Last spring, around April 2022, my dad and I were walking around the neighbourhood and met a man doing woodwork in his garage. Clyde showed us his lathe and the tools he uses to turn a variety of objects: bowls, platters, candlesticks, foot massagers.
Prior to this encounter I had never really thought about the process behind making an object like a wooden salad bowl, though I have often admired finished products. I may have had a loose understanding of what a lathe was, but I had no familiarity with the craft of woodturning.
I was intrigued. I went home and did a little bit of reading online about what woodturning was, how it worked, and what you could make using woodturning techniques. I then went back, knocked on Clyde’s door, and asked if he wouldn’t mind giving me a few lessons on his lathe using his tools.
A few weeks later I visited again, this time with eye protection, and we spent a few hours turning a maple foot massager (like a rolling pin, but for the soles of your feet). I learned about some of the key tools, how to use the tool rest and introduce the tool to your work, how to rough out a shape and how to work through various stages of roughing, shaping, detailing, sanding, and treating to arrive at a “finished product”.
I can’t say I was addicted right away; it took me several months to think about whether this was a hobby worth picking up, what equipment to acquire, and what basic skills I would need to develop to make a go of it. But there was something wonderful in that first experience that left me with a strong desire to learn more about the craft.
Now that I have picked woodturning up, I think I can summarize its appeal (to me, anyways) as having two main dimensions. I’ve deepened my appreciation for both since that first session, but I believe both were present right from the start.
The first is the tactile feedback of the experience. When you turn something on a lathe you are introducing a sharp tool (gouge, scraper, etc) into a piece of wood that is rotating very quickly. As soon as that tool touches the work, even ever so slightly, you know it: you see it and feel it as the tool responds in your hands. Very closely related to that tactile experience is the appreciation you start to form, even from the start, of whether you are doing a good or bad job. You make adjustments, you pass over a certain area again, trying to get it into the shape you want it. With every piece of effort something happens to the work, for good or ill, and you get immediate feedback on whether things are working out as they should (or could).
So that first appeal is the immediate, highly tactile nature of the feedback you get when turning a piece of work; and closely coupled to that, a growing sensitivity to the quality (or lack thereof) of what you are trying to do. Few things, from a craft perspective, are as satisfying as drawing a bowl gouge smoothly and evenly across the curve of your work, seeing the final profile emerge as you wanted it to. On the flip side, few things are as jarring as catching that same tool in the work, bringing the whole operation to an immediate, shuddering stop.
The second dimension of the appeal I’ve found in woodturning is the balance of creativity and technical competence that successful turning requires. On one hand this is a world of specific techniques and tools, of bevels ground to specific angles and practices at all stages that guide what one should do. But on the other, it is an exercise in visualizing an end form to the work, and then proceeding in that direction, or in some other, through creative, serendipitous, sometimes accidental choices or actions. The end product can be beautiful, arguably only because of this creative aspect to the process. However you explain it, turning seems to require striking a constant balance between thinking about how something should be done and feeling your way towards and expression of what you want to do.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are some of the key ingredients in flow state activities as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi thinks about them. I find myself entering a flow state quickly when turning, and staying there until fatigue begins to impact the quality of my work. It’s more of a coincidence that I first started thinking about woodturning seriously around about the time that I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig. I didn’t pick up the craft (or hobby, until I can get to craft level work) because of the book, but Persig’s exploration of the importance of quality certainly gave me a language or a framework for how I have been thinking about building a skill.
This is already too long, but I also want to capture some of the specifics of how I’ve started and what I’ve learned. That will have to wait for another post.
In 1933, at the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor began to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Years later his notes and reflections became two book length treatments of the trip: A Time of Gifts and Between the Wood and the Water (joined posthumously by an unfinished draft of the last portion of the journey, The Broken Road). These have been favourites of mine for a long time, and I recently decided to re-read them.
One day I hope to repeat portions of Fermor’s walk in person; this time, I decided to follow along virtually. While I didn’t start with a plan, I quickly settled on a straightforward approach: I read each chapter with a pen and notebook handy, recording place names and key details as they appeared in the narrative. Once a chapter was complete, I took my notes to the computer. Initially I began looking place names up on Google Maps and saving the results as a starred location. Google Maps isn’t ideal for this, though, and so I switched to a new product, Felt. “the best way to make maps on the internet.” I figured this was a pretty good use case.
The result has been a map that develops as I read. I’m not taking advantage all of Felt’s features, but the basic ones are quite useful. I can look up and mark locations on the map, distinguishing by pin type where it makes sense (I’ve been marking castles and churches in particular). I can trace a walking route between pins; I’m not trying to mirror the specific route Fermor took – In many places, that might be impossible even if it was well documented – but it is nice to think that the route is snapping to a walking route, even if it probably isn’t the exact one Fermor used.
I’m not sure how surprising this should be, but the exercise has been exceptionally satisfying. Taking notes while reading has made me a more active, engaged participant in the story; tracing locations on a map has made the journey real in a way that I previously haven’t had access to (I don’t have any personal experience with walking Central Europe)! It helps, of course, that the map is a rich one. Fermor is able to name an amazing number of villages, towns, abbeys, cathedrals, and castles. In sequence, they come together into a realized, highly plausible reconstruction of the journey.
