Chapter 35

Ever since Eleanor had suggested it six years ago, Nicholas had spent considerable time thinking and making notes about craftsmanship. He wanted to show that moment when mastery and flow melded so well that the work became an end in itself. He wanted to write something that would capture the meditative quality of skilled work. He also wanted to write a “journey story”, something reminiscent of Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.

The gamekeeper’s cottage he rented from the Earl, a cozy weathered stone cottage which had become his anchor in England, was the perfect place to begin putting pen to paper.

The cottage itself embodied the craftsmanship. Built by hands that understood stone and mortar, it had weathered the elements for three centuries, with the kind of quiet dignity that only comes from work done properly the first time. Here, surrounded by the tangible evidence of skilled labor, Nicholas could balance his writing with the boathouse project that kept his own hands busy during the day and his mind sharp for the writing. The rhythm of physical work and intellectual pursuit felt natural in this setting, each promoting the other.

A month after the tree house project, Nicholas had set out on a craft pilgrimage through England, Scotland and Wales. Everytown and village he visited, he sought out the practitioners of ancient crafts that were still practiced with the same dedication their ancestors had brought to the work. In Yorkshire, for example, he spent several days with a crew of dry stone wallers, watching as they handpicked each stone, testing its weight and shape before fitting it into place. The fallen fence they were repairing had stood for over two hundred years before succumbing to time and temperature, and now these craftsmen were rebuilding it with the same techniques, the same patient attention to detail their great, great grandfathers had used to build it the first time. They wanted to build it to stand for another two centuries.

In Gloucestershire, he watched thatchers laying a new roof on a cottage that predated the American Revolution. The rhythm of their work—the careful selection of reed, the precise layering, the way they moved across the steep pitch with the confidence of those who had apprenticed for years before being trusted with such responsibility — spoke to something deeper than mere technique. It was a conversation between individual skill and collective memory.

Another was his visit with a grandmother and granddaughter in Honiton, who were tatting lace and making bobbin lace the old way. The grandmother, an engaging woman with sparkling mischievous eyes, had learned it from her grandmother and now she was passing it on in turn. Nicholas spent two hours with them, listening to the grandmother’s stories while watching the pair’s fingers move with the fluid precision of someone who had been practicing the craft for decades. Her workspace was modest, almost sparse, but the lace she created was intricate beyond imagination, each piece a testament to patience and perfectionism that seemed anachronistic in a world obsessed with speed and efficiency.

His favorite was at High Wycombe, where he spent time watching a custom chair maker named John Lambert. He built winsor chairs one by one with plane and lathe, steam bending beechwood and oak into elegant dining chairs as his father and grandfathers had done before him.