Steffan Hruby
The Forge
“He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.“
-St. Francis of Assisi
My great-grandfather was a blacksmith. He was a gruff, first-generation Czech, born in 1903. As soon as I entered his shop, he removed his own sweat-hardened gloves and told me to put them on. I did and felt the shell of his closed fist in the leather and the thinned patches where the padded parts of his fingers would be. I was only nine-years-old.
“This is a ploughshare,” he said. “We’re going to make it sharp again.” It was a heavy, rectangular blade with a wedge tip set at an angle, but the edge was battered and bent from hitting rocks in the ground.
He handed me a pair of flat-beaked tongs and I clamped down on the blade using both hands, thrusting it into the coals. Small flames burst up and made my face hot. I dug the blade deeper, and when the coals rubbed together, they sounded like the muffled echo of rounded stones as they bump and roll in a shallow stream.
Once the ploughshare turned red, my great-grandfather took the tongs from my hands, carried it to the battered anvil, and slowly drew out the blade with his hammer. When the metal cooled, he thrust it into the forge again.
He handed me the tongues and said, “Pull it from the coals.” I pulled it from the coals. “Take this.” I took the hammer. “Now do what I did.”
I looked at him in disbelief and saw he was smiling. Taking a deep breath, heat filling my lungs, I ordered the hammer down as the shock of metal on metal made the heavy tool jerk and twist in my hand. I never dropped it, but I heard his easy laughter as it jolted away from me again and again. He stepped close behind me with his leather apron pressed to my back, and I could smell the baked sweat in his clothing. Then, he put his strong bare hands over my gloved ones, raised my arm and struck down as I watched the blade slowly return to its original shape.
My great-grandfather repeated this process I don’t remember how many times, mostly using a Little Giant trip hammer—a joint-saving, ear-shattering, stationary power-hammer. But he finished the edge by hand until it became a clean, sharp line. Then he pointed at an industrial sink and told me to dunk it. Often he’d use grunts and gestures instead of words, gently nudging and pulling me around the room or simply taking possession of my limbs. I carried the plow blade with the tongs, my arms shaking from the strain, and dropped it into the sink. The water spat, briefly boiled and steamed.
*
The north wall of Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry mural is all power—fire, boiling metal, and steel; strong arms and machines. Some men lean into their work as others pull in unison. They pour, rivet, hammer, and press. Each wears distinctive clothing that represents a different nation—Cuba, Poland, the US—in many colors. The multiracial group is unified by labor and progress, both Communist and Capitalist. But farther back in the mural, their clothing fades to blue and beige and they seem to become one race: machine. It becomes difficult to distinguish between the men and the factory itself. The workers part down the middle and angle outward, leaning into the milling machines, as if the main floor were a V8 engine block. There are other rooms higher up, one with workers performing some repetitive task in an eerie, cold light; in another, they are pouring molten steel, faces reflecting the red glow. And at the top of the panel, someone with a long pole stands before a blast furnace, flames curling like huge waves. It’s as if a piece of the sun had landed in Detroit and Henry Ford built a factory around it.
As I stood before this mural, I felt torn between a bourgeois sentimentality for labor and visceral recognition, between an appreciation for art and the memory of burning shoulders. I’ve had plenty of hard jobs from digging ditches to building conference tables made of solid wood, but there’s something special about iron, and I knew a little about that too. My grandfather was a tractor mechanic and my great-grandfather, of course, was a blacksmith.
I also thought about Robert Bly’s ideas on the Industrial Revolution. During the early 1980s, my father joined Bly’s men’s movement and remained a member for over twenty years. Bly felt that men lost their way during the Industrial Revolution because fathers no longer taught their sons how to be farmers, wheelwrights, and stonemasons. They left the fields to work in textile mills and factories, to stand assembling or drilling—the same unchanging task. They became disconnected from their families and especially their sons, who had traditionally worked with their fathers learning a trade, a practiced skill, often based on labor. It’s here that fathers taught their sons “how to be men” in the best sense, through nurturing commitment and adult wisdom, allowing boys access to what Bly called “the deep masculine,” something he viewed as an antidote to patriarchy.
