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Authors: Barry Lopez

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BOOK: About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory
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S
OME FRONT STOKERS WORK
in a relaxed manner but are highly focused. Others are fastidiously organized and intense. Some exude confidence, others are unsure, self-conscious. Over the years, Jack’s seen many personalities come and go at the Dragon Kiln, and he has been through the trials of human community with them. In a group like this, where little money changes hands, no one who arrives without wood or food stays long. Jack and the others pose silent questions to any newcomer: Can you imagine the other fellow’s needs? Can you recognize and take on the less glamorous, more onerous tasks? Can you put a young visitor at ease? Will you give as much as you take?

Since it requires an integrated human community to properly load, fuel, and operate an anagama kiln, keeping the community well integrated is a sine qua non of memorable anagama pots. As the linchpin of a leaderless group, Jack exerts a great influence on the direction a firing takes; and for as serious an artist as he is, he shows remarkable flexibility and patience. During several firings I watched him observe petulance, competition, and immaturity without a ripple. To him, such expressions of frustration are just another stick in that particular fire.

When I pressed him, about a year after we met, he confided that only three things really bothered him. People who didn’t bring wood or ever join wood-gathering or wood-cutting expeditions. Loadings that went too quickly, because everyone waited
until the last minute to bring their pots. And the way people scattered so soon after an unloading. There was no time, then, to savor what happened, to study it.

I
N THE BEGINNING
, probably like any outsider, I perceived a relatively seamless group of fifteen or so people ebbing and flowing in their emotions through a firing, all of them clearly at ease with one another and enjoying one another’s company. (Very few human events anymore, of course, bring people together this intensely for this long on a regular basis.) But over the two years I attended firings, I saw people who didn’t have much to offer except their pots eased gently out of the group; and I watched others struggle with new responsibilities as a fire boss. One person’s dog interrupted another person’s sleep or ate someone’s unguarded food and it was roundly denounced to its owner. People kvetched when someone else wouldn’t relinquish his position as head stoker. What I saw was the prosaic stumbling in human endeavor. What always seemed praiseworthy about this polyglot group, what overrode any individual failing, was their willingness to work, to cooperate, to give in to one another. And Jack was the exemplar.

Toward the end of my time in their community, the Dragon Kiln potters were getting ready for their first group show. The artist’s statements they prepared for it were revealing. Wrote one, “There is no switch to flip to turn the kiln on, and no computer to monitor its progress, so there is room for human ignorance, and therefore room for brilliance as well.” A ceramics instructor wrote of the kiln sometimes speaking “a language hard to understand,” and of the harmonious relationship he found between the “gestural qualities” of his pieces and the action of the wood fire. And he wrote that the ritual of firing helped him reestablish the connections he wanted to have with other people and with the landscape he lived in.

Nearly every potter used the same terms of wonder, curiosity, and respect in referring to the Dragon Kiln community and in describing
ceramic sculpture and pots. They saw each as integral to the most important element of a firing—creation, making beautiful and useful objects within the frame of a working community.

A potter who’d attended firings at the kiln since the early nineties wrote of how Jack’s neighbors—loggers, fishermen, farmers, store owners, high school teachers—and a small but steady stream of visitors had affected him. “It is the most unusual coming together of divergent personalities and occupations that I have ever seen,” he wrote. “And each time I look at one of the pots that came from the kiln, I am reminded of these many different people who made a difference in the looks of that pot.”

Jack remarked once that stoking the fire was like “groping in an energy field.” He could as easily have said this of building relations with potters in his community. It annoys him when people don’t attend to each other, or presume they know what someone else is going to say. In response to this tendency toward inattentiveness he once removed a pyrometer (a device that measures temperatures inside a kiln) which he’d reluctantly agreed to install. “People were watching the pyrometer,” he told me. “They weren’t listening to the kiln.”

