This summer, my favorite hammer suffered a broken wooden handle, an inevitability that I preferred to let someone else endure. So I gave it to my young neighbor, Kaleb, not yet a journeyman carpenter, who gave it back a week later in two pieces. When new, this hammer appeared on the cover and inside pages of my first book, photographed in full color by the incomparable Portland photographer, Rich Iwasaki; and to be candid without being clear, it would have snapped something deep inside my spirit to feel the ash handle break (just under the head, by the way) in my hand.

On one hand, although I am no longer young, strong and immortal, I am now wise enough, through experience, to pull nails only with tools made of steel or fiberglass. On the other hand, it was actually my fault for not giving him a cat’s paw with the hammer.

It’s a Hart framing hammer, now in need of repair. Part of a hammer collection of over three hundred (back in the day) now whittled to a mere 25 hammers. Some I will give away, some I will sell, and a few will go in my coffin organizer so I can take them with me into the afterlife.

My love of hammers in general goes back to toddlerhood, when one Christmas I received a toy with six wooden pegs and a perfectly balanced toy hammer. For three years of my childhood, I happily banged those six pegs flush, turned the wooden frame upside-down, and drove them back again. (Later, I discovered that Norm Abram also owned a similar toy.) I practiced this endless hammering with the same diligence that modern kids apply to video games.

As a carpenter and a writer, somehow I began collecting tools by the hundreds. Each plane that came my way, especially the oldies, seemed to be as unique as human beings. I became an amateur galoot, which is the proper word for the pathology of falling in love with the ineffable aura of tools, specifically antiques.

Fixing this Hart framer will be a breeze, involving only setting up a workbench with a vise, finding the tools needed to clean out the adze-eye, salvaging those incredibly perfect circular wedges that Hart uses, locating a replacement handle in town or on the Internet, and the cheerful investment of approximately four hours of my valuable time, not including travel.

You say that you can fix my hammer in under an hour? Sure. Truly, it must be wonderful to be you, chained to a ticking timepiece and such an unrelenting production schedule, glowing with the false pride of rapid workmanship; but I humbly suggest that four pleasant, peaceful hours spent slowly restoring an old, old friend, one that happens to be a hammer, back to perfect working condition, brings into your head some subtleties of satisfaction that impart a sense of relaxation, not accomplishment. As I see it, the real joy is in working toward a goal without being aware of anything but the work at hand. More like kayaking down the McKenzie River than joining the crew of a tasked nuclear submarine, if you get my drift

Part two will describe the process and the mood, with pithy quotes from Pirsig and others, plus a practical list of tools, and some things you should consider in the planning stage of wooden hammer-handle replacement. If you do not acknowledge and sincerely believe that a planning stage is required for such a simple operation of tool maintenance ... No, I cannot help you, not yet. Sorry. You just don’t love wooden-handled hammers enough. Maybe someday.

Illustration by Bob Rech

Imagine awaking suddenly. Imagine a northern view of a beautiful wooden church, fronted by a small paved road, speed limit 25 MPH in this quiet little backwater community. That was an odd dream. You are working on a book, and having lots of fun doing it, because you’ve finally broken through a writer’s block that has lasted a decade. Life is good.

It’s late afternoon, and you were napping, which is understandable because you’ve been writing all night on other projects, things that pay for this large room, the writer’s office in which you will live until the next book is finished. You get up, make the bed, vacuum, dust and starting hitting the keyboard.

Ten minutes go by. The cat is still asleep on the bed. Sound of tapping keys.

Now, imagine a 26-foot moving van coming from the north at high speed, veering on two wheels, and the thought balloon above your head reads: This vehicle could collide with the building in which you peacefully reside, and flatten you like a cockroach. All summed up in one word, the very same word found on every black box where the pilot or copilot sees what’s coming.

On June 22, a truck dropped in, uninvited. For the next three months, I was privileged to live like a refugee in my own American community, tenting for the first month, but the operative word is "lived." Somehow I survived the event, by luck, grace, foresight, intuition, and one gazelle-like leap out of my comfortable writing chair toward the only corner of the room that was not turned into Beirut.

