We don’t know where the end of the mind may be, nor if all or any minds may have such palms. We know that towards the end of his life Wallace Stevens wrote a poem called ‘Of Mere Being’ that spoke of such a palm.

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

As usual, this may be a very oblique way of introducing the subject of this post. Then again, it may not be. You shall judge.

In early 2004, after a very cold and difficult yet triumphant winter in Syracuse I had the pleasure of spending a few days in Santa Barbara. Palm trees abound there and of one I took home a seed. I was very surprised later that spring when it sprouted in a pot on my porch in Massachusetts. For nine years or so it fought the odds of being a houseplant, kind of throve, pictured below in 2013.

It was struggling against the pot that it lived in. The roots were more vigorous than circumstance permitted. That story is told here. Some accommodation was made in the form of Box 17.

The goal of any seed is to find a place to thrive, eventually to bear fruit. Circle of Life and all that. In 2019 the palm moved with life and journeyed to Maine in a blue plastic trash can and lived therein until this past (2022) winter when a great and primal accommodation was completed.

The special thing here being, unlike Box 17, that the earth is connected and continuous, that should the palm seek to grow roots all the way to China (as they used to say, as it was told to children (one being me) in the sandbox, that of course you could dig all the way to China, it would just take such a very long time and it would be dangerous and what if the hole caved in?!) that indeed such roots could be grown.

Now it would seem that a bird is called for, with golden fire-fangled feathers.

A story will be told, probably here, about a local bridge of doom. This is not that story.

You see, the floor in the pantry had begun to fall in because the beams beneath it, all save the one pictured, had at least partially rotted. The floor was three layers of wide planks. Those planks cried out that they still had life, that they were not ready for the fire. Sometimes one must go with the flow (probably more often than is often understood). In the kitchen, the trash bag had been domiciling in a cardboard box. The stage was set.

Of course no nails, as has been my method of box making. I cut the the corner runners from some scrap, glued and doweled them into place. I measured not once. I swizzled and re-swizzled, dithered and dithyrambed. In no time at all, and with a very innovative hinge, Box 20 emerged.

Note the irregular placement of the dowels. Their angles are also divergent. This is so that any particular whack/injury cannot call forth a systemic failure. As much as any given dowel may wish to surrender to a given force, it’s brethren will disagree. This is strength by non-alignment. I prattle.

Thar she is, finished with the usual tung oil and limonene. Smells awesome, if you like that smell. Of note, you should be able to see, above, that the hinge is of rope.

At first I wanted to make a classic dowel hinge. This requires a little bit more planning than the flow state usually affords – also, the pride (amount they stick out) of the protrusions on the lid was insufficient to get the drill bit aligned with the line of the would be wooden hinge. Scratch, scratch, scratch… what if the hinge were … not a straight line. Unthinkable! Or not.

An additional benefit of such a hinge is that it’s relatively unbreakable. Whereas, if a person were to casually sit on said trash box, a dowel hinge might break and cause considerable consternation. Not so the go with the flow rope hinge. Simplicity, benefit, joy.

Righteously recycled, deployed.

discovered, had been thought to be unfinished, but after perhaps 5 years of quiet rest and self-contemplation decided that indeed, it was what is was, it is what it is, and that by itself it is complete, though lidless, complete, though imperfect, and actually neater than many boxes ever might be.

This probably should have been somewhere around Box 8, if a proper timeline gave the number of the box. Maybe it’s more like a box recognition number. It shows primitive but effective finger jointing at the corner. It features red eucalyptus cut from a great block. Has the standard 3/8 cedar floor. Is holding a nice piece of tiger iron.

No special remarks. It’s a rough piece conceived with ambitions but never gussied. Dignity and utility are likely simple things.

or maybe it’s the Blob connection.  We’re talking about a big box here, at least compared to the size of any previous box I’ve made.  Greater than 16 cubic feet..  Only two previous boxes (4 + 6, the tool box and the tombstone planter) vaguely pushed at a cubic foot. The idea of it kept whispering ‘Cincinnati, Cincinnati’ to me, as if something that big was meant to consume something even bigger, to grow, a force unto itself.  There was a movie.  Actually, here I was about to insert a hyperlink to a move called “The Blob that ate Cincinnati” – HOWEVER – apparently there never was such a movie. There was a movie about a cockroach that ate Cincinnati, and apparently the Blob was not as vigorous as I’d imagined, eating whole municipalities, so the connection must have to something to do with rational proteins making a memory where none existed.  I could have sworn till moments ago that I could picture said Blob (from memory) overwhelming the skyline of Cincinnati on its way to heaven knows where.  So this connection, this whispering by an idea of a (false) memory.  Subtle are the workings and non-workings in the mind.  First things first though.

