Little and Often by Trent Preszler

Author:Trent Preszler [Preszler, Trent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2021-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Breaking Point

The first time I used a table saw, the blade hit a knot in the juniper and the entire board shattered. Shards exploded back toward me like bullets. One piece caught me in the thigh, narrowly missing my crotch. A bigger piece rocketed past my head and punched through the sliding glass patio door, showering thousands of glass bits onto the tile floor. For a few dazed moments, I stared in shock at the broken glass while cool spring air flowed in and Caper cowered in the kitchen. I swept up the glass and felt like an idiot for ignoring the safety manual. When I brought the table saw home from the hardware store, I simply unpacked it, plugged it in, and started sawing, counting on its operation to be self-explanatory. I had watched my father use a table saw without incident hundreds of times, but that was exactly the point. It had taken him years of practice to make dangerous tasks look effortless.

What I had been trying to do with the table saw seemed so basic in theory. I needed to rip-saw all my lumber into quarter-inch-thick strips that would be molded around the strongback forms. Each new layer of strips would gradually build up the boat and close the hull. Molding thin wood strips around forms was not the only way to build a canoe, just the current way. Woodworking tools used for carving and shaping dugout canoes—hollowed-out tree trunks—had been found in coastal Maine and carbon-dated to four thousand years ago. Over time, Native tribes abandoned dugout canoes and began crafting them out of thin strips of birch bark that were lashed together with spruce roots and sealed with boiled pine tar and bear tallow. In modern times, dugout and birch bark canoes were replaced by those made from wood strips and sealed with fiberglass, like the one I was building.

After buying a Plexiglas face and body shield to protect myself from flying shrapnel, I carried on sawing with some trepidation. I adjusted the metal guide that ran parallel to the blade so it would rip a quarter-inch-thick strip off the board in the long direction of the grain. The table saw roared to life like a jet engine and I pushed a board through the whirring circular blade with a plastic stick that kept my appendages a healthy distance away. Rust-orange sawdust spewed out the back exhaust. Watching the jagged-toothed blade spin on its axle, I feared that it might shoot out of its slot in the metal table and slice through my guts, all in the blink of an eye. Every time the roar of the saw changed pitch, I flinched, aware of the damage it might inflict. It took a leap of faith to continue sawing, but I did.

Two weeks trudged past with the spinning blade wreaking havoc on my self-esteem. Aside from hiring a professional to re-glaze the broken patio door, I didn’t accomplish much. I would come home from work every day, mangle a few strips, and go to sleep.

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