soldier

“The sword has to be more than a simple weapon; it has to be an answer to life’s questions.”

Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

(you can read about the crafting of the original Operator here)

I’ve always been drawn to people who do things. The people who speak through their work and translate knowledge and mastery through their particular skill set without having to say much. This is a day and age where anyone can broadcast claims of mastery and experience to a large audience and it can be difficult to discern who has done the work to back up these claims and who is just trying to get to the bank.

In today’s vernacular, ‘operator’ commonly refers to military personnel who are at the pointy-end of things. They are the ones who are taking the orders and quietly (or not so) doing the work out of a sense of duty and service. ‘Operator’ is a title that gets tossed around and claimed where it doesn’t always belong, very similar to ‘genius’. The ones who actually fit the bill generally eschew such titles. This is usually a symptom that you are doing the work.

This blade was a commission for a military serviceman doing Ops work. I wanted to build him a tool that would serve him in the work he was doing.

There was a summer about ten years ago where I was between semesters of study. I had decided that I wanted to learn how to fix things. Many of my friends were working at Blockbusters or car washes but I liked the idea of being able to take care of things myself. I took a really awful job doing apartment maintenance for three and a half months and did just that.

It was not very satisfying. The job I took was for a rental company who owned properties in my neighborhood so I could walk to work. It was a pretty slummish company that rented to a lot of college kids. I ended up having keys to half the apartments of what was called ‘Hell Block’ of a street close by to me. The summer was when a lot of leases ended so there were many people moving in and out. As a result the streets and alleys were full of discarded furniture for most of the summer, a lot of which was set ablaze by some of the rowdier tenants. Sometimes my days started with cleaning up the ashes of incinerated love seats.

Other days started with hauling four-burner stoves up three flights of a fire escape. Most of the time was spent flipping apartments from where someone had moved out so that someone else could move in. There was a lot of painting. Flat antique white for the walls and ceilings and semi-gloss eggshell white for the trim and kitchens. The apartments weren’t very nice to begin with and after three days of work they still didn’t look very nice. I tried to remind myself to just make it about the work.

I would spend hours gutting bathrooms- ripping out drywall, removing tiling, and replacing subflooring before redoing everything. The best days were when I could work by myself and keep my own company. Bathrooms were a bit more satisfying to do because they would actually look nice when you finished them.

There was one time when a new tenant couldn’t move into her apartment because a homeless person had moved in after we had flipped it. We went in the apartment after the police took him away and found no less than eight bicycles, some smelly furniture, and a plethora of bizarre pornography. There were also footprints all over the wall. We had to repaint that one.

My boss was a middle-aged anomaly with claims of ties to the trash hauling unions of New York City. I didn’t really believe anything he said. There were four of us handling most of the work orders:

-Mark was in art school, a bit cranky, and liked to smoke a lot of pot. Oftentimes it was hard to tell whether he was stoned or not. I liked him.

-Scott had gotten back from several tours of Iraq, most recently Abu Ghraib. He was a good guy but wouldn’t get anything done unless he was told exactly what to do.

-Mario was in his late thirties and from Guatemala. He worked 7 days a week and sent most of his money home to his family. He didn’t say much but I think he missed home. The man could eat faster than anyone I’d ever met. He said that in the Guatemalan Army they only gave you three minutes for lunch.

There was also a rotating cast of derelicts who would come in and work for a week and then disappear. I never learned their names.

One of the happiest days I had was telling my jackass boss that I quit. I gave myself a two week vacation before I went back to school.

What I learned at this job was that in order to get through many uncomfortable situations with a modicum of success you have to make it about the work. It helps to find something bigger than yourself in what you are doing. The skills I was learning would serve me well much later down the line, and the money would help me buy books and live through the school year and work on my education. Everything else was just bullshit that came with the job.

