A cemetery cedar, a carpenter and a song
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BY JOE DUGGAN/Lincoln Journal Star
PLEASANT DALE — The 71-year-old woodworker sits outside on an October afternoon, pushing the gouge into a piece of cedar older than him.
He holds the metal gouge lightly in fingers with knuckles that look like knotted rope. He scrapes with the rhythm of a musician, peeling curls of cedar that release a sharp, piney fragrance.
But Jim Lee can’t smell the wood. He can’t smell anything — doesn’t even have the memory of scent.
As bad as that might seem to someone enjoying a nose-full of cedar, the old woodworker doesn’t fret about it. Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t seem to worry about the things that worry most people. Or maybe it’s because he has another sense attuned to wood that others can scarcely imagine, let alone understand.
Jim Lee says he hears trees.
Sounds a bit strange, he knows. But if the Lincoln man cared what people thought, he wouldn’t have revealed his novel ability in the first place.
Trees talk to him, he says in a matter-of-fact way.
He doesn’t hear them with his ears, which are just marginally more useful than his sense of smell. Trees talk to him in a way that resonates inside, an unspoken, timeless language.
“I’ll see a piece of wood and it will grab me and I’ll go work on it,” he says, his voice vibrating a little, like a low string plucked on a guitar.
So he tells how a grand old cedar grabbed him three years ago.
It happened after a summer storm stirred a powerful wind over Wyuka Cemetery in Lincoln. Lee knew that wind would damage some of the oldest trees in Lincoln, so he drove his pickup down the cemetery paths the next day.
The old cedar told him when to turn, when to brake, when to look up.
There it leaned, gray and peeling, thicker than a telephone pole, battered by the wind, stripped of nearly all its branches, but still standing.
The cemetery groundskeeper told him it would have to be cut down and, yes, he could have it.
“I didn’t really need anything to do, but I feel an obligation to the trees,” he says. “It was a grand old tree and I didn’t want to see it in the dump.”
He returned the day they cut it down, delighted they used a crane to prevent the tree from slamming into the ground and breaking. He cut the cedar into four nine-foot sections and the crew loaded them into his pickup.
Before he left, he walked around and read the headstones the old cedar once shaded. Most of them marked the resting places of children, which made Lee wonder if they died from a common illness. All of the markers were about 100 years old.
Lee didn’t have the tree aged, but judging from its size and the grave markers, he’s confident the tree stood for about a century.
He unloaded the tree at his shop behind the Pleasant Dale Lumber and Oil Co., a small-town business owned by Wes Reil. For more than 20 years, Lee was foreman on Reil’s construction crew and, although Lee retired about five years ago, Reil still lets him keep the woodworking shop out of respect and friendship.
“He always wanted to do it right,” Reil says of his former foreman. “No shortcuts, you can believe that. Sometimes it cost me money, but in the end, the job always got done right.”
Over the years, Lee made Reil gifts out of salvaged trees — picture frames, a wine rack and a gun rack — all of them one-of-a-kind. Lee works with wood, allowing the natural bends, splits and so-called flaws to shape a piece. Instead of forcing the wood into an object, he sees an object in the wood and simply puts the pieces in place.
“There isn't anything I've got at home from him that anybody in the world has,” Reil says.
Some might call it folk art. Lee says it’s a vision, which is, of course, guided by the trees themselves.
So the four pieces of old cedar sat outside his shop and Lee waited for inspiration. Finally, he saw a guitar in one of the pieces.
He had made cedar guitars before, short-necked instruments of stunning beauty and an old-time plunky sound perfect for the roots country music that Lee admires. He’d donated them to the Ozark Folk Center in Mountain View, Ark., figuring he could go back to playing the Stella guitar he learned on.
He figured wrong.
So he made another guitar, almost entirely from hand tools, sandpaper and wood sealer. Since he doesn’t sell his instruments, he never tracks the time he spends on one, but he guesses it runs more than 150 hours.
“I keep working on it and the wood talks to me, telling me when I’m done,” he says. “I’m not a luthier, so I don’t have to worry about getting down to the millimeter. When it tells me I’m done, I’m done.”
When he finished the guitar, he started making a dulcimer. Although he does not play a dulcimer, he decided to put a pair of saddles on the bottom of the instrument so it would sit better on a player’s lap.
He also carved dove motifs in the top of the dulcimer. Dove inlays mark all of his other instruments, a symbol of the inner peace Lee says he feels, a peace he wishes for others.
He entered his cedar duclimer in the woodworking competition at the 2007 Nebraska State Fair. The instrument won first in its category and the artist’s guild award.
Now, on a warm October afternoon, he’s working on a second guitar from the cemetery cedar.
He takes a break to pick a tune on one of his finished guitars. He sings a song about the oldest living trees on earth, a Hugh Prestwood song called “Bristlecone Pine.”
He made a trip to Nevada once just to see one.
When he came back, he wrote his own verse to the song.
Trees talk to Jim Lee.
Sometimes he sings back to them.
Reach Joe Duggan at 473-7239 or jduggan@journalstar.com
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