The Frame of the Earth

Jacob Lefton

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ed's blacksmithing shop is in the old horse barn at Historic Northampton. It smells of fresh cut pine, cold, sharp steel, and the old, wet wood of the barn itself. Darkness looming overhead from the unlit loft makes the tight space between the workbenches, the walls, the anvil, and the forge seem even tighter. Ted dominates the space.

Justin and Travis, tonight's students, stand with Ted at a homemade workbench. Laid out on the bench, among wood debris and tools, are several blue and white cardboard templates for spatula blades. Ted picks up each template, and holds it against the end of a square bar that will soon be a spatula handle. At the other end of each bar is last week's project: a wavy fork and spiral design.

Ted looks closely at the drawings Travis has made. "What are these?" Ted asks in his deliberate, deep voice.

Travis, tall and lanky, leans in to look. "Just doodles," he says.

Ted holds up a wavy design. "I like this one," he says.

"I like it too," says Travis, "but it seems too easy, too simple."

After looking through all the templates, holding them up to the unshaped end of the handle, Ted chooses Travis' wavy doodle. “I like this one. It matches the wavy pattern here," Ted says, pointing to the fork on the other end. Travis makes a thoughtful “Hmm’.

Ted repeats the process with Justin's designs, finally picking a rectangular blade with two long holes in the middle. As the students mull over Ted's suggestions, he goes over to another bench and picks up a knife. "I just did this as a demo for another student out of a railroad spike." He thunks it point-first into the table, where it stands and wobbles for a moment, testament to the stubborn staying power of a blacksmith.

 

Travis stands with feet spread, hammering a chisel into a piece of sheet metal onto which he has traced his spatula design. The chiseling takes place on a lead block mounted on a high stump, intended to funnel the energy of every blow straight into the floor. The sheet metal rings piercingly every time Travis hammers on it. He stops for a moment and feels the blade of the tool with this finger.

Justin, who has been sitting by the vise filing sharp edges off his spatula, asks, "Is it dulling?"

Travis shrugs.

Ted walks over and takes the chisel. "Let me see..." he feels the edge with his thumb. "It's fine for now."

He doesn't hand it back, but grabs his disc sander from the bench, lays it down disc-up, turns it on, and touches the chisel to it, first one side and then the other. Sparks shoot off in a four-foot arc. They arc across the bench and over Ted's cup of tea. He feels the chisel and then hands it back to Travis. Then he picks up his tea and looks at it ruefully.

"Well," he says, smiling, "if any of that got in my tea, I'll have more iron in my diet." He blinks, then takes a sip. "I mean, I was at this one blacksmithing meet and this old guy came over and took the red hot poker I was working on and stuck it in his coffee to heat it up."

Travis and Justin switch places. Travis starts to file down the edge he's just chiseled; Justin begins to cut out the holes in his spatula design. Conversation stops for a few minutes as he hammers; each blow makes a piercing ring that overwhelms our ears.

After a moment, Justin looks up from the piece that he's been working on. He frowns. "Now what?" He looks down again at the half-cut hole. "How do I get it out?"

Ted says, "You need to cut all the way through"

Travis asks, "Can't you drill some holes?"

"No, you don't want to do that," says Ted. "You learn more this way."

Justin hammers a few more times.

"I mean," says Ted, "if you were on a plantation in Plymouth and all you had was a coal forge and a hammer, you could still make this."

 

 

Ted's forge is a metal table with two walls and a hood. An exhaust vent travels straight up two stories to the ceiling. The forge is divided in two. On the left is a jumbled forest of scrap metal and tongs. On the right is a flat carpet of grayish coal. A blower stands on that side of the forge table. As you crank counter-clockwise, air blows up through a grated hole hidden under the gray coal.

The forge's fire is out, now. Justin picks up a small shovel and starts to dig through the burnt coal at the bottom. Travis helps by picking through the "clinker" that Justin lifts out of the dead fire. "Clinker" are chalky impurities in the coal that don't burn off, but come to rest at the bottom of the forge in layered, bubbly clods of rust and ash.

Travis and Justin crumple up three balls of newspaper and toss them in bottom of the forge's fire pit. They get scrap wood from the tinderbox and split the pieces, making short, thumb-width strips out of which they will build a teepee – Boy Scout style. Ted hands Justin an electric stovetop lighter. Justin clicks the button and a candle-sized flame flickers to life. He sticks it in between a few cracks in the teepee: smoke starts to rise. Orange flames from the newspaper flicker up; the wood starts to catch. It crackles and burns by itself for a moment before Travis turns the crank on the blower next to the forge. The flames disappear before bursting back to life bigger than before, as more oxygen rushes up from the bottom. Travis starts to pile coals around the teepee; it looks like he's smothered the whole thing. Only a few strips of wood stick out.

They crank harder on the blower. First, there's only the whine of the blower and the rush of air, then there's a dull red glow and a low rumble starts to rise from the cracks in the top layer of coals. Dull red turns into cherry red, cherry red turns orange, then yellow, then white as the fire climbs to two thousand degrees. As they crank harder, orange jets of flame burst through spaces in between coals. The last piece of wood, blackened by the flame, warps backward from the heat, slowly turns to white ash, then disintegrates.

