Beautiful Scars

Last month I made a batch of wooden belt buckles from a block of spalted maple. "Spalting" in wood is when invading fungi leaves behind mineral deposits that appear as dark, wandering lines and random splotches. They are botanical scars, the products of a microscopic war. 

To my eye it is the flawed, the damaged and disfigured things, that better reflect us. 
Imperfection is universal. Injury is our common language. Embrace it. 

The Tortoise on Two Wheels

I have this recurring dream. I am riding my bike down some back road with friends. We are pedaling over and around the rolling hills near where I live. And I soon realize they are all outpacing me, and I watch helplessly as the gap between us widens. My legs are pumping frantically. The pedals are spinning around in a blur. Still, I am slipping farther and farther behind. 

I look down and notice the chain ring I am turning is only the size of a silver dollar. The frustration builds, and angrily I pedal even harder. But I never catch the other riders. I am left alone with only my tired legs and resentment.   

The dream is a reminder that what I most often need is not to speed up but to slow down, pedal at my own pace, and feel the teeth bear against the chain. Unhurried but steady; gradual but consistent. It has carried me this far. 

Speaking in Tongues

I once played a gig for a gymnasium full of inmates. The Tennessee Prison for Women was hosting a performance series in which my band was invited to play. Hours before the show we entered the grounds through a high chain link gate topped with razor wire. Inside, guards x-rayed our guitar cases, our amplifiers, our drums and microphones. Everything. We were asked to remove our hats before being scanned with a metal detecting wand. Finally, we were patted down with an unapologetic thoroughness that would have revealed any overlooked contraband.    

Once in the auditorium, we plugged in and tuned up as the prisoners were escorted through the doors and toward their seats. Half were lost in some animated conversation with their neighbor. Half were lost inside a thousand yard stare, like they could see right through the walls.  All wore identical uniforms, muted gray scrubs with a stencil on the back: TN DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS. 

I gave a nod to the band and hollered, "One...two...one, two, three, four!" The stutter of a kick drum and the wash of guitars filled the room...   

Afterwards a guard told me, “Those ladies couldn’t understand a word you were singing.” The cinder-block walls only reverberated the music into mush and knotted the lyrics into some indecipherable language. But they had stomped their feet and clapped for us. They had roared with unchecked enthusiasm. They had understood something about the songs. At least that’s what I tell myself. That’s what I always tell myself. 

Britton Hill

It is almost indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape, a slight rise among the cow pastures and pine stands of north Walton County, Florida. If you didn't know it was there you would be forgiven for missing it. But it has some prestige. At 345 feet, it is the highest point in the state. To give you an idea of just how low of a high point this is, the parasailing tourists at the beach 40 miles south are higher above sea level than the top of Britton Hill.

It may seem like a frivolous thing, to place a monument on such a paltry hill. But aren't we the same, clinging to whatever distinctions make us known? Because recognition, no matter how minor, beats insignificance. So, we plant our flags on low hills and call ourselves kings of high mountains.

88 Keys

Granny's piano was the first instrument I ever laid hands on. It was a mahogany Wurlitzer that stood against the wall in her living room. I was probably still in diapers the first time I slid the fall-board back to expose the strange repeating pattern of black and white keys. I pecked at them with a single finger, testing the sound of each against its neighbor, until an adult came in the room, closed the cover, and shooed me away. 

I inherited the old upright last week. And after we rolled it against the wall in our own living room I found an envelope in the storage compartment of the bench. Inside was a brochure for her model along with the original bill of sale dated Sept. 29, 1965 for $720.85. Today that would equal nearly $3,500, an awful lot of money for a bookkeeper and an auto body repairman. It also explains why I was not allowed to haphazardly hammer away on the thing at will.

I watched my own children, eager to experiment with this new instrument in the house, as they slid the fall-board back and pressed the keys, timidly at first, then with more force and conviction. It sounded frantic. Their four hands crisscrossed in a tuneless and chaotic thundering on the keys. My first instinct was to quiet them, to shoo them away. But I didn't. Because I recognized the melody.

It was the same one I'd tried playing at Granny's house, the same one every untrained hand plays. It doesn't have a name, but it sounds like delirium and cacophony and joy. 

Boxed In

I used to think I was claustrophobic. My childhood dentist was on the 16th floor of a Memphis high rise. Rather than take the elevator to the waiting room, I would take the stairs. You read that right: I would climb 16 flights of stairs to avoid a 60-second ride in the elevator. I thought it was the size of the box that spooked me, the crushing smallness of it.