Oh, and the movies are all wrong about the sound it makes. If you watch a lot of adventure movies, you have perhaps seen the camera’s-eye view of a wall imploding and a vehicle coming straight at you, the viewer. Trust me on this: The reality is much more real. For one thing, you can leave a movie behind, get in your car, and go home and make love to your significant other. For another, you don’t even have to pick up the spilled popcorn in the theater. No no debris to clean up.

The recurring images of a windshield heading straight at me, standing in a whirlwind of pulverized glass, drywall pellets and dust, a 200-pound bookcase missing my head by inches, and two horrified faces apparently wondering why I was still alive — the rear wheels caught on the foundation, and the cab jammed up on the main gable beam, or I would have been jelly on the hood — my Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome has taken the form of a euphoria and gratitude for the gift of every single day, not to mention a hypergraphia — barely controllable compulsion to write — that dates from Ramming Day. Not too bad.

My cat survived unscathed, although the bed we were both napping on was run over and obliterated. Midst the tumult and impending images of my own death, the most vivid memory is of Nameless the Cat, levitating to an impossible height from a sound sleep, all his pink toes visible and his eyes as wide as a lemur’s. Not a scratch on him afterwards. The only injury of note was … the young laborer whom the driver had stowed in the back of the moving van, in contravention of the laws of the state of Oregon and whatever common sense God gave a sack of doorknobs. This young man had a tiny cut on the pinky of his left hand. Had the truck wrecked any other way, he would have been killed. So, whew.

At the moment, I do not require a lot of proof that God exists, the universe is generally benign, and guardian angels work overtime. Been there, got that.

Had this happened to anyone else, it might have been more than just a shrieking pain in the glutes, plus a chance to go after an insurance company for my villa in Capri. But for a chronicler of the human experience, or more simply put, this happy, blessed hack writer, it was … just sublime. At the moment, life is even better. Whoever made all this happen, thank you very much.

Photos by Roger Richardson

A few weeks ago, rummaging in an antique store, I found a booklet by Ed Robinson, titled How to Do Wonders With a Little Land. The sponsor was Rototiller; I've used Rototiller's inventions for the last forty years with great happiness.

The booklet covers all the bases. The balance of text and photographs eases the eye, with a splash of red on the front and back covers to catch it. This little booklet of mine looks like it has been read a hundred times, but there are no disrespectful dog-ears. (And it still does its magic: After reading it once, almost fifty years after publication, I find myself consumed by a desire to own a Rototiller — as soon as possible.)

The copyright date is 1954. At the time, I was three years old, living in a brownstone in Greenwich Village. Ed and his wife, Carolyn, had already taken the big jump and moved to rural Connecticut. But this booklet, and the simple, all-important book that it helped promote — The Have-More Plan, published by the MacMillan Co. and republished in the first issues of MOTHER EARTH NEWS — not only set the course of my life, but also put me on the path of my livelihood as a writer.

This February, MOTHER EARTH NEWS will celebrate its 40th anniversary. How time flies. In 1972, I discovered MOTHER EARTH NEWS at my favorite local bookstore, Grass Roots in Corvallis, Ore. There was a rack with all the back issues, including the first. I purchased every one. (And yes, I still have them.) Took them home, started with No. 1, and inhaled every word. It was like discovering a universe of limitless joy and independence, contained between the covers of a magazine.

It was like planting a seed. In 1980, I sold my first national article to MOTHER EARTH NEWS, about rebuilding a burned-out house. Since then, I’ve earned a living as a freelance, and have churned out many booklets such as the one Ed Robinson wrote. I doubt my booklets have changed any lives. But his began to change my life, for the unimaginably better, when I was still knee-high. Thank you, Ed Robinson.

At the end of this summer, a dear friend of mine climbed up on his roof to clean the gutters. This guy is like a brother to me, not just a neighbor but a pal I’ve known for years, college-educated and smart as a whip … except he climbed the ladder without a spotter. Well, why not? It was his house. What could possibly go wrong?

