Date: 2025-01-15 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00024911
WOODWORK
HANDWORK ON WOOD
Handwork om Wood ... a 276 page book written by William Noyes
HANDWORK ON WOOD
Handwork om Wood ... a 276 page book written by William Noyes
Open PDF: Handwork-in-Wood-by-William-Noyes
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
This PDF has 276 pages, and I find it quite fascinating.
I have lived my life in fairly close proximity with wood. During my childhood I used 'wood' to build things, and it was really only as a young adult that I started to learn how to work with other materials. I never got the skills of a craftsman, but I spent enough time trying to make things that I get to have a great appreciation for those that are really skilled in a craft.
The Noyes' book is a lot ... impressive ... and covers a lot of ground in considerable depth.
I particularly liked reading it because it kept reminding me of incidents in my childhood and then at various times during my adult life.
When I was around 8 years old my grandfather came to stay with us for quite a long time. At the time we lived in Okehampton (Devon, England) in a fairly large house with a large garden. When we moved in in about September 1945 the large garden was very much overgrown with a number of big trees that shaded everything. When my grandfather joined us in around 1948 when he was probably in his mid 60s he set about 'fixing' the garden. I was introduced to 'crosscut' saws and everything about cutting big trees down safely. Though I was very young, I was positioned at one end of the cross-cut saw and though I am sure I did not add much muscle, I was probably pretty important in keeping the saw positioned right. 75 years later, I live in a house in rural Pennsylvanie in the USA and still have sa huge respect for the value of healthy trees.
I got some appreciation of the importance of timber and forest when I first visited North America as a 20 year old student in the summer of 1960. Two of us drove a car across Canada from Montreal to Edmonton and then contnued by Greyhound bus to Vancouver ... eventually getting back to Montreal by Greyahound Bus about a month later. Three os us then drove another car from Montreal to Florida before taking a Greyhound bus back to New York for our return flight to London. I remember miles and miles of trees and I rememer crossing big rivers ... and the scale of North America.
I married in England in 1966 and quite soon after that migrated to Canada and later the United Statess. Fairly early in my American life, my wife and I purchased some woodland in Massachussets ... about 120 acres not far from ???. I learned a little bit about the rules that applied to ownership of this sort of land, but never became a true expert. I learned enough to 'harvest' trees for logging and did this several times during our ownership of the property.
In the late 1970s I started doing economic consulting work internationally with the World Bank and the United Nations. There was one assignment in connection with rural development in India involving tree crops where I was working alongside one of the world's top forestry experts. My part in the team was to do with economics and finance, but I have always linked work on economics and finance with the tangible world or engineering and technology and organization and markets. While our international team brought a lot of competence to our work in India, I was impressed by the competence of our Indian Government counterparts who handled the scale of India's geography and its massive and diverse population with extreme understanding and sensitivity.
Peter Burgess