About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (20 page)

L
ET ME BEGIN
by confessing some prevarication. The man called here Jack is not named Jack. He does not live near Chinook, which town doesn’t exist in the Coast Range of Oregon. But this story is truthfully set in that country, and what I am about to write down—people’s emotions, a natural history of the region, the description of a wood-fired kiln, an aesthetic of anagama ceramics—is as true to what I witnessed as I can make it. If the story that follows is flawed by my tactic, I can’t help it. I know no other way to protect the people and the place in their privacy, without which there would be no story for me to tell.

I’
VE WALKED IN
the Quartz Creek drainage near my home in the Cascade Mountains for almost thirty years, and recently
have begun to feel I’ve reached a kind of agreement with the beaver living on its lower stretch, despite obvious manifold gaps in my understanding of their lives. For these years and longer, until he was incapacitated by a stroke, my downriver neighbor has trapped and killed them and sold their pelts, a tactic of life that never arrived for me, though I, too, have sought something from them. I wanted permission to remove, from the back eddies and banks of their reserve, twigs of alder, willow, and cottonwood which they’d stripped of edible bark. I regarded the abandoned cobs as lumber needed neither for dams nor for shelter. That permission could come in only one way, as I saw it: I would need to make restitution. I would have to establish reciprocity with them.

Managing an arrangement like this is like starting life over in the woods with no help, though I’ve been at the practice awhile. I’ve met men of my own culture—middle-class, educated, white—engaged in a similar way, exploring moral relations with what we still differentiate as “the natural world.” Mostly, in my understanding, equity here comes down to listening. With the beaver, I stand where they’ve been felling timber or sit somewhere on creek cobbles by willows they’ve been cutting into. I remain a few hours, not trying to achieve anything, just trying to listen. I then gather a few beaver sticks, depending, and go home. Each one I pick up I heft. I try to get its measure. Are you finished with this one? I think. May I take this one?

I put the sticks in my truck and add them to a pile at home. Most are small, a few feet long, maybe an inch through. In this tenuous exchange with the Quartz Creek beaver, however, a few stout logs—eight or ten inches through, ten or twelve feet long after I buck them—have also come my way. It’s taken more than a year to assemble a half cord of beaver wood. I need four cords. It doesn’t bother me that this is going to take a while. The slowness of it is another lesson.

The beaver wood is for a particular fire, to be stoked in the maw of a large pottery kiln in the central Coast Range. Fed splits, it will mount and intensify until in the sixtieth hour, devouring Douglas fir, maple, hemlock, and alder chunks the size of a man’s leg, it will be as nuclear in aspect as anything seen on Earth. The
wood heat will surge through the kiln at 2400 degrees Fahrenheit, rippling like a river through decks of pottery, clay stabilized just shy of a threshold beyond which it would buckle and ooze like volcanic magma.

The kiln I keep in mind stands in a copse of red alder a few miles from the crossroads village of Chinook. It’s misleading to say that someone owns the kiln, in the sense of possessing it like an automobile or a painting, but the man we shall call Jack is its chief interpreter. I’m inclined to call him the kiln’s human companion, though paragraphs from now you may choose some other appellation. Local people call it Jack’s kiln; or they say the Dragon Kiln, because sometimes flame lashes Gorgon-like from its sideports, because the cavity of its mouth roars white-orange when it’s being fed. And because, over a three-day firing, its brick spine arches.

Some among the group of potters who fire there speak of the kiln as though it were sentient. I’ve watched Jack run his hand over its heated flanks, a light stroke, the way a man might massage the swollen belly of a pregnant woman. Effleurage, it’s called. The tender, encouraging motion of his hand is a sign that one is not within the realm of a technology here, but nearer cooperation with a mystery.

When the kiln is hibernating and I’m at Jack’s to cut wood, I’ve still seen him reach for it, his inquiring touch lingering while he considers where, exactly, to stack new wood so that the splits will rotate in right, meld into a flow of firewood so they will wind up at the mouth of the kiln at the right moment, dry, and with the least human effort.