The other night at a community poker game, we had a talk about his injury — the one he had from falling off a ladder that was leaning against his own roof. The one that concussed him and inflicted a brain injury. He’s home now, on medication to stave off his narcoleptic attacks. He has no recollection of anything but setting up the ladder and beginning to climb; the rest of it, cleaning out the gutters and beginning the descent, that’s all erased. He leaned the ladder against the eaves, and then woke up in the hospital.

I don’t give a tiny pinch of raccoon scat about numbers, counting, computation or calculation involving adding, subtracting, multiplying or division, how the heck should I know how many articles I’ve written over the years on ladder safety? Dozens, at least. Wonder if any of them have persuaded even one reader to use basic common sense around ladders …

My friend cannot recall if he was wearing sandals on that day, but I’d place a healthy bet that his favorite Birkenstocks were on his big, wide, flat Danish feet when he climbed a ladder. He also favors those rubber thongs for outdoor work, because they go well with shorts. As for myself, I won’t even touch one rung of a ladder unless I’m wearing steel-toed boots, leather gloves, and long muslin workpants, preferably Filson’s. And climbing a ladder alone is out of the question, because I won’t do it. Except at gunpoint, which means I’m not alone, and therefore, if I fall, someone can call the ambulance. Or else shoot me and put me out of my misery. Don’t want to scare you, dear reader, but ladder accidents are not always instantly fatal.

BE CAREFUL WITH LADDERS. There’s something called “the Cassandra Syndrome,” meaning the handy foreknowledge of future events, weirdly coupled with the torment of being unable to change them. When I write these words, over and over, that’s how it feels.

If you have an unfinished basement, a garage or a storage shed, you can store much more in it if you have shelves. Built-in shelves are great, but if you’re renting or want the flexibility to rearrange the shelving units, you might want to make some free-standing shelves. Here’s a simple method for building some inexpensive storage shelves — and you can build them without power tools.

Materials to make two shelving units:

• 1 1/2-inch-thick sheet of plywood or oriented strand board (OSB). A full sheet is 4-feet-by-8-feet. Cost: about $7.50
• 16 8-foot 2-by-4s. Cost: $1.85 x 16 = $29.60
• 5 pounds of 3-inch deck screws. Cost: $28.24. You could probably find cheaper screws.

Process:

1) Cut the 4-foot-by-8-foot sheet of plywood or OSB into six pieces that are 4 feet by 16 inches. This requires five cuts. The lumberyard or building center might cut the plywood for you if you don’t have a power saw. Accounting for the width of the saw blade, these pieces will be slightly less than 16 inches wide.

2) Cut 12 pieces of 2-by-4 to 13 inches.

3) Cut six of the 2-by-4s in half. These will be slightly less than 48 inches.

4) Make six frames for the shelves. Put the 13-inch pieces between the ends of the 48-inch pieces and join each corner with two screws.

5) Attach the plywood pieces to the tops of the shelf frames with screws — two on each long side at least, more if you’d like. Note that the OSB will likely have a smooth side and a rough side. Keep this in mind as you attach it to the frames. Either side will work — this is only personal preference.

6) Attach an 8-foot 2-by-4 to each corner of the shelves, three shelves per unit. Use two or three screws per joint. You can pick a height for each shelf that works for you. Try to keep the shelves as level as possible.

7) Set the shelves in place.

Tips:

• For safety, attach at least one corner leg to a ceiling joist or something secure to stabilize the unit.
• If the shelving units aren’t perfectly level, you can use shims to level them — or use the method for leveling a table from Build Your Own Table (scroll down to “Make Your Table Stable”).
• The legs can be shorter than 8 feet. You might want to trim these to fit your space. I cut 13 inches from each and used those pieces for the frames, so I had longer leftover pieces.

Bicycle riding is popular all over the country in rural, suburban and urban settings. More and more cities are recognizing the need for bike lanes and special bike paths to accommodate the growing number of cyclists.

But on occasion, there is not a safe place to ride in your community or you would like to take your bikes on the road, so to speak. In which case, you may have need of a bike rack to transport your cycle. Sure, you can buy a ready-made rooftop bike carrier, but why not save a little dough and fabricate one yourself? A bicycle is a sustainable mode of transportation and making your own bike rack from scrap material is just part of a sustainable lifestyle.