Northern Woodlands

Purchase this book:
IndieBound | Powell’s Books | Amazon

Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods (With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts)

Amongst the multitudes of wildlife field guides, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods (With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts) is unique in that it deals exclusively with animals that do not exist. Given the bizarre and often bloodthirsty nature of the fauna depicted within, it can only be a comfort that they reside purely within the rich folklore of early lumberjacks. Twenty such oddities are showcased in this 50-page volume, with their appearance and behavior described in detail. While the book’s creators could have hardly predicted it, Fearsome Creatures has become a definitive resource of American mythology nearly a hundred years after it was first published.

In the author’s introduction, forester and conservationist William Cox expresses a great affection for lumberjack adventure yarns and the surreal brutes featured in them. The tales were transmitted from logging camp to logging camp, growing more incredible with each re-telling, like today’s viral internet memes. Yet each forest region maintained its own distinct flavor of folklore, informed by the culture of the area and the ethnic traditions of the loggers who operated there. With this book, Cox offers a broad sampling of tales from across North America, extending from Canada and New England to the Great Lakes Region, the Southwest, and even Florida. It is this comprehensive nature that has afforded Fearsome Creatures its cultural and historic significance.

The subjects of Fearsome Creatures are notably freakish. Among the abnormalities that supposedly call New England their home are the Argopelter, a fiendish primate with ropy arms for flinging rocks with deadly accuracy at unlucky travelers, and Billdad, a duck-billed rodent whose meat compels those who eat it to drown themselves. Not all of the creatures, however, are necessarily belligerent. The ponderous Tote-Road Shagamaw is a hoofed humanoid with a penchant for marching through the forests of Maine in a continuous loop. The miserable Squonk, known to melt into a puddle of tears at the sight of its own ugly reflection, is particularly harmless.

All of these fantasy animals are examined as if they truly dwelled in their respective forests. Each entry is written in a deadpan naturalist manner and is accompanied by pen-and-ink illustrations by forester Coert DuBois. There are even Latin classifications, provided by George Sudworth, chief dendrologist of the U.S. Forest Service. Clearly this book is a labor of love, and the devotion of Cox and DuBois comes through on every page. At the time of its publication, America was becoming increasingly urban and industrialized. Cox writes of vanishing wilderness and a changing logging industry. His book attempted to preserve the unique lumberjack culture before that way of life faded away forever.

The book has long since entered the public domain, and there are several versions available to read online. Still, despite being repeatedly referenced by folklorists and mythology enthusiasts (even by renowned Argentinean surrealist Jorge Luis Borges, in his book Manual de Zoología Fantástica), Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods has received only sporadic reprinting. In 2007, Kessinger Publishing released a Legacy Reprint of the book, and while this version contains some uncorrected pagination errors, it is both widely available and comparatively inexpensive. Until a better edition comes along, this is the best way to enjoy this classic. Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods will make a charming and unusual gift to all who love the forest and the stories it has inspired.

Benjamin Peberdy

© 2009 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

Purchase this book:
IndieBound | Powell’s Books | Amazon

Shop Class as Soulcraft, An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

One morning I followed a link sent to me by a friend and found that I had been quoted in The New York Times. That’s not a thing that happens often to woodshop teachers.

The article cited my blog in its discussion of Matthew Crawford’s best selling book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. Crawford’s book opens by quoting me:

“In schools we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement… Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract, and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

Such a statement could have been made by any of the remaining woodshop teachers in America. We all know in our hearts, through our own soulcraft, that our students learn best when their hands are engaged in real problem solving.

Certainly, Crawford’s book isn’t the first to look at the values of work and the absurdities of the blue collar/white collar divide, though all of us hand-guys and shop teachers revel in its success. As a woodshop teacher and hands-on learning enthusiast, I welcome all the help I can get in explaining the value of my program. Crawford’s well-written exploration is a much-valued addition to others on the subject. Mike Rose’s Mind at Work and Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman are recent books that come to mind that inquire intelligently about the values of work.

