About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory Read online

  One evening, after Jack and I had unloaded three quarters of a cord of wood from my trailer (a firing typically consumes four cords of wood in seventy-two hours), we took seats in his living room and I asked about his history with the kiln. He recalled building at least six chimneys before getting the draft right. He burned up two or three steel damper plates in the smoke trace (“They couldn’t take the energy”) and experimented with various air delivery systems before finding one he felt worked. (Well designed, the latter system ensures the kiln will reach and hold temperatures within a certain time frame; it conveys heat evenly through the ware chamber; and it maintains a reducing or oxidizing atmosphere around the pots, as required.)

  Jack’s still not entirely happy with the design. And the kiln itself, he points out, changes with every firing. “It changes during a firing,” he says. “It’s always changing, growing older. Like you.”

  A COMMUNITY OF POTTERS—a core group of ten or twelve but sometimes more than twenty—fires regularly at Jack’s every three or four months. They cut and haul wood together and they share chores and potluck food at the firings, around which rotate, like planets, a certain number of Jack’s neighbors, curious visitors from outside the United States, assorted friends, dogs, and a few children. Though their aesthetics are divergent, the potters take obvious pleasure in examining one another’s work before and after a firing. Some are seasoned clay artists, others determined amateurs, but no system of seniority prevails. Jack’s is the only conspicuous presence.

  Early on in the development of his art, Jack wrapped his pots in natural material—grass, feathers—to create surface effects. Seeing how high-temperature fire warped pots, he began melting species of rock—feldspar, obsidian, basalt—into and through his forms. This way, he said, he became “involved for a very short time in the geology of the rock.” When we talked about wood that night in his living room he referred to bark as “the expressive and emotional face of the tree.” (The distinctive character of an anagama pot comes largely from its contact with gases and ash from mineral-laden wood bark.)

  Perhaps the most compelling aspects of Jack’s art are the near recklessness with which he approaches the requirement for order, his constant experimentation with unpredictable materials, and the extent to which he includes the accidental. (A Japanese formal garden is considered more beautiful if a few fallen leaves lie scattered about. Jack’s taste approximates this principle of shibumi.) His singular devotion to the refinement of his aesthetic, and the fact that he eschews notions of commerce and career, have made Jack, at the age of forty-eight, something of a hero to other Oregon artists. He’s also criticized for favoring process over product; for his lack of interest in perfecting technique (“People focused in on technique,” he told me once, “tend to want to make the same thing all over again”); and for his fascination with funk, with most any wamper-jawed object.

  The evening we talked about his history with the Dragon Kiln, Jack discoursed about his neighbors at length, as if this group of people, none of them potters, had as much to do with what Jack was up to as clay or alder wood. He wasn’t gossiping. He was clearly intrigued with their skills, their farming success, interested in their self-sufficiency and savvy. Jack grew up within a few miles of here. He joined the Navy after high school and went to Vietnam, but he’s deeply rooted in this agrarian landscape. Until 1978, when he became a full-time potter, he supported his wife, Carol, and himself working as a logger for Crown Zellerbach. His respect for several older men who farm nearby, and who drop in regularly during firings, is based on regard for their physical endurance, the depth of their experience with the surrounding country, and a knowledge of tools and techniques of which they are the last masters. I’ve seen Jack’s cups and pots in their living rooms and kitchens, and I’ve seen their families’ grave monuments curing in his kiln. Jack’s heritage is theirs, his art merely another mystery, like the life of the wood duck.

  In the years since he first started working with clay, Jack has come to focus exclusively on local materials; he serves as an anchor for a local community of potters; and he prefers to show his work in local galleries. I’ve never known an artist more insistently local. It took many conversations before Jack concurred there was little appreciation around Chinook for what he wants to do. He wants to redefine the relationship of a clay artist to natural materials in an era of manufactured materials; and he wants to redefine the artist’s relationship to community in an era of gallery courting and self-promotion. The absence of local understanding only compels him to pursue his ideals more ardently. He doesn’t want to embrace any artistic success that would take him out of daily contact with his neighbors.

