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Life, Outdoors, Ron Marr's Musings

Whittle House on the Prairie

by Ron Marr

Ron Marr

RON MARR

WARY WHITTLER

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Torturing innocent pieces of wood is a quintessential hillbilly skill, and being a nearly quintessential hillbilly, I’m especially adept at the practice.

I’ve spent countless days felling trees, splitting logs, and tossing copious amounts of hickory and hedge into the blazing Gehenna that heats my house. I imagine this imagery offends the sensibilities of a certain breed of self-proclaimed environmentally conscious suburbanites, but in reality, my torment of timber makes me the ultimate environmentalist, a leading advocate of the “forest to wood stove” movement. Is anything more empathetic than stoking a blaze comprised of organically grown, deciduous organisms? Sometimes, when a rapid-boil of smoke is pouring from my chimney, I feel as karmically savvy as the Dalai Lama.

While pondering my symbiotic relationship with lumber, I realized I’d lived a remiss and unexamined life. I’d never engaged with the most hallowed of wood-related activities, a revered pastime imprinted on the soul of all card-carrying ridge runners with a dime-store pocket knife.

Awash with shame, I sadly admitted I’d never whittled.

My ignorance of whittling is baffling. I’ve amassed an embarrassing number of knives (I just found a switchblade in my sock drawer) but combining blade and wood to carve geegaws and gimcracks never occurred to me. Meshing two great things that go great together does not come easily to the human brain, which maybe explains why the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup wasn’t invented until 1928.

So, I bought a whittling knife, grabbed a willow log, and skimmed a tutorial on carving a snowman. The resulting Frosty exceeded my wildest expectations. Ecstatic at discovering a heretofore unknown talent, I dove headfirst down the hole of the rabbit that was to be my next creation.

The bunny didn’t go so well. A whittling knife is roughly a billion times sharper than a regular knife, and when Peter Cottontail’s ear snapped off, the unfettered blade sliced my finger to the bone. Though I’d intuited that whittling was in my blood, I didn’t anticipate my blood being in my whittling.

All passions have their price. Mine was the suggested retail value of stitches, plus a Kevlar carving glove.

I eventually healed up and began fashioning a bear. It was a five-hour whittling session that resulted in a reasonable facsimile of Gentle Ben’s tiny brother. I was euphoric, until the next morning, when I discovered that marathon whittling is incompatible with carpal tunnel syndrome. I could neither close my hands nor bend my fingers. The hands that I had just used to carve a block of wood now felt like a block of wood.

Thus, my latest fashion accessories are forearm-to-fingertip wrist-braces. I can’t type nearly as fast as I used to, and sincerely apologize if my incapacitation forces you to read more slowly than normal. Seriously, this entire affair almost forced me to contemplate the relationship between art, suffering, and being a very slow learner.

Almost … but not quite.

My next project is a dolphin.

I’m hoping to not lose a leg.


This column was originally published in the January/February 2020 edition of Missouri Life.

Ron Marr sells custom walking sticks and other carved doodads (pictured below) at RonMarr.com.

Photos courtesy of Ron Marr

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