Selling soulcraft
Despite the effort to build a sense of community, there is still a lot of solitude in the artisan game. Allan Sandy, a maker of heirloom-quality flintlock firearms, has to know that solitude intimately. It’s now approaching noon on the day of our road trip, and Sandy is opening his gun safe and describing the amount of work he puts into one of his guns.
“As with any handcrafted item, it takes a long time to produce,” he says. “This one, in 40 to 60 hour weeks, took me about two months.”
Sandy reaches into the safe and pulls out one of the most exquisite objects I have ever seen. It is a handmade, double-barreled, flintlock shotgun. The stock is made from a piece of impressively rich, dark, “curly” walnut, so called because of the wave pattern of its grain. The finish is so lustrous you feel you could swim in its depths. The stock is hand-knurled in a tight checked pattern behind the triggers to texture the grip. Silver beads punctuate the knurling, and swirling filigrees of gold and sterling silver wire trace elegant figures in the wood.
Sandy hands me the gun. Despite the twin 30″ metal barrels, it is surprisingly light and perfectly balanced. The first time I visited the West Coast, I remember I stepped out of the front doors of LAX and my body just sang for joy at its first taste of the perfectly pitched, temperate Southern California air and sunshine. That’s the way my hands feel holding this gun. I can’t resist a glimpse at the price tag hanging from the trigger guard. $11,000. How can I get me one of these?
The level of cultivated skill that we’ve seen so far on this brief little dip into the Artisan Trail is a bit dazzling. Both Boggs and Sandy have around 25 years under their belts. They both tell stories of having sought out masters of their craft—in Boggs’ case it was Keswick blacksmith Stephen Stokes, for Sandy it was West Virginia longrifle craftsman Keith Casteel. They also talk about the fact that they are still travelling on the long path of improvement. For Boggs, what takes the longest to improve is “the eye,” the ability to see and know quality. For Sandy, even after about 160 guns, it’s a little bit of everything.
“You tend to get better,” he says. “Every one gets better.”
It takes an act of conscious imagination to recall that there was once a vehement demand, a pressing, practical need, driving what these artisans do. But time and technological change have blown away the practical draw to these professions. If all we want is a usable gun or a fireplace screen or bottle opener, we can get them at Walmart. That leaves only two motives for someone to seek out their work—either there’s interest in the historical value of it, or there’s interest in the aesthetic value of it. In order for these guys to make a living, at least one of those things has to be true.
Oh, and there’s one other thing that has to be true. People have to be willing to pay for it.
A short while after leaving Allan Sandy’s studio we are travelling along the base of the Blue Ridge down Route 151 into Nelson County. John Conover first came through this part of Central Virginia back in the early 1970s. He and his wife Virginia Daugherty decided to settle down here after having spent a year or so “hippying around,” as he puts it, travelling the country and living in an old bread truck. (An interesting story, that. But we’ll save it for another day.)
As we drive along, he reminisces about what that part of Virginia was like 40 years ago. “We came here to sign up welfare recipients,” he says. “Nelson at the time had only 33 families on welfare or food assistance. But it was very poor here. A lot of people lived without indoor plumbing.”
That was two years after Hurricane Camille, the legendary storm that dumped 27 inches of rain on Nelson County in a 24 hour period, killing hundreds.
“That caused such a scar in the county. It was still so real for people. But people were resistant to being on welfare. So we went around organizing, finding folks that were eligible, and dragging them down to Lovingston to sign them up.”
Things have changed in Nelson County. In Albemarle, tourism is certainly big business; in Nelson it’s becoming just about the only game in town. According to a 2001 study, Monticello brings over 500,000 visitors to the area annually, with a total economic impact in Albemarle of more than $40 million. But the overall economy of Albemarle dwarfs that number. A 2007 study found that tech industries alone generated over $4 billion annually, primarily centered in Charlottesville and Albemarle. So, although tourism is certainly significant, it pales by comparison to the economic impact of the local tech sector alone.
But in Nelson, Wintergreen and the ever-expanding and tourist-friendly rota of wineries and breweries along Route 151 are a very big deal.
