Rustic barnwood reincarnated as platform for lemonade and potato salad

Chieftain column, May 26, 2011

I’ve been collecting old barnwood and lumber over the years here in Wallowa County. Working with boards that were nailed together ninety years ago gives you a real feel for history. Especially in your fingers and hands. Some of these splinters are never coming out. I’ve tried tweezers, needles, vise grips … some are so large they’re not technically splinters but chunks of wood. Something you might kindle a fire with. I made choker cables out of dental floss to pull them out but it was no good. Thought about trying to burn them out like old stumps, but I believe I’ve got no choice but to let these pieces of old red fir and pine and tamarack buried in my system stay where they are.

Arise, old boards . . . and function once again by facilitating meals outside.

So Wallowa County has literally become part of me. Little molecules of old tight-grained, rough-cut, true dimension lumber are right now sloughing off and running through my bloodstream. Probably some paint chips and antique dirt too. But hey, good with the bad.

First building I salvaged was an old pack station barn at the head of the lake next to Heidi’s store. I spent weeks up there pulling nails and sorting boards. Finding old graffiti scrawled or carved by long-ago wranglers.

Apparently Randy and Bev had issues.

The Matterhorn Swiss Village is right across the road from where the barn stood, so I spent a good deal of time thinking about how we call Wallowa County ‘Little Switzerland.’ And I decided we should get a tourism official from Switzerland over here to see what we’ve got going so they can start advertising Switzerland as ‘Big Wallowa County.’ I think it’s only fair.

Wood pegs that used to hold bridles and tack in that old barn now hold up towels next to my hot tub. The tub sits on a deck made from other pieces of that old building and I’d like to think the boards are happy with their new job, as opposed to going onto a burnpile.

I’ve been building picnic tables lately with other boards from that barn. You can try one out at Mutiny Brewing in Joseph.

Not pictured: potato salad and lemonade.

The legs holding you up used to be the pack station. The benches are from a house on Alder Slope and the table tops used to be walls inside a cute little log cabin at Wallowa Lake.

It's so cute.

Pulling all the nails and slivers can get tiresome. Some would say salvaging antique boards is more trouble than it’s worth. They’re probably right, except you drag the first brush of stain across these old things and it sets off the yellow, grey and other shades that have been baked and weathered in over the years and, you know, I just don’t get the same satisfaction with a shiny new board that doesn’t have horse hair caught in the cracks or a water stain that started during a rainstorm back when Eisenhower was in office. Patina, some people call it. Seems an awfully fancy term. Too fancy, I think. It’s just old. Experienced. Been around. And I like keeping things around.

I studied history back in college. And I think all those history papers I wrote are the same as building with barnwood. You sort through something that’s been there a long while, decide what you want to use, make sense of the rough spots and sand away the splinters, put some preservative on and send it back out in the world to get more use out of it. So a biography and a picnic table aren’t all that different. For my next project I might just make a table out of old biographies. Or Swiss history books with stories from Big Wallowa County.

I just built a tiny little table for my nieces out of old Wallowa County barnwood. The girls have about five years between the two of them and they’ll be sitting on boards made almost a hundred years ago. No telling how old the trees were when they went off to the mill. So this stuff is made from sunlight and rain well over a hundred years ago and it’ll sit outside again in sunlight and rain that hasn’t got here yet. For more trouble than it’s worth, it still seems worth it.