Philosophy

A philosophy shared in four parts.

A Dodge all-wheel-drive truck is a tool. Time-honored tools are simple, elegant in their simplicity, and durable. Fundamental, effective tools will be kept and used as long as we live.

I can learn something about a man when I enter his shop, when I look in his toolbox. I can see what he keeps, what he cares for, and I can learn something of his style.

In spending time together, we come to better understand and honor our common
bonds.

Part One

I sit examining an inspiring publication filled with pieces of furniture
wandering along the gauzy boundary between exotic furniture and sculpture
that happens to be made of wood. A good share of it I wouldn't care to own.

I do earnestly admire the craftsmanship, the patience, the attention to
detail, and the display of skills I hold in the highest esteem.

Having spent a good bit of time working with wood, I read the magazine and
imagine me studiously attending to the birth of a crafted thing, laboring
over the finest details and construction techniques; honoring the product as
a measure of me, my skill, and my reverence for accuracy and form.

Do I start? Do I grasp the first rough board and lay it to measure with tape
and rule? Do I sit bent at the drawing table to plan the pilgrimage?

No.

Why, then?

It is because I am daunted by the herculean task.

I think it noble in the fullest to spend huge lots of time from one's finite
life in the pursuit of any such honest goal as the production of a solid
table.

Even the word tablehas a good sound to it. I savor it, I want to say it
more than once. Twice, or even three times.

I think I shall make a table, and it will be good.

Do I mean the table or the making of it? It will be solid. It will be home,
it will be a foundation.

A foundation for life... yours and mine. Will this foundation be the table,
or will it be what I learn during the making of it?

We can gather around it, you and I, and we can share time and space. We can
think together for a bit. We will then go on, better for it, and look back
upon the experience fondly.

We sit at a good table.

That table shall be at the center of it all, doing what it does best – being
unobtrusive, yet serving us as required, along with our accessories. Our
drink, our papers and books, our guns and knives... or whatever we choose to
examine. Together.

Better yet if the table is something I have personally and privately labored
over. If it is made from great slabs of wood rescued from the fallen barn on
the old place.

History. Who lived there before?

Native timbers, rough hewn from the hearts of trees grown long ago in these
parts and experienced in the passage of time; both easy and hard. Trees that
knew the sunny days and the violent storms. Living valiantly through it
all.

Being in the presence of such veteran stuff yields its own confidence in the
possibility of making it to the morrow unscathed. We have a friend in this
table; the great and strong tree it used to be. It knows no matter what
happens, we will all be here tomorrow when the sun breaks the rim of the
world.

My soul could better be in it if I had sawed the wood with brutish, human
labor; if I, with my hands, planed it. Especially after honing the steel
blade on a bench stone, then testing the edge on my living skin.

The curled shavings would fall to the shop's floor and land about my worn
leather boots. All these things good and natural in color. Smelling, too.

Better if the plane was very old and very used. My grandfather's plane, a
tool he used to make good things. The plane even a bit of someone else, made
in a place shaded by steel and smoke, inhabited by men with coarse cloth
shirts, snap-brimmed caps and rough hands; wooden benches and steel tools
bearing the sheen of use and time. Men who fished from row boats and ate
picnic lunches from covered baskets wove of peeled wooden strips.

All of this loops back on itself and intricately illustrates a continuity
and connectedness between me and the tree and the earth it came from... and
you, if you sit with me at the table, petting the dog who patiently stands
at your knee.

The dog may have done his own thing on a tree, a descendant of the old timer
used to build the table. We all loop together, forming whorls in the grain
of our cosmic forest's wood.

I do not start because I get lost in the motion and pattern of all this. I
back away in silence and wonder if I am equal to it.

If my dovetails are not perfect, have I blasphemed? If the joints are not
tight, is it disrespect for the life of the tree? Have I squandered the
resources used to grow the oak or pine before me? Material that lies flat,
naked, even vulnerable before me on the bench. I tremble in the thinking of
it, therefore cannot reach to touch it.

And so I bring myself to a place where there is a casting retaining a
precision Timken set guiding an alloy shaft, itself bearing splines and
various diameters turned; through a cavernous case filled with refined
petroleum, all held together with graded, threaded fasteners and the labor
of someone manipulating a fine forged wrench. It is daunting, it is
illuminating, it is humbling, it pierces.

It stills me in mind and in body.

