Made by Hand Read online

  We found a van large enough to take our luggage and us to the holiday bungalow where we planned to stay until we found a place to rent. It took only about two minutes of looking out the van’s window to wipe out any preconceived fantasies we had harbored about island life. We passed a long stretch of diesel tanks, refineries, and warehouses. The main road was clogged with cars and noisy motorscooters. Everywhere we looked, there were signs of neglect and ugliness: rusting oil drums, falling-down cinderblock fences, and small packs of skinny feral dogs trotting along with their tongues hanging out.

  We didn’t remember any of this from our first visit. It had been there, of course, but we had seen it through tourists’ eyes. Now that we were back to stay, in a van that reeked of diesel exhaust, passing little houses on the side of the road with missing windows, rotting roofs, and torn curtains in lieu of doors, five months of romanticized notions flew from our heads and were replaced by one question:

  What the fuck had we gotten ourselves into?

  Our first impulse was to turn around and get the hell out. Our tickets were open-ended, which meant we could leave anytime we felt like it. But we couldn’t do that. The humiliation would be excruciating; we would never be able to face our friends again. More than that, the months of planning and work that we’d put into doing this would have been for nothing. Worst of all, going back home would have meant abandoning a dream that we had come to believe in.

  By the time the van dropped us off at the tiny bungalow, the sky was dark gray. As I dragged the luggage in, it started to rain. The baby began to cry. A sleep-deprived, whiny Sarina asked over and over again if we could go to the wind-whipped beach.

  It wasn’t that we had an awful time in Rarotonga. We just didn’t find what we were looking for there. Part of the problem was that we didn’t know what we were looking for, other than that we wanted to feel good. Our problems, which we assumed were caused by living in Los Angeles, had taken the plane ride with us. It turned out that we were the problem. Moving to a so-called paradise couldn’t change things.

  In some ways, our life on the island was even poorer than it had been in Los Angeles. We had a hard time making friends because the people who lived there were, understandably, not interested—who wants to invest time in forging a friendship with transients? So we lacked a social network. That too was something we hadn’t thought about. Since we’d always had friends and family to give us support when we needed it, we hadn’t realized how important a circle of friends could be until we didn’t have one.

  Sarina missed her friends and complained about it incessantly. Jane, at three months old, needed constant care, and Carla missed being able to hang out with mothers of kids the same age. It was just the four of us, and at times it became stifling, with Sarina insisting on having Carla and me as her constant playmates.

  Our daily routine involved one of us playing with Sarina while the other took care of Jane. When Jane napped, one of us would frantically write for an hour while the other played with Sarina. We felt just as time-deprived and stressed out as we’d been in Los Angeles, if not more so.

  Still, some of our experiences on the island did hint at a more rewarding way to live. After we’d settled into a small house near the ocean (a house once lived in by Robert Frisbie’s daughter, Johnny), we enrolled Sarina in a school and, as a result, became friendly with a family on the island. Lori was a Canadian who had met her husband, John, who was half Rarotongan and half Canadian, while he was doing his stint as a Mormon missionary in Canada. They had eight kids and lived across the street from the school, so we often went over to visit at the end of the school day.

  One day I saw Lori impale a coconut on a half-inch steel rod sticking out of the ground before husking the fibrous outer coating. I asked if I could try, and she was happy to let me because she needed a lot of coconut meat for her baking that night. Lori showed me how to get leverage by stabbing the coconut husk onto the rod, then rolling it to peel the husk away.

  After husking a half dozen, Lori showed me how to crack the coconuts in half by whacking them with the dull side of a machete (what Rarotongans call a “bush knife”). Her seven-year-old daughter, Neomi, was there to catch the coconut water in a pitcher. Next, Lori demonstrated how to use a coconut-scraping bench, a small wooden surface with a blade protruding from one end. She straddled the bench and scraped the meat of a coconut into a white plastic bowl below the blade. I gave it a try and got the hang of it quickly. Sarina wanted to try it, too, so I let her and was surprised to see how easily she took to it.

