TOADTalk: Why Bo Builds Things

Over the course of a year at Thacher, students and faculty members learn about each other in a thousand different ways, times, and contexts: around the breakfast or formal dinner table, in a sunshiny moment on the Pergola or a sunset shared on a trail, at the whiteboard in a classroom, lab, studio or seminar circle, at practices and games and rehearsals, at coffeehouses and Open Houses, in dorm common rooms, and in Suburbans on highways or back roads on the way to community service projects, field trips, cultural excursions, or athletic events. Then there’s each faculty member’s TOADTalk. Monday morning’s all-School Assembly launches with whatever the Teacher On Active Duty wishes to share—a reflection, a story or song, a demonstration of some sort, or a simple poem. In this way, every week of the school year, the community gains a new window into the mind or heart or spirit of one of our own.

Bo Manson, whose TOADTalk is featured below, has called Thacher  home for well over two decades. He teaches English (and will return to that and Woodworking once he and Julie return from their sabbatical in 2013-14); he also coaches lacrosse and rock climbing and served as a dorm head in Casa for 19 years.  Bo and Julie recently welcomed into their family fold (Jeffrey CdeP 1998, Tyler CdeP 2001, Kylie CdeP 2003, Madi CdeP 2009) a grandson, Finn--first child of Tyler and Lauren Cerre Manson CdeP 2001).

The traditional school calendar remains one of the last vestiges of the agricultural life lost to the 19th century’s Industrial Revolution. While most careers today punch a decidedly 21st century clock, teaching and learning—at least as far as American schools are concerned—continue to adhere to the ebb and flow of the seasons. We not only send all of you away each June, apparently to complete the summer’s planting on your families’ farms, we also weave into our school year three additional, and quite generous, vacations from our school routine.

This morning, however, we reassemble here on campus, not too tired, I hope, from your work on the family farm and eager to reconnect with friends and faculty as we get back to the business of your education. No matter what work or play occupied all of us during the past two weeks, we now find ourselves much like Joseph Conrad’s fictional crew of the Nellie; the school “flood [has] made” and, as Conrad writes, “the only thing for it [is] to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.” In our case, that tide will inevitably turn on the morning of Saturday, June 2. But this morning, I find myself thinking back to our recent vacation and the work and play that it afforded me.

One pleasure of vacation is the opportunity to read whatever I choose, and last week I read Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own, the Education of an Amateur Builder. Maybe you’ve had the experience of reading a book in which the author seems to be speaking directly to you. As I read A Place of My Own, I felt that Mr. Pollan not only understood my past but was eager to point out to me our shared experiences. I knew exactly what he meant as he described how the notion of building a small wood-frame hut in the woods behind his house began to occupy his imaginings.

A similar notion occurred to me several years ago, and now a little 10’ by 12’ wooden hut occupies a prime site on the west-facing slope behind my house. It took me over two years of school vacations to design and build what my family took to calling “Bo’s Folly,” and undeniably the hut represents some foolishness on my part. I dedicated hundreds of hours to its construction when I could have been sitting on the beach with a good book. I suffered countless splinters, nicks and bruises, and at least one life-threatening moment when the foot of the extension ladder I was on slid out from under me leaving me swinging from the edge of the roof. Since completing the hut, it has served as an extra bedroom when our older children come to visit. While I find the fact that they enjoy it quite gratifying, I don’t use the hut myself for anything. I built it but, as it turns out, I don’t really need it and haven’t discovered a consistent use for it. Is that foolish of me? I’m not quite sure.

Pollan’s book got me thinking about why I build things and why I regularly dedicate much of my school holidays to the building of these things. Over the years I’ve built two porches, four decks, a bedroom, three outside showers, two skiffs, a dory, a 31’ sloop, and my little hut. I’ve also designed and built various tables, cabinets, and benches. Pollan suggests that “giving form to our abstract mental constructs—our [foolish] dreams—seems to be what we do.” Emerson urged, “Build therefore your own world,” and over the years I have tried. I’m not, as Pollan suggests, “given to Thoreauvian fantasies of self-sufficiency or worries about the fate of manhood in the modern world.” For me, building—and my dedication of so many vacation hours to this pursuit—suggests a more personal need.

I love teaching and I love coaching, but when vacation rolls around and quiet descends on the campus, I also enjoy the solitude of my own company. Building, at least the way I approach it, is a solitary pursuit. I build most things by myself. While Mrs. Manson might disagree with me, I do ask for help when I need it. Twenty years ago, for instance, while building the room the Carneys now use to watch TV, I asked Mr. Meyer to calculate the bird’s mouth joints on the ceiling joists. He arrived with calculator in hand, punched in a series of figures, and, in just a few minutes, had drawn the joints on the joists, a task that would have taken me an hour with no guarantee of accuracy. Having a mathematician living across the street proved to be very convenient.

Building, then, for me is a contemplative activity, a sort of meditation. It’s often repetitive, but it demands conscious awareness. Swinging a 16 oz. framing hammer or pulling the trigger on an electric skill saw requires absolute attention. Daydreaming can be dangerous.

Just three days ago, I was cutting the plywood subflooring for the porch of a cottage we own in town. I had three sawhorses positioned under a 4’ by 8’ foot sheet of ¾ inch plywood. I was cutting the sheet in half. Now, in hindsight, it seems pretty obvious what will happen when an eight foot sheet of plywood, resting on three sawhorses, is cut in two. One half will continue to sit securely on two of the sawhorses. The other half will be left to balance, precariously as it turns out, on a single sawhorse. Add to the balancing plywood the weight of a rather heavy electric saw and a carpenter stretched out across the width of the plywood as he carefully completes his cut, and the piece of plywood, in the instant the saw separates it from its other half, will fall, pulling with it the saw and the carpenter. The single metal sawhorse, designed conveniently to fold when not in use, will collapse. The carpenter will quickly find himself lying on his back on a freshly cut piece of plywood and a collapsed sawhorse while the skill saw, still clutched in his hand and now resting on the ground just above his head, will fill his ears with the whine of its blade’s 4000 RPM’s.

Maybe Mrs. Manson is right about the help I need.

The building of something, anything really, is, according to Pollan, an act of “simplification—of reducing [the] many daunting complexities” of our hectic and challenging lives into “something as stripped-down and uncomplicated as a hut” perched on a hillside. After all, “work is how we situate ourselves in the world, and like the work of many people nowadays, mine [seems to] put me in a relationship to the world that [is increasingly] abstract, glancing,” virtual. Building, it turns out, is my way of adding something, as Pollan says, “to the stock of reality”: a table to sit at, a door to open, a cupboard to hold a belonging, or a little house with a window to frame my view of the world.