And here am I, a lone lorn Englishman, tumbled out of the known world of the British Empire on to this stage: for it persists in seeming like a stage to me, and not like the proper world.
D.H. Lawrence, from Lorenzo in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan
The first bit of wood I acquired after moving here—aside from a load of furring strips, which must always be stocked—was a slab of blue spruce that was given to me. I had abandoned my desk before moving, after learning that the story of its origin was my own misremembered invention and it had much weight but no value. Strange enough it was, also, that the blue spruce among all trees is especially my friend.
At first I planned to make the whole desk out of blue spruce, but didn’t want to use milled lumber for the legs. It is surprisingly hard to find thin logs of blue spruce ready to go, and while it can be done, in the course of that search I remembered that where I used to live in Taos, the yards are commonly fenced with latillas which I remembered to be largely spruce.
After some searching and a day’s travel, I acquired some dried and debarked latillas of Engelmann spruce. Now, these fences may start out straight, but they rarely end up that way, and I thought I might mimic such a crooked fence with the legs. To do this, I cut the legs of equal length and used a hole saw to cut tenons, then roughly cut out the tenons so that they would be unlikely to sit flat. I drilled corresponding mortises in the desk at a slightly larger size so that the legs would be able to lie flat wherever they felt like it. To make the whole desk sit evenly upon the floor, I inserted a dowel into the bottom of each leg and sanded them until the level was happy.
Truthfully, they did not turn out quite as crooked as I had hoped:
And I had not fully extended the concept. So I brought it back into the shop and added more latillas, which you can see in the final result. Being my desk, it is simple, taller than most desks because I want it that way, and with no drawers because I dislike drawers on desks. I can now work upon a surface of the blue spruce which signifies this region, and which rests upon these latillas stretching to the past, to borrow for my work some of Lawrence’s ‘stage’—for to stick one’s roots in northern New Mexico is to draw to every leaf the sense that this is all a novel which we must live.
Blue spruce is not sought after for its appearance, though I hope you will agree from this example that it should be.