Intellectually, I find this pre-industrial idea—at least in the broad sociological sense—a little too nostalgic for a masculinity that probably never was. At the same time, there’s something in this idea that feels honest to me, especially regarding the bond created through the teaching of a craft. Learning a difficult skill makes us vulnerable to our weaknesses, demands introspection and self-discipline, creates a willingness to fail and trust and grow—or at least it should—all of which foster stronger relationships. And whether we choose to attach loftier ideas of gender, religion, or culture to such an experience seems irrelevant to me. What matters is the craft and the relationship. Sometimes it’s between fathers and sons, and sometimes not.
Ironically, my own father rejected this life despite his belief system. My grandfather owned the John Deere implement that housed my great-grandfather’s blacksmith shop and the two worked side-by-side for nearly fifty years. Both expected my father to take over the family business after graduating high school, but my father chose college and then medical school.
He does, however, work with his hands. As a doctor of osteopathy, my father manipulates bones, fascia, and tendons with his hands to relieve pain and injury: whiplashed necks, judo shoulders and violin wrists. And while he would never admit it, he’s a master of his craft. He loves his work, finds it endlessly fascinating and is always improving his skills through reading, conferences and bodywork groups. I’ve met people in the New Age community who think he’s a magician—perfect strangers who told me there’s this guy named Dr. Richard Hruby who can heal you with his voice. My father hates that shit. It’s craft; technique.
I was thirteen the first time my father taught me osteopathy. My grandmother had developed emphysema after a bad chest cold and whenever she coughed, loose phlegm flopped around her chest like a frantic minnow cupped between two hands. She was lying down surrounded by pictures of our family, angel figurines, and a portrait of Saint Anthony, her favorite saint.
“Just slide your hands under her back,” my father said. I was on my knees next to the bed and felt a slow “rug burn” on my knuckles as I slid them into place. “That’s it. Now we’re going to separate her ribs, give them a little more elasticity and allow her lungs to breathe.” My grandmother wasn’t the cuddly type (or maybe that was me) and the intimacy felt strange.
“Good. Now gently dig your fingers between her ribs,” he said.
My grandmother coughed. “That’s the spot,” she said.
“Now this is a little hard to explain,” my father said, “but I want you to sink your awareness between her ribs and listen with your hands.”
“What?” I asked.
My father laughed. “Imagine your fingers…Hold on.”
He sidled up next to me and slid his long hands beneath mine the way my mother used to place her hands over mine at the piano, pressing down on my fingers.
“Listen with your hands,” he repeated.
My fingertips seemed to heat up, to sink into my grandmother’s back like hot pokers into ice.
“That’s it! Now take her rib where it wants to go.”
I became confused.
“Does it want to twist?” he asked.
I dug around a little and my grandmother exhaled, slow, and raspy. “It wants to separate more,” I said.
“Good, you’ve got it!” I heard his lips peel back over his teeth in a smile and my brain seemed to concuss with pride.
That evening my grandmother said she felt better and I briefly, for like one day, considered following my father into osteopathy. I liked taking part in my father’s work, the job that consumed so much of his time. But his work was too subtle for me. It wasn’t “move your hand to the left” so much as “think about moving your hand to the left.” I wanted a physical life like my great-grandfather. That was real work, I decided. My grandfather, though a capable mechanic and trained blacksmith, was more of a businessperson, and I didn’t want that either. I wanted to test my strength, to build and to lift.
And most of the work I’ve done over the last two decades has been physical. I installed irrigation systems, taught martial arts and gym class. I was even a bouncer for five years, wresting drunk and furious people out the door. And during my thirties, until my boss sold his business, I built sustainable furniture from naturally-sourced, exotic wood—monkey pod, ceiba, black walnut, even redwood taken from old bridges.
I’m not sure why traditions of work are so important to me. Sometimes I think it’s because I feel so disconnected from my extended family in every other way. We have very little in common. I grew up in a city; they grew up in small towns. I’m a liberal and, strangest to my family, a vegetarian. And where my father turned away from the farming trade to become a doctor, I turned away from medicine to become a martial artist and writer. But, in the case of my great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and me, our mutual dedication to craft came through creating a feeling of connection that, for me, is much more important than a shared last name. It’s like I got my 23andMe results and they came back “blacksmith or something.”