Once Jack and I were felling black locust in the town of Forest Grove near Pacific University, where in 1974 he took a degree in ceramics and comparative religion. I glanced across at him—the two of us quick-lopping limbs with axes—an affirmation without words. It seemed we were sprung on white threads, tethers that rose from our shoulders into the bright September sky and shuddered in the wind’s carry across mountains to the Dragon Kiln on a far hillside, to cold decks of firewood there, to an adjacent
studio in a converted barn where Jack fisted clay and worked antlers, freshwater mussel shells, bird wings, and a dozen other earthy cantles into his handforms. In that moment, breathing black locust perfume, we were the kiln’s antennae, gathering histories human and natural embedded in the logs. The wood’s stories would debouch in the kiln. What had happened to the trees would imbue the pots.

Years from now, when the beaver firing Jack and I plan is finished, I’ll carry back a few bowls, a ceramic mask, maybe a stone whistle. I’ll set them amid the cottonwood and alder growing along Quartz Creek, votives placed incongruous on the ground. If I don’t, the beaver will intuit something missing, and I will ever after have to walk the creek through their country an exile.

A
NAGAMA KILNS
like Jack’s, wood-burning tube chambers built on a gentle slope to promote draft, burn hot enough to fire porcelain. In 1980, perhaps a dozen of them were operating in the United States; by the late 1990s the number was passing a hundred. Part of the explanation for their popularity lies with the pottery itself. Licked and scorched by wood flame, glazed and encrusted with wood ash, anagama ware contrasts sharply with ware produced in tamer environments like that in an electric kiln. Anagama pots also have standout character because the effects of a wood firing are so much less predictable than those achieved in the carefully modulated heat of other kilns. Even an experienced anagama fire boss may be unable to explain the outcome of a particular firing, not know how to achieve such beauty again. Strikingly distinguished from the domesticated (some would say staid) appearance of much contemporary pottery, anagama ware impinges on the 1990s the way raku pottery impinged on the 1970s. Its popularity, however, has as much to do with the process as the look.

The physical effort required to prepare wood and feed the fire night and day for several days means a small human community has to coalesce. The communal aspect of this protracted firing,
and the fact that the fire changes its nature with a change in stokers or the type of wood being burned, attract potters drawn to social cooperation, physical work, and subtle firings. Anagama is the antithesis of the rigid commercial kiln processes that produce the indifferent stoneware people most often buy to vase flowers, dish trinkets, and store their pasta in.

I knew none of this when I sought an invitation to one of two anagama kilns I knew were operating in the Coast Range near my home. I approached a woman I shall call Nora, an internationally known Wasco Indian ceramist, and asked if she’d consider introducing me to one of the anagama communities she fired with. Weeks later she called to say, “I think you and Jack should meet.” I thought she meant I should learn the anagama process at Jack’s kiln near Chinook, but she meant exactly what she said. Jack, half Hawaiian, had grown up in a logging family. He spent a lot of time in the woods and was caught up in the lives of wild animals. Nora believed we had much in common. Before I ever thought of it, she saw the beaver firing coming. And she knew just how Jack would respond.

T
HE LANDSCAPE CRADLING
the Chinook Dragon Kiln is a patchwork of low-lying pasture and wooded hills, mostly second- and third-growth Douglas fir. (The surrounding area has been heavily and repeatedly logged.) Jack’s home stands at the edge of a river valley cleaved by sloughs and wire-fenced into great, green paddocks where meat and dairy cattle graze and where wild birds strike and wheel and glean—herring gulls, ring-billed gulls, crows, cliff swallows, Brewer’s blackbirds, red-winged blackbirds, red-tailed hawks, and great blue herons. His few-acre landhold on a southeast-facing slope of alder and Douglas fir sits a few miles inland from the Pacific and includes a beaver-dammed creek.

The kiln shed, roofed with sheet tin and fiberglass panels and corniced with a jerry-built section of clerestory windows, stands on a wooded bench at the back of his property. It closes out most
inclement weather—light winter snows and about eighty inches of annual rain—but admits the wind. The shed’s wide entrance is bunked with ricks of wood and fronted on one side by two long, shallow sheds jammed with kiln fuel: old-growth hemlock, bundles of trim from planing mills, dimension lumber salvaged from house demolitions and dumps, alder, locust, and cherry logs, Douglas fir limbs, shipping pallets, and furniture stiles.