Soulcraft’s great appeal is that it is an engaging story well told from personal experience by someone measured successful on both sides of the white collar/blue collar divide, someone who chose the blue and provides eloquent defense of his decision. It illuminates our misperceptions of the values of each and presents a strong case for rethinking the educational goals we might reasonably demand of our children. I was one of those whose parental aspirations were that I might become a lawyer before my own hands and heart got in the way of their ambitions for me. So I am particularly pleased to see anyone make the case that a craftsman or tradesman can find in his work not only pleasure but also success and meaning.

Crawford is a Ph.D. philosopher turned motorcycle mechanic. His tale shows that our ideal of university education for all may for some be a waste of time and for some a great disservice. Many reluctant students might find greater pleasure and deeper meaning in the direct hands-on problem solving that a life in the trades can provide. As suggested by another book, The Millionaire Next Door, by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko, a life in the trades might even end up making more money.

Perhaps most pleasing is that Crawford demonstrates his chops as both a mechanic and philosopher, through thoughtful and coherent discourse. Motorcycle mechanics and philosophy? That is not necessarily a surprise, since years ago we had Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and readers may sense a connection. But long before that, Jean Jacques Rousseau had said in Emelius and Sophia, 1763: “If instead of making a child stick to his books I employ him in a workshop, his hands labor to the profit of his mind, he becomes a philosopher but fancies he is only a workman.”

Doug Stowe

© 2009 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

Purchase this book:
IndieBound | Powell’s Books | Amazon

Notes on a Lost Flute: A Field Guide to the Wabanaki

N. Scott Momaday writes, in The Man Made of Words, “The storyteller’s place, within the context of his language, must include both geographical and mythic frame of reference. Within that frame of reference is the freedom of infinite possibility.”

In Notes on a Lost Flute, Kerry Hardy’s first book, infinite possibility abounds. A fine storyteller and ardent researcher, his essays incorporate philological scholarship and linguistics that are evidenced in the current language and place names of New England’s – and especially Maine’s – once primary inhabitants, the native Wabanaki tribes. The esoteric and the mundane become, on every gloriously illustrated page, fertile fodder for him. He is eager to share his fascination with language, forestry, gardening, environmental science, and old Native American customs and knowledge that can be relevant to our lives today.

Hardy challenges the reader in enjoyable ways. Instead of footnotes, Hardy enriches the text with sidebars, photos, and drawings that enchant: a subtle urge to readers to flip the pages slowly. The book contains elements of language, cultural history, and vital information, such as how to build a mobile home (a wigwam), the names for the moons of each month, a Hardy-imagined chart showing the Wabanaki food for each month depending on availability, plant medicines, the fur trade, and how to fish for that now-too-rare delicacy, the sturgeon. There are numerous notings on different trees and their uses and on edible plants.

His prose is inventive: “If I had to choose just one place to tell the story of Maine’s human history, I’d take Damariscotta. That very name is enough to send archaeologists into raptures… Damariscotta, along with the rest of mid-coast Maine is the landform equivalent of ribbon candy.”

Where does the title come from? “I wanted something cryptic,” Hardy says. “Something that left an unanswered question.” Hardy includes a sidebar about what many consider the world’s oldest musical instrument. A recent Wall Street Journal article describes the discovery of what is believed to be a 35,000-year-old flute made from a wing bone – highlighting “a prehistoric moment when the mind learned to soar on flights of melody and rhythm.”

Notes on a Lost Flute is filled with Hardy’s irrepressible sense of wonder, with the challenge of life once lived in ways that have brought us to the present moment. “What fun,” he writes, “to wander through time each night, filling notebooks with nuggets of history as easily as one might forage mushrooms while rambling in his own woodlot. In the pages that follow, I will collect, jiggle, sort…share glimpses of a vanished people and their landscape.”

Hannah Merker

© 2009 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.