5.21.08

Well I was just in California buying a bunch of this old growth reclaimed redwood that we have been working with.  The trip up from San Francisco was beautiful and certainly put me in the right frame of mind.  Once you pass through the major population centers and make your way beyond Ukiah, things really start to get interesting.  It’s all up highway 101 which clings to the sides of steep gorges and meanders down into the river bottoms of the canyons, suddenly weaving in and out of these magnificent stands of redwoods.  These redwoods.  Man. . .  Just like prehistoric dinosaurs slowly making their way across the road – of course the road weaves intentionally around them, every now and then you see a little bit of a car imbedded 20ft up the trunk of the tree where someone cut it a little too close -finding out the hard way that these trees don’t loose those battles.  They just seem so immovable, so constant.  It’s sort of a bitter sweet drive.  I have heard about stories passed down from Indian tribes of a time when they could walk down the coast here for three weeks and never see the light of day – the sun being forever blocked out by the never ending canopy of these 1000 year old redwoods.  Then came the lumber industry at the turn of the century, and as is an all too common tale in human history, it was decimated in what amounts to a blink of an eye in histories time line.  

So I arrive a one of the reclaimed lumber guys I work with to his “shop.”  I say “shop” because it's basically a windswept piece of tarmac on a peninsula on the coast.  No buildings, nothing.  But there scattered across what must be around 6 football fields of land was a combination of huge root stystems, stacks of drying logs (were talking big 5ft wide, 15ft long logs), and randomly placed bits of wood.  It's all first and second growth redwood, fir, some maple and a few other species thrown in for good measure.  The big deal is it is all reclaimed.  It's fortunately now illegal to cut down redwoods in the forest, so this guy goes out and finds dead fall or blow down trees, trees in rivers, old huge 20ftx20ft root systems and stumps left sitting since the lumber baron days.  So for the next four hours we went through this yard, looking at big logs for coffee tables, looking at these big gnarley root systems filled with burl wood trying to see how we can cut a few of our root coffee tables and consoles out of one piece, how to pick out some of the big logs without heart rot (where the inside core of the tree has gone to that sort of powder consistency that redwood gets), picking out burl pieces to make great waterfall grain consoles.  Then later on it was off to this other guy who dismantles old lumber mills and bridges (after they have been condemned . . .  he doesn’t walk up to someone’s functioning lumber mill and just start taking the place apart). Big 24x24” pilings (that I couldn’t afford, but it was cool to see), all sorts of architectural pieces – simple stuff like floor joyces, columns, flooring.  Again, limited supplies in a specific configuration, so if we can design things out of these pieces, we keep ourselves in that small quantities – not produced area that I really like being in.

Of course this is just the start of the production process.  We then have to take all of this raw lumber back to our warehouse, and through a process of large chainsaws to get it into the shapes and boards that we want, let it dry for weeks to months, spend a day hand planing each piece, spend a day belt sanding every surface of each piece, pad sand each surface of each piece and then spend a week putting finish on each piece.  Every object has around four days of work into it, but the end result makes it all worth it.  While we are doing things in a number of different woods, old growth redwood has a special place in my heart, especially after this trip.