Going back to early 2004 I was in Santa Barbara after a long project.  I spent a day collecting seeds, since they have such beautiful things growing there.  One was a palm seed that eventually sprouted and has thrived since.

Of course every year it gets bigger.  The last few years I’ve not re-potted and I guess the roots keep growing, they’ve pushed it up in pot till the soil is over the top of the pot.

Also the pot itself is crumbling.  Long story short it needs a new pot, but there are not so many pots that would be a fit step up.  Flash now to 2010, in Hawaii, stopping somewhere near Punalu’u at a roadside coffee farm where also there were lots of macadamia trees.  Took a bunch of the nuts home, planted a few, one took and for a few years each year did better and better.  This year though it too was getting tired of it’s pot and something happened too where it dropped most of its leaves.

It too, therefore, was in the new pot market. Maybe a pot big enough for both of them?  Cincinnati, Cincinnati!  The existing pots, truncated cones, were about eighteen inches in height and also 18 inches in diameter at the top.  I wanted not to do this every year or two.  Twenty four?  For each, as cubes, 2 x 2 x 2, x2, or 2 x 4 x 2.  It’s only sixteen cubic feet.  How much could that weigh?  I looked it up…

Weights of Other Materials in Pounds Per *Cubic Foot

Earth, Common Loam    75.00-90.00
Earth, Dry/Loose            76.00
Earth, Dry/Packed         95.00
Earth, Mud/Packed        115.00

Hmm.  How much does a milk cow weigh?  About 1500 pounds, it is reported.  Light dirt would bring it in at 1200.  Packed mud at 1840.  Somewhere in the middle, about a cow’s worth.  It’s hard to believe though.  And the box itself probably adds 100 pounds.  Mud + box plus a few decorative rocks on top?  Perhaps a ton.  Sounds like a realistic plan, so.

Notched 4 x 4’s for strength.  No screws, so nothing can be screwed up.  Dowels.  Can’t rust either.

Two end frames.

I was pleased with this, only having four foot long pipe clamps, that by using the middle bars I could effectively brace the whole thing for assembly.  I had a bunch of  1 x 6 fir tongue and groove boards left over from a dozen years ago, had to supplement a bit.

Got a feeling of building a barn or an ark.  A mighty thing it seems, initially, but would a cow just laugh at it?  Clearly the design banks on the inertness of the soil.  A ton of earth is not a ton of live and kicking muscle.

Here it is emerging from the workshop into the world.  So uncertain, these first steps.

Stood up nicely, first on one side then the other, for a final sanding in a well ventilated area.  The lowest two slats worth of cladding and the bottom are lined with plastic sheeting, to keep water off the wood and to force it to drain out that center opening you see.  A catch pan will sit under that.  During this sanding process it started to snow – this being October 18th, mind you, and the first frost only having been the previous evening.  I had taken the sanding outside both for the open air and also to see what my assistant wanted to contribute.

The assistant first has gone to get some lumber, but then he saw (see the white streak in the picture) the snow flakes.  He decided instead then to contemplate them

Tonight Box 17 sits outside on the deck waiting domestic blessing.  The palm and macadamia, had they eyes, would be able to see it just on the other side of the window.  I don’t know what they know, if a plant knows it has a mentor.

Another post on this will follow, showing either the rejected box, no doubt angry, hitching a ride for Cincinnati, or a box living a purpose driven life, holding the world together for two trees and probably a ton of smaller experimental plantings.

Until soon

I never would have predicted this – I mean, boxes are generally not turtles.  I guess there is a kind of turtle called a box turtle, but I only knew that in passing and could not tell you much about box turtles before reading the content in the hyperlink you’ve just passed.  This started because my sister recently sent me a wooden turtle that had come from my grandfather’s house.

I vaguely recall this guy from when I was a wee lad, as something in the set of forbidden things one was not to touch.  Anyway, the turtle comes to my house and I’m honored, that across fifty years finally, it has no better place to go, and now I’m good enough.  But really I’m at peace with this turtle, just being a little dramatic.  Anyway, looking at it, suddenly it seemed like a great idea to make a new one – this is what ADD is all about – there is a wild delight in chasing that next squirrel.

I noticed that quarter-sawn wood would be a very bad choice for this design, as that would taunt the legs to break off at where they join the body.  In fact, selecting a flaw-sawn piece where it was a chord near the edge, such that each of the legs could be with the grain as they came down and out from the body, that would be perfect.  I found a piece of black walnut with just such a grain.  I probably should have taken pictures of some of these intriguing intermediate steps, but I had not thought the exercise would turn out so happily, so my dry text will have to do for a bit.