But as I got older I found that same anxiety could flare up in ever larger spaces. I am terrified of airplanes; I get panicky if my theater seat is too far from the aisle; and even now, being quarantined in a 3 bedroom house with a wide open lawn beneath a wide open sky makes me uneasy and prone to a chilling dread. 

I used to think I was claustrophobic. I have learned, however, it is not the size of the space that troubles me, but the feeling of being bound to it. And this loss of agency feels like a loss of control. So, I inhale deeply, exhale slowly, and remind myself of this: you were never in control. 

Thoughts from 12:01am, January 1, 2020

“Where were you 10 years ago tonight?” At 11:00pm, this is the question that was circling the party we were at on New Year’s Eve. I was about to release my first record. Nashville was about witness its worst flood in the city’s history. My children, now 10 and 12, were still shitting in diapers.

tick…tick…tick…
 
At midnight, the party’s host put a dent the size of a champagne cork in the ceiling’s drywall and filled our plastic flutes. We raised a toast to the new decade. We shouted. We gulped. We kissed.
My son said, “it doesn’t feel any different.”

tick…tick…tick…

The second hand of an analog clock is a frail thing, a slender, spring-driven needle of a thing. But its quiet sweep is enough to move decades, to moves centuries, to move us all without pain, without perception.

Flicker and Fade

I had been there only once before, a little graveyard at a hard bend on a back road in Wheel, Tennessee. My name is on the gate: Haskins Cemetery. So, when I was traveling alone through Bedford County last week, I decided to turn up Haskins Chapel Road and pay a second visit to those long-gone family members. It is so quiet out there, so disarmingly still, like the last of the interred just buried themselves—shovel and all—and disappeared, unknown to the living world. 

I sat alone in that little cemetery for a while thinking on their lives. And mine. Of things gone and here and coming yet. I squinted at their faded dates—born 1811, died 1890—and considered the consequence of time, how what is ancient to me was once, to them, “now.”

It became objectively clear how small it all is, these plans for the future, this shame of the past. What’s come of them will come of us. And we will lay there too some tomorrow. So, do something, anything, in your “now” worthy of the flickering wonder you are today. 

By Degrees In Decline

I wanted to tell him to fuck off. And maybe I should have. But when I recently described my weekend in Paducah, KY mixing the new album to someone, a person I love, and their response came: “Are you actually gonna make any money off this one,” a certain shame crept in.

I offered up some bull crap bingo card of salesman-like lingo I’d heard before about “inbound marketing” and “a/b split tests” and “blah, blah, blah.” It was a concession, not a truth. See, the truth is I don’t know. The broader truth is no one does. And the ultimate truth is… I don’t give a shit one way or the other. Because when we treat art only as a vendible commodity and judge its worthiness in that context we drain it of its blood, embalm what is left, and experience it as a dead thing.

There is a lyric on the new record that goes:
I’ve been the failing kind, by degrees in decline;
Ventured long in the wrong direction for want of a sign…

But I am not looking for signs anymore. I can see my path clearly. And I’m not wanting for anyone else’s validation as a source of light. I am carrying the fire.

Cocaine-Cola

There is little doubt that a serving of Coca-Cola once contained a significant shot of cocaine. In fact, the psychoactive drug extracted from the coca leaf remained a part of the drink's recipe until 1929, fully 15 years after cocaine was outlawed in the United States. 

You wouldn't know this to visit the Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta, GA where the company is headquartered though. There is no mention of the narcotic among the museum displays, and the docents, when asked, will flatly deny cocaine's connection to the drink. They dismiss the idea as a myth, an urban legend. But the drink was invented by a pharmacist in 1886, a time when cocaine was commonly mixed into everything from (supposed) medicinal elixirs to wine. Not to mention that fact that the plant from which the drug is derived is literally half the name of the drink.    
The reason this matters (at least to me) is that the cocaine component of Coca-Cola's story is easily its most compelling. I can't understand why they would hide that element of their history and, in the face of overwhelming evidence, deny it even existed? That's what makes the company's past interesting. That salacious bit of backstory is what separates them from every other drier-than-dirt corporate biography. 

Anyway, I'm diabetic, and I don't give a shit about Coca-Cola other than the lesson to be learned here: Embrace your strange; it's the part of you the people who matter most are drawn to.  

Little Axes

Beavers are not born with baby teeth. They come gnawing into this world with the set they will have for life. Like all mammals of the order Rodentia, their upper and lower incisors grow continuously. In fact, a beaver can sprout teeth at a rate of 4 feet a year. They are kept at the proper length by these scaly-tailed rodents doing what they do best: chewing wood.

