The beaver's table

I’m way too pleased with myself. I’m nearly finished with my first piece of rustic furniture, a coffee table made in part from the bones of many meals the beavers have made of the understory that once grew on Rebel’s Isle. This table was not born of happy circumstances. Beavers have always been a nuisance here but one year they were a major problem. A family of beavers can and will strip bare a small island like Rebel if you let ‘em. Small pines, juneberry trees, willows, alders, birch, small oaks, stripped of their bark and left to rot. My seventeen-year war with the beavers has felt like an endless conflict, and please don’t bug me with your city notions of the poor woodland creatures roaming free on God’s Green Earth. Cruel though it may sound, I note that it takes a lot longer to grow a tree than it takes to grow a beaver. It’s no fault of the beavers; it’s us. We screwed up the balance of nature long ago and we’re stuck with the consequences. We turned the woods into a park when we created Cottage Country and if we insist on using the North as a playground we’ve got to be gardeners and game wardens. I accept the responsibility but I hired a trapper to do the dirty work. So as far as I know the beavers are now hats and cunning fur accessories somewhere. Of course the trapper waited for prime season, securing the doom of several more trees, before he did his evil work. And we still have beaver, but not so many and the thinning they do is acceptable for now. Proof that I’m slightly conflicted in all this is the concept of the table. For some reason I wanted it to act as a kind of totem to the beavers. I thought I’d take this lacy tangle of small sticks and create a useful work of art that would evoke the presence of the beaver and memorialize the trees that had been destroyed. The teeth marks on the sticks seemed very important and worth preserving, integral to the overall design. All winter long I sketched and imagined my table. The many sticks would weave a complex pattern, a wooden bone yard, an engineering marvel of interwoven pieces of beaver-chewed wood. One fine morning in July the work began. It nearly ended the same day. That was three years ago. I won’t try to describe the first version; it was way too complex. It defies description. Totem it was, table it wasn’t. Even I, in my mad fog of creativity could see that no glass would stand for long on its artful surface. Nor would you enjoy cleaning it. I pulled it apart and set it aside. Year two was a fit of trial and error. The legs looked right, cut from a downed juneberry and screwed to a plywood base. The top was level and nothing wobbled. (I can work a tape measure with the best of them). But the top, the whole point of it all, lived only in my head. Where my vision met reality a tangled mess of sticks spoke of limited skills and the futile conceit of a hobby wood worker. I tore it apart once again. By the way, if you want to work with juneberry you will need specially hardened cutting tools. It is the hardest wood I’ve ever worked with. It is also inconsistently hard, and the grain grows in a random twisting way that deflects drill bits and bends nails. But the grain is lovely, a creamy background with mauve streaks swirling all through it. Worth the chewed drill bits and the odd bit of skin. Still a long way from realizing my totem-table concept, after two years of grim effort I had achieved a plywood table top trimmed around with some leftover 1x2 and stained a dirty warm grey. I did that because I thought it would make a good neutral backdrop to bring out the intricacies of the beaver sticks. Having abandoned the intricacy part, I was left with an ugly table that had great legs. I was about ready to give up on the whole thing when we happened to make a pilgrimage to the Petroglyphs Park on the North Shore of Stoney Lake. The Petroglyphs are an ancient meeting place where the indigenous people held religious ceremonies and carved primitive symbols in this huge white rock. It’s been preserved, restored and given back to them as the rightful custodians of this sacred place. They have an interpretative center that explains a lot of things about life from the original residents perspective. I don’t know that I buy all this spiritualism or not, but I do know I felt a change come over me while watching and listening to an old man making a canoe. With complete humility, and in all seriousness I went back to the table and asked the wood what it wanted me to do with it. And the wood took my hands and began to guide me. I got out the block plane and shaved all the sharp edges smooth. Some scraps of pine board called from the corner of my shop. Seems they wanted to be the tabletop. They had nice knots. I’d never planned to inlay the beaver sticks into an old board, but the curve of the sticks and the swirl of the grain played nicely together, so I learned to carve grooves in wood and fit crooked sticks into them and then to trim and sand them into one smooth surface. I’d stopped imagining how I wanted the table to be and accepted instead what it was becoming and the table began to shape itself. In rustic work the materials have a will of their own which is unwise to fight, but very good to follow. The last bit of fun was carving the sun, birds, fish, beavers and trees into the rim. Yesterday I learned to rub beeswax into the grain and the table is beginning to glow a reddish honey tone. Soon it will be finished, and as I said I’m way too pleased with myself considering all the help I had making it. One last thing. Just because I’ve made such a big deal about the process, don’t imagine this table is a work of fine art and craftsmanship. If you like, some day I will show you the inept mortise and tenon work; the first one is absurd, the second merely awful and the rest okay, all part of the learning process. And I’ll show you where I should have mitered the corners of the rim, not butt-joined them with the exposed end grain. And I’d find a way to hide the screw holes somehow. But what the heck, it’s rustic. It’s a rustic table in the true sense of the word. Like so many other projects I’ve done around the cottage it’s good enough. For me anyway.