Decomposition Study
The land lives in its people. It is more alive because they worked it, because they left this hillside and that creek bottom marked by their shovels and axes. The meaning of this place lies in the rough weight of their hands, in the imprint of their gum-booted travel.
– John Haines
I
Only hours from the forest and I was still searching for the perfect hiking socks. I’d researched websites for a week, I’d talked to salespeople in every outdoor shop from Seattle to Portland on my drive down. I continually texted my concerns and updates to family and friends. And at last I found them, the socks I’d been looking for, in a mom-and-pop gear store. After weighty consultation with the owner who assured me they were extraordinary, I paid for the socks and changed into them right there. This last frontier soundly conquered and my feet safe in an exquisite blend of merino wool, alpaca, and a hint of nylon for the right amount of stretch, I got into my car, fired up the engine, turned the radio loud, and headed to the forest. There, as a writer-in-residence among the trees, to look for the perfect story.
I happened upon a little antique store three miles down the road. I love old woodworking tools and rarely miss a chance to scope them out. Besides, it wasn’t even noon yet, plenty of time to get to the forest. I pulled into the parking lot and stepped into the store with the unspent urgency of a mercenary.
The guy behind the counter waved as I marched by, and we both went to our business. A display case in the back of the store housed a promising smattering of tools along with some arrowheads, old musket balls, and a powder horn. A folding knife with a half-dozen loose attachments, all resting on a cracked pouch that could use some leather conditioner, caught my eye.
“Excuse me,” I called out, “can I see this knife here?”
The guy looked up from the cash register and walked my way. He was pretty grizzled, akwardly tall, no ass whatsoever to hold up his jeans and these goofy John Lennon wire-rimmed glasses way too small for his head.
“That one there?” he asked pointing to the knife. He fumbled with a mess of keys, trying to find the one that unlocked the display case. “Oh yeah, that gizmo,” he explained as he worked the lock, inserting key after key, “Yeah, never seen one like it before or since.”
He finally opened the case, shrugged, and reached in. “Take yer time,” he said as he handed the pouch and its contents to me, “I’ll be up front if you need anything.” The knife had long use to it. But I couldn’t manage to engage any of the attachments, which I now saw to be a flat chisel, a gouge, a saw, a file and the like.
“I can’t figure out how to make it work,” I called out and the guy offered to show me, coming my way again while thumping his glasses onto his nose. I handed him the knife and the file attachment. “Yeah,” he joked, “it’s like the original Swiss Army knife.”
He tried it this way, and he tried it that way, trying my patience, and he couldn’t do it either. I glanced out a window. The sun was maneuvering behind clouds.
“That’s okay,” I mumbled, “the blade’s nicked pretty badly anyway.”
“Yeah, in my twenty-five years of business in this stuff, I never seen anything like this knife,” he repeated maybe by way of explanation for his own difficulties with it. He handed the tool back to me. “You want, I’ll give you a deal. It’s good steel, you can tell it’s good steel.”
I looked at the price tag. Ridiculous with any deal, and you can’t even get the attachments on. “All right,” said the guy as he put the the tool back in the display case. “I like tools,” he added, “I always keep some here at hand in the store. You can work that nick out, ye know.”
“Uh-huh,” I responded, not really interested anymore and mainly thinking I was hungry. Should get some lunch, check in at the main office when I got to the forest, unload my car at my cabin, then meet up with the person who’s supposed to show me around as an orientation to things. There’d be time after that to gear up for a hike. I bounced up and down on the toes of my boots. My socked feet felt vibrant and airy, I noted with satisfaction. I looked through a stack of old magazines without much enthusiasm, getting ready to leave.
Just then the sweetest guitar playing came from the back of the antique store. It was just an unaccompanied slide guitar, sweet, and edgy and wild raw. That vibration of the metal slide against frets and metal strings vibrated you into some mad longing. Like for sex and fire and things far more ancient. At first I thought the music was coming in over a speaker. It went on for only a minute or so, and I stood dumbfounded blinking as the antique-store guy finished off his riff. He set the guitar back on its rack, just five feet from where I’d looked at the knife not even noticing the instrument. The guy gave his pants a tug up and put his hand on the guitar. “It has good sound to it, yeah?” he said.
“Yeah, and, uh, wow, the playing, too,” I stammered, “The playing, it sounds good, too.”
“There’s another guitar back here, there’s two of ‘em. Take a look if you want.”
They weren’t antiques, but brand new, and quiet and sure in meticulous and masterful craftsmanship. The one he’d been playing was smooth polished with rich figure in the dark of the wood and inlayed with silverwork on the fretboard. “This one’s mostly koa wood,” he explained, “from Hawaii.” The other guitar was based on a Martin from the late 1920s, he said, a lighter wood to it, with mother-of-pearl inlay on ebony accents.
“I love these things, you know?” He asked if I play. He took down the Martin model, did a run with fast fingers. I said no, I didn’t play. He shrugged, but I couldn’t catch the meaning of it. “Over time,” he said still holding the guitar, “they’re new now, these instruments, but over time as people play them over the years . . . they change hands, you know, these guitars, and they’ll take each person’s stories and life into them.”
Raising the guitar to eye level, he sighted down its long neck. He nodded several times, handed the guitar’s magic body to me, and readjusted his glasses. “They sound good,” he said again and told me only then that he makes them, that they’re his hands’ work.
His redemption and my abashment both complete, I got back into my car.
Continue reading Bagdassarian’s “Decomposition Study.”