My own front teeth have been knocked out playing baseball. Twice. So, the first time I saw the stump of a beaver-felled tree in northern Minnesota— just a woody nub, conical shaped and smoothed as if hewn by little hatchets, I could not imagine my own frail teeth withstanding the force it must have required. But there is a reason their teeth are so adept at lumberjacking. It’s the reason their pearly whites...ain’t so much white, but a dull, rust-colored hue. It is the same reason the surface of Mars is red. The same reason your blood is too. It is the presence of iron. The enamel on the front of their four incisors is laced with the stuff of industrial machinery. However, the back of the tooth is composed of dentin, a softer material which wears away more easily than the dense, iron-infused veneer on its face. This creates a tooth which is beveled like the edge of a carpenter’s tool. In other words, beavers have literal chisels socketed into their skulls.

There is a trade-off to this enhancement though. Because their teeth never stop growing, the beaver’s survival depends upon its teeth being constantly worn away. To be idle is to invite gruesome consequences. Their incisors, allowed to grow unchecked, can inflict mortal wounds on the animal. The lower pair can curl upwards far enough to impale the beaver’s eyeballs; the upper pair will curl down eventually piercing the beaver’s own throat. Indolence is suicide.

And what about us? What in our own lives, if anything, do we attack with that same sense of not-fucking-around commitment? Like it was our sole purpose. Like our very lives depended on it.     

Aeternum Vale

The doctors pulled his life support 3 days before Christmas. He died the following morning. I used to laugh when he called me — 11 years older than him — an “old man.” But now that memory stings. Gone at 31, he will never know 42, or how young it still feels most days. He had a problem with his liver. It is the price of a problem with the bottle. And we were close, just not close enough for me to see what was happening in him.

The priest performed the Rite of Commendation 3 days after Christmas. He flicked holy water and swung incense while we looked on, stock-still and grieving, from rigid pews. The sanctuary was still bright with the red of poinsettias and the hope of a nativity scene. “It doesn’t seem right to us,” the priest had said. And it wasn’t. These two things set so close together— a manger and a casket. Promise and departure.
 

It is a new year now, and time still moves, or maybe only we do. Last week, his own sister gave birth to a baby boy. And the child was given his name, to bear the word like a light into a day only it will see.

The Pain Cave

5 hours, 4 minutes, and 12 seconds. That’s how long it took me to run the 26.2 miles of the Rocket City Marathon in Huntsville, Alabama earlier this month. This was the second time I’d had a marathon finisher’s medal hung around my neck. And it was the second time I’d taken more than 5 hours to earn it. By measure of the clock and my stated goal, the race was a failure. I’d come to town determined to finish in 4:59:59 or less. But when, at around mile 22 of this cold and drizzly run, the 5 hour pacers passed me, my heart sunk to the icy bottom of my soaking wet socks (most marathons have designated “pacers” whose job it is to run at a set pace guaranteeing anyone running ahead of them to beat that time).   

Now, I do not love running; I love having run. I anticipate the glow of accomplishment and rush of endorphins when it’s done. Don’t get me wrong, there are periods during every run when I experience that high of being in the zone and walking the wire, suspended between nirvana and pain. But I can’t maintain it. The wire always breaks, and I free fall into a chasm of exhaustion and hurt. Sometimes I can climb my way back onto the tightrope and find that balance again. But on the 22nd mile of damp Huntsville asphalt I could not. And so I shuffled the remaining 4 miles to a mostly empty finish line celebration.  

I wasn’t out there after a trophy. I was 2 ½ hours too late for that. And I wasn’t out there to beat any of the other 1,000 who were running the race. I was out there to beat one guy, and he only exists in memory. See, I would rather race against the me of yesterday than the you of today, because we are our own most worthy opponent. We are ourselves the most difficult province to conquer. I limped away vanquished and low. But I've already signed up for the next race... 

Bloodline (or Broadway as a Genealogical Yardstick)

If you were to stand at the foot of Broadway in Nashville, Tennessee, a lineup of your forefathers would barely reach Tootsie's Orchid Lounge before they forgot how to farm. We are fashionably late to this biological party, you and me.

Let me explain: imagine you are overlooking the Cumberland River, a child's little fingers in one hand, your dad's firm grip in the other. Now, your father is in turn holding your grandfather's hand who likewise is holding his own father's hand, your great-grandfather. Continuing this familial pattern your lineage would reach back to the time of Jesus before it stretched just one block (250 feet, 2,000 yrs.) to the Hard Rock Cafe. By the time your ancestors were looking up at the "Batman Building" from 3rd Ave (550 feet, 4,500 yrs.) they would be without iron or written history. And further still, your distant ascendants standing at the end of Honky Tonk Row in front of Bridgestone Arena (1,400 feet, 10,000 yrs.) would be Paleolithic hunter-gatherers wielding stone weapons and tools. As Homo sapiens our bloodline is surprisingly short. Late comers indeed.

