I shaped the Agave blank last week, a task I performed with all the existential angst of a bird wearing eau de corpse cleaning the teeth of a dozing croc. I learnt a few things though…firstly a good respirator is a wonderful thing and a few simple precautions (working outdoors, wearing a long sleeve shirt etc.) go a long way in making the work more pleasant. Working with this wood again distilled my existing thoughts on the intricacies of harvesting and milling Agave. Making a good quality, even density blank requires a certain amount of knowledge and timing. A couple of years ago a carpenter friend of mine harvested and milled some Agave. He picked only the vigorous, green, crazy horny, springtime-of-their-lives, stems; planked them immediately and dried them. The resulting wood was, to extend a metaphor, virginal white, rot free, as light weight as foam and evenly dense. My new blank was less virtuous, more Mary Magdalene than Mary mother of God. It united the pale rot free planks with dense brown strips cut from close to the surface as well as red and grey planks where the decay had set in. Trying to shape the latter with a block plane was like attempting to plane a sponge and although the resulting combination of colours is deeply pleasing, the lack of uniformity in desity made shaping trickier than it needed to be. Still, I think it all worked out of in the end. My new board is a slight departure from my usual, single concave, planing hull obsession. Its a 4’9” quagg. Flat bottomed stand up paipo. Flat bottomed girls make the rockin world go round!
By not knowing, and not demanding to know, we are trusting that what we are paying for has been produced fairly and safely, but we are in fact leaving this up to chance. As most products these days are imported, we are not only buying something ‘blindly’, but we also seem to forget that by importing we’re increasing our environmental impact, as well as effectively exporting our money. As consumers we have more control over what is available to us to buy than we might think. As consumers we collectively choose to keep products and services available on the market as we create the demand. However we often seem to forget this incredible power that we have. With this power we can control the economy and also create jobs, by the simple act of being a ‘localist’.
By buying locally we not only contribute to our own communities immediate economy, but we are also ensuring that our communities ‘spirits’ and unique qualities live on.
There’s something really nice about personally knowing the carpenter that made the chair that you sit on everyday, you know he took his time to create it with love and care, and these qualities matter. You also hope and are pretty sure that the money that went to him will be circulated back into the local community. For a sustainable future we need to start caring for our local community and that means supporting the businesses within it too.
Be proudly local, support local businesses and let’s grow our local community together.