciousness” so profound that he was given the Sanskrit name Sundarananda, which means “one who delights in beauty.” Bango.

Nakashima’s work thereafter was inculcated with a religious zeal, even as he created his first furniture for the ashram dormitory. He believed that “it was necessary to remove the desire to promote one’s individual ego from the creative process and to devote work each day to the divine,” a notion quite contrary to Western culture, but one that would inspire him to great heights nonetheless. Bongo.

Returning to Japan, young George canvassed the island nation, absorbing the subtly alluring details of traditional Japanese architecture, and met Marion Okajima, also born in America, who would become his wife. Walkin’ tall, eh, what, Georgie? A groovy Sanskrit name and a foxy bride on top of a winning disposition and a surplus of talent for design? The lovebirds moved to Seattle and opened a furniture workshop in 1940, and Marion gave birth to a beautiful daughter, Mira, in January of 1942, and everything was peachy kee—(sound of tires screeching to a stop!). Oh. Dang. Pearl Harbor.

You youngsters may not be hyperaware of this little speed bump in our great nation’s track record regarding civil liberties, but if you’ll recall from chapter 7, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, ol’ FDR pooped his presidential drawers and, under the pressure of his advisers, issued Executive Order 9066, which yanked about 120,000 Japanese Americans from their (mostly West Coast) homes and plunked them unceremoniously into concentration camps.

“Say what?” you say.

“That is accurate reporting,” I reply.

“No shit?,” you add.

“That’s a negatory on the shit,” I persevere.

“That is fucked up,” you conclude.

“You don’t say. Read on.” This next part is juicy and shameful.

We (white folks) tossed the Japanese into camps, despite the fact that two-thirds of them were US citizens, like the Nakashimas. This action was undertaken out of sheer racism and fear. Classic white-guy move. We tucked the “Orientals” out of sight, just to be on the safe side, while we were firebombing Japanese cities in preparation for a massive attack of the Allied forces on Japan. Remember, this is mere decades after the “Yellow Peril” was the commonplace term for our civilization’s fear of some sort of Asian invasion.

World War II, to me, is best represented by a group of boys of varying races, playing with their toy guns on a playground. They are shooting and seriously wounding one another, taking sides with their allies, and seeing who will dare to push the game the furthest. One kid with a weird, tiny mustache is playing like an asshole, like he owns the playground, so he is subdued, and it seems like things are going to wind down, except that Japanese kid is refusing to give up. He lands a couple of good shots on the American kid, just on his elbow, but still, it smarts. So the American kid pulls out a nuclear bomb and
nukes
the Japanese kid. The playground is stunned. Nothing remains of the victim but a white shadow on the side of the school building.

Like it or not, if you end a war by being the biggest asshole (by far),
you are not really a “victor.” You’re the biggest asshole, who had the last word, and the reason nobody retaliated is not because the other nations think America is the best. It’s because there is not another world power willing to be such a dick on the playground. Knee-jerk “patriots” who proclaim our country’s obvious superiority are ignorant to the fact that, while we are indeed superior, it’s actually as bullies that we have established our dominance.

The Manifest Destiny was our nation’s presumptive attitude in expanding west across the continent, with the absurd aim of “democratic conquest,” declared (by us) justifiable, based upon our virtue. You ask, “But who could bestow such a privilege upon this particular group of white people?” Why, the answer is God, of course. That’s the Christian God. The same white-bearded fellow who approves of our playground “diplomacy” in the Middle East, for how much difference is there, really, between the Yellow Peril and the Muslim Terror? The same deity, we were told (by George W. Bush), that put George W. Bush in the White House, despite his losing the election—a miracle indeed.

I really like the teachings of Jesus, by the way. They are beautiful and profound and morally unimpeachable. I only wish, like Wendell Berry, that so many of these gosh-darned
Christians
felt the same way. Mr. Berry is classy and respectable, and I admire him powerfully, but he’s not here right now, so I’m going to go ahead and assert that the vast number of Americans who claim to follow Christ and yet support actions like our imperialistic tendencies, including slavery, “internment” camps (sounds more gentle than “concentration”), genocide, “police actions,” torture, and “collateral damage” . . . well, you’re
clearly full of shit. Now, let’s talk about a goddamn nice furniture maker.

Despite their lemony incarceration at the hands of their cool, white captors (and fellow Americans), the Nakashimas made lemonade quite handily. While imprisoned, George met (and began to assist) Gentaro Hikogawa, a fellow inmate who was trained in traditional Japanese joinery. This style of joinery employs no fasteners, relying instead upon cleverly mating puzzlelike components that are designed to remain dependably conjoined for as long a time as the wood timbers themselves do. Once again, we are presented with a discipline that chooses beauty, quality, and patience over speed and profit.

