Bow Down

Some weeks ago, our little group lined up at Trackers HQ, beanies pulled down over our faces. Grey is fond of blindfolds, and usually when we gamely agree to shut our eyes and be led around we're in for something...entertaining. This time, he led us by the elbow to a mixed selection of bow staves propped up against the wall near the archery range. Each of us individually selected our own stave--a six or seven foot tall, six inch thick rectangular cube sawed out of a larger tree trunk.

I walked along the wall, fingertips outstretched, not sure what it was I was looking for, feeling for. I felt a little foolish as the folks in the blacksmith area looked on at a group of four blindfolded adults, each of us taking it in turns to grope dead trees.

But I didn't just pick one--or at least, in retrospect, I don't think I did. I chose a stave, or a stave chose me, and it was different from all the others. I didn't know it when I stopped and told Grey, "this one" and he put it aside for me, but my stave of Osage Orange has a beautiful imperfection that none of the other ones available had. In the center, where the handle of my bow will be, is a large knot. Two inches across, it will become the centerpiece of my bow, a hole in the center of my handle, a unique and unusual feature in a craft that typically looks for straight-grained, knot free wood. Had this large knot been anywhere else along the length of wood, the stave would not have been suitable for a bow.

In the hours since then where I've stood with this stave clamped against a table, drawknife in hand, slowly peeling off layers of bark, cambium, and sapwood, working my way carefully down through the layers until I find that bright orange heartwood that will become my first bow, I think about the holes, the knots, in my life. 

Like most products of industrial civilization, I have many imperfections, emotional knots, historical traumas, that mar the straight grain of my soul. Last week when we spent all day working on these bows, I hit a point in the mid-afternoon where continuing with the task at hand would have been imprudent. The drawknife is not a forgiving tool.

Physically, I was strained from standing at an angle for hours, trying not to cut too deep, managing the temperature variations as the weather went from chilly to warm and back again while the sun traced a small arc through the open shop door. But there was more than the physical at play that afternoon.

I stopped. I put down my drawknife. I placed my hands on the edge of the tabletop and bent over, hinging at the hips, my face towards the floor, stretching out my shoulders, bowing down in front of my bow stave. I faced the drawknife of my own life, the careful, painstaking work of removing the layers of my trauma, of smoothing out the knots in growing up, of living, somehow, in a deeply fractured society while maintaining my own integrity. 

In the course of the year so far, I have worked with my own hands to make many of the tools I need to perform the tasks of wild living. I have crafted my own water bottle out of a gourd. I have stitched and crocheted wool clothes, whittled a fire bow kit and tent staves, knotted together a shelter door, and flint knapped cutting tools. I have spent umpteen hours in the gathering, preparation, cooking, and preservation of food, a task that forms the centerpiece of any life spent, even momentarily, without the convenience of grocery stores. I have chopped and scavenged wood for more fires than I can count--which we make, on these cool mornings, as a matter of course. 

But I have also worked with my own inner being, tending to the tight kernels of fire, the insecurities, the rough edges, the places where my inner sense of security and tranquility goes rushing into an inescapable dark hole. These are my knots.

When I work with the bow stave, I scrape the drawknife in small, shallow movements around the knot in the center of my bow. I have just begun, really, to do much of anything with this stave. Many hours of work are ahead of me. The handle will be a technical challenge. That large knot requires patience and skill that I don't yet have--though Grey does, and he is always near, offering support, advice, pointing out where the lowest layer is, helping me draw out my next step. When my bow is finished, the center of it will be this knot, smoothed out, shiny and beautiful--not a flaw, but a piece of practical and functional art.