  That evening, when I went to our landlady’s house to pay the rent, I asked her where I could buy a coconut-scraping bench. She told me I would have to go to the junkyard in town and buy a piece of a leaf spring from a broken car, take it to a metal shop to have it forged and get the end serrated, and then take that to a carpenter to have a bench made for it.

  “Or,” she said, “you can borrow mine.” She also gave me a coconut-husking rod, a bush knife, and a bag of wild spinach she had just picked.

  For the remainder of our time on the island, coconut harvesting and processing was an almost daily ritual that Carla, Sarina, and I relished. Here’s a typical coconut-centric day, as recorded in Carla’s journal: Mark’s goal today is to make coconut cream, which he will then use to make coconut chicken, creamy pasta sauce, and scones from scratch.

  He’s recruited Sarina to help him in his mission. They collected fallen coconuts this morning, spotting a few next to our laundry lines, and a couple more scattered around the border of our lawn.

  Now Mark and Sarina are out in the front yard, trying to open the fruits, which is no simple matter. The edible part of a coconut is encapsulated by a fibrous shell, which is protected by another, thicker shell that—as Mark has learned—cannot be penetrated by whacking it with a sharp rock.

  While Mark pries the outer shells open with his handmade iron-wood spear (which took him two days to carve and sharpen), Sarina sits on the grass with a bush knife in hand, whacking the inner shells in half.

  “You could slice off someone’s head with one of those knives,” I hear Mark say.

  “Really?” Sarina squeals.

  I fl inch as she raises the knife up into the air and wonder if I should interfere. I don’t think a bush knife is an age-appropriate tool for a six-year-old. But then she cracks the coconut open, a perfect split, and she and Mark hoot with delight.

  Once the coconuts are all opened, the white “meat” needs to be grated. Again, this is no simple matter. It’s not something you can do with your ordinary cheese grater. The fruit is tenaciously tough and must be shredded with a coconut scraper. Mark and Sarina argue over who gets to scrape the coconuts, and Sarina wins. She straddles the bench with half a coconut in hand, bends forward, and begins to scrape the inside of the shell against the metal scraper. The moist shreds fall into a bucket. She stops for a moment to peel off her shirt, then continues to grate until she runs out of coconuts.

  Mark scoops the white mush into a large piece of cheesecloth and wrings it into a jar, which also contains fresh, clear milk from the coconuts. It’s surprising how much liquid squirts out of the cloth.

  He’s now ready to begin cooking.

  Jane is napping, so I decide to steal Sarina for the afternoon. We head down to the beach and rent a bright orange kayak. The boat has an inch of water that sloshes around our feet as we paddle out to a “motu,” or islet. The bottom of the shallow lagoon is patched with huge black spots, which, we soon find out, are clusters of sea cucumbers. Sarina leans way over the boat, almost capsizing us.

  “What are you doing?” I shout.

  She laughs and holds up a fat, limp cucumber, as if she’d just won a trophy.

  We come home famished. Mark walks out to the front yard to greet us, looks up at our palm tree, and by sheer luck witnesses a coconut falling from its top. It thumps to the ground with a force that could crack a skull. His eyes water with amazement, the way Moses may have wept when he w
itnessed the parting of the Red Sea.

  I make a mental note to stay clear of that tree when hanging my clothes on the line.

  Looking back, the days we spent being deeply involved with our food—collecting it, extracting it, processing it, and cooking it—were the most memorable and rewarding. It was a luxury to spend all day baking coconut scones or making tortillas and pasta from flour, salt, and eggs. Sure, we still would go out to a restaurant for a quick meal when we were too burned out from a day of hiking in the rain forest or dealing with the kids when they got sick, but coconut days became one of the highlights of our routine. When Sarina’s classmates came over, they loved to help us and often offered tips on doing things a better way.

