Blacksmithing
An accidental trip in a time machine with The Smithy
Photos by Author
My friend Dave called at 10 a.m. “Hey, happy birthday. Let’s go shoot something.” He knocked on my door thirty minutes later, glasses fogged, rivulets of water running down his forehead. The day was the color of drab. The wind slobbered rain into our faces on the mad dash to his car. No respectable photographers would be out on a day like this. We decided to rethink our adventure over a cup of steaming courage and scrambled eggs at Natalie’s Cafe in downtown Camas, Washington. Eventually, the rain subsided, as it always does in the Pacific Northwest, and Dave’s face lit up, “I have an idea! Let’s go.”
Ten miles east of Portland, we took an exit ramp and drove a two-lane blacktop road around a large manicured field littered with old log cabins corralled by a huge fence — Fort Vancouver. I didn’t know the place existed even though I had driven by it umpteen times, “Wow, this place is in great shape for being so old!” My friend smirks, “It’s a replica.” The Hudson Bay Company built the original trading post in the early 1800s and it was a major hub for fur trading in the region at the time.
The light was dull. I shot a few photos of the grounds and the outbuildings but didn’t feel inspired. The afternoon was waning, and there was no low-angle magic glow breaking through the clouds. Before we left, we decided to peek into the last little cabin sitting in the southeast corner of the fort. Strange clanking sounds were pinging from inside those walls. Dave opened the heavy, red-painted wood door hung with big iron hinges stretched halfway across its breadth, and we stepped into a dimly lit time machine that smelled of soot and men. When my eyes adjusted, I was riveted by what I saw. This must be what it felt like to enter the wardrobe into Narnia.
The Smithy pulled a chain with a wooden handle attached, pumping the huge bellows fastened to the ceiling. Piles of coal spilled from the dirty brick fireplace. Bellowed air breathed life into red-hot chunks inflating bright yellow flames with every pull. The only clue that the man was in fact not born in 1800-something, was the plastic safety glasses shielding his eyes from renegade sparks. His other hand took an iron tool out of the bed of coals, clenching a bright orange iron ring. He walked it across the room to the anvil and began hammering it into the shape he envisioned. The age-old art form of molding metal with fire came to life inside this tiny cabin. Chains, doorknobs, hooks, harnesses, tools, and mysterious old-world gadgets hung on the walls like metal Picassos in a log cabin museum.
Ghostly beautiful light tumbled through old pane glass windows, bouncing off hand-hewn log walls, black metal, and dirt floor. I don’t know if I have ever seen a more beautiful light inside a building. My hands lifted the lens to my eye where it remained glued to my face for forty-five minutes. Dave fired up a cheerful conversation with two of the three Smithy’s who were quitting work for the day. The third Smithy, wearing an old red-striped shirt, was still bending metal gracefully using techniques handed down through generations for thousands of years. Something struck me watching the craftsman work his magic.
This world is carbon. Coal. Life is fire. Flames. All our metal bones and iron hearts are forged in circumstances, choices and traumas. In love, healing, and grace. We are born a certain shape of DNA. The fire softens us. The Smithy bends us into something beautiful. Something useful to this world. And sometimes the most stunning light spills through into the darkest, sootiest of places, bending time and reality into a perfect work of art.
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