The Ox - Portrait of a Master Woodworker

the engineer and designer who engineered the gold gate bridge engineered a bridge he knew full well could not be built but he had complete faith in the craftsman of the time to get the job done and we did i'm eric hollenbeck i own and operate blue ox millworks and community school in the redwood forest blue ox is a custom job shop we make architectural mill work for buildings all over the united states doors windows moldings turnings our newest machine in the whole place is 1948 same year i was born corner blocks i did 1200 of these by hand you want to see one done sure okay i still got it well if this tree is 1800 years old yeah rome would have been going okay i think i'm a wood person uh we're wood people up here we're using the same kind of equipment that the original guys used clear back when well when my grandfather's grandfather would have been doing this i liken it to a train going down the road well as the train's going down the track the train of society it's scooping up information scooping up scooping up scooping up scooping up as it goes down the track for some reason the train can only hold so much information i don't know why and the guy on the caboose he's throwing the information off as fast as he can to make room for new information coming on the front and the problem with that is that the information we're throwing off is the information it took us 25 000 years to glean we first had the idea of the school 25 years ago these are kids that would not otherwise be in school starting at the top is the public school system if you get kicked out of there you go to continuation high school if you get kicked out of that you go to locally here so barnum if you get kicked out of that the last rung of the ladder is called court-ordered community school and that's what these students are and they're great kids there isn't anything wrong with them they're just doers and not sitters every single time i see wood or something i'll just try to make something out of it let me see all right oh nice i fought my way through school so i i get these kids i get that when you can't fit in then you gotta look for some other way to fit in and that ain't always pleasant so at the shop they get to fit in they get to fit in just being themselves they get to fit in by making something quiet place huh even even with my ringing in the ears is quiet he makes the ringing in the ears go away i ran away from the monsters for 45 years and i ran a damn good race you know i used work i worked myself to the bone every day of the week seven days a week and i use beer drink a beer at night and then i'd fall into bed and everything would be fine now i've reached an age where the beer doesn't work and i can't work as quite as hard anymore and i am a veteran i'm a front-line infantry veteran um i was in some of the heaviest combat in vietnam at a month and a half into 19 years old i got two eric's going on all the time i've got a 65 year old eric and i have an 18 year old scared to death little kid you you take a spring and you bend the coil spring you can try and bend it back and you can get it close but you can never get that spring back to where it originally was and that's what happened to all of us we got bent i see now at 65 that that's what i did i built my own island i built my own island i don't i didn't have to get off of that's why we got a blacksmith shop that's why we got a machine shop that's why we got a sawmill and a molder building and a foundry and all the other things so that i don't got to go to the store i don't got to go to no place i just make whatever i got to make why don't you want to go because i don't fit it's not a that and me aren't a good fit in 45 years i have bent the spring back without snapping it as close to what it was as i can get it but it don't never come back when you make something when you go through the process all the steps and at the end you have a finished product that you made with your own hands out of your own mind that is your own design it's a reflection of your soul you can start with nothing and build your own company it's coming from somebody who did that i have tried to do something positive out of the experience and we were just contacted by the veterans administration and asