Yusuf Zengul
Cherry Wood Spoon
While walking around my neighborhood lake, I shift my gaze, expecting to see my favorite tree: a tree that possesses beautiful pink blossoms atop its gray-striped trunk laden with golden sap; a tree whose beauty tempts yet prevents me from carving its deep red flesh.
As I approached, I realized the tree was not where it used to stand. The tree had fallen, its trunk a frayed mess of red and yellow splinters surrounded by tire marks alluding to the culprit of the crime. I was saddened but also ecstatic at the opportunity to make something out of the tree’s misfortune. After processing the wood, I caught a whiff of a pleasant scent – it smelled like cherries.
I have always been fond of creating things. Whether I'm carving a pumpkin or building and programming robots, I love the process of making something from seemingly nothing. In my mind, nothing could beat the feeling of working on something with my two hands. Now I had a new medium to manipulate and tinker with: wood.
After deciding to carve a cooking spoon for my mother, I started by hacking away at one of the pieces of red cherry wood until it was shaped more like a block than a log. Then I traced my chosen design, a flat cooking spoon, onto the block. To make use of the cherry wood's natural two-tone coloring, I decided to carve the spoon from the intersection of the golden sapwood and cherry red heartwood. The next step has become one of my favorite steps of wood carving due to its stress-relieving properties: hacking away with a hatchet to rough out the spoon's shape. Next comes the lengthiest step and a great test of patience: slowly whittling away at the wood, taking slivers off one by one, thinning and shaping the wood one splinter at a time. The repeated and precise action of scraping my knife along the grain of the wood, watching the slivers fall, and feeling my worries chip away while the spoon took shape calmed my mind. No internet to take away hours of my time, no pressure to socialize and maintain a face, no feeling of impending doom over an upcoming test, just me, a knife, and a block of wood.
After a few weeks of carving, I was finally done shaping the timber. Now came the scariest part, drying the wood. When drying, wood can split. It is possible to prevent splitting by drying the wood slowly, but the risk will always remain. In the case of my spoon, this risk was even higher as wood tends to split at the intersection between its heartwood and sapwood, the exact intersection from which I had carved the spoon. Carving teaches that no matter how hard you try, the wood can still split. Failure happens, but one must overcome it. When I checked on my spoon after leaving it to dry, I was distraught to see a 2-inch fracture running down the head of the scoop parting the red and yellow grain. Yet I didn’t concede, instead filling the crack with wood glue and clamping it down, saving the spoon. It's been 3 years, and my mom is still happily using the spoon with no problems.
Carving has become a helpful tool and teacher in my journey to create. From it, I have learned patience and to accept and learn from failure. I have used many mediums during my journey of creation. No matter what I'm creating, whether it be designing a program with my teammates to guide our autonomous robot to victory, soldering a LiPo battery to a soda can RC car, or working on building a chicken coop with my dad, I will always love the feeling of designing and creating, alone or with help, using my mind and two hands.