*
Each summer while I was growing up, my father joined Robert Bly and a large group at a YMCA summer camp where they would streak naked through the woods; hold Native American sweat lodges and drum circles; read myths and fairytales that illustrated the archetypal roles of men; and gather in a field of tall, golden grass, form a circle and manifest their power animals—spinning monkeys, crows, eagles, and loping bears, maybe a coyote or a snake, hissing. Hissing and growling for men, for the “deep masculine” and the pre-industrial male—for coopers, cobblers, and blacksmiths.
My father was completely swept up in the movement, while I was at the edges looking in. I didn’t see much of my father growing up, since he was always working or travelling, but when we did hang out, we’d usually build something or share an activity inspired by Robert Bly. Bly’s ideas about life, poetry, and indigenous traditions percolated through my childhood like a religion.
When I was eleven my father wanted to build a big drum, so we drove from Minneapolis to the St. Croix River valley to buy a sixty-gallon wine barrel from a local winery. The next weekend his friend Will came over to help. Will was about 6’4, loose-limbed and charismatic. He had long, wavy hair and usually wore baggy pants, Redwing boots, and some kind of old-style hat—Cordova, Stetson, Indiana Jones.
We set the wine barrel in the center of the garage and gathered our tools. I loved building things with my father, to be included in his life. And it was always something weird—a drum, a hammer dulcimer, a kitchen shelf for his dried apricots and beans. To begin, we cut the barrel in half, around the belly, like a Russian nesting doll. Will and I each hugged one end, while my father cut with his handsaw. The big cask wanted to teeter and roll. I’d swept the basement clean, but street grit ground and popped between the barrel and the floor. Sawdust got into my nose and stung the back of my throat. “Hold on,” I said, sneezing.
After the cutting was finished, we fitted a donut-shaped piece of oak into the chosen half. “Take this,” my father said. I took the screwdriver. “Now screw it into place.” A little thrill ponged around my chest. The first screw.
I dug my hand into the box of black screws. I’ve always loved that sound, the muted clink of metal-on-metal; the muffled, echo scrape of metal-on-cardboard. After marking the spot, I lined up the screw and drove. The wood made cracking sounds with each turn as bits of wood pulp fell to the floor.
“Breathe,” my father said. “That’s it. Keep it going straight.”
Will was sitting on a bucket, nodding and smiling. He seemed to enjoy the tableaux—father guiding son in the work of a craftsperson. It was everything the men’s movement stood for and what better expression of father-son bonding than building a drum, that sacred instrument of generations. I could almost feel Robert Bly in the room with us, like we’d saved him a bucket.
By the third or fourth screw my hand began to cramp and my forearm burned. I felt ashamed, like I’d failed a test. Why were my arms so weak? Eventually my turns slowed, shortened and stopped. My forearm turned, the screw didn’t—a wheel buried in mud.
“Let me do a couple,” Will said, holding out his hand then playfully shoving me aside. Will and my father were nothing alike. Will was big, outgoing, and full of jokes where my father was slight, quiet, and feisty. Wrestling with my father was like fighting a monkey—all hands, elbows, bones and quickness. He had shaggy brown hair, a patchy beard, and blue eyes.
Once we finished screwing each stave into place, we clipped the steel bands holding the barrel together. They popped off with a twang and skittered across the floor.
After my father retrieved the cowhide that had been soaking in the bathtub upstairs, I unfolded a ratty green towel and spread it over the workbench. He laid down the cowhide and then another towel over that before Will snatched it away and snapped me in the chest. I ran around the room, looking for something to throw at him. “Are you circumcised yet?” he asked. “Because if you aren’t, you will be after today!”
“Too slow,” I taunted. I dodged, cut left and right, until he had me cornered and the best I could do was face the wall as he snapped the backs of my legs. Will was the older brother I never had. He was a veterinarian and I wanted to be just like Will, so I would trail him at work sometimes, watching and listening, sweeping up dog hair, and wiping down exam tables. It seems I’ve been looking for teachers my whole life. Or maybe the right vocation.
