A couple months ago, right before the virus lock downs started, I was driving home from taking my son to school and saw that a house about a block away from mine had two guys with chainsaws and a pickup studying a tree in the yard. The tree looked really bad: Inconsistent leaves, bark missing, and limbs on one side that looked really brittle. It didn’t take more than a second to realize something bad had happened to that tree and it needed to go.
A few hours later, I ran out to get some errands done and on the way back, there was a two foot stump where the tree used to be, and a whole lot of wood piled up next to the street. I stopped the car, looked at the wood, and muscled a large chunk of the tree trunk into the car. Based on the size, my guess was I’d be able to get four bowls out of the one piece of wood. As I was stuffing the tail end of the log into the truck, the fate of the tree was revealed when a big black ant crawled out of a hole in the tree. Carpenter ants like these bore into trees to make nests and will eventually cause the tree to rot from the inside out.
I got home, cut the wood into four pieces, threw one of them away because it was just too damaged, and continued to process two of the three pieces. The last piece had an odd shape, a whole bunch of bug damage, and some nasty looking cracks that had already started to form. I set it outside next to the garbage can and figured I’d throw it away with the garbage. After a week, it has started to crack and there were obvious signs of wood rot where the bark was missing. We missed garbage night, so it sat for a second week. By then, it was looking really nasty, but the cracks were arranged in a really interesting way, so I started thinking.
The initial plan was to cut the piece of wood into a round bowl blank, fill all the cracks with resin to hold it all together, then turn it and see what it looked like. I got it almost round, but my bandsaw blade broke halfway through, so I had to go to plan B. Plan B was to put it on the lathe, dangerous cracks and all, but only turn it enough to get it round. After about 20 minutes, it was done, ready for the resin. I shut the lathe off and was absolutely amazed that ALL of the cracks and all of the wood rot had been turned away. I was left with a fairly solid bowl, with the only damage being the hole through it where the ants had chewed a highway.
I filled the highway with blue resin, let it cure, and went back to turning. Below is the final product. Guess I should be happy that we forgot to set the garbage out, or this one would have been lost.
The plan now is to wait until night and leave this on the neighbor’s porch, with a note explaining why it was left there. I figure one of two things will happen. They could either read the note, say to themselves “I always hated that tree” and chuck the bowl right in the garbage. If that happens, then I guess we’re back to my initial plan to throw the wood away and no harm, no foul. The other possibility is they’ll see the bowl, appreciate that it used to be growing in their yard, and smile. I’m really hoping for the second outcome. We could all use a few more smiles these days.