To let yourself speak through the work you do, whether you are toppling Marxist empires or replacing toilets in shitty tenements- this is the lesson of the Operator. In these situations our work speaks through us but also teaches us our lessons.

The recipient of this blade may find himself in harms way and needed a blade that would serve in such situations:

Rough cutting:

Bevels profiled:

Hardened:

Hand sanding:

This is G10, a commercially manufactured synthetic material. Normally I prefer to make my own handle material but in this instance I opted for something consistently fabricated that would be failsafe in a potentially tactical situation:

The Operator, MkII: O1 tool steel, G10 scales, fabric spacers, and steel hardware.

Let your work be your lessons.

“Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.”

― John Wayne

soldier on: phrasal verb with soldier. to continue doing something although it is difficult

–Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and Thesaurus

This blade was a commission for the father of a gentleman who is a professional videographer. I came to know this gentleman after building a knife for him. He called and asked if I could make a blade for a very special person- his father.

When I first met with the client, we talked for about an hour. He showed me a short film he had made about his father, his father’s deep love of football, and how it brought the two of them closer as adults. The film was quite stunning. The NFL thought so too- it won their family tickets to the Super Bowl.

In the film, he told his father’s story of how he lost a chance to play for the Baltimore Colts, losing out to Johnny Unitas. What followed was a strained relationship where the client really didn’t get a chance to know his father. The film documented how football brought bonding and healing. He asked if I could make a blade with an element of the game that his father loves.

I felt quite a bit of anxiety in making this blade. I had to design it and give it a life for somebody’s loved one whom I had never met before. It took a very long time because I really wanted to make the right statement. The recipient of this blade is a man’s man, stoic, and has taken his licks. He has a bit of cowboy in him- John Wayne was mentioned during our talk. I named it the Rio Bravo after the John Wayne film. Wayne was 51 when he starred in the film but still kicks a lot of ass.

I write this from a man’s perspective. As a man I have a hard time dealing with difficult emotions and I think most men would agree that it is a bitch coming to terms with them. They don’t go away, they just sit and fester if not dealt with. In dealing with them we often fall apart, have meltdowns, withdraw, avoid, and sometimes leave a path of destruction. You want to succeed, to have a purpose, to leave your mark on the world, and make things right. When that doesn’t happen you can find yourself questioning your self-worth. I don’t have children but when there are little ones looking up to you and watching you I imagine it adds that much more pressure.

The lesson of the Rio Bravo is that no matter what you soldier on. The only way out is through. You show up, you do the work, you laugh, you cry, and you take the bitter with the sweet. I crafted this blade for a man who has done all of that and serves as an inspiration of what soldiering on earns you.

The beautiful part of this commission has been seeing how inspiring the healing can be. A son did this for a father where there was pain on both ends. The client showed me, a stranger, this incredibly vulnerable and moving film. It’s hard to imagine the courage it took to make that film and to put an intimate story out into the world.

I loved working with this client. There were multiple conversations about designs and materials. He is an artist and we can talk about concrete things in abstract and obtuse ways. At the end of it he always told me to do what I thought and that he trusted me. This is where I started:

Some jimping for grip, and a nod to the laces of a football.

Rough Grind

Hardened…

….and tempered

I wanted something with the feel of a football…

I cut it into strips and glued it together….

…and it failed miserably. Still, I really wanted to work the leather in. That’s the spirit of football even though it isn’t pigskin. I was also really into the idea of having a part of something that once walked the earth be a part of this blade. I wanted this to be a very masculine blade, with a southwestern theme. For me it doesn’t get much more manly than the combination of Texas Mesquite, leather, and steel. I put in some thin tin spacers for a bit of sparkle.

I have a cousin in Texas who is a woodturner with a sawmill. He handpicks cutoffs with the most gorgeous figures and sends them to me. When I’m using his wood for a handle it’s like Christmas morning- think of opening your favorite Christmas present, only you get to do it for two and a half hours. Thank you Bill Cockrell. You are a very good man.