About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (22 page)

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.

Y
OU 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.

The loader will also set out test bowls, draw tiles, and cone packs. Test bowls contain minerals in loose or powdered form. The way fire affects these bits of glass and rock gives the potters some idea of how they might behave used in glazes at high temperature. Draw tiles (or draw “trials”) are pulled from the kiln during a firing. Their condition gives stokers a sense of how various glazes are fusing—though not what their colors might be, because the tiles are cooled too quickly, plunged hissing and spitting into a bucket of water.

Cone packs (or “plaques”) are temperature indicators. They consist of four or five pastel-colored clay posts, each one with a different melting point, set up like a picket row of three-inch fangs in a base of high-temperature clay. Six or eight cone packs, placed atop the bagwall and within view of the side stokers, give the fire boss an idea of time and temperature relationships in the kiln and of differences in heat distribution. At Jack’s the desired goal most often is to “get cone ten down” at the back of the kiln and to “get twelve down and fourteen leaning a little” at the bagwall. (If the kiln has been gaining temperature at about 108 degrees Fahrenheit per hour, cone twelve will go down at 2383° F, cone fourteen at 2530° F. Above these temperatures, very few things on Earth hold together. The most refractory materials known, carbides like tantalum carbide, borides, and sulfides, and a few elements like hafnium, have melting points approaching 4000° F. Outside these rare and often unstable exotics, common clay—2SiO
₂
Al
₂
O
₃
2H
₂
O—is nearly the most heat-resistant earthly compound.)

It’s commonly suggested by fire potters that commercial clays don’t fare well in wood-fired kilns. Many Dragon Kiln potters mix their own clays. They’re after a certain degree of plasticity in the clay body. They’ll also blend in preferred fluxes like talc and bone ash that act like shortening in a cake mix. For color they’ll wedge in mineral impurities, coarsely or finely ground. And they’ll add a greater measure of refractory material like alumina
(aluminum oxide) or kaolin to help the pot hold its shape in very high temperatures but still open its pores to the wood ash.

One evening, stoking at a sideport and taking a few extra moments—with the head stoker’s permission—to stare into the fire with a pair of welder’s glasses, I actually saw the current of white heat moving slowly through the kiln. It flowed visibly around sculpture, vases, and kimchi jars, stroking the larger pieces, as Jack had described. It moved through like a storm front unfolding over low hills and a wooded plain, a silent susurration. The head stoker signaled me to close the port. He didn’t want to lose temperature.

I sat there in the darkness, listening to big winds coming in off the Pacific and seething in the alder grove without, to the clatter of rain spat and alder twigs on the corrugated roof. The weather, especially the wind, is one of the uncontrolled natural elements that help form anagama ware; in the stacking and in the stoking of the kiln, however, one can’t miss the clear assertion of human will, a desire to exercise authority very much in keeping with human nature, East and West. The Dragon Kiln potters deliberately try to achieve some of the very effects their progenitors in Japan were trying to prevent, by not paying such scrupulous attention to heat and temperature fluctuation, and by not controlling so tightly the spacing and duration of cycles of reduction and oxidizing.

“We have this incredible tool,” Jack mused one day. “The hard part is knowing what you want.”

A
T MIDPOINT IN
a long firing, the kiln and its environs have come to feel as comfortable as old clothes to the participants. To an outsider, the scene may seem as intimidating as an unfamiliar urban neighborhood. Especially confusing is the temporal disarray. Three or four people may be upstairs in the loft above Jack’s studio, sleeping off a night shift. Someone else might be grilling a whole salmon on a bed of coals taken from the kiln’s firebox. Someone else is racking splits of wood in a rick closer to
the head stoker’s reach. Another person might be shaking off a nap with a cold breakfast, thrown together from an array of casseroles and fresh and fast food arranged on long tables in a covered area adjacent to Jack’s studio.