The exceptions are, in many cases, by design. Fermor is welcomed into the homes and histories of many titled families along his journey. These parts of the story are some of the most interesting, but Fermor is understandably reticent about the particulars of many of these visits.
As far as reconstructing the route goes, however, this discretion will not do. And in places, Fermor includes so many potentially identifying details he is practically inviting a little bit of sleuthing, a little bit of work on the part of the reader to fill in these particulars he, with some discretion, has left out. I was happy to leave these parts of the trip fuzzy on previous reads, but this time around I am invested in accuracy! And so where we have some details of a visit or a stop, but no explicit identifying information, I’ve felt compelled to spend at least a little bit of time tracking down a hint of the particulars.
Here’s one example of this.
Chapter 6 of A Time of Gifts finds the young Fermor walking through Austria in the mid-winter of 1934, just about to turn nineteen. Working his way north of Salzburg, Fermor follows the path of the Danube. An earlier encounter with a German Baron in Ulm had opened doors into other great houses along the route. Fermor comes within reach of the first of these soon after visiting Gottweig Abbey, Austria’s Monte Cassino. Based on the understanding that he was more or less expected, he puts in a call; his hosts, despite not actually having any advance warning – the letter from the Baron would arrive a day after Fermor – welcome him in. But neither these hosts, nor the schloss itself, are ever mentioned by name.
Fermor drops a number of tantalizing clues while narrating his brief visit, however. Here’s what we know:
The castle is an easy half day’s walk from Gottingen Abbey. It has a proper moat and battlements.
His host is known as Graf (Count) Joseph, and is one of two brothers who live in the house. The lady of the house is of Greek extraction
The family has a famous ancestor who’s portrait hangs in a main room: a major figure in the Thirty Year’s War and the Peace of Westphalia, he is described as having a Don Juan beard, a gold chain around his neck, wearing all black, and having a “smart and ugly” countenance.
At the end of the visit, Fermor is chauffeured to a rural train station nearby on the St. Polten - Vienna line.
With these details in play, Fermor is basically begging his readers to do a bit of detective work. So I obliged.
My starting point was the information available about the castle itself. A quick google search reveals six castles within seven hours of Gottweig: Atzenbrugg, Wurmla, Viehoven, Totzenbach, Wasserburg, and Pottenbrunn. Of these, the first three aren’t equipped with moats, so we can exclude them from any further look. Google Maps says that the walk between Gottweig and Totzenbach should take around six and a half hours, which to me is a little more than an “easy half day’s walk”. The walk to Wasserburg and Pottenbrunn are around 4 hours: very reasonable. I decided to focus in on these two castles for further analysis.
I started with Schloss Wasserburg. It doesn’t look particularly castle-ly, but it does have moat. One of the top Google Search results is a Spotting History write up of the castle, which indicates that Count Carl Hugo Seilern von Aspang bought the property in 1923, 10 years before Fermor passed through. The fact that the owner at the time was Count seemed promising! A little more googling brought me to a Geni page for Count Carl Hugo, which reveals that one of his middle names was Joseph, he had at least one brother, and his wife was born in Romania. Romania isn’t Greece, but it isn’t entirely off base either. Was Fermor a guest at Schloss Wasserburg at the invitation of the Seilern von Aspangs? I decided to look into Schloss Pottenbrunn before deciding… but absent any new information, I was ready to say I had figured it out.
Schloss Pottenbrunn looks a lot more like a true castle than Wasserburg. It has a proper moat and is located close to the St. Polten line. Wikipedia tells us that it was acquired by the Trauttmansdorff family in 1926. Almanach de Saxe Gotha gives us a lot more information about this particular family: apparently some of them are princes and princesses, but cadet members are Count or Countesses von und zu Trauttmansdorff-Weinsberg. Further down the page we find Carl Joseph, one of the only Trauttmansdorffs who is plausibly the right age to host Fermor (he was born in Vienna in 1897, and died in 1976). A separate google search turns up Carl Joseph’s Geneanet page: he had a male sibling, Ferdinand, and a Czech (not Greek) wife named Johanna.
So far, so good: the castle fits (moat and all), and Carl Joseph and Johanna seem to be plausible hosts. The final piece to confirm: did they have a famous ancestor? I googled “trauttmansdorff westphalia thirty years war” and the first result is a Britannica page for Maximilian: “confidant of the emperors Ferdinand II and Ferdinand III, chief imperial plenipotentiary during the negotiations of the Peace of Westphalia, and one of the foremost political figures of early 17th-century Europe.” We’ve got our guy. Because Fermor mentions the portrait, I also did a quick google search, and it turns out the young traveller captured all the key details of the most famous portrait of the man, right down to his, smart, ugly countenance.
Our sleuthing done, we can fill one of the only significant gaps in Chapter 6: it’s extremely likely that Fermor’s last stop before Vienna was with Carl Joseph and Johanna at Schloss Pottenbrunn.
I’ve been doing some prep reading over the last few weeks to get ready for a new job. Some of these are close reads, some of these are more for skimming, but I’ve gotten something valuable out of all of them.
