A Good Day's Work (21 page)

Pierre worked until two this morning. (“When I go to the smithy and work, time stops—or at least slows down,” he tells me.) So he's having a deservedly slow start to the day: sitting on an iron chair beside the herb garden, waiting for the sun to warm his joints, talking about his family's long history in the area. The son of a cashier in a restaurant and a lumberjack who also did some farming, he was a different kid: “I've always
been interested in handmade things,” he says in softly accented English. “I believed in that old saying, what is it, ‘Idle hands are the devil's work tools.' I was always fixing things around the house. When I was young, I used to carve wood, making little lumberjacks and wood puppets. I had a flea circus and put boats in bottles.”

They're good memories, you can tell. Pierre likes things that last. He treasures tradition. It feels good for him to make his home where his people have lived for generations. Just as he considers himself blessed to practise an art mentioned in the Book of Genesis; that was said to be practised by Vulcan, the blacksmith of the gods; that forged the scimitars of Saladin and the anchors of the
Nina, Pinta
and the
Santa Maria
. An art that, after all those millennia, remains as basic as ever: air, fire, water and metal—the power of the physical merged with the chemical. A man with a hammer trying, through pure will and muscle, to change the nature of a piece of iron.

As much as anything, it is the intent that matters to Pierre: what he does—forge things out of metal—is practical but, in this day and age of mass production, absolutely irrelevant. All that is really at stake is the tissue-thin difference between “a thing done well and a thing done ill,” even as the rest of the world cares less and less about craftsmanship, dedication, patience and meticulous attention. “There is a right way of doing things,” Pierre likes to say. The ecstasy he seeks isn't the thrill of heart-thumping excitement. It is the deep pleasure along the eternal road to mastery.

Pierre—who lives where he wants and generally does what he chooses according to his own schedule and rhythms—is a contented man, a blissful man. He doesn't hurry. His natural
expression is a half smile. He laughs easily. Pierre stands, yawns, then walks toward a solid, beaten wooden building topped with an old weather vane. Some other laid-back soul would probably just stay outside and soak in the astounding day. Yet
le forgeron
lives for the flame of the forge, the clang of the hammer. Today Quebec's Brotherhood of Blacksmiths has dwindled to just fifty members. About half are hobbyists: guys with an anvil in the garage who dabble at forging. The rest are professional artisan blacksmiths like Pierre, who make and repair metal products—decorative, practical and sometimes both—with a few simple tools. That he is the only one who slavishly adheres to the “old ways” is as much hard-headed pragmatism as misty-eyed romanticism. “I am trying to keep the old techniques alive because they work,” he says. “A house will burn down and the only thing salvageable will be ironwork. I'm doing the same thing the same way it's been done since the Iron Age—because it lasts.”

Inside his workshop the air bulges with heat. Some kind of particulate stings the eyes. Coal overpowers the sinuses. What light there is comes from outside, or from the forge, which he started firing up a few hours ago. At first the eyes dart around, searching for something heavy, slow and nasty—a Minotaur maybe, over there in the corner. Once they grow accustomed to the smoke and gloom, it's possible to make out a room that's about the size of a small barn, which is what it once was. A horseshoe, symbolically, overhangs the entrance. If there is a floor, I can't see it. Two anvils—the smaller one atop an old tree stump—are visible. I glimpse a primordial workbench, a wooden barrel full of water—the slack tub, for cooling the hot metal—and a
cast-iron block, called a “swage block,” with holes and grooves for shaping metal.

To a visitor used to typing away on a laptop in a neat little room, the shop looks chaotic and tousled. A closer look shows that everything has its place: the pile of debris is scrap metal, which will always come in handy. The stacks of tools are different kinds of tongs, files and chisels and dozens upon dozens of punches. In a thigh-high rack I count twenty-six hammers, different sizes, shapes and materials, no two of them alike.

Pierre has four forges. A smith, I discover, can never really have too many. Before metal can be shaped, it has to be heated until it is as malleable as clay. Heat like that requires a safe fire-resistant structure to house the fire. Pierre's forge is wide based and waist high. The bowl-shaped fire pot has a hole in the bottom, through which air is piped to increase the flame's heat. A draft hood to draw off the smoke from the flame looms over the hearth.

Pierre shows me the drill: how he puts kindling and newspaper inside the fire pot. How he lights the kindling and uses a long, hooked tool called a “rake” to pile coal into the fire pot. The coal—shipped from Montreal in hundred-pound bags that cost thirty-five dollars each and last between a day and a week depending upon the work being done—is the bituminous variety. It has to be baked for a few minutes until the impurities are burned off. The dull-looking leftover residue, which is called “coke,” burns more easily and hotter than coal. Pierre, who moves with an outfielder's unhurried grace, rakes away the coke that has burned to ash.

He pokes around in the fire pot for “clinkers,” hunks of non-combustible impurities from the coal that dilute the
quality of the flame. Once the pile in the fire pot burns grey, hard and porous he turns on the blower to feed the forge with more oxygen. Smiths used to depend upon a bellows operated by an apprentice. Pierre's blower is electric. He flicks a switch, hears the whoosh, then steps back and waits for the deep bed of coke to heat.

Today he is working on a
cadenas de cabane à sucre
or, in English, sugar shack lock—a lock for one of those small shacks dotting the Quebec woods where sap collected from sugar maple trees is boiled into maple sugar. Right now it's nothing more than a piece of wrought iron a couple of inches across. From those rude beginnings will emerge a nifty little conical device into which a heart-shaped key is inserted that sets or releases the shackle. Eventually the lock, which will take about sixteen hours to make, will retail on the Internet for three hundred dollars. He knows that's not great money. Pierre could make more dough cranking out in-demand antique reproductions for Home Depot and home furnishing outlets looking for a little old-style authenticity. He calls that “monkey work.” And life is just too short.