When I was first cooking up our little forced march along the Artisan Trail, the agri-business and brewery end of things was not a high priority in my mind. I was much more interested in seeing a few people who work in traditional trades. But here we are, just past midday, and Devil’s Backbone Brewing Company is coming into sight. Maybe just a quick one.
A few minutes later we are seated with a couple of tasting flights laid out in front of us. They are pretty good, but my attention is focused more on the surroundings. The place is hopping. People are streaming in and out. The staff is pleasant but very busy. And the cash register is ringing like an army of angels getting their wings. We have clearly left the track we were on and moved to another dimension.
I have a brief chat with the manager, who is a pleasant, professional guy. But the entire time we talk his eyes are searching the room, as any pleasant professional would do, making sure that the customer experience is pleasant for all. He’s proud that the business lives up to its artisan designation by using locally-sourced recycled materials in the building. Six gardeners work to grow ingredients for the restaurant and the brewery. I have no doubt that there is true artisanship at work here. But it is heavily larded with commerce.
The secret
If the hunger for the artisanal, the locally sourced, the authentic is driven by blowback against the superficiality of our commercial culture, then the relief that Devils Backbone provides people is operating under what I would call the Gilligan’s Island theory of the cure. It goes something like this: You’ve been hit on the head with a coconut and now you have amnesia. How do you cure that amnesia? By being hit on the head with another coconut.
If the problem is that an overabundance of heavily marketed buying opportunities have diluted our sense of being part of a real, authentic culture, how does another heavily marketed buying opportunity help?
By the time we start climbing the mountain toward Montebello, the day is winding down. We have time for one more stop, and then the drive back up 29 to home. Part of what’s slowed us down has been the distance we’re trying to cover, but part of it is the nature of the company. Sandy and Boggs are easygoing, voluble guys deeply immersed in the demands of their craft and happy to share everything they can about it. Our final contact is cut from the same cloth.
Richard Christy makes hand-crafted waterfowl decoys in the tradition of the Tidewater and Outer Banks. His business is called Buck Island Bay Decoys after a little intercoastal nook near Sandbridge where he spent time growing up.
“I used to do a lot of deer hunting and turkey hunting,” he says. “And I still do it. I go in the woods, but I won’t kill anything anymore. The truth is, I find a beauty in the living animal.”
Christy was in the restaurant business for 35 years as a certified master chef. For a time he cooked in the White House as an executive chef for Gerald Ford. Later, he moved back to Virginia Beach and started a catering business, where he began to take an interest in getting better at the carving work he was doing to create ice sculptures for his clients. He remembered the old men who hand carved decoys around Back Bay. So he sought them out.
“I started looking for the old timers, and begging them to pass that trade on,” he says.
“So you knew that they were there?” I ask.
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Because I had read about them in my reference books.”
He moves across the cluttered workshop. There are wooden birds of all shapes and sizes and degrees of completion lying about. Shore birds, and ducks, and cranes, and a half-hewn swan. Each of them has a story. Richard Christy is lit up like a Christmas tree going deep into his books, turning pages, pointing out craftsmen from the past and talking about their work. And Will and John and I are huddled around. Nodding, asking questions. Going with him.
And I think “this is it.” This is the hook. These guys have got the secret.
And the secret is really only fully dawning on me now, weeks later, as I sit here and write this. The secret key to authenticity cannot be bought and taken home and put on your shelf. And it cannot be consumed on or off premises. The selling opportunity is just a decoy. It’s meant to get your attention. To get you to light on the pond and sit still long enough to be struck by something.
The real secret is in the hunger to know. To go deep. And to keep going. To keep learning, and to keep hammering out your knowledge on the anvil of the world. And when you’ve added the last brush stroke to the decoy, or the last chisel strike, or the last strand of silver wire to the stock, or the last period at the end of the sentence, to put it aside. To sell it if you can to someone who will take the bait and pay attention and discover a little hunger in themselves to know more. And then to start again. And to go deep. And to keep going deep.