Almost as regularly as cold fronts the driftwood used to come in to the beach. It was a wild mix of shapes and sizes, from sticks to logs and everything in between. Much of it was waterlogged, so heavy that as it bobbed in the frigid lake water you could scarcely spot it. But if it washed ashore on a day of waves, and if it didn’t get buried too firmly in the sand, and if it was the right shape, then we wanted it.
The project was a fort—what else would 10-year-old boys build? We started it at the base of the neighbors’ bluff, where an open patch of sand was a little bit hidden behind a scrim of slender trees and brush, and where the steep clay slope could form the back wall.
The best building material we had was lumber, sawn pieces that were sometimes substantial: six or eight inches across, three or four inches deep, some feet long. After their time in the water they were beaten and battered, any semblance of flat edges long since worn away. Some were smooth as pudding, others splintery. They’d probably floated down from some demolished wharf or fishing pier in Wisconsin, but we always imagined they were relics from some long-ago schooner foundered in a ferocious storm, their last bit of human contact some desperate sailor hanging on as long as he could before succumbing to the frigid water.
We laid the longest of the planks on the sand, then another atop it. Somewhere during my relentless beachcombing I’d found a couple of rusty railroad spikes—which I also imagined came from some ship—and we figured we could somehow pound things together with them. We had a hammer, borrowed from dad’s workshop.
Wham. The spike hardly moved. Wham. That old wood was hard. Wham. That one hurt my hand. How were we going to attach these boards? Plus, we only had a couple of spikes. How were we going to fasten another board on top of the first two, and another on that?
I don’t recall how long it took us to figure out that we had to stick a post into the ground first, then attach the planks to that, but we did. And so we got our fort, a low wall of weathered old planks that with its pale hue did a pretty good job of blending into its surroundings.
We never did get the walls up very high. There wasn’t that much stackable driftwood and, anyway, we really didn’t have any enemies to defend against. It was fun though to use it as a hideout when adults were on the beach. Somewhere inside we tucked away our survival jar. It was an old coffee can full of matches and food that wouldn’t go bad—probably Hostess Ho-Ho’s.
Fortunately we never had to use it during those ’70s détente years. The fort washed away before too long, the victim of winter storms with their surging waves. But the adventure is something I think about today now that doomsday prepping has become a fashion again. And I think about it too when I walk past the old shed that sits out back, made of wood quite likely older than the stuff we used on the beach all those decades ago.
It was a simple box, six by eight feet, that leaned to one side, an old-timer riven with the afflictions of age. Some of the wide planks that sided the outside had cracked in complex riverine patterns. Skunks sometimes lived underneath. The corrugated roof was a mess of ejecting nails and rusting steel sheets that leaked in the snow and flapped in the wind. Long rusted nails poked out at odd angles from the dark interior. But the lumber someone had used to build it was stout, the two-by-fours that held up the roof the genuine old-school article, an honest-to-goodness two inches wide instead of today’s measly inch-and-a-half.
When we bought the house we began using the shed to store the random gear that never quite found another place: skis, coolers, garden equipment. Sure, we could have demolished it and built a handy, clean new shed wherever we wanted, but this one was useful. It was already standing there.
Besides, I could scarcely have torn down a structure that so manifestly wore its many years. It almost shimmered with its deep patina, the wide outside planks softened to misty gray, the interior studs and rafters darkened to a rich tawny brown as if they’d been rubbed with tobacco juice.
The Japanese have a term for this: wabi-sabi, or the distinctive wear and tear that shows the passage of time on any physical object, and it was the real reason for my affection. It was its wabi-sabi that showed the shed’s wood had been the subject of attention from other people who came before, who had left their own mark on our little place and the neighborhood. It was its wabi-sabi that in causing the shed to lean one way, not another, incorporated all the stresses of wind and roofsnow and nailsag and not-quite-level ground that the building had experienced over all its many years. It was the equivalent of the wrinkles on the face of someone you love: a unique and irreplaceable map memorializing a lifetime of experience in one person and one person only.
Like those wrinkles, true wabi-sabi is also something that cannot be bought—a relief in our hyper-consumerist society. By the time I’d rebuilt the shed by sequentially taking off almost all its wood and re-attaching it, we could have instead built three or four trig, brand-new ones. I would have ended up with far fewer splinters in my fingers. But now we have, instead, an old-new shed, held together with mainly new nails and screws, that incorporates as much of the old wood I could salvage, plus equally patina-ed lumber from a renovation project down the street, plus, yes, a few new planks from Home Depot to fill in where the original wood was just too far gone. Here’s hoping that someone else in 50 years or so will run a wondering hand along it and will regard the splinter that results as part of a long conversation with those who came before.