Nakashima wrote, “The decline in quality of modern furniture is probably due in part to the use of the quick, easy and cheap dowel joint. The decline of modern domestic architecture can be traced to the popularity of the stud wall put together with hammer and nails, a type of construction calling for no joinery at all. By contrast, the early American house and barn with their excellent joinery still represent the best we have produced and will greatly outlast contemporary buildings.”

Nakashima took to this ancient joinery style like a televangelist to your grandmother’s pension dollars, and when his family was sprung from the Idaho camp after being “sponsored” by their white pal Antonin Raymond, they set up a home in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where Raymond lived. The young family had to start over very much from scratch, and they spent a rough couple of winters getting their domicile together, literally stacking the stones from the property into walls.

It wasn’t long before George was crafting what would become his signature style of sculptural tables, chairs, benches, and cabinets in his Pennsylvania studio. The Nakashima table style can best be described as employing a large slab of wood—made from one vertical slice of the tree—which has been flattened and smoothed on its faces but retains the organic, natural outer edges. In the beginning, he used no power tools, mostly because there was no power. As a purist student trying to emulate his work, I always felt conflicted when employing electricity upon any step of a Nakashima piece, until I read this: “As much as man controls the end product, there is no disadvantage in the use of modern machinery and there is no need for embarrassment. . . . A power plane can do in a few minutes what might require a day or more by hand. In a creative craft, it becomes a question of responsibility, whether it is a man or the machine that controls the work’s progress.” Boy, that was good news. I was further tickled to discover that George would drive a couple of large screws up through the bottom of his tabletops into each wing of the famous butterfly keys that he installed along cracks or seams. Screws!

He applied his philosophy of gentle curiosity to the wood, revering the material with a most Eastern sensibility. “I have always been interested in meditation and mysticism,” he said. “I think I’ve always been that kind of seeker. But I am also Japanese enough and pragmatic enough to want to give this spirit physical expression.” I suppose I can’t blame him for citing his Japanese heritage after being, you know, thrown into a concentration camp with his wife and infant daughter, but I hope that we Americans can evolve our country into someplace where George would not mind flying his flag.

We certainly have a long way to go. In a 1962 manifesto, George said this: “In proportion to the flood of consumer goods, we are probably at one of the lowest ebbs of design excellence that the world has seen. It requires a genuine fight to produce one well-designed object of relatively permanent value.” Now, reader, I’ll let you figure out if we’ve improved matters since then, or if we’ve made them worse. If you need to hunt for the answer, you’ll want to dig up your passport, because the information you seek lies in China, and at the headquarters of IKEA, and Walmart, as well as piled up for your ready research in the “stacks”—by which I mean the landfills around the globe.

For me, one of the most appealing attributes of Nakashima’s ethos is that it requires a slow approach. If you are one man or woman, attempting to make wooden implements that patrons will desire, then it does little good to build a plain bench or table exactly like something that could be purchased more cheaply from a mass manufacturer. By using an entire slice of a tree, one creates a singular, sculptural work of art that transcends the mere notion of “table” and becomes something more. With such work, one is literally suggesting that we choose beauty and nature over industrial produce; that we rise above the human weakness that causes things like internment camps. As George put it, “In a world where manual skills are shunned, we believe in them, not only in the act of producing a better product, but in the sheer joy of doing or becoming.”

Despite the success and acclaim he received, he strove to keep his shop from growing. He insisted that he and his fellow woodworkers maintain their focus on quality and pure artistry, never quantity. The popularity of his furniture grew incrementally, servicing neighbors
and more distant customers alike (like the parents of Michael Pollan) until 1973, when New York governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered two hundred pieces for his new house in Pocantico Hills, New York. From that point on, Nakashima’s work began to be highly collectible and is now gracing many major museum collections around the world.

I reckon gumption, then, in the case of George Nakashima, would be located in his ability to bear the indignities and damages inflicted upon him by the sad white people whom he only wanted the right to call “neighbor”; to look inside himself and the trees beneath his hands and find a deliverance to a more peaceful life. In 1981 George published his book
The Soul of a Tree
, which instantly became required reading for any aspiring woodworker. In this gorgeous book, dripping with his philosophy and his work in equal parts, he wrote that he strove to discover each wooden slab’s ideal use, to “create an object of utility to man and, if nature smiles, an object of lasting beauty.”

George passed away in 1990, at eighty-five years of age, but his charismatic daughter, Mira, has taken up the mantle of the craft, to continue his life’s work without abatement. The studio is still turning out work as gorgeous as ever to this day, if not more so, since it now has gained the advantage of a woman’s perspective. Speaking of her own assistant, Miriam Carpenter, Mira said, “She’s been with us for six years, basically doing what I did for two decades, being the understudy. With one big difference: When I did a drawing that Dad didn’t like, he would just go in and change it. When I feel I need to change something, I explain why.”

I am thus delighted to discern a gorgeous vein of gumption running through the George Nakashima Woodworker studios even now.