  “The kiln’s very American,” Jack said once. “Everyone is welcome, the accomplished artist with commissioned work, the beginner. We’ve had a Japanese anagama artist feeding wood alongside a twelve-year-old girl at her first firing. We’re always tinkering, you know, looking for new ways to help the community, to make good pots, to involve the wood, the history of the trees. The residue of animals that once lived here is in the clay, my neighbor’s cows walk around on it out there.”

  Jack wants to narrow the rift between human society and nature in a work of art. And he wants to insinuate that art in the lives of people who feel they do not have the education or the social standing to appreciate it. In Wood-Fired Stoneware and Porcelain (1995), author J. Troy underscores an often repeated maxim of modern anagama, explaining that it’s a spirited rejection of an older English tradition of mastering the materials and exercising a high degree of control to produce an object stopped in time like a portrait. Fire potters, he says, are set apart by a desire to enter the mystery, not merely accommodate it. For them, he writes, quoting another historian, “the pot may be considered not so much a static object as a record of the play of various forces.”

  A striking difference between Troy, an international spokesman for wood-fire technique, and Jack is that for Jack these forces are more pervasive, unruly, and beautiful, and collaboration with them perhaps more salvific.

  Walking me up to my truck that evening, Jack said, “When I started sketching the kiln out, talking to potters up in Portland and wherever, talking to my dad, you know, thinking where am I gonna get the materials for this, how am I gonna learn it, I saw this was a big, big, big idea.” He shook his head, as if to say it is only by such naïveté, such miscalculation that he ever seems to find illumination. It’s also, of course, the beginner’s mind to which Buddhists aspire.

  Jack asked me to wait at the truck while he ran back to the house. From the gravel drive on the hill I could see bufflehead and American wigeon at rest on a pond, the dark crowns of huge maple trees motionless in the night air, and cattle grazing slow as winter in a pasture where I’d heard coyotes howl. Jack returned with a small package, backstrap meat from an elk he’d taken that fall. In exchange for the wood I’d brought. When I took the package from him I held his hands briefly in mine, then slipped them like a released salmon.

  A FIRST-TIME VISITOR to the Dragon Kiln spots the signs posted around the eaves of the kiln shed: QUIET PLEASE, DO NOT DISTURB THE STOKERS; CHECK-OUT TIME 2 A.M.; IF IN DOUBT, STOKE. Stenciled on the side of a wheelbarrow is HARDLY MINING CO. One catches the eclectic array of seats right away. A legless office chair is suspended on cords from the roof beams. Twisted wheelchairs, backless dining chairs, and chairs cobbled together from scrap lumber are clues to funk at the kiln. Taken together with the stokers’ clothing (“singewear”), the soot and wood debris that smudges people’s faces and clings to their hair, and the mud that forms around the shed entrances during a firing in the rain, the chairs offer a stark contrast to the raison d’être, the spectral eggs visible in a fundament of white heat when a fire door is opened for a stoke.

  The first time I came to Jack’s, arriving late on a fall evening and walking up the steep drive in a light mist to find him and a friend silhouetted against light projected from the draft hole, I marked the chairs.
At night they convey an informal conviviality, suggest the comfort of a battered sofa in a well-used clubhouse. I held back in the mist for a while, watching the two men, the sideways incline of their heads, a gesture of the hand indicating an occasional remark. Later, I would understand that Jack’s concentration was on the color of the flame, on listening to sonic amplitudes that signaled the fire’s rhythm and intensity, and that he was second-guessing the load, his placement of some three hundred pieces of stemware, flatware, and hollowware. The reactions inside the kiln—quartz inversions in the clay, the melting of glazes in the Hyrcanian fire—belied the tranquility, the domesticity of the scene.