The top layer of coals collapses into the inferno where the wood and newspaper used to be. Justin turns his face away as a blast of heat hits him from the radiant core of the fire. The coal forge is like a volcano bursting out of the rocky earth.

The fire is hot enough.

 

Nate is another blacksmithing student. He is at work on some horseshoes in the shop of Hampshire's Lemelson Center. The tongs he’d carefully balanced on the horn of his anvil clatter to the floor as he pounds a metal punch into one of his horseshoes. He pushes the shoe over the pritchel hole, whacks the punch through, then pulls it out, making a square hole fit for a nail. He places the tip of his punch an inch further down the shoe and starts to hammer again, to make another hole. A second horseshoe waits, orange hot, in the fire.

"Nate," I say. Waves of heat and the sickly-sweet smell of propane wash over me as I step closer to the forge.

He stops hammering and looks up.

I ask, "Did you need help striking?" Nate had mentioned he might need someone to swing the sledgehammer for him.

"No," he says. He grabs a tool from the bench and shows it to me. "I needed help making this."

'This' is a stainless steel chisel, mirror smooth and very new.

 

Unlike Nate, the other students in the Lemleson shop that evening are all beginners. They've come to learn the ancient art and craft of blacksmithing in the only way they can, by doing it themselves. Blacksmithing has been taught this way, passed down from master to apprentice for over three thousand years. It's one of the few crafts still left that cannot be learned solely from a book.

Lemelson's master blacksmith is a broad, jolly man named Don. He begins by teaching the students how to make points.

Don grabs the cold end of a long, thin, square bar whose tip has been heating in the forge. Its first four inches are orange hot; hot enough to vaporize flesh on contact. Before registering pain, anyone careless enough to touch the bar's heated tip would see a ring of white ash expand from the touched point as their flesh burnt like dry grass.

"This is how you make a point," Don says. "Hold the bar as flat against the anvil as possible," he says as he hammers, pounding twice on one side, then on the other, rotating the bar back and forth, two blows to a side. While the metal is hot, Don's strikes sound like dull thunks, almost as if he were hitting clay. In a few precise strikes, a sharp point grows from the end of the bar. Don cuts it off, and hands the bar to a student. "This one can be yours," he says.

The student messily strikes a few weak blows. The bar bends, but nothing more. "You make it look so easy," the student says.

"Well, I've only got twenty-five years on you," Don says jokingly. He peers over his glasses.

"You know," he says, "I had a student once who worked for four months on a knife. He was so proud of it. Until one day, we had a blade-smith come in and do a knife demo in forty minutes."

 

Nate keeps working on his horseshoes as Don's new students begin work on their bars. The anvils in the shop sing to each other in clanks and rings as. The fire roars with its own tone and the electric blower hums as it feeds fuel and oxygen into the forge. Occasionally, Don interjects a bit of philosophy:

"Every hammer has its nationality," he says. He points to the one in my hand. "That one is French." He hefts his. "This is Swedish." He picks up another. "This one is Japanese. That one," he points to Nate's hammer, "is German."

Don loves to talk about the universality of blacksmithing. Despite the nationalities of the hammers, they all do the same thing: move the metal. Love of metal is common among blacksmiths. Back in 1920, a master blacksmith named Samuel Yellin, said, "I love Iron; it is the stuff of which the frame of the Earth is made."

"Blacksmithing is the oldest profession," Don says, grinning.

"I thought that was something else," I say.

"Nope," he says with a chuckle. "Someone had to make the money to pay the prostitutes."

 

 

Don stands two steps back from the anvil with his hands clasped under his belly watching his students' progress with their square points. One of his students is a girl who’s not strong enough for the hammer she's swinging. As she should, she lets its weight put force into her blows, but when she lifts it again, her wrist leads, and the head of the hammer drags behind, ponderously. When she’s finished hammering, she holds up a pointed, crooked bar for Don to see.

"Oh, that's nice," he says with great interest, looking at the point through his small glasses. I remember that tone of voice. It's the one he used for my first point, two years ago. I've heard it with every student since, regardless of the quality of the point.

In Don's opinion, what's more important than the quality of the point is the experience of making it. It's one thing to know how something is done. It's another to know what the maker went through and why. By heating the iron, swinging the hammer, reheating and thinking about the next set of moves, the students learn why part of history and part of the world looks and works the way it does.

 

Nate works twice as fast as Don's new students. At all times, one of his horseshoes is in the fire heating up, while he is working the other on the anvil. When he finishes working the horseshoes in the forge, he quenches them in a bucket of water by his anvil. The water boils and hisses and vaporizes; steam billows up. The hissing changes to a muted bubbling, then peters off into a quiet fizz. Nate takes his horseshoes out of the water and touches them with the back of his hand. He uses a power grinder to finish them. Explosions of tiny sparks fly into the air as the grinder eats the metal away.

"How many do you need to make?" I ask Nate.

"Until I can make them faster," Nate says with a grin.

 

Photo Credits:
All photos in this story, Jacob Lefton.