Making It

David Savage and his Morgan.

Apparently there comes a time when you stop struggling to find money, work and respect. You hit a calmer sea, the hard work has paid off and… then what?

On Sunday, I was asked to moderate a discussion of the book “The Intelligent Hand” by David Savage for The Woodworkers Book Club. It was an interesting discussion (if you like books, you should join – they’re very nice people). It also churned up some memories I wasn’t quite ready to face.

David was a father figure to me, and his death in 2019 from cancer came 11 months after my biological father’s death from cancer. Before their too-early deaths, I had these two important lifelines to the past. People who would tell me if I was full of shit when no one else would. People who could see my work and struggles from the outside. (I don’t know about you, but I sometimes need someone to tell me something obvious that I simply can’t see. “Chris, you’re depressed.” Oh my god, thank you.)

My biological father gave me all my ethics and compassion. He made me a humanist before Kurt Vonnegut gave it a name in my head.

David gave me an equally important gift.

I spent a couple weeks working with David at his workshop (Rowden Atelier) in Devon in 2015. I taught a toolbox class, and he taught me veneering (along with a dozen other students). The days in the workshop were fantastic, of course. Rowden is an amazing school (even now with David’s absence). If I were 21, I would enroll there in seconds.

But it was the time in the mornings and evenings outside of class that meant the most to me.

There aren’t a lot of places to stay near Rowden Atelier – it is firmly ensconced in the middle of Beautiful Nowhere, circa 1972. You cell phone doesn’t work. Internet is scarce. All there is to do is make nice furniture.

Sheepwash – literally a low point in the road where farmers would bring their sheep to be washed in this stream.

I stayed at the pub in Sheepwash, a lovely little village that catered to hunters and anglers. One night one of the guests had taken a large buck, and there was a venison special on the menu for most of the week as a result.

I remember the little niceties of the staff at the pub. They packed me a thoughtful lunch every day – it was like I was in elementary school again.

I didn’t have a car, so David picked me up each morning in his wildly eccentric Morgan, and during the drive to Rowden we’d talk about furniture, business and life. In the evenings, we go out for dinner and do the same.

The year I went to Rowden was the year that Lucy and I bought the old German bar where we live, and I now work. The purchase and restoration of the bar was a gamble, and the risk was heavy on my mind as David whipped me through the sunken lanes of Devon in his car.

If you haven’t read “The Intelligent Hand,” you need to know this: David lost everything to bankruptcy at one time. His shop, machines and his reputation. He had to start again from scratch with a black mark to his name.

You would think that someone who had been through the ringer like that would be risk averse. David was the opposite.

That fact – in and of itself – was reassuring to me. But David took it one step further.