Totems
My life is now all about one totem after another. We all know what a totem pole is, but I’m not sure many of us have stopped to wonder about the underlying reasons why native people display them. A totem is a cultural symbol that tells people who we are and what we respect. They are most often a natural object or an animal that is believed by someone to have spiritual significance. I think that in days gone by, native cultures had so little control over the forces of nature that they wanted to throw anything they could at the situation that might conceivably help. Whether they were evil spirits, dangerous predatory animals or just general bad juju, the thought was that perhaps they could be scared away from the clan and at the same time remind themselves of what they stood for. It is wrong to assume that native people were all about survival and didn’t think about who they were. Identity is a critically important part of being and if a native or even the whole clan weren’t convinced that the totem would keep them safe, it did remind them of why they cared and who they were.
I have been wondering why I feel so compelled to adorn my gardens with all manner of manmade objects. It’s easy to rationalize a Hobbit House as something for the pleasure of my granddaughters, but how about the various pieces of metal sculpture that are quickly approaching twenty or so items ranging from my massive Bison Boulder sculpture to baby javelina pig and multiple wind sculptures. I haven’t thought of these items as totems. They have just been objects of interest and whimsy that I have used to create some movement or some added interest to the garden. Some think that plants are enough, but I feel compelled to add things that are symbolic and artistic. I don’t really understand why, but I know the hits just keep on coming with every new day that I have too little to do or some strange spirit moves me.
Not all of my whims work out the way I plan. Let’s take for example this lovely 45-inch three-inch thick slab from some two-hundred-year-old massive tree. I bought it for my patio and ordered a pair of anodized steel X legs, thinking it would make a wonderful serving table that would compliment our live-oak kitchen counter. When you buy these things online you either buy them raw or partially prepped and sanded or epoxy-filled and partially finished, or maybe completely finished. Since I wanted it for the patio, I was warned that it might not hold up as well as if it were kept indoor (our live-edge in the kitchen is as perfect as it was when it was installed five years ago). That made me order it partially finished with special merlot-colored epoxy fill in whatever gaps and cracks existed in it. That way I could finish it with extra-special protective polyurethane, applied far thicker than normal to keep the outdoors outdoors. After I bolted the two leg brackets to the underside with six deep-set stainless steel lag bolts on each, I got concerned that the legs needed to be braced against one another. I got a welder I know to come over and weld a v-shaped bracing bar between the legs. I was very proud of my new table.
I will spare you the details of what the last eight months have wrought on my table project. Suffice it to say that I had no idea wood could flex and bow as much as this tabletop has. At this point there isn’t enough merlot epoxy in the Western U.S. to fill the new cracks and gaps that have opened up on this table. By all rights I should toss this table in a landfill somewhere, but I prefer to keep it as a cautionary tale of just how bad a project can go when you bite off more than you can chew. At this point, I’ve decided that fine furniture (even outdoor furniture) is more than I can chew. The funniest thing is that the symbolism in that table was to show my creative side applied to something so functional and unique. I think its fair to say that the symbolism that table now speaks to is pretty much the opposite of that.
Keeping that in mind, I have been a little hesitant to work in the medium of wood. I feel like I have conquered stone carving and there is only so much I can do myself with metal since every time I do I end up calling in my welder friend to bail me out. So I thought perhaps if I stuck with wood but steered clear of fine furniture I might be OK, For some reason I happened upon totem poles from the Pacific Northwest. I liked the way they looked and felt that a totem pole had all the basic elements I need for my hillside. To begin with, totem poles have scale and my hilltop seems to give yard art major shrinkage because of the wide-open spaces out here. And then there’s the colorful nature of totem poles, the ones I have seen online range from those of the Native Americans of the Northwest to the Fiji Islanders and Māori of New Zealand, and the color schemes abound.
The first thing I did was look up what woods are best for carving. The unequivocal answer seems to be red cedar. I then looked for a red cedar log that I could purchase in the 6-8’ range. Now I consider myself to be a pretty good online buyer, especially of strange wood products. I’ve even bought eight-foot white cedar logs this year from some Amish woodsman in northern Michigan for the Hobbit House. But those were 8” diameter logs and I needed something more like 12-15” diameter and I couldn’t make sense of anything that could be bought. What I did find on Etsy were these two-foot high red cedar log end tables that were of the desired diameter. The only accoutrement added by the vendor besides a bit of sanding down the edges was four nailed-in PVC slider feet (easily removed). They each weigh about 70 pounds so I’m thinking I am glad I didn’t find a 6-8 foot log since it would be unmanageably heavy, not to mention hard to sculpt. But the two two-footers are perfect for what I have in mind, they are the perfect size for one totem face on each. I could then find something to put on top to get to that scale I feel I need.
It was an easy task to draw an interesting face on each log using Google images as my guide. I mixed elements I liked from several totems and blended South Pacific with Pacific Northwest. I had learned on my Boca Della Verita boulder sculpting that hand chiseling is way too hard when power hand tools are available. Where the Dremel I own couldn’t even scratch the granite boulder, it works wonders on red cedar. I bought every chiseling, routering and sanding/grinding bits that Lowe’s had to offer for Dremels. There are no how-to guides on You-Tube for carving a totem pole, so I just went at it. As the old expression goes, chisel away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant and you can carve an elephant. So, that’s what I did to carve my two totem logs. As soon as I finished the first one, I went out and bought paint and went at randomly painting my newly carved totem. I bought red, white, black and yellow for some inexplicable reason and since I had no paint-by-number guide, I just painted as the spirit moved me. I did the same with the second log and then tried stacking them one way and then the other.
I had found the perfect topper for my totems, a large diving screech owl hand carved from wood, sized perfectly to sit on top of whichever totem I placed on top. A little touch up with the yellow paint on the beak, the whites of his eyes and the red of his claws and this owl looked menacingly like it was meant to sit atop my totem pole. As an after-thought I empties two spray cans of clear polyurethane, thinking specifically that I didn’t want anything like what happened to my ill-fated table top to happen to these. Tomorrow they are ready for installation on the front rock hillside. I bought a steel pin to drill the two logs together and a steel post stake to keep the whole thing firmly on the hill (I hope). I’d like to think I learn from my mistakes, but mostly I have learned that birds gotta fly and totems gotta get carved and displayed on my hillside.