Consider the resources mustered in the foundry and in the forge. The history
and experience lost somewhere in the heart of the assembly now silent.
Waiting passively for touch and the resultant, exultant motion.

It is all a pattern in the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral we build for our
deepest fascinations.

It is our responsibility to care for the parts, know them well, value their
every virtue. Even the ones not immediate and recognizable. They come to us
in oblique moments, later and farther away, and perhaps in the middle of
something else.

The truck, it is solid, too. We can gather with it and talk and share and
know one another. We can travel forward in space and backward in time. All
at once.

It is good.

This is how I can spend an hour looking at a part, feeling the weight, the
sharp edges, the drilled holes and the machined surfaces. Love the texture
of the casting left on much of it. Believing the dirt upon it is honest and
right.

Not a thing to mind in the dark of a night, alone. The ceiling a black sky
with a single, brilliant moon.

Part Two

A woman and a teenage boy examine a CD player in a stereo shop. The boy
holds a remote control unit in his hand, entranced. He pushes buttons and
marvels. She observes.

"How is this different from the one you have now?" she asks.

He waves the remote at her, "With this, I don't have to get out of bed."

This is not advanced technology. It is retarding technology. It needs to be
stopped before we choke on it.

I consider these things as I load pieces of rough sawn oak in the back of my
truck. They are halves of railroad ties not ever treated with creosote, used
one time – fresh from the sawmill – as cribbing for the raising of a house. I am
happy to have them, as I intend to raise my house. I will need many such
blocks, and I gather them when I can.

I intend to do this work without a fiber-optic network, without a laser
beam, without a computer. I will do it with jacks and wood blocks. I will do
it by hand.

I will have to get out of bed to do it.

Manufacture once meant to make by hand. That was long ago, but it certainly
communicates the notion that humans can touch, create and shape. A
connection between people and things. A healthy and necessary connection.

I once worked with a machinist who said we should raise our own green beans,
not buy them in metal cans. We should dig in the soil, plant the seeds.
Weed, water, and pick them. It might seem less economical than buying beans
at the store, but it would feed us in a number of ways.

We wouldn't need countless metal cans with printed paper labels, all ending
up at a landfill. Instead, a glass jar could be used over and over. All the
activities associated with the bean production would be beneficial to the
participants.

As the process became less labor-efficient, more people could be involved.
Productively. The work would be good exercise, providing meaningful activity
for many.

It would be better than having some people sitting, simply waiting for that
which they have come to feel entitled. Today we have enormous numbers of
people who are idle, yet they manage to overconsume. In fact, they feel
entitled to overconsume, at the same time they do not wish to take work they
suggest is beneath them.

I recently walked through an event called a thieves market. It was a place
where the products of artists were displayed and sold. Pottery, wood
products, framed and unframed art in a variety of media, jewelry, textiles,
and leather.

None of these things were made using modern or exotic technology. None of
these things were made at high speed; neat clones of hundreds before and
hundreds after, produced on computer controlled mass production equipment.

They represent craft. They represent human involvement, pride in the skills
and processes, and in the objects. Things produced in such a manner allow
humans to connect with them. A polar opposite to the images and sounds
emanating from an electronic arcade game, with its joy stick, hollow voices
and sounds, and artificial movement of humanoid cartoon figures caroming
across the screen.

Next will be the joy button. We will need it when we run into the wall; when
we are told something cannot happen because the computer is down. Divorcing
the human from any and all responsibility in the matter.

A tragedy in the emergence of the computer as prime force is that it breeds
a lack of confidence in human judgment, human measurement, human
performance. An irony, in light of the fact that the computer has been
created to simulate human functions.

The more we become surrounded by cathode ray tubes and programmable logic
controllers, the more we need the opportunity to sit in the dirt and tend to
some beans, form a lump of clay on a potter's wheel, shape a piece of metal
or wood clamped in a vise.

The highly technological world can leave one with the feeling of being
closed in a glass box, where we can't quite hear everything, and we can't
feel very much.

When I flee the cathode ray tube, I wrestle with heavy oak blocks in the
back of a thirty year old truck, or watch a lazy line of black oil draining
from a gearbox made of cast iron.

I hope the kid has to get out of bed.

Part Three

A pocket comb is lying on the asphalt paving in a parking lot. It is missing
no teeth and bears no apparent damage. The fact that it has been run over
several times offers mute testimony to its robust durability.

