Ryan Penner of RST Timber Works in Gloucester, Virginia
Good evening dear friends,
Last week I introduced Gloucester sawmill owner and new member of our Virginia House building team, Mr. Ryan Penner, of RST Timber Works. We spent a fine winter's day together pulling white oaks out of the woods in preparation for building our frame.
In immediate succession after we left, Ryan suffered 1. a blown hydraulic hose on his dump trailer, 2. a permanently exhausted battery on his tractor, and, just two sill beams into his first day's work, 3. a stripped mechanism on his band saw, the replacement part for which would require an impossible ten days for delivery. By then, the opportunity we have worked toward for five years would have forever expired.
The combat engineering division of the U. S. Navy in which Ryan served is known as the SeaBees, so called for a contraction of their formal name "Construction Battalion": C for Construction and B for Battalion, therefore CBs, or Seabees. Their informal motto is a simple American "Can Do."
In that spirit, Ryan first put his trailer, then his tractor to rights by salvaging local parts and materials. Then he set about can-doing his way to a solution on his broken bandsaw. He called upon a friend or two for advice. He thought back to what was, by his own account, his pretty rusty recollection of welding techniques. But rusty or no, he plunged into the fray and shaped and machined and welded a new apparatus into place. That it would hold together, on the other hand, was by no means a settled thing. But it held, even improving on the original in places. And all at a loss of only two and a half days instead of ten. Ryan called our builder Garland and explained the situation. Garland came up with an accommodating change of plan. Between the two of them, Ryan was on schedule again by Friday.
Then over the weekend I visited Ryan at his home and sawmill, situated on about ten acres of wooded land. Like Ryan himself, the place is an exercise in self-reliance. What he and his family eat, they or their neighbors tend or grow or harvest from the land. When something breaks, Ryan fixes it. Against the rain, he raises his own shelter. Against the cold, he builds his own fire. Against the sun, he casts his own shade. What he buys he mostly acquires among his neighbors and friends. There is room in Ryan's view for a whole wide world of different people living in different ways. His dream is to expand his timber works sufficiently to accommodate visiting combat veterans, who he hopes may find some healing in cultivating a harmony with the land and a reverence for wood, as he has done.
Milling to order is a much more exacting business than one might suppose. The thick dimensions of timbers required for a traditional timber frame, in combination with the natural irregularities of trees, make carving one out of the other a slightly hair-raising affair. One of our heavy oak sill beams was nearly too much for the available dimensions of our last log. As Ryan explained to Garland, it had to be left "with a lot of bark still on." But Garland knew how to shift its position to make it work, and on went the milling.
I took so many pictures at the sawmill that day that my no-can-do cellphone battery finally gave up on me. We were almost finished, though, so nothing was really lost. Nothing, that is, until we set out on our way back home again through the maze of country roads without GPS for a guide. It is strange how you do not notice what you do not expect to need. In short order we were pretty well lost.
I asked myself what Ryan would do. In the first place, he would not have gotten lost, but that was no help to me then. So I stopped and asked the next farmer I saw from the road, who was deep in meditation over his seedbeds. Quentin was his name. He looked up as I approached through the field, no doubt appearing to him like some hopeless city slicker. But he smiled at me warmly, and nodded as I told my sad tale. Then, with inexhaustible patience and good will, he pointed out the way.
Ryan called me late this afternoon to say that his first load of sills and joists and posts and braces was done, a day ahead of schedule. He will be delivering it to us here first thing in the morning. Mr. Emerson once observed in his journal, "I like people who can do things." So do I. I would be lost without them.
Yours always,
Michael
The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.
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M. Lorence: Ryan Penner of RST Timber Works
M. Lorence: RST Timber Works