“All right, all right. Enough already,” my father growled. Will and I stretched the hide across the barrel, while my father nailed it down with strong bronze tacks in two alternating rows and then I hammered in the third row. I felt like one of the men. I felt like a builder of things. And the next day, after the leather dried, the drum made a low, sonorous bong.
*
In Iron John: A Book About Men, Bly writes, “In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building an emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.” In part, I think this experience is what Bly was trying to capture in the men’s movement, a kind of male, non-sexual body-ecstasy, both physical and spiritual, which was often expressed through drumming and Native American rituals.
Bly’s rituals have become one of the most difficult things for me to understand about the men’s movement. Putting aside the cultural appropriation issues, which were legion, and keeping in mind that Bly was born in 1926, there was clearly something about Native American ceremonies and traditions that appealed to him. I imagine he wanted to give the group something unique, and since most Minnesotans are familiar with at least a few Ojibwe traditions, it made sense from that viewpoint. I suppose he could have chosen a Norwegian ceremony (Bly’s ancestral heritage), but what the hell would a Viking ritual look like? It probably would have involved axes, mead and entering berserkergang; maybe a death match or a few animal sacrifices?
And, trust me, nobody goes to Camp Robert Bly for more Christianity. Besides, Christian rituals, unless they involve snakes or exorcisms, are pretty dull. Would you rather listen to organ music or play the drum; kneel or dance; congregate in a church or around a bond-fire? Christian rituals tend to be cerebral and modest, where Native American rituals are visceral and alive—sweat lodges and chanting and the sound of a hundred men drumming, like floating on thunder. It’s pounding, drumming, stomping. It’s like lighting your bones on fire.
The real question—at least for this discussion—is why “borrow” these rituals and traditions at all? Why have rituals, period?
When I was twelve-years-old, my father and I made Native American prayer sticks. We cut a limb from a fallen ash tree, sectioned off two eighteen-inch pieces, and sharpened one end with a folding knife. Then we tied on five or six personal, totemic objects with strips of red cloth. Mine included three Chinese coins with square holes in the center, a blue-jay feather, a crow feather, and a polished tiger’s eye stone. I planted mine next to a small grove of silver maple and northern pin oak, where a quiet stream farther down was just visible through the trees. I said a few words and pounded the prayer stick into the ground with a rock, which left sharp, red impressions in my palm and jangled my nerves to the elbow.
I remember feeling moved by this experience, like I’d achieved a rite of passage. My chest swelled so big it ached and the world became sharper somehow, distinct—I noticed individual pine needles and heard the tall grass whip against my calves as I walked back to the road. I told myself I’d stop being so sarcastic and whiny. I’d cut a bold figure at school and shine before Savita, my childhood crush. But by the next week I was employing sarcasm freely and the swelling in my chest returned to a familiar slump. The prayer stick ritual had become a hollow one. Without the cultural heritage, the history and the blood, I was just a kid hitting a stick with a rock.
Not that I’m a cultural purist. I don’t believe there’s a magical confluence between ethnicity and spiritual initiation, but I do think rituals need deep context, just as mastery needs discipline. It was work, not vision quests; blistered hands, not keeping a dream journal that initiated my great-grandfather into the world of adulthood.
Perhaps Bly’s rituals were simply designed to achieve group bonding, in which case they were highly effective. But I’ve since come to believe these ceremonies were genuine attempts at lasting personal transformation, and it wasn’t until I started thinking about craft and apprenticeships that I realized the rituals in the men’s movement were gestures, even shortcuts to the sacred.
But there are no shortcuts to the sacred. Bly knew this. As an accomplished poet, of course, he knew this. There are no shortcuts to mastery either. In Iron John, when Bly talks about “an emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy,” he isn’t describing an unskilled laborer; he’s describing an artist.
*
On 4th of July a few years back, I took a blacksmithing class in Columbus, Ohio. I wanted to remind myself of the heat and the sounds, what it felt like to work my shoulders again. The instructor, Adlai Stein, had been blacksmithing for nearly thirty years and made a living by doing custom work: ornamental hooks, kitchen knives, iron chandeliers and the occasional sword. He even appeared on an episode of Forged in Fire, a reality show on the History Channel, but was eliminated in the first round.