The recognition of all this nearly brings me up short. This perfectly good
comb is going to waste. In spite of that, no one picks it up.

Not that I have desire or need for the comb. I have my own. It is a
wonderful, unbreakable, nylon model I got in junior high. I am now fifty,
thus allowing you to have better perspective on the age of my comb.

In spite of age, it combs well, carries well, and could realize no
functional improvement.

Many years of carry have made more than a few marks on the comb. It rides
around with change and pocket knives. I am occasionally criticized for
carrying this scarred grooming tool. It has been suggested my comb does not
look good. For this reason I no longer offer it for public display, in stead
only scheduling private showings.

I have purchased new and supposedly unbreakable combs. Every time they
broke, losing clumps of teeth in my pocket. The old nylon model always came
back from the dresser top, returned to service. Homely as ever, dull of
finish, combing as well as when new.

Madison Avenue strains desperately to direct our needs and desires. We must
want the new and the innovative. Shun the old, the faded, the traditional
and predictable thing. Discard anything with signs of wear.

Toss the one you have now, it is from last season.

It must be a designer model, high tech, and preferably solid state. These ad
people would never be able to sell an anvil. Too uncomplicated, and they
might actually have to talk about function in simplified terms.

Quality, on the other hand, is a different concept. Quality mixes durability
and performance. It smells and tastes of good design. Aesthetic and
functional. Elegance rooted in simplicity.

Hence the comb. Not something we would build a shrine for, but a needed
thing, certainly. It is not possible – given any conscience – to design a
comb bearing needless complexity or utilizing high technology. We are left
only with performance, durability, and pleasing design.

Kids shooting one another for jackets and tennis shoes are somehow missing
all this. Adults spending $150 for sun glasses and the accompanying
thermonuclear protection are also missing this.

I am not opposed to spending money on product. I am opposed to spending
money when there is no substantial and observable benefit.

My grandfather was renowned and criticized for spending what was deemed too
much on many things. I was a dumb kid at the time, so I just listened
and watched. I observed relatives begrudgingly comment on the quality of
things he bought, and how long these purchases lasted.

Certainly there is no guaranteed correlation between price and quality or
durability. But, the good thing will probably cost more.

John Ruskin, an author of the 1800's, had the following to say:

It's unwise to pay too much. But it is worse to pay too little.

When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all.

When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing
you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.

The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a
lot. It can't be done.

If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk
you run.

And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better.

There is hardly anything in the world that someone can't make a little worse
and sell a little cheaper – and people who consider price alone are this
man's lawful prey.

John Ruskin
1819-1900

I have a long wooden box that belonged to my grandfather. It contains two
Starrett machinist rules. One is a full six feet long, with the expected
graduations in 64ths on one edge. These rules are beautiful and marvelous,
and I keep them well oiled. They are capital, they are quality, they require
no LED's or batteries.

Properly cared for they could outlast our civilization on this planet,
providing utility well into the future.

I am doing my part.

Part Four

Tall timber separates the place from a gravel road. Big oaks, most still
bearing last year's leaves, hickory, and a number of scattered, man-planted
groves of mature, white pines. The pines sing their song of the north wind.
It is a sound you know if you have been among pines.

It is late winter. A bitter cold spell has just passed, now replaced, even
if only briefly, by an unusually warm spell. The day has risen to the low
forties. Snow glistens from heavy melting. There is the faint sound of water
running somewhere.

Rabbits stand silent.

An old man lives back in these woods, at the end of a lane cut through the
thick of it. At the far end of a clearing is his house, a structure colored
of weathered wood, topped with shake shingles. Smoke curls from the chimney.
There is the smell of a wood fire.

A porch having a huge overhang runs the full length of the building. Three
old lawn chairs, the kind with stamped steel seats and backs fitted to
tubular leg-frames, line a portion of the porch. The stampings are all
painted differently, and nicely faded.

Two big dogs lay on the board floor of the porch, seeming to sleep, but
watching.

Near the house is a workshop, much taller, longer and wider than the house.
Two huge doors on the shop are open wide. The building is built from what
appear to be rough hewn timbers. Sawmill stock connected with iron plates
and bolts, roofed and sided with sheetmetal, some galvanized and some
painted. Several colors.

There is considerable stuff visible inside the shop. Benches, tool cabinets,
welder and torch, beams with trolleys and hoists.

At the side of the building there is a neatly arranged pile of iron; long
and short, big and small, new and old. Pipe, angle, channel, beam, square
and rectangular tubing.

