Not Growing Up Irish

I’m not Irish.

I want to make that clear.

In fact, people tell me I look Italian or French, but in reality I’m not sure I look like anything. I’m a classic American mutt with a handy name for a hurleymaker.

I'd say, on a good day I'm 10-15%

At Indiana University I majored in bike racing. Honestly, that’s what I did. I rode my bike as much as I could and read in my spare time to earn an English degree. My love of the bicycle stems from watching a film called Breaking Away, a movie about bicycle racing set at the same University at which I attended. As a freshman I shaved my legs, took Italian, and put an Italy tricolor on the back of my car window. I listened to Puccini and Verdi—just like the kid in the movie. I loved everything about the bike, the dynamics of a race, rider against rider, rider against the elements, rider against the landscape. I loved training. I loved watching races on videos traded by riders in on the local scene. More than anything I loved the discipline and sacrifices of the rider. Cycling is very simple when it comes down to it. The one who can suffer the most will win.

At Indiana University, I was accepted to the Cultural Studies Program, where it was arranged that I would conduct my student teaching in Ireland. I’m not sure why I picked Ireland as I had no affinity to the place. I guess, more than anything I was lured to the island as it was home of my favorite cyclist, Sean Kelly. I had read a story about Kelly which had painted him as the workingman’s cyclist. A man who would drive half the night from race to race fully aware that he would be doing the same amount of driving if his lot in life would have found him a deliveryman rather than a professional cyclist. I was planning on taking the bike over and prayed that my job would be as close to Carrick on Sur as possible as I had heard Kelly enjoyed training alongside the locals on the hills around his town. But as the date for departure approached, I was dissuaded from hauling over a bike by someone who argued the weather would be too rough as I would be teaching in Ireland during the fall term.

To complete my cultural program at Indiana I studied with other students who were also assigned to teach in Ireland. We wrote reports on various aspects of Irish culture, from population to religion and wrote reports on our findings about economics and even wildlife. Additionally, I enrolled in the only Irish History course available, where we memorized the counties and provinces of Ireland, learned about Celtic religion and culture, Irish myths, the Celtic migration, the troubles and everything in between that the professor could truncate. During this course, I remember watching a video on Irish Sport and being dumbfounded by a man running forever down a pitch while balancing a ball on a stick. I wondered what that could be. 

  Nobody was more excited for me to go to Ireland than my friend Patrick McDonald. I met Patrick my senior year, just before I went off to Ireland. Patrick was a prankster, perennially in trouble for throwing things off the roof of his dorm, tying roadkill deer to the top of his friend’s car and driving it around campus, and general disorderly conduct. His grandparents were from County Donnegal and his parents had just built a house on the family’s property. He couldn’t get over the fact that I was preparing to do my student teaching in Ireland. He was genuinely more excited about my prospects there than I was. And I think he did more to set the tone for my travels than anyone else. It was more than drinking Guinness to Patrick, which was the one thing everyone said when I mentioned I was going to teach over there. Nobody ever said you’re going to love the kids. Just the beer.

 –You’re going to love going back there.

I scowled at him. Back there?

 –You know, back to Ireland.

--But  I’ve never been out of the country.

He shook his head. --But your name is Stephen Quigley. You’re Irish.

Perhaps it derived from the same romanticism that led me to shave my legs and sing arias on the bicycle, but this was the moment when I first realized that some part of me was Irish more than my name, and that I had an opportunity to go to Ireland for a prolonged period and figure out what that part was.

This Hurleymaker on St. Patrick's Day

One might assume that for a hurleymaker, St. Patrick’s Day would be one to celebrate, but the weeks leading up to St. Patrick’s day are not easy ones nor are they exceedingly profitable, and the day itself is a day of conflict. Wife’s birthday is on St. Patrick’s Day. How fitting you might think. An Irish American kid and a hurleymaker at that, married to an Irish American girl born on St. Patrick’s Day. And while that initially added to wife’s mystique and sense that we were destined to be together, the reality has been otherwise.  

March means march. In the weeks leading up to St. Patrick’s Day everybody  needs a hurley yesterday so they can march in a parade today. Why they absolutely need this prop I don’t know. Messages filled with sheer panic inundate my voicemail inbox from all corners of the states. We are not busy in terms of volume—I’m not blasting through my stock of blanks—rather, I’m busy making the arrangements that will get the sale done: reassuring customers, doing extra paperwork, putting in late nights to get an order ready for the next day, and making special trips to the post office to next-day air.

Meanwhile the birthday clock is ticking and as usual I have yet to secure a present for wife and have no plan for the day itself. I detest those friends and non-friends who plan birthday bonanzas for their spouses: a picnic on a mountain peak, a glass of wine in the surf at sunset, a blindfolded mystery evening, a surprise party at a choice rooftop venue. I don’t like to hear those stories. I don’t want to be friends with those people. I hate those people.

Listen to what Brant did… he is just so creative, I hear wife beam.

Maybe the opposite is true. Maybe he isn’t creative, but he has the time to sit around in an empty office all day pushing pencils thinking about such things—thinking all year about that one day he can pull off something spectacular and make all of his wife’s friends impressed and their husbands sick to their stomach. Creative? I create all day long. I make things. My mind is consumed by my creation.