  On first encounter Jack seems extremely polite and slightly scattered. Dark brown eyes, short black hair. His corded muscles lean not bulked. He walks quickly, with a slight forward cant as if compensating for a lumbar injury. His habit of lacing his boots in such a way as to bind in his lower pant legs, an assortment of odd ballcaps, and the way his belt bypasses belt loops contribute to an impression of absentmindedness. The idiosyncracies form an effective barrier, however, for someone exceedingly private. Behind the ready laugh, the urgency with which he seeks someone else’s view on a problem, he’s alert like a wild animal, as focused as a cutting torch.

  In the months following our introduction, Jack and I drove about a good deal in his truck or mine, cutting firewood, culling used lumber from dump sites, collecting fresh mussels and clams for dinner. We stopped for anything that looked useful. Sometimes we dug clay.

  Jack has a good grasp of local geology and of the soils within fifty miles of his home. I found it difficult at first to grasp “clay.” Most clays derive from the disintegration of granitic and feld-spathic rock and consist of silicates and aluminum oxides bound with water molecules. Stoneware clays, unlike earthenware clays, hold their shape at very high temperatures; all clays render color according to impurities they contain, mostly metallic oxides of iron and some manganese, copper, and chromium. Clay is further textured and colored by the action of glazes and slips and, in wood-firing, by the deposition of cinders and fly ash, by moisture and minerals in the wood, and by fluctuations in the intensity and quantity of energy in the fire.

  Selecting or mixing clay for an anagama firing is like setting out the two-by-fours for a house. While the framing lumber is essential, there’s slight hint of the architecture in it.

  The chemistry and geology of clays (a staple component of the protracted conversation around a firing), like the throwing of pots, didn’t draw me as did the kiln process, the central mystery in anagama. At Jack’s an elementary dragon inhaled massive drafts of air from a grove of alders to feed a fire so hot it melted stone, and the earth within it was wrung of water. Around these primal elements, a group of men and women, some with Native American or Asian backgrounds, worked hard on the problematic themes of community life: loyalty, selflessness, respect, generosity. How, they would inquire, feeding wood, can such desirable attributes be maintained in a culture where consumption has replaced communion, where the consumer has replaced the neighbor? More than quartz inversions, more even than potters’ gossip sometimes, these topics bearing on communality drove the anagama conversation.

  Here is what Gaston Bachelard, the French scientist and philosopher, had to say about the animating element in this event:

  Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and universal. It lives in our heart. It lives in the sky. It rises from the depth of the substance and hides there, latent and pent-up, like hate and vengeance. Among all phenomena, it is really the only one to which there can be so definitely attributed the opposing values of good and evil. It shines in paradise. It burns in hell.

  THAT NIGHT I CAME UP the hill and met Jack and the others for the first time, I knew I was at the edge of something right away, a kind of knowledge I didn’t have but which I might intuit. Given the late hour, I was reluctant to stride up the grade. Someone’s dogs might be loose in the bucolic dark. The firings were closed, the community close-knit. Why make room for a stranger? All I possessed, really, was the introduction from Nora, my enthusiasm, and, by a slight stretch, the credential of local residence.

  Jack’s curious about enthusiasm. His initial handshake was cordial and without preamble we fell into a conversation about wood, which is alchemical for him. We talked like two paleontologists passing an inscrutable bone back and forth. (The first time I brought Jack a load of black locust, a wood with which he was not familiar, he took a narrow split and sat with it, turning it over and examining it carefully, as if it were an expensive vase. He laid it to his cheek to get its moisture. After a while he suggested it compared with cascara by smell and color. He went back to the deck of logs we’d stacked and picked at them with his fingernail. He likened its texture to elderberry wood. A while later he pronounced the locust “imposing” as a kiln wood because of its thick bark. What you could get from an index to firewood—locust’s specific gravity, its porosity—was not as interesting to him as the sound of his fingernail popping away from the runnels of its bark.)

