Have you ever known a woodcrafter? I have and more than one. When I was a kid growing up there was always one or two around every community. I always knew them as wildcrafters but my spell checker says the proper term is woodcrafter. What do they know about either? So for the purposes of this missive I will call them the way I always knew them.

A wildcrafter is someone who prides themselves with never having labored for wages or for an annual wage, in short any kind of steady work. They live off the land in much the same way the early homesteaders that cleared the land did, built a cabin and relied for the land to fill their needs. In most cases they were miles from other people with primitive modes of transportation and had no other choices. As the country became settled and modern means of travel became affordable fewer and fewer people opted to live that way. The vast majority took the path of least resistance and opted for the more secure traditional way of life.

I only knew what I would call a true wildcrafter in every sense of the word. He had not been so for much of the time before I knew him because someone who knew him in his younger days told me he had been an outstanding woodworker. His name was Hubert Steffens but all the locals around Phoenix knew him as Hook. He lived in a little camp on the Oneida River outside of the village. I had a rapport with him when I was growing up because he did all the things I yearned to do.

He fished, hunted, trapped and sold bait. His door and welcome mat was always open to us kids. Never had a car and rode his bike to the few places he cared to go. He showed us how to make birdhouses, minnow traps and how to gather soft shell crawfish or crabs as they were better known to us. He was a mild mannered man not given to boasting or being effusive over anything. I liked him and was proud to call him my friend which few people could say. Most everyone, especially the older people around the area, thought he was lazy and antisocial. I knew better.

Our friendship continued on into my late teens and early twenties. I worked as a roofer and siding applicator and kept him in nails and odds and ends of lumber and other building materials with which he made knickknacks, birdhouses, sign’s etc. to sell. Whenever I stopped by with my truck he would paw through my tool box with a magnet gleaning loose nails that routinely fell out of our nail aprons.

When I was a kid I had a pet crow. I was forever raiding crow’s nest or digging out little foxes and woodchucks which I kept for a time until the novelty wore off and I turned back to the wild. I always wanted a pet skunk but my one and only attempt at capturing one convinced me and my mother that it was not to be. She put up with the woodchucks and foxes but finally drew the line on my last crow.

My sister was born when I was eleven and when she was four or five the crow delighted in harassing her. He would land on her head and bite her on the ear. The crow had been on thin ice previous to that for pulling the clothes pins off the line along with the clothes. If that was not bad enough he would also occasionally foul some article of clothing or a bed sheet. To make a long story short the crow had to go and I was in a quandary as what to do with him.

You probably guessed it long before this but Hook’s was the most logical place for him because of his way of life and his rapport with everything wild. I knew he would have a good home and he did for a time until his crow instincts set in and he followed his wild cousins on their way to sunnier climes with the fall migration. Some of my buddies used to kid me that Hook ate him but I know that was not true.

Age and poverty finally caught up with Hook he lost his place to taxes and he was packed off to an old folks home. I never saw him after that he just seemed to disappear into thin air. I was sad and could not get it off my mind for a long time. When I learned about his tax problems I offered to give him the money to pay them but he told me it was not a problem.

I pass by the site today where his little camp once stood and there is no trace of any structure having ever been there. The person who bought it for the back taxes never got to enjoy the site because I assume the lot was not nearly large enough to survive modern day zoning challenges. I think of Hook every time I pass by there and am further saddened that he would not let me help him even though I now know why he would not.

He did not have much and never asked for anything that was not his or that he thought he was entitled too. He had pride and what better test of a man can you ask for?

The thought for the week is from Willa Sibert Cather: The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or woman.