St. Patrick’s Day is further complicated in that the club also has plans for me— you’ll be at this school talking to a heap of kids and don’t crack any in the head, and at this lunch talking to the old people, and you’ll be at this pub, jersey on, finding new lads to sign up. We are depending on you! The truth is I know that I will fail them. I’ll be late to my post if I get there at all. Especially if the day is March 17th.

I have tried to move the celebration of wife’s birthday to March 16^th or 18^th, or possibly the weekend before or after, but wife has always been a purist on the point of celebrating on the very day so that idea is roundly shelved.

From wife’s perspective, March 17^th can’t even be classified as anti-climax. That implies that one has had their hopes up, that one expected more and that in a twist of situational irony the day turned out differently. From wife’s perspective this cannot ever be so. She has come to expect disappointment on her birthday. It has become my job to deliver.  This may seem more than strange, but wife takes some sort of solace in knowing her pessimistic predictions are proved true.

This year’s St. Patricks Day went this way. I wake. Set out the flowers. Set out the cards. Make the coffee. Wife notices cards and flowers with wry smile, kisses kids, hopefully kisses me, goes to yoga. Wife still at yoga. Wife returns and asks for birthday plans. Smiles when she hears them in that way that says that she knows she is right about something. I am humiliated and at the same time, as mentioned before, curiously satisfied in that I proved her right. Wife roundly rejects all plans proffered. Tells me that she is inviting all of our friends (whom she put on retainer should I fail in my preparations as expected) over for dinner.  Wife goes to lunch with best friend. Comes home from lunch with a car full of groceries minus my favorite beer. I insist that I could have done the grocery shopping. She reassures me that I am not trusted to do such tasks and reminds me that most grocery stores do not welcome me on their premises for reasons I do not wish to discuss here.  

Friends come over. We eat, we drink. I sneak to the other room to look at my watch knowing I was supposed to meet clubmates at the pub hours ago. I try to look like I am enjoying myself but I know that I am emoting discomfort in ways that I cannot control. I catch wife from time to time looking at me with same wry smile.

At no predictable moment, when wife thinks I have had enough, she announces in front of the party. Okay Steve. You can go now. Our friends look on me with pity.

I must say that wife always has a good birthday because she wills it so. She makes a big joke out of the day, celebrates it on her terms, and has a laugh at my awkwardness. It is all in good fun.       

So I away to the pub where I will meet potential hurlers who are now too drunk to recruit—too fixated on the actual word hurling in their present state to move on to the discussion of the game itself.

Feb 8

Feb 8  

I always keep a table in the shop to work on bit by bit and it gives us a little extra money. I chip away at it. Let the process take its time. When I’m working on it I feel a fullness, and when I’m away I wake at three in the morning scared to death about it breaking apart from poor craftsmanship or from end-customer neglect. These tables fill me both with a sense of joy and terror. Is this passion or foolishness?

Mar 6 Of Butts and Sawing

How do I know a good butt? Because I’ve seen enough bad ones.

When I find the right ash butt I can see the hurleys in it—I can count them. All I have to do is carve them out.

It all starts with selecting a butt. For me, the best ash trees are between 12-16 inches at girth (4ft). 

Primo is 14-15”, but I’ll take them up to 18” or as little as 10”. That being said, the wood inside an older ash will not be as supple and the flair of the grain can be too long in its apex, while diameters less than 11” can be depressing to saw as it yields poorly.

I look at the tines to see how they line up, the best being oriented like a clock at 3-6-9-and 12. If the tines are level in the ground they are prized, but if the ground falls away down the hill and the tines are offset by more than a foot then cutting the butt may be a waste of time. I read the bark to see if it is straight as twisting bark means twisting grain. Read the bark and you will read the grain. Many times an ash grows with a sister, but in most of these cases the sister has died off. Where the sister lay the wood is fragile and the grain burled. There are no good hurleys here and this region can quickly dull a saw blade. Before I cut I look for folds that may trap dirt, and I look for rocks around the base that may need to be cleared away with a mattock.

Some geographic regions are good for ash and some are not. Sometimes the ash runs brown. And some times there are mineral deposits that splotch the wood. The ugliest ash I ever cut came out of a patch of woods that used to be an auto dump some forty years before. I’ve cut black, white, green, brown (basket ash), and pumpkin ash, and what I would call balsa ash if there were such a thing--that wasn’t a good batch of hurleys!

I fell the tree first at girth and then work on cutting out the tines. I’ve seen plenty of people on youtube felling the tree all the way at the tines, but I’ve always thought that was a bit dangerous. Still, I don’t know any different than the way I do it. I have dropped hundreds of trees but I don’t enjoy it. To an outsider whose experience comes from watching a logger show on television it may seem like a grand job. But I have seen enough people almost killed and heard a hundred stories in which someone did die. It’s nothing to play around with.