  The summer after I started firing with Jack I learned a house lot in a nearby town was being cleared of trees and I went to look it over. The owners had felled big-leaf maple, Douglas fir, Lombardy poplar, red cedar, that black locust, and a little cherry. I cut about three cords of locust, maple, and cherry, using my truck like a tractor to skid the big logs free of one other and swamping them out with a limbing ax and a bow saw. I bucked them into thirty-four-inch lengths with a chain saw, split the bolts, and loaded them.

  I like working alone at a steady pace, using the mechanical advantage of a truck and employing good hand tools in combination with power tools. The days I was cutting were sweltering, and I gorged on water. I worked the day long damp with sweat. Canada geese and ducks flew by over the river, and when the saw wasn’t running I could hear woodpeckers tappeting and osprey cries. Splitting the locust revealed pale green heartwood and creamy white sapwood. It split cleanly through the bole, but called for a wedge higher up in its stout limbs. The cherry split as cleanly, its heartwood golden in the sunlight and bound by a rind of pale tan sapwood. The organic smells were intoxicating. The textures in the saw kerfs drew my eye, drew my hand.

  I was refreshed by the physical labor and surprised to find a set of river otter tracks etched sharply in a patch of silt. When I asked the owners, a couple, what decided them to cut the trees down, they shrugged. The man said a larger lawn would improve the property. The woodpeckers, I thought, the osprey, the otters tangent to the trees, were they just to move along now? I nodded politely to his logic.

  When I told Jack the story of the man’s disdain for the life around him, he asked me to describe the otter tracks. He told me about a time he found a Lincoln-head cent in a coyote scat.

  YOU LOAD THE Dragon on hands and knees. You squat in its dank interior like someone preparing to trowel a flower bed. The refractory walls gleam chocolate, the color of impurities boiled out of the brick over time. The tang of a fresh coat of kiln wash rises off the cream-colored floor. The air is damp from a hosing out the day before and cool because of the heat sink of the earth underneath. The stark record of sixty-some firings is apparent where fireclay mortar has cracked or where wood ash has bonded to the walls.

  Stacking (or “loading” or “setting”) an anagama kiln is guided, as is all else in this process, by a mixture of the irrational and the intuitive, set within the ambit of the known. The same pot fired in a different place in the kiln—high or low, front or back—will come out looking different. It will take its look, too, from the pots it’s placed beside. Pots toward the front will be more affected by ash deposits. They’ll mature in this, the hottest part of the kiln, in a reducing (oxygen-lean) environment, in which dark black and deep purple wood-ash glazes commonly emerge. The floor at the back of the kiln, where the flame tongue is at its thinnest, is the coolest section, usually. An oxidizing (oxygen-rich) atmosphere here most often produces softer blushes of color. But every
kiln has microenvironments; and the way the kiln is loaded sets up wind currents that affect the circulation of the flame and ash, sometimes creating strong back eddies that will accentuate the asymmetric glazing typical of anagama pottery.

  The stacker is charged with building the rapids around which the river of fire will stream. The usual practice is to stack tightly near the top to force the flame down to the floor, but the loader must also stack firmly and securely so pieces won’t fall over or get knocked down by a stick of side wood. He or she also has to select, in consultation with the artist, a “front” for each piece, the part of it that will face the flame. Some pieces are tumble-stacked together, leaning against each other or a wall; others are set on silicon-carbide shelves, which then are tiered up using posts of the same material or firebricks set on end. To keep melting glazes and slips from bonding pots to the shelves or the floor, the pieces are footed on hand-formed wads of kaolin (a porcelain clay) or similar material.

  At Jack’s, considering all the variables, a conscientious stacker will want two days to load, though he or she rarely gets it.

  Potters bring three sorts of ware to the kiln: unfired pots, called greenware; bisque ware (short for biscuit ware), which has already been fired but at a lower temperature; and ware previously fired at high temperatures that is to be fired over again, anagama style. The majority is bisque ware. Its pale tan, pink, and white coloration gives no indication of the primary colors—ethereal, tortured, deep—that will emerge days hence.