Jon Mangum drove up from Tennessee to Vermont to spend a few days with his father-in-law. The father has been fishing much of the afternoon while Jon played his fiddle. We shared the pond and tried to paddle our Julia the canoe against the rising wind to catch the pond's reflections, its copper wavelets, sudden blue circles and squiggly ghosts of birch trees. The colors danced with the wind and fiddle tunes.
Now the sun is gone and the hues grow dim. The fisherman is packing his gear -- no luck today, he says -- and Jon strolls over to talk to us. He tells us that every fiddle he makes has its distinct history. The one he is holding has a cherry top made from the wood given him by a good friend and the bottom from an old house beam buried for years under a layer of soil. "Imagine," he says. "You are this old big beam which has not seen any light for years, and suddenly you are out in the open, seeing the world, making music."
His instruments are all organic: he makes his glue from a rabbit's hide, mixes his own varnishes and uses only hand tools. But once his new fiddle is finished it is not nearly ready: it just does not know what to do with sound. And when you first play it is not quite good, almost if the wood were a bit deaf.
"Wood has to learn music," he says.
This part of the story needs more proximity and Jon crouches close to us in the moss cushioning the bank of Knapp Brook's Pond. We bob in Julia on the wind-stirred dark water and I ask how the wood learns. Jon says you just needs to play it, and play it some more.
"And then the wood molecules begin to respond and change," he says. "They get more sensitive, and the more music they make the better they get. I make fiddles and not violins because they are too restricting in what wood you must use, and I am a free spirit and like to use what I want. But just listen to some of these hundreds of years old Stradivari and the great sound they make. They had all these centuries to learn."
The forests which surround us are not old. Second growth? third? with their understory now deeply hued and autumn-splendid. And we imagine the sound of their wood -- the oak, maple, elm, birch, aspen, ash, hickory, pine, spruce -- may be fairly muted. But who knows? In Vermont, after many years of clear-cutting, nearly eight out of every ten acres of land is thickly wooded again.
And if in 1847 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow could write:
"The murmering pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garmets green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic..."
then what we hear today may just need the most attentive ear.
There is also "silenced wood" in instruments not discarded but set outside under some trees as if returning them to their core origin.
Other wood sounds are loud and clear. We paddle around a small peninsula and even before we see them, they are off: Canada geese, taking to air with their clamor of voices.
And where there are geese and ducks, there are duck hunters. Some paddle their flat boats. Others sit quietly with dogs at their side, watchful and very still.
I know this kind of stillness. And when I can, I manage to will away the noise I carry with me into the wild places of my life. Seventy years ago I used to hunt ducks with my father and remember walking along pre-dawn lakes in Poland and then lie next to him in the dewy grass. We waited for the sun to burn the mist and the first flocks of Mallards explode from a distant stand of bulrushes. And these quiet hours and our watchful waiting for nature to change its pace did stay with me.
Before he died, my father wrote me a letter: he wanted me to have his shotgun. A forester's son who hunted since he was 6, he was an excellent shot. And our many hunting trips were always full of purpose: the family ate the meat, and all the fox, wild hare and deer hides were tanned and used or sold; they were among the most precious assets in post-war Poland. So handing over his weapon to me was a profound gesture of love and care: he wanted to assure I would not go hungry and cold. But I was already living in the States and my cameras were the only tools I wanted to make sure I eat and stay warm. And I said no.
I should have said yes.
I should have found a way to ship that old shotgun over from Poland and find a good safe place to rest it really well.
Yva
Now the sun is gone and the hues grow dim. The fisherman is packing his gear -- no luck today, he says -- and Jon strolls over to talk to us. He tells us that every fiddle he makes has its distinct history. The one he is holding has a cherry top made from the wood given him by a good friend and the bottom from an old house beam buried for years under a layer of soil. "Imagine," he says. "You are this old big beam which has not seen any light for years, and suddenly you are out in the open, seeing the world, making music."
His instruments are all organic: he makes his glue from a rabbit's hide, mixes his own varnishes and uses only hand tools. But once his new fiddle is finished it is not nearly ready: it just does not know what to do with sound. And when you first play it is not quite good, almost if the wood were a bit deaf.
"Wood has to learn music," he says.
This part of the story needs more proximity and Jon crouches close to us in the moss cushioning the bank of Knapp Brook's Pond. We bob in Julia on the wind-stirred dark water and I ask how the wood learns. Jon says you just needs to play it, and play it some more.
"And then the wood molecules begin to respond and change," he says. "They get more sensitive, and the more music they make the better they get. I make fiddles and not violins because they are too restricting in what wood you must use, and I am a free spirit and like to use what I want. But just listen to some of these hundreds of years old Stradivari and the great sound they make. They had all these centuries to learn."
The forests which surround us are not old. Second growth? third? with their understory now deeply hued and autumn-splendid. And we imagine the sound of their wood -- the oak, maple, elm, birch, aspen, ash, hickory, pine, spruce -- may be fairly muted. But who knows? In Vermont, after many years of clear-cutting, nearly eight out of every ten acres of land is thickly wooded again.
And if in 1847 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow could write:
"The murmering pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garmets green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic..."
There is also "silenced wood" in instruments not discarded but set outside under some trees as if returning them to their core origin.
Other wood sounds are loud and clear. We paddle around a small peninsula and even before we see them, they are off: Canada geese, taking to air with their clamor of voices.
And where there are geese and ducks, there are duck hunters. Some paddle their flat boats. Others sit quietly with dogs at their side, watchful and very still.
I know this kind of stillness. And when I can, I manage to will away the noise I carry with me into the wild places of my life. Seventy years ago I used to hunt ducks with my father and remember walking along pre-dawn lakes in Poland and then lie next to him in the dewy grass. We waited for the sun to burn the mist and the first flocks of Mallards explode from a distant stand of bulrushes. And these quiet hours and our watchful waiting for nature to change its pace did stay with me.
Before he died, my father wrote me a letter: he wanted me to have his shotgun. A forester's son who hunted since he was 6, he was an excellent shot. And our many hunting trips were always full of purpose: the family ate the meat, and all the fox, wild hare and deer hides were tanned and used or sold; they were among the most precious assets in post-war Poland. So handing over his weapon to me was a profound gesture of love and care: he wanted to assure I would not go hungry and cold. But I was already living in the States and my cameras were the only tools I wanted to make sure I eat and stay warm. And I said no.
I should have said yes.
I should have found a way to ship that old shotgun over from Poland and find a good safe place to rest it really well.
Yva