On each of a dozen visits to Jack’s to assist at firings and to deliver wood, I’ve regarded the kiln as a site of repose. It has the feel of a structure built for semireligious purposes or periodic social gatherings, an Eskimo
kargi
or Hopi kiva. (An unspoken agreement keeps radios, recorded-music players, and cameras out.) Artificial lights are used at night as needed, but only briefly, as though darkness itself were a fuel necessary to the firing. No materials but firewood are stored inside and no other human activity occurs within. After an unloading the kiln is swept clean.

Stepping into this oblong shed on the day before a firing, one enters a trenchlike corridor formed by two six-foot-high walls of dry wood, neatly squared and divided according to species. Passing between these ricks, one arrives at the mouth of the kiln. A semisubterranean tunnel about three feet high, it slopes upward into a hillside at an angle of 12 degrees and is abutted on each flank by a flagstone walkway. These walks, beginning as steps on either side of the main fire door, start at a point about halfway up the catenary arch that describes the kiln’s cross section. They rise at a slightly steeper angle than the kiln and run out into the same hillside.

Outside these stone paths are long decks of short lumberwood, kindling-size pieces that will be fed through the kiln’s sideports. About twenty-five feet from the front fire door, the kiln narrows to form a smoke trace or underground smoke trail, which carries exhaust gases to a yellow-tan firebrick chimney. The flame path from fire door to chimney cap is about fifty-two feet.

Jack once showed me the original drawing for the design, a stub-pencil sketch on ruled paper torn from a notebook. It is
characteristic of Jack that he would take a traditional design idea—the layout for an anagama kiln—and adapt it to a task he envisioned but had not performed, using whatever materials he had to hand. Traditional anagamas have no fixed length, but they typically consist of a main firebox separated from a ware chamber by an open lattice of stacked brick called a bagwall. The kiln tapers at both ends; its floor ascends in a staircase of long, shallow steps to provide level surfaces on what is customarily a 15-degree slope. The vaulted roof is also arched front to back, forming an interior frequently likened to the shape of a candle flame or the inside of an inverted canoe.

Jack’s kiln differs in two ways. Its rise is slightly shallower (the consequent reduction in draft, Jack imagined, would promote a reducing or oxygen-poor atmosphere in the ware chamber). And it’s got a loading port about halfway back on the right side. Traditional anagamas are loaded through the front fire door.

Although the Japanese are generally credited with perfecting the anagama kiln, the design is Korean, brought over to Japan perhaps as early as the fifth century. All anagamas are cross-draft kilns; air enters at one end, passes through a ware chamber, and exits through a flue. Because of the length of the chamber—the one at Jack’s is about nineteen feet—it can take many hours to build uniformly high temperatures throughout. Anagama firings, therefore, tend to be long, from a few days to a month or more. (Longer firings are deliberately designed to retard the rate at which the chamber gains temperature, an approach some prefer for curing the pots.)

The variables in the anagama process, especially with regard to types of wood burned and the way in which it’s fired, range toward the incalculable. It is largely for this reason that no other pottery currently produced in the United States departs so dramatically in its conception and execution from traditional European ideas of what constitutes art, beauty, and refinement.

Jack built the Dragon Kiln with a friend in 1985, after first experimenting with a salt kiln, a cave kiln, and other firing methods in pursuit of a particular look, an aesthetic grounded in the
forms and colors of the Pacific tidal zone and mountains he’d lived in all his life. He built the refractory (heat-reflecting) interior of the kiln with brick salvaged from the lining of a cannery boiler dumped in the Columbia River near Astoria. In place of a second layer of insulating firebrick, which he couldn’t afford, Jack chose a nontraditional route. He cased a second layer of hard brick in several layers of insulating and heat-resistant material—mixtures of fireclay, portland cement, and alumina hydrate reinforced with chicken wire. The outermost skin is a pale gray layer of smooth clay mud checked with sooty cracks. (The Japanese contend that in the best anagamas this last layer always cracks in a pattern like a turtle’s shell.) Inset in it above the fire door are a black-tailed deer antler, seashells, and other natural objects on the verge of a handprint at the center.