Getting the face and feet more right seemed somehow important, as if in keeping with my neo-primitive preferences a little worshipful realism might be the thing.  I browsed pictures of turtle tails and turtle feet and turtles faces.  My primary model for the face, just to make sure I was honoring the truth about turtle faces, follows.

And thus memorialized –

My attempt was not to mimic the whole turtle photo, merely to use the face as a way of improving the marginally correct face on the wooden original.  This is a box, and I even stamped the inside using the railroad spike signature stamp I’d made some time back.  The cool thing was, that to make an imprint properly one needs single strong and decisive hammer blow.  I still have lying around my grandfather’s sledge hammer.  I used that.  That made a nice circle, of replicating something he had and applying the signature with the force from his hammer.  Rich and strange are these seemingly desirable associations.

Here he is open before getting the tung and orange oil treatment.

The doing of this went very fast using a jig saw, kutzall wheel via angle grinder, kutzall bits via Dremel, rasp, files, sandpaper.  Ok, that’s not neo-primitive.

There pretty much you have it.  Here he is before donning his shell.

And then two shots of them playing on the kitchen counter.

It’s one of those things.  I noticed specifically as I was filing the turtle, shaping the neck and head and legs, a certain deja vu, like I’d done this before, perhaps many times before, that it seemed very natural.

Another finger joint box – I’ll get off this kick soon enough, but it’s been very satisfactory to be able to produce joints with comparatively few flaws.  This one is all walnut, the lid that Bastogne/Claro kind, and the sides just conventional black walnut.  The floor of it is Spanish cedar from the estate of Ed Brodie, a local woodworker who passed last summer and whose family gave away much wood from his workshop to whomsoever desired.

You’ll recall that previously I had called these jutting out fingers ‘proud’, as I was and am still a trifle taken with that carpentry use of the word, but I saw another label of jutting fingers recently, as ‘knuckles’ and I like that one too.  I went with also because I had some tear out when cutting the fingers and to sort of enhance the knuckliness of it I decided to groove where the between finger tear outs were, so very much like the space between fingers and knuckles now there’s a bit of an indent there.

No metal parts of course, dowels between the lid and right and left walls to create the hinging.  A little overhang left on the back of the lid so that it opens just a hair past ninety degrees and holds there.

The box cries out no special utility – it’s hardly airtight enough to be a humidor.  It’s sturdy enough, perhaps holy hand grenades.

In any event a very satisfactory endeavor.

Humble wood too, pine and cedar.  The pins are walnut, but that’s really just for contrast, not for fancy.

This box does attempt to be fine in any way, just wants to knock out two ideas with one test, namely the humble fingers bit, opposite of proud, not jutting out, smoothed together as well pinned fingers.  The latter were attractive to me inasmuch as they would seem to possess some mechanical superiority to simple finger joints, being inclined not to pull apart.

I put a groove on the top and lowered the front to use a piece of cedar as a lid.  Went a little thin and the left groove top broke off, but in a test box no biggie.

I like how the pinned fingers look – makes me start to think wooden hinge.

In the last corner below you see a throw in failure, as I was racing through the execution, which is what I seem to do when a box is just an experiment, I over-rasped some, exposing the pin that I think was too close to the outside anyway.

Nonetheless all to the good.  I like and will re-use the pinned humble finger thing.

I’d never heard the word ‘proud’ used to mean ‘sticks out a little bit more than it is supposed to’ before, until I took up carpentry last year.  It’s a usage that provokes some thought – proud is what goes beyond useful.  Hmm.  The corners on this box are proud on purpose, as a decorative element – not sure if that takes the pride out of them – but they need not be ashamed.  It’s so easy to fall into conundrums.

The lid, which slides in and out on routed grooves, is of redwood.  Redwood with what they call flames.  Notice how they are perpendicular (roughly) to the grain.  I see them as waves of energy moving (when it was alive) within the wood.  I wonder if they do move, if one cut the tree at time X or X + N (where X and N are positive numbers) would the flames be in different places?

The flames are chatoyant, like tigers eye, with the bright lines changing depending on the angle of view.

All those fingers really are just a test of a very nice finger jig (Incra) I received for Christmas.  By comparison It certainly exposes the imperfection of my hands.  I think I’ll enjoy using it for those times where a piece is not trying to lean at art but where function is first with a few aesthetics thrown in for good measure.

My grandfather kept his chess pieces in a wooden box with a lid that slid like this.