Adlai was a rough-talking man with a thick beard, craggy forehead and heavy shoulders. “We only have two rules,” he told us. “Assume everything metal is eight-hundred-degrees Fahrenheit and if you’re going to handle a piece of iron that’s been in the forge, I don’t care if you dunk it in one of these pales or piss on it, you’ve got to cool it down.”
The class was held in an open garage, like a car shop, and had two propane forges that burned at around 1400 degrees. The heat index broke one hundred that day and there were periodic downpours outside the bay doors. The class included six students and the project was for each of us to make a twist-handled knife out of a railroad spike.
I stuck mine in the forge using a pair of box jaw tongs. When the iron began to glow bright red, it seemed like the spike, not the forge, was the source of heat in the room. I carried it to the anvil and began to draw out the blade. It felt good at first strike, the clang of metal-on-metal, the slow transformation as the iron stretched and flattened. I thought it would be louder, remembered it being louder.
In this moment I also thought of my great-grandfather, the time he guided my hammering arm. The idea of family has never been that important to me—they’re just people I know and love. But we are social animals, and whether we find connection through family, cultural identity, religion, or fucking Twitter, most of us seek some kind of human contact. Even the most reclusive artists eventually want to share their work with the world, want to feel understood. Perhaps the practice of passing down a skill like blacksmithing was something born of necessity—the need for food, protection, community—but through necessity we created traditions, and through traditions we created associations of meaning and connection. I may not identify strongly as an American, a Minnesotan, or even a Hruby—but I did feel a family connection at the forge.
“Stay in tight and use your shoulders,” Adlai told us. “Let the hammer do the work.”
I took my time and drew the blade out slowly. A drop of sweat fell from my nose and sizzled on the anvil. An occasional flake of hot scale would land on my bare hand and slowly cool.
Back to the forge a dozen times.
The heat was so intense that my bones seemed to ripple and bend. I felt like a blue hydrangea in the too-hot sun, my curly, mop-ball of a head wanting to touch the floor. I don’t know how my great-grandfather did it. He worked seven days a week at the forge, twelve hours a day for nearly seventy years, shoeing horses, fixing wagon wheels, mending ploughshare and tractor parts. At least he lived in Minnesota. Blacksmithing, according to some sources, began in Egypt around 1350 BCE—I can’t imagine working a forge in that kind of heat.
“Alright,” Adlai said. “Let’s work on the handle.” I stuck the other end into the forge and heated it until nearly white. Grabbing a pair of wolf tongs, I pulled the knife out and locked it into a stationary vice, tip down. Adlai clamped a short bar to the handle so they were perpendicular to each other and I turned the bar like a horizontal wheel. Then it was back into the forge until the entire piece glowed red.
“Ok, dunk it,” Adlai said. Gripping the knife with the tongs, I dunked it into a pale of grey water and swirled it around as it spat and steamed. It was cool to the touch, from eight-hundred-degrees to room temperature, in just over a minute. Then I sniffed at it. I love the smell of metal, whether hot out of the forge or ground on a wet-stone; I love iron-rich well water, the earthy, blood-scented tang of it. I even like the smell of skin-greased coins and stainless steel pens, perfumed with a trace of ink. Like snow, metal always smells clean to me.
Once the knife cooled, I took it to the belt sander to shape the blade. I stayed late polishing and sharpening, trying to get the curve just right. I’d spent the last two years in graduate school growing flabby, only using my head and my voice, sitting in my chair while my head floats in cyberspace, fingers plunking on my keyboard. It feels good really working with my hands again, I thought to myself before inwardly cringing, my mind leaping to Diego Rivera and bearded hipsters. But then I pushed all of that aside and focused on the work. I ground and shaped and polished until Adlai began locking doors.
*
A meaningful life, at least for me, comes mostly through a sense of improvement, through the daily attention to craft, through seeking the ever unattainable and impossible-to-define experience of mastery. My father is similar, I think, though I’m not sure he’d agree. He places a greater emphasis on spirituality and friendship; ironically, I’m far more social than he has ever been and feel loneliness more keenly.
