One summer, as I whittled away my time in a remote cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, I got an unexpected call. Seems a friend of mine who knew that I took a keen interest in mountain crafts had passed my name along to a farmer in North Carolina who worked a team of oxen.
“I was wondering if you’d be interested in learning how to make a yoke, the ole-timey way?” the fellow asked. “I’ll supply the wood if you’ll carve it.”
At first I thought I might be the victim of some kind of practical joke. But soon I was driving back to my cabin with a 5-foot, 12-inch-thick beam of hardwood poking through the open window of my car.
I used a felt-tip marker to draw the outline of the undulating yoke against the blocky, rough-milled basswood. Then I spent two weekends browsing through general stores, flea markets, and shops with signs that said things like “We Buy Junk but Sell Fine Antiques,” searching for the appropriately obscure hand tools necessary to make it the old-fashioned way. The ones I was looking for went out of vogue around the same time that the tractor replaced oxen on most American farms. But I found what I needed, thanks to a slump in consumer demand for such labor-saving devices as drawknives and broad hatchets.
The chiseling began in late summer, and by the time the frost was on the pumpkin, I had managed to sculpt, file and sand that stubborn piece of wood into a yoke as pretty as you please.
The wood chips made great kindling, and as I sat beside my woodstove polishing the yoke with linseed oil, I became inspired. Nostalgia swept me back to the days when life was simpler, my predecessors worked the land with beasts of burden, and Appalachian homesteaders slow-cured their wood not in automated kilns, but by leaving it beneath a dry haystack for one full year.
Oops.
A robust crack – energized by the heat of the stove, no doubt – spread along the heartwood to snap me out of my idealistic trance.
“If you yoke a ton of Brown Swiss together with that thing, it will snap like a twig and could seriously injure both of them,” their owner later acknowledged. “I should have cured that wood slower, instead of buying it from a lumberyard where they heat it up in a kiln. But these are impatient times, which I reckon is why I’m the only farmer in North Carolina plowing his fields behind a team of oxen.
“But thanks for trying.”
For the next two years – and through three moves across state lines – I hauled that yoke around, determined to find some practical use for it. Too big for a doorstop, it was too small to use as a rafter beam and too curvy for a mantel or bookshelf.
I think it was Henry David Thoreau who said that firewood warms you twice – once when you cut and split it, and again when you burn it. So one cold night I got fed up and stuffed my yoke into the fireplace. I lit a fire at the base of it, and that Paul Bunyan-sized Yule log burned 12 hours straight, heating up the house so much I had to open windows.
Although I had slaved more than 100 hours on that project, I was somehow satisfied to watch it burn away the winter chill.
Yes, I had invested time, skinned knuckles, and a hundred dollars worth of tools, blades, and Arkansas stones for naught. But I did get $15 worth of awesome cordwood out of the deal. Maybe I wouldn’t have the last laugh, but I’d at least have a toasty chuckle.
A few months later I visited an antique shop to trade one of the yoke-making tools. As I entered the store, I overheard a customer ask the owner, “You don’t happen to have an old ox yoke, do you?”
“No ma’am, I sure don’t. Haven’t seen one in years.”
“Well. I’m decorating my summer home, and I would give anything to get my hands on one of those to hang on the wall of the den.”
The store owner was piqued. “How much are you willing to pay?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Three or four hundred dollars.”
I held the door for her as she left and couldn’t help but confess, “You know, I had one of those until recently. But it got burned up in a fire.”
“What a shame!” she replied.
“Yeah. I was just thinking the same thing myself.”