Using a set of long, tapered tongs, he plunges the iron into the by now white-hot coals, then rakes some more coal overtop. It takes anywhere from 1,200 to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit to heat a piece of iron to the point where it can be easily shaped.

Pierre doesn't own a thermometer. The shop's perpetual gloom allows him to read the metal. He knows that when a piece of metal is red-orange, he can bend it. When it turns yellow, he can punch a hole in it. When it is white, he can “upset the metal”—hammer the metal back into itself to
increase the mass and make it shorter—which is what he wants to do now. Blacksmiths can do other things with a piece of metal, an anvil and hammer: they can “draw out” or lengthen the metal; they can punch decorative patterns into the metal.

When it glows white enough, Pierre uses tongs to extract the metal from the fire. Then he drops it onto the smooth surface of his anvil. At 129 pounds it's small by anvil standards—his other, a double-horned French anvil, weighs about two hundred pounds—but big enough for the job at hand. Pierre owns a homemade power hammer, which is easy on the joints but can't do the kind of precision, angled work he aims for. He almost always opts for muscle power.

By perusing the website for Kayne & Son, a North Carolina blacksmithing family who supply Pierre with many of his tools, I discover that lots of hammers are fit for forge work: bossing mallets, chasing and dinging hammers and French, German, Nordic and Czech hammers. There are hammers for planishing, polishing, raising and rounding. There are cross peens (with a wedge-shaped surface on one edge of the head) and ball peens (one end round and the other cylindrical). The biggest one I discover is a French sledge (17.6 pounds) and the smallest one may well be a doming hammer (.35 pounds), apparently used by armourers. Each of Pierre's hammers has a different handle to make it instantly identifiable. He lifts one that he forged himself out of the rack: two-foot wooden handle, steel cross peen head with a total weight of 3.5 pounds. Then he steps toward the anvil. It is time to pound some iron.

IN junior high school when I grew up, boys took a class called “industrial arts,” where, theoretically, we learned how to make things with tools. My self-esteem suffered mightily in that class. I lacked the patience to measure twice and cut once. Nothing—not tie racks, footstools or jewellery boxes—was plumb, flush or smooth. Everything jiggled. When the shop teacher—an ex-navy diver with a chest like a bellows—started talking about fret saws and rip cuts, he might just as well have been speaking Phoenician.

That didn't stop me from seeing the value and virtue of such an activity. Perhaps it has something to do with a family tree that was dotted with electricians, carpenters, auto mechanics, bakers and Linotype operators. All I know is that since I started thinking about such things, I've felt nothing but wonder for the people who make the stuff of life. They build things, keep them running, then fix them when they break. They do something important and absolutely necessary—they may even do it with a little flair—with just a few tools and their own two hands. My admiration for people who work with their hands began as simply as that. But I also liked their no-nonsense ways. The sense of accomplishment of making or fixing something—instead of trying to anticipate the airy whims of some magazine editor—appealed to me. So did the notion of being rooted in the real world and making lives better in some concrete way.

Once we all worked with our hands. We know that from our names—Baker, Barber, Brewer, Carpenter, Chandler (a maker of candles), Collier (coal miner), Cooper, Draper, Drover (someone who drivers cattle or sheep to market), Fisher, Farmer, Mason, Miller, Plumber, Porter, Roper, Sawyer (a
carpenter or one who saws), Smith, Stone, Tanner, Taylor, Tucker (a cleaner of clothes), Wainwright (wagon maker) or Weaver. With time, gigantic clanking, hissing machines would replace solo men pounding hammers in small workshops. In his book
The Craftsman
Richard Sennett argues that craftsmanship—which he describes as “an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake”—isn't disappearing. He thinks it has merely migrated. The Linux software operating system, for Sennett, is no less the work of a community of craftsmen than an ancient pot.

I fear we run in different circles. From where I sit there's an obvious de-skilling going on in places like Canada. When technology and the modern-day consumer marketplace can do so much, who the hell needs to make a wall that lasts, to re-sole Dad's hand-me-down brogues or to lift up the hood and see why the light in the dashboard stays on? To my mind, that's a woeful development. Some things can't be written down. Some skills—the understanding of the expert attained by a lifetime in proximity to his material, which is passed down from master to apprentice—disappear forever when the line is broken.

I pondered this last thought after reading a British study that pointed out that in some UK organizations, over 80 percent of manual workers exercised less skill in their jobs than they used driving to work. I've discovered no comparable figures about the de-skilling of Canada. But I do note that a century ago the province Pierre calls home had more carpenters (12,313 in all) than teachers, engineers, lawyers and accountants combined. In 1911, according to the Canadian census, Quebec had more stonemasons and cutters, plumbers
and steamfitters than government bureaucrats. Overall, nearly half the Quebecers who held down jobs back then worked on farms. There were also more people working in the skilled building trades than in “commerce.”

Quebec, at that point in time, had barbers and bootblacks (2,328), sextons (636), explosives makers (348), button makers (39), furriers (1,148) and white-wear makers (901). It had platers and polishers (138), printers and engravers (3,941), tanners and curriers (1,306), sail makers and riggers (15), along with telephone and telegraph linemen (987). It had people who made and repaired watches, clocks and jewellery (199), scales (38), boots and shoes (9,133), trunks (218) and musical instruments (373). Its citizens constructed fruit baskets and boxes (504), picture frames and showcases (62), brooms and brushes (293), bags and sacks (80), metal shelves (51) and surgical instruments (5). The great expansion of Quebec's heavy industries may have been just getting underway, but skilled workers were busy building locomotives (1,618) and toiling as machinists (5,205), iron founders (2,177) and metalworkers (1,060).