S
AD MOMENTS COME
at a firing—a pot is seen to break down inside or someone suffers a burn or an allergic reaction to the terrific heat. The saddest moments are at the end, when it’s finished and there’s nothing to do but wait out the week and see what’s happened. People drift off to their cars and trucks, some omitting their good-byes. Others collapse in makeshift beds or on sleeping pads in the summer woods and sleep away the rest of the night.

One time I drove up to Jack’s the evening before an unloading. I found him in the shed, his back to me, his hands to the kiln’s blunt nose above the fire door. He brushed its surface like a man comforting a stranded whale. I went down to the house and waited for him.

In my memory unloadings often fall on sunny days. (Because
so many in the community have other jobs—nurse, set designer, computer technician, freelance photographer—firings usually begin on a Thursday and end on a Sunday, with the unloading a week later.) Robins, Swainson’s thrushes, and fox sparrows call from the alders, and more children than attend a firing are running around, with more dogs. The mood is festive, but anxious. While most of the work in the kiln is personal or even experimental, some potters have expensive commissioned pieces inside and may be on tenterhooks. The chimney is uncapped and undamped and the stoking ports are opened to vent the last of the heat before the wall in the loading port is dismantled. The interior is always warm and, entering the kiln, it’s easy to believe it’s still breathing, still alive.

It takes only half as many hours to unload or “draw” the kiln. Each piece is examined first in the low-temperature light of an incandescent bulb, then handed to someone outside who looks at it quickly in the warmer but still shaded light of the kiln shed. Finally it’s passed to someone in bright sunshine, where the pale ware of ten days ago reveals itself fully. Here, as if by a miracle, are raucous purples, coy yellows, prosaic blues, belligerent reds, and what the late poet Denise Levertov called ardent whites. Here are glazes thin as breath, cracks that enhance a form rather than mar it because of where they occur. Here are deposits of ash which unify, like a calligrapher’s
hana
stroke, elements in a piece that previously were not well integrated. Here is a pot that raises nothing but a shrug from its maker and causes someone else to do a double take.

The pots—jars, tiles, masks, urns, torsos, bowls, faux industrial tools, water pitchers—come forth sintered, flashed, scorched, ash-decorated, swollen, fatigued, and composed. Some glazes are seen to have produced unfamiliar colors, other glazes to have weeped across a piece like colored rain. As the pieces come from the kiln they’re arranged on large tables where a milling crowd of potters and their families and everyone’s friends can examine them at leisure, lifting, comparing, appraising. Meaning bursts through in disjointed ways in some pieces that
are technically flawed. Other work shows exceptional technical skill but no strong vision. Classic pieces contrast with kitsch, the whimsical with the romantic.

Gradually exposed to light, the interior of the kiln appears tomblike. Beneath one sideport a large jar sits bunked in ashes, seemingly the dust of centuries. At another sideport a cluster of tumble-stacked, unglazed cups looks like a nest of dinosaur eggs. Pots that have buckled may have destroyed stronger pots alongside them. Dripping glazes may have glued some pots to the shelves. (They can often be tapped free using a wooden mallet, a loosening achieved not by direct blows but by setting up a harmonic vibration.) On the surface of pots from the front of the kiln you can read the generational and evolutionary phases of the firing, the layering up of ash. Pieces clink now. Glaze and clay have become glass and stone.

What Jack calls “successful” is any pot that offers good evidence of the anagama process. It might not in itself be a beautiful object. I asked him once what a potter means at an unloading by referring to a pot as “a failure.” Is it a failure because it cracked or was otherwise distorted by the heat and temperature? Or was it an aesthetic failure because the color was unappealing?

After a moment he asked, “What’s the difference?”

The ceramics historian Daniel Rhodes has written, “Often the kiln confers graces on the pots which exceed even the potter’s dreams. The greatest pots are those one meets coming from the kiln as strong objects; they may seem in texture or color quite beyond one’s power to visualize or predict.”

After an unloading, after everyone has departed, Jack has a frustrated and somewhat forlorn look on his face which perhaps nothing but the preparation for another firing can cure. He is left with his own pots, and perhaps the work of someone who couldn’t make arrangements to get there that day.