It’s hard to discern a clear pattern of work, but the fire is never without a head stoker, without a personality to engage with. Someone’s always driving. It’s the map that eludes an observer, and to a lesser degree the participants.

T
HE FIRE-BAKING
of clay, the oldest and most widespread human art, begins with wood fire. Fred Olsen, in a review of the history of ceramics, calls wood “the most alluring of fuels,” but its allure defies analysis. To a stoker it has two salient characteristics beyond its species and mineral content. First, how wet is it? What is its degree of greenness? While green wood may come into play at some point (to hold temperature but not increase it), it’s dry wood the stoker wants. Each split of wood, secondly, has its own volume and surface area. The smaller and drier the pieces, the farther back in the kiln the flame will reach. Softwoods will produce fewer coals than hardwoods and release their energy more quickly, though hardwoods hold more potential energy in any given volume of wood. Barkwood will provide most of the ash and cinder for natural glazing, but the stoker, either as a variable in his or her own regime or in concert with other head stokers, might want to stay with lumberwood for a few hours in order to raise temperature in the kiln more quickly.

Ideally, the head stoker will examine every piece of wood he or she pitches in, watching especially for painted wood, plywood, wood with nails, and driftwood. Their salt, metal, glues, and enamels could mar the pots. (Such possibilities, again, might be attractive to potters at a particular firing. As a rule, however, stokers set aside any material likely to corrode the interior of the kiln, such as driftwood, because of its salt content.)

Whatever wood a stoker selects and with whatever rhythm it’s fed, the combination will have three basic effects. It will raise or
lower temperature (a measure of the intensity of the energy being released by combustion). It will increase or lower heat (a measure of the quantity of energy flooding the interior of the kiln). And it will change the atmosphere in the kiln. Understoking makes more oxygen available, producing an oxidizing atmosphere for the pots. It will also promote an increase in temperature and allow for fuller combustion of carbon in the wood, resulting in fewer coals. Overstoking removes oxygen from the kiln, creating a reducing atmosphere. It retards a rise in temperature, but permits more ash to circulate in the kiln wind. It also produces an excess of coals, which may crowd the firebox and have to be removed.

Depending on the stage of the firing, and what effect the stoker is after, he or she will favor either a reducing or an oxidizing fire. (The nature of Jack’s kiln and the method of firing it are such that it’s more often in an oxidizing state.) A stoker can quickly judge the condition of the kiln atmosphere with a glance at the chimney cap. A dunce hat of flame there indicates reduction, a cone of clear shimmering air, oxidation.

Troy writes that fire has five important characteristics: tempo, velocity, sound, color, and texture. By a regular visual inspection of the fire, by exchanging information with the side stokers, noting the gradual collapse of the cones, and paying attention to the roar, a good stoker can keep track of the behavior of the fire and convey that information to his or her successor at a shift change. (At Jack’s much of this is written down in a kiln log for later review.)

Traditionally, anagama firings start out slowly. The fire at the Dragon Kiln is lit on bare ground in front of the draft hole. It’s a small fire, meant to heat the interior of the kiln very gradually. Hours later, after the kiln has developed a good draft, the fire is pushed into the firebox. The sideport doors, left open to vent moisture from the kiln during the initial heating phase, are closed and the fire is slowly built up. Sixty or so hours later the temperature at the front of the kiln peaks at over 2400 degrees. The head stoker holds it there for another twelve hours or so, a final, high-temperature “soaking” of the sculpture and pots.

Firings at Jack’s always seem to end about two in the morning. The last few sticks might be passed around and people present might hand-rub them along their length before sliding them through the fire door, sometimes with a generous soaking of sake. The fire door is then closed for the last time and mudded over along with the sideports and the main draft. The chimney is damped and capped, and the fire is left to burn itself out. At a temperature of about 1075 degrees, a few days after the kiln is shut down, its interior has cooled enough to no longer glow. For the first time since a fire was struck at its mouth, the inside of the Dragon is dark.