Greetings. Richard McFarland-Dorworth here. After almost three decades in this now maturing, reclaimed wood industry that has grown up from the crumbling foundations of the traditional timber industry, I have a lot of material for this first blog post. For instance, I could write about salvaging the “bones of the dinosaurs” – the giant Douglas fir timbers from the sawmills of the Pacific Northwest in the 1990’s where we got our start or I could write about chasing vintners around the California wine country buying up the last of the old growth redwood wine tanks. I could write about the crazy enterprise that involved turning Thai railroad ties into hardwood flooring in the early part of this young century. I could tell the story of turning a massive 1929 Teak tobacco warehouse from Central Java into a stunning upscale resort structure that ended up on Hawaii, or of diving for sunken Teak in a harbor on an island off of South Sulawesi…. Yes, I could tell a lot of stories…..Or I could digress into an environmental rant justifying why we did all those things……
But as I sit down to bang out a few words, I get distracted, once again, by that ubiquitous opiate of the masses, the Facebook rabbit hole, and I stumble across a video that catches my attention (at least for a as long as my easily distractible mind can focus on it) and it gives me some inspiration.
It appears to be footage from 1958, shot on a movie camera on cellulose film and set to some sort of Russian Polka music. It depicts how the Ukrainian timber industry of that time transported their logs by river from the forests in the mountains to the sawmills somewhere downstream. I watch it once. I am riveted. I watch it again. Totally absorbed. In this short clip, I see a metaphor of my entire professional career in the reclaimed wood business. Sounds a bit implausible you say? Let me explain.
Watch the video and you will see what appears to be a completely insane activity. Small teams of men are piloting massive rafts (really just bunches of logs tied together) down some fairly impressive whitewater with what looks like little or no control, at very high risk to themselves.
Many years ago, before I ever laid my hands on an old piece of wood and thought, “Hmmm, I think I could make something out of this”, I was a river guide. I lived for running whitewater, for raw adventure and for the thrill of exploration. It was a good life. I met my business partner, Erika Carpenter, on a river a long time ago…. Our paths have taken many unexpected twists and turns, but neither on of us has ever stopped running rivers and we are obviously still in the reclaimed wood business. Our lives have revolved around our passion for two elements, water (mostly in the form of rivers) and wood. But I digress….
What these men are doing in this clip looks like a death wish, a one off and completely insane activity. One might think that maybe it was the result of a dare. Or perhaps it was something that some alpha male declared was a great idea and a few guys jumped on the bandwagon (or raft, as the case may be).
“Hey guys! I’ve got a great idea! Lets tie about 500 logs together, fashion some sweep oars that are so heavy it takes two guys to use one and attach them to the front to this juggernaut and see it we can get the whole mess down the river without killing ourselves! You guys on the front there, trying to manage those battering rams, don’t worry, I’ll set up a guy behind you to hold onto your belts so you don’t fall off.” What could possibly go wrong.???
Surely, they all died horrible deaths, ground to a pulp in the riverbed by tons of logs.
It feels a bit like what we did back in 1991 when we jumped feet first into the nonexistent reclaimed wood industry. “Hey! I’ve got an idea! Lets take an old flatbed truck that barely runs, borrow some money to buy a portable sawmill and start scavenging big old Douglas fir timbers from abandoned sawmill buildings and sawing them up to sell.” “To whom”, you say? “Who knows, I’m sure someone will want them……..”
Feels a bit like borrowing another shit pile of money to go to Thailand, buy up hundreds of thousands of old railroad ties, yes complete with splits, spikes, embedded rocks and some decay (but no creosote), because we are surely going to be able to make some really nice hardwood flooring out of them. “Surely someone will love the fact that the flooring is full of spike holes that will need to be plugged. How cool is that!?”
Yes, we actually did those things, and a lot more. And yes, it often felt like we were riding a massive juggernaut with unbelievable momentum in a barely controlled descent downstream towards an as yet unknown destination.
So as I continue to watch this video in utter fascination, I am re-inspired and re-invigorated. Yes, I say, lets do this thing!
You see, the men in this video were clearly part of the first wave of the lumber industry. Trees were plentiful and the market for wood was growing. They took some calculated risks, figured out some innovative ways to do things and created something new. Pretty cool. And scary. Definitely.
We are part of the current iteration of the lumber industry. We have never cut any trees. All of our wood is reclaimed from old structures. The old-growth forests are mostly gone. So we scratch our heads, take some risks and figure out some new ways to do things. We are not so different from those guys on the log rafts after all.
The other thing that starts to sink in as I watch this video is that I notice the infrastructure. They have built dams to hold back water to float the logs and create flat water to construct the rafts. There are gates and ramps to direct the logs. There appear to be some bulkheads along some to the riverbanks to deflect the rafts. And the guys on the rafts actually appear to know what they are doing. Like they have done it before. Probably many times. What I start to notice is that this is not a one-off, crazy, life-risking stunt. This is a well-oiled machine. This is an enterprise that has been tried and tested, refined and adapted until it is clearly an effective and efficient method of transporting logs to the mill. They have been doing this for quite a while and they are really good at it. This is a system and it works.
I somehow find this deeply gratifying. It helps me to justify the significant chunk of my life that I have devoted to the sometimes confounding and often unpredictable world of finding old wood in the far-flung corners of the world, turning it into products and finding markets for it. Perhaps it is not so crazy after all. It all began with the idea that we could convince people that wood is actually more of a highly re-usable resource than a renewable resource. But that’s a subject for another blog….
So, as I watch the video again, promising myself I’ll get off the computer after this last time, I am left considering the fact that, at some point, someone had to be the first. Someone had to get on the first log raft, risk everything, feeling some inexplicable sense of confidence deep in their belly, get that beast down the river and walk away from it and and say, “See, it works, lets go get the next load and do it again”.
That’s who we are.