  When we left the South Pacific after just four and a half months, beaten by pneumonia, bronchitis, lice, ringworm, toenail fungus, and social isolation, I promised myself I’d come up with a “coconut-day” equivalent in Los Angeles—something that would allow me to slow down, use my hands, and become more engaged with the world around me in a meaningful way. As it turned out, I lucked into something even better.

  As soon as I returned to L.A. I got a call from Dale Dougherty, the cofounder of O’Reilly Media, a technical-books publisher in northern California. Dale was familiar with Boing Boing, the nerd-culture blog I founded in 2000, and we’d chatted a few times on the phone while I was in the South Pacific about an idea he’d had for a general-interest technology-project magazine. Dale had successfully launched a line of books called the “Hacks” series, which offered practical tips and short projects in a variety of areas, such as astronomy, selling things on Amazon, improving one’s mental abilities, automating the home, and so on. His idea for a magazine that showed how to make, modify, and repair things appealed to me.

  Dale and I met several times to brainstorm. We looked at do-it-yourself magazines from the past—the 1940s through 1960s were a heyday for do-it-yourselfers. Popular Science contained quite a few articles devoted to making things such as go-karts from lawn mower engines and modernistic coffee tables from plywood and ceramic tile.

  Dale and I noticed that these kinds of projects, along with traditional crafting and homesteading activities, such as gardening, raising chickens, keeping bees, and preserving food, had again become popular, due in large part to the great information-delivery capability of the Web. People were rediscovering the joy of DIY. We decided that the magazine should be a celebration of the kind of making, experimenting, and tinkering that was being chronicled by enthusiasts on the Web. The magazine would showcase the best projects in an attractive format and offer tested, step-by-step instructions for doing them at home. We’d encourage tinkering and experimentation by profiling our favorite “alpha makers”—individuals who have learned how to design and build cool stuff—and by recommending and reviewing tools, guide-books, Web sites, and other resources that people interested in making things could use.

  The first issue of Make came out in February 2005. Dale and I hoped that the magazine would get ten thousand subscribers in the first year. But we were off by a factor of four: Forty thousand people subscribed. Today the paid circulation is well over a hundred thousand. As editor in chief, I’ve met hundreds of delightful DIYers over the years. I find their approach to living both refreshing and inspiring. DIYers are not afraid to take responsibility for the creation and maintenance of the things they and their families use, eat, wear, play with, learn from, and live in. In fact, they welcome the challenge of creating, maintaining, and modifying their physical environment.

  Eventually, my exposure to DIYers led me to the realization that do-it-yourself activities were an essential, if not central, part of achieving a richer and more meaningful life, a life of engagement with the world. I wanted to learn as much as I could from the alpha makers I’d met through the magazine, so that I could incorporate their lessons into my own life.

  One thing I learned is that most alpha DIYers have long, ever-growing, and ever-evolving lists of projects they intend to tackle. So I began to keep a list of the things I wanted to try. I didn’t allow fear or lack of experience to prevent me from writing down everything I eventually wanted to accomplish: Kill my lawn

  Plant a vegetable garden

  Start a fruit-tree orchard

  Grow mushrooms

  Raise chickens

  Throw a house concert

  Make a cigar-box ukulele

  Keep bees

  Make preserved and cultured foods

  Hack my espresso machine

  Make a still

  Make a human-powered electricity generator

  Tutor my kids in math and science

  Measure the diameter of the Earth, and the distance from the Earth to the moon and from the Earth to the sun

  Make stilts for my daughters

  Build a treehouse

  Make a coffee table

  Sew and knit clothes for my family

  Carve wooden spoons

  Forge aluminum espresso tampers

  Make a silver ring using precious-metal clay

  Harvest olives and extract the oil

  This was a long list, and I didn’t expect that I would enjoy, or succeed at, everything (and I didn’t, as you’ll see). I wasn’t about to say goodbye to modern life again, as we’d attempted in Rarotonga. Instead, I was looking for a balanced approach that worked for my family and me. By incorporating elements of DIY into our household—for example, raising chickens, keeping bees, growing vegetables, sewing clothes, preserving food, and making simple things out of wood and other materials—I hoped we would become more mindful of our daily activities, more appreciative of what we have, and more engaged with the systems and things that keep us alive and well.