For most of my adult life, my focus was martial arts. I’ve spent thousands of hours learning and practicing techniques, drilling, sparring, grappling and perfecting. I wrote the occasional essay and read, but it wasn’t until I tore my rotator cuff five years ago that I began seriously writing again. I’ve had to learn new work habits and sensibilities—how to recognize the slow bloom of metaphor, how to sit still and think.
I believe I’d be a better writer if the act of writing, the actual physicality of it, made me sweat. I do feel a slight quickening of the heart when putting down a solid metaphor, but it’s not like sparring or a rigorous stick workout. It’s not like hammering ploughshares or railroad spikes. I want to feel the bulging of my arm muscles, the heaving of my lungs. I also want a teacher, a master, who can take possession of my limbs and show me how it’s done—like my great-grandfather did, like my father and my martial arts instructors.
Although I never joined the men’s movement, there’s something about the pre-industrial that’s clearly taken hold. And I’d like to believe my experience at the forge influenced how I understand craft and artistic process—how I hammer a thought into shape; hone a clean, sharp line; fold ideas and images into each other; heat up and cool down my perceptions; and sometimes melt it all down and start over.
I’d also like to believe my devotion to craft has been passed down from generation to generation—blacksmith, mechanic, osteopath, writer. But I’m not sure I’m willing to call myself a writer, because, as Samuel Johnson wrote, “Those who attain any excellence commonly spend life in one pursuit; for excellence, is not often granted upon easier terms.” These words have haunted me for years.
It’s an uncomfortable feeling taking up an art again so late in life and I’m afraid I won’t live up to my father’s level of dedication. And to Robert Bly’s, for that matter. When I was practicing martial arts I rarely felt that way. I was, at least amongst my small band of eccentric sword-swingers, respected. I put in the work. Now I’m starting all over again. Most days I feel like a third-level apprentice still shoveling coal and changing slag water—at forty-two. That might be a good thing, but it’s also a little humiliating or maybe a lot.
Maybe that’s why I find myself taking shortcuts, to catch up more quickly. I’ve re-used my best descriptions; pandered; deflected with humor; placed style over truth. And if what Auden says is true, that “Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings,” I’ve taken shortcuts there as well. I’ve simplified mixed feelings and concealed unclear thinking. In white space. In lists. In abrupt transitions that I prefer to call thought provoking.
*
My great-grandfather was one of the last traditional blacksmiths in Minnesota. He became an apprentice in 1918 then struck out on his own a number of years later in Montgomery, a small town in the prairie lands, all bounding fields, lakes and oak trees. His shop was at the very end of Main Street, and when my father looked out his bedroom window, he could see my great-grandfather at the anvil, hear the clang-clang-clang of his hammer, the jagged metronome of his childhood. I looked out the same window and heard the same clanging on the morning of the day I worked with my great-grandfather. I also saw the linden tree my great-grandfather planted when he was still a young man. And it’s still there; I saw it last week.
After finishing the ploughshare, he put me to work sweeping and picking up scraps of metal as he cut, bent, drilled and hammered for the remainder of the afternoon. I swept under tables and around all the stationary tools. The shop was covered in coal dust, dirt from the gravel road, and flakes of oxidized iron scale. Once I’d gathered everything into piles, I knelt down and sifted through each pile for salvageable iron.
When the farmer whose ploughshare we’d sharpened stopped by, my great-grandfather told me to fetch it from the bin. The scruff-faced man, wearing a green John Deere hat and overalls, smiled as I handed it over.
“My great-grandson did this one. What do you think?”
“Looks like you have another blacksmith in the family” the man said.
I knew he was playing along, but it felt good anyway. Throughout the afternoon farmers came in to pick up or drop off different farm tools. From each of these men, we learned the news of their wives and children, their work, their lives.
I took home a piece of blacksmith’s coal from my great-grandfather’s shop that day. It’s on my desk now, like compressed fire.
Steffan Hruby’s essays and fiction appear in The Antioch Review, Southwest Review, Massachusetts Review, Boulevard and Hotel Amerika. His work received a Notable Essay citation in Best American Essays 2015.