“The best pots,” he told me one evening, “make me understand something I never did before.” After a pause he said, “In wood fire, what I’m involved with in myself is the part some people call ‘nature.’ It’s an emotional thing that’s grown into me
through the things I have eaten and the space that I have lived in, and stuff that has seeped into me over a very long period of time. I know that. And if we separate ourselves from nature, we will never understand wood fire. We will never appreciate it in its ultimate sense.”

A characteristic movement of Jack’s hands is to bring two disparate things together, keeping them there side by side. Sometimes he seems like a man come from some great distance in time. One of the first things Nora told me about him was that he was “about a thousand years old.”

M
Y CONVERSATIONS AND
working days with Jack were always marked by long silences, as if we were fishing for steelhead together in the coastal rivers and not inclined to talk much because it broke our concentration on the fish. Late one night when he was stoking the front port and we were sitting together for four or five minutes at a time, Jack told me about a pot he’d placed in Tanner’s River, the river the creek he lives by drains into. He told me he waded out and put it down in the current and left it there for several months, and that when he came back and pulled it out, holding it up to the light and letting the water spill down his arms, he was astonished to find he felt the same way he’d felt taking the pot out of the kiln. Jack, who is childless, never looked across at me but kept his eyes on the fire.

When he sat down again, I told him that for several years I had been walking in the current of the river by my house. In summer the current is clear, the river no deeper than three feet, and you can see the bottom on the other side more than three hundred feet away. It’s a strong current, I said, but I’d learned to walk in it without a staff by not having any specific goal, no particular place I had to get to, nothing I had to do. I just wanted to be in the current. I wanted to feel it against my legs, feel it against my arms when I swept them back and forth in the cold water. I wanted the undulation of it to enter my flesh. I wanted to take the physical sensation and translate it.

“The kiln’s just like the river,” said Jack. “We’re trying to get back inside something here.”

The next morning, before I left, I walked up the creek on Jack’s place to a spot where beaver had been working. They’d built a series of dams, and the water there was so calm I could follow the convolution of clouds in its surface. Ravens called around me, that complicated raw cry and pop and cluck and mutter they can make. I thought of the beaver back home on Quartz Creek, and imagined beaver all over the mountains carrying on despite all that had happened to the country they lived in. I saw their forbearance.

At the next unloading, Jack gave me one of his large pots. It was fall. I took it home and put it out in the middle of the river to overwinter.

M
IDWAY THROUGH
my time at the kiln, Jack had a one-person show at a local gallery. I came up for the opening on a cool, wet October night.

Jack’s work was poorly displayed, the pieces not arranged to show them at any advantage. Too much of it was set against a wall, like painting. Jack had set some firewood and shanks of bark out to signal a larger causality. He’d also posted this statement on the wall in typescript:

Each pot tells a
story
. The story emerges in the process. It becomes visible in layers—layers of earth and fire, layers of emotion, ideas and change. Between the layers there seems to be a vibration—a connecting field of invisible dust, only felt, unmeasured and pointing to the unknown.

The wood-fire kiln is the window that opens into this beautiful dynamic place. Through this window I’m allowed to participate and engage in this fundamental process. Between the living layers of expression, the kiln holds me, somewhat like a rock might be held in the middle of the river’s flow. We’re both looking for possibilities on our journey to the sea. Maybe I could compare it to a burning star, held in the center of this vibrating space, waiting to burn out.

Wherever or whatever this place is, it’s where I’m happy—between the layers of ash, floating, swirling, bouncing along like some lucky, created fool. Enjoy the pottery and thank you for coming to take a look.

People mill through the gallery for an hour before Jack begins a formal slide presentation. The crowd is an admixture of university professors, art critics from Portland, potters from inside and outside the Dragon Kiln community, local environmentalists, some of Jack’s logging and farming neighbors, and a three-man crew he’s been working with at a paying job aboard a National Marine Fisheries Service boat.

BOOK: About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory
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