If I can mark the tree and let a timber cutter who drops a hundred trees a day do it then why should I mess with it? Ash are tough as you know. They don’t always cut cleanly and are prone to splitting or, due to the fact that their branches fork, hanging up on other trees. I’d rather transfer the onus of the dropping of the tree to the cutter because if I hang up a tree or slow down the operation then the crew will be less likely to want to work with me.  

Once the tree is prepped I put my saw tip down in it at an angle so that the saw handle is kept at my shins and start working it around the butt. I imagine a point in the center that I’m trying to hit as I work the saw. If I do it well, I can break the butt out by blowing on it. Sometimes I rock it with my hands. If it is too lose I will make another circle looking for my weak spot. When I used to work in the woods myself I’d pull a stubborn butt out with the truck or a come-along. But now I only work with loggers who use dozers and skidders to pull out the butt. 

There is nothing I love more than taking a log and sawing it into planks. When you are good at a skill, really good at it, the act of performing that skill can be a moment of clarity, the closest thing I know to religion. So much brought you to that skill and so much depends on it.

I used to handle all the logs with a cant hook and roll them onto the mill. Since I broke my neck I use the skid steer. Once on the mill I line up the tines, wedge up the top of the butt to send the blade through the heart. I always saw from the small end towards the tines as sawing through the root can send a blade off course. I quarter the logs on the bandmill as best I can and place the quarters aside till I’m ready to set up for planking. To plank I make quick studies of the bark and the grain to decide how to get the best yield. Some planks will be graded senior and others youth. I can flip a quarter several time to get it right. If the tines dissolve, or if the tine is now most prominent at a 45 degree angle, I will rewedge the piece, turning it on its side to perform a type of sawing called rift sawing. Rift sawing is tedious and one of the skills of which I am most proud. I know my machine, I know the stock, and the process creates higher quality blanks. In rift sawing the rings are perpendicular to the cut which will make for the finest hurleys.

When the log is 18” or bigger, I can’t quarter the butt with my mill as the tine end will be bigger than 24” When this happens I have to rive the log. I cut a plane through the heart of the log with my chainsaw and then drive wedges into the end. As the wedges drive in I leapfrog the riving blocks and make my way down the log tapping in more as I go. This is how pole spitting was done. This is hurley splitting.

On a mid- summer’s day ten years back, I was standing on top of a huge ash butt that was too big and ugly to make good hurleys—but I was out of ash. This was a big sucker. The biggest I ever did or ever faced. This was my champion. The sun was high and it was hot and humid as all get out—I had my shirt off and was wearing a cowboy hat. I stood atop that butt driving in wedges. I was an hour into the bastard and it showed no sign of giving up. I’m working away and I hear a clipity-clop, clipity-clop and just then I look up and see a black bearded Amish in black suit clothes driving his black horse and black buggy and just behind him he has a trailered ruby red portable sawmill—yes, pulling a sawmill behind a buggy. I tipped my hat to him. He tipped his to me. Here I was the modern guy doing it the old-timey way while the old-timey guy was doing it the modern way.

 

Feb 26

The rain falls sideways and freezing my face and hands while above me the red oaks slash through the air. Nervous that I will get hit by a widowmaker, I fiddle through my key ring looking for the one that will get this gate open and me through it and on inside the shop where I have a bag of spoke shavings and plenty of dry wood saved for just such a day. Seamus is home from school sick with a stomach bug and wife is watching him while I work the morning shift. At lunch I’ll relieve her so she can go teach.   

I open the shop going directly to the stove and build a Lincoln log pyre and stuff the base with shavings. Just as I light the fuel and feel the first warmth I hear the clatter of sheet metal. This is not unusual, but this particular crash stretches, screams, and whines like a building is coming down.

I go to the window but can’t see anything through all of the rain.

I load scraps onto the fire as it is now well burning, put on my parka, and go outside to see if the out buildings still stand, The cold and the rain hit me all over again as I make my way around the building tiptoeing around puddles too large to not get soaked if I step in them. All looks fine,  but as I turn to go something catches my eye and I stop and do a doubletake of the sawmill. The lower half of the roof is missing. I hadn’t noticed it before as the roof pitches away from me, but now I had just the right angle, and yes, it was clearly missing.

I have things to do, I think. And this isn’t one of them. Not today. Not in this rain. I’m not even sure where the missing corrugated metal has blown off to. I can’t see it anywhere. 

A muddy reservoir forms below, but I make it through alright. One of my sheets has rolled clear across the yard and is pinned against a lumber stack. The other blew the other way, over the barbed wire fence and against a set of storage buildings my landlord rents out. I am able to make my way over the fence and move the sheet metal through a space between a set of gates. I secure the corrugated sheet metal by placing several 8x8 stringers on top of it. I look at the exposed sawmill and tools and wonder if I shouldn't do the roof repairs now.

 

But there is an old saying from the hills that fill my head.

Only a fool would fix a roof in such a rain. And when it ain’t rainin the roof won’t leak. 

I let this wisdom play about me while imagining the warm fire inside. I head to the shop thinking myself pretty smart considering my feet are defacto wet even though I never did manage to step in a puddle. A fire will do me just fine I think. I return to the stove inside and find that even in my short absence the fire has long since burnt out.