Parked near the shop is an old Power Wagon, once blue and black. The blue
parts of the truck have aged to near-black. All surfaces are truly dull.
Remarkably, the top of the cab is perfect; smooth and rounded. No dents.

There is a pickup box. There is no tailgate. The back of the truck is filled
with all manner of jutting iron – big channel, beam and angle – anchoring a long
boom reaching out into the atmosphere.

A heavy cable dangling with no load from a pulley at the high end of the
joined boom tubes is stiff and just a little curved, terminating in a great,
age-browned slip hook. Other cables, along with chain, truss the boom.

At the fore end of the bed rests a big winch of huge, rounded castings
bearing the name Tulsa. The assembly oozes heavy oil.

Wide roller chain rises through a slot in the box floor, reaching a sprocket
on the winch. The chain links display the sheen of lubrication and
attention, marked in contrast with the dull of box sheetmetal and bed wood.
Heavy tread plate forms a distinct, rectangular section, defining the area
occupied by winch and boom underpinning.

A no-nonsense push bumper fills out the front of the rig, replete with grab
hooks, bolted shackles, and carefully hand burned openings for the passage
and snagging of big links of log chain. In the middle of the bumper is a
Braden MU2, the spool wrapped completely full with carefully laid and well
oiled cable.

The rear of the truck has a unique bumper, square in cross-section and
fitted with hardware supporting props that can be swiveled down to point at
the earth. These props are telescoping; held in place by big pins, and shod
in thick, square plates. Stitching all this mass together are unrelenting
beads of arc weld.

There is a massive pintle hook, with clever and substantial provision for
changing the elevation of the hook, as well as removal and replacement with
ball hitches or other implements of pull. Several hitch balls of different
sizes are lined up for selection, stored in a series of holes provided.

On the driver's running board, right along side of the fore end of the
pickup box, there is a metal box with lid. A sturdy hasp secures a lid
fabricated from tread plate, allowing the box to double as a step into the
truck bed. Inside this step box are compartments, each filled with long
chains; some 3/8", some 5/16", and one with 1/2" chain. Forged grab
hooks – marked U.S.A. – on all.

Big, handsome double-faced lights sit atop the front fenders, bearing amber
to the front and red to the rear. Dietz is the brand, chrome are the bezels.
A chrome spotlight is attached to the left side of the windshield.

A look inside the cab reveals a heavy-duty turn signal switch attached to
the steering column. Across the cab, mounted on the dash, is a defroster fan
pointed upward at the driver's side of the windshield. There is a switch on
the dash marked Micro-Lock.

Levers rise from the floor; PTO, transmission and transfer case. More chain
and a snatch block can be seen on the passenger's side. In the middle of the
chain, rising from the iron tangle, is a hydraulic jack. Also bobbing in
this brown, iron surf are hitch pins, shackles, and a few odd combinations
of grab hooks and clevises. Chrome from one end of a 3/4 drive breaker bar
protrudes, a gleam interrupting the brown.

Not much room left for passenger feet. Appropriately, the windshield says No
Riders.

Leather gloves with wide cuffs rest on the seat cushion. Ready for the next
job.

The old man seems to have everything he needs.

Conclusion

You keep a six-foot bar, sledgehammer, ratcheting chain winch, and an
acetylene torch in your shop. Such items are not for amusement. They are
kept and valued because they provide final solutions to otherwise impossible
challenges.

So it is with the Power Wagon. It is not fast. It is not pretty, though you
do come to believe it is beautiful. It will not be stopped. It becomes
immaterial that it gets there slowly. It gets there.

You realize, after due consideration, that you are honored to be in its
presence. You sit nearby, silently regarding it, remembering the great
deeds.

The truck is brute force, densely packed into a small space, creating a
heavy package – entirely portable – capable of traversing impossible terrain
to reach the most remote location.

We envy these trucks – if machines can be envied – for their confidence,
rugged construction, and ability to perform under the worst conditions. We
can only hope to be the stalwart friends they have been for us, for as long
as we have known them.

A man wants a friend like this truck, and wishes to be worthy of the
friendship.

Common beliefs such as these have brought us together. Join with us each
month to celebrate our common values and ideals. Learn from others how to be
self-reliant in your own way, with your own tools, in a manner that brings
you quiet pride.

Gordon Maney
Editor, Power Wagon Advertiser

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