  1

  THE COURAGE TO SCREW THINGS UP

  “I tell myself I will learn more from my mistakes than I ever could by being a submissive follower of instructions and bowing to the dubious authority of some distant and unknown manufacturer.”

  —GEORGE GROTZ, THE FURNITURE DOCTOR

  When I started working at Make and began to meet with the highly skilled individuals who would create DIY projects for the magazine, I never thought I’d learn how to design electronic circuits, build furniture, construct robots, modify bicycles, or make musical instruments myself. I was sure I didn’t have that kind of talent. I felt envious of “alpha makers” like William Gurstelle, who once built a taffy-pulling machine for Make at my request. (I’d seen one in a movie and thought it would be a fun how-to project.) Envious of Mister Jalopy, who artfully integrated an old-fashioned wooden hi-fi cabinet with a computer to simultaneously play old records and digitize the songs for his iPod. Envious of Charles Platt, who could make anything out of ABS plastic, from a board game to a device for resuscitating victims of cardiac arrest.

  Then there was Chris Benton, a professor of architecture at the University of California-Berkeley, who attached remote-control camera rigs to kites for taking aerial photographs. Kim Pedersen, who built a monorail train and elevated track in his backyard in Fremont, California. Billy Hoffman, a teenager who created a magnetic stripe reader to reveal the data stored on his driver’s license and credit cards.

  What qualities did these people have that I, and millions of others, lacked?

  After I spent more time with these DIYers and dozens of others, I learned that they hadn’t been born with special talents. Mister Jalopy, who is a kind of artist-hero in the DIY world, knew very little about making things until the day in the 1990s that he made a conscious decision to do whatever it took to become “handy.” One of my DIYer friend’s hands shake with palsy, yet he manages to use it to assemble intricate mechanisms.

  I’ve met my share of DIYers who’ve lost fingers from mishaps with power tools. It hasn’t stopped them from making stuff.

  Their secret isn’t so much what they have as what they don’t have: a fear of failure. Most people loathe failing so much they avoid trying things that require pushing past their current abilities. It�
��s no coincidence that many of my favorite DIYers either dropped out of or never attended college. A few even dropped out of high school. Maybe they were lucky to have escaped the educational system; in school, mistakes result in punishment in the form of poor grades. Because we’ve been trained to believe that mistakes must be avoided, many of us don’t want to attempt to make or fix things, or we quit soon after we start, because our initial attempts end in failure.

  My early forays into DIY certainly did. After a few home-improvement projects in my twenties that resulted in leaky pipes, cracked tiles, and crooked wallpaper, and gardening experiments that led to brown tomato plants surrounded by weeds, I gave up and directed my creative urges to computer-based graphic design and illustration, where the UNDO key makes it easy to back out of mistakes.

  Making things confounded me, which in part explains my considerable respect for people who do know how to fix things around the house, knit clothes, work on cars, or build things from scratch like go-karts and remote-controlled model airplanes. Though I wasn’t a DIYer, my admiration for the breed paid off careerwise. As editor in chief of Make, I developed a knack for knowing which projects our readers would enjoy. I was satisfied with helping contributors write their articles and present their projects in an attractive, accessible way.

  After I got to know Mister Jalopy, he knocked me out of this comfortable rut.

  I became acquainted with Mister Jalopy (he doesn’t use his real name in public) through the tool reviews he submitted for the first issue of Make. I was charmed by his perspective of the world as a hackable platform, something to be remade and remodeled to his exacting, eccentric, yet infectiously appealing aesthetic sensibilities. His first Make review was for a screwdriver kit that came with fifty-seven different tamperproof screw bits that would, as he put it, “open damn near every machine meant to remain unopened.”