Coulda, shoulda, 'wooda'

Palm Coast Observer
Opinion

There’s a room toward the back of James Holland Park that smells sweet like sawdust, smoke and the inside of my grandfather’s workshop.

In it, the Palm Coast Wood Carvers meet weekly to turn trees into tokens. It’s a pattern I’ve seen before. My Grandpa Vito, before he lost himself to dementia, used to spend hours in a shack in his garage, making chairs, flower boxes, animal shapes.

People like him take nature and transform it. They turn it into rocking horses, castles, birds, boots, busts, church reliefs and caricatures.

They slice it, sand it, stain it, and turn it into things worth leaving behind.

“Once you start doing it, it becomes your life,” said Jan Catina, who has been in the club a year. “I’m addicted.”

And almost all the 20-odd other members there agreed.

Strolling around the room, Bud Tanis, who took over the class in 1991, periodically stops to give pointers and praise. His students, all of whom are also retired, come to him like kids, showing off their work and saying things like, “Look how thin I got the tail on my dolphin!”

He smiles, nods. “Oh, wow,” he’ll say.

The class members also speak in reverant tones about John Schumacher, the “artiste” and “master,” who turned a chunk of cypress into a monument that looks like a model from “Lord of the Rings.”

“We use many different kinds of wood,” Tanis told me, pointing to oak, driftwood, bark. “But I think we’ll start you with some cedar.”

That’s what I’d use to try my hand at a “fancy spoon,” he said.

Tanis handed me a model, told me to trace in decorative lines and ridges. He gave me a knife. He said to take short strokes.

Forty minutes later, my piece looked about the same, but rounded. “Look at him go!” Tanis said, patting my shoulder. “Now he’s got it!”

Later, someone new walked in and everybody yelled in greeting, as if he were Norm from “Cheers.”

“It’s a nice group,” said Kitty Crouse, a newer club member. It’s the kind in which everybody talks and shares secrets, she added. While they work, they laugh and tell stories.

It’s the kind of group that welcomes you in like family.

Scratching away at the edges of my spoon, woodchips sprinkled all around me, I thought again of that old workshop of my father’s father. My brother and I were never allowed inside because of the power tools, but we’d tiptoe by the door sometimes, peeking through the haze at the saws and scraps.

We’d stare in and wonder what it must be like to be big. And then we’d hear a voice and run away, our fragile footprints cast in the sawdust.