Whenever I dwell on this concept, that our appearance on the cosmic stage has been so terrifically recent, it leaves me flush with gratitude to be here at all. But more than that, it gives me a sort of awed optimism, because if we have gone from learning the secret of seeds to standing on the moon's dust in less than a quarter of a mile, what wonders will be accomplished by the child whose hand is in mine? Or the one whose hand they have yet to hold?

Seventeen Syllables

When I was in elementary school I would sneak my literature textbook onto my lap and read poems during our math lessons. It wasn’t that I found math boringly easy (I didn’t). And it wasn’t that I had fallen behind and needed to catch up in English class (I hadn’t). I just preferred the way words fit together more than numbers. The irony is that one of my favorite forms was one bound by numbers. I marveled at the way the 17 syllables of haiku, its 5–7–5, imposed order on the lawlessness of imagination and distilled every hard truth and easy beauty of the world into something that can be said in a single breath.

It’s been years, too long really, since I cheated responsibility to read poetry the way I did in math class. So, last week when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed with commitments and to-do lists it was a timely accident to stumble into John Paul Lederach’s haiku reminding us to lay our hands only on the task before us and let the result deliver itself.

Don’t ask the mountain
To move; just take a pebble
Each time you visit

Chasing Twain: a Rowboat, a River, a Reconciliation

The poet, T.S. Eliot called it a “strong brown god.” Walt Whitman called it, “by far the most important stream on the globe.” The Ojibwa just called it “Mississippi.” And for 3 months during the summer of 2002, I called it home. I was a Memphis kid, snowed-in and homesick in a small New England town when I decided to build the only thing I felt could truly carry me back home— a Mississippi River yawl boat, the kind of open wooden skiff used to row and sail these muddy waters a century ago. The intent was to take the boat 2,300 miles from the Mississippi headwaters in Northern Minnesota to its end in the bayous below New Orleans. It was supposed to take 90 days to reach the Gulf of Mexico. It took me 15 years.

Following the research and construction of an historic boat, my wife and I spent a summer and fall traveling down the river under sail and oar. We camped on sandbars and in canebrakes and came to know the Mississippi, its people and its history, in ways no other mode of travel could allow. When the voyage ended abruptly at Algiers Bend in New Orleans, 93 miles short of the Gulf, I walked away satisfied that I had nothing more to prove. But the further I got from the river, and the closer I got to middle age, the more it troubled me to know I had left the thing undone. Confronting the anxieties of crossing into mid-life, my mind returned to the river and my hands to labor as I rebuilt a neglected and rotting boat to relaunch her in the river and finish what I started as a younger man.

Part travelogue, part narrative history of the Mississippi, and part memoir, Chasing Twain is a story about reconciling the past, rekindling a spirit of adventure, and rowing down the most important stream on the globe.

The above is an overview of Chasing Twain, a book currently in progress. 

Sound, Script, & Sawdust

She Persisted

PJ Harvey's first time on stage was an abject failure. Her trio, Automic Dlamini, played its debut performance in Charmouth, England in April 1991. When they started playing there were 50 people in the room. By the end of the first song there were 2. Harvey recounts that during their second song a woman came up to the band while they were playing and shouted, "Don't you realize nobody likes you! We'll pay you, you can stop playing, we'll still pay you!"

They kept playing.

Since that disastrous night she has been nominated for 7 Grammys, won a Meteor Award for Best International Female, and was twice included in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Whatever tool you wield, be it a guitar or a paint brush or carving chisel or an ink pen, don't put it down. Keep playing.

Just last weekend we completed vocal tracking for my forthcoming album, Blood in the Honey. As we dive into mixing, mastering, and preparing for the record's release, here is a teaser for one of the tracks, Ain't No Trouble.
All the footage was shot at Franklin, Tennessee graveyards and churches.  

Rivendell Manor

The Rivendell Writer's Colony in Sewanee, Tennessee recently closed it's doors. Before it served as the organization's home I had the honor of serving as the lead carpenter during the manor's restoration a decade ago. I recently published this remembrance of my time there and the stories I took away from the project: 

Requiem for Rivendell: Sawdust, Glitter, and Methamphetamines 

More writing can be found at Medium.com/@TrapperHaskins

I have two concurrent projects in the shop right now: a farmhouse style pedestal dining table (patterns pictured) and a series of sidetables that will juxtapose the rawness of a bare log with a more refined base. Follow along with woodworking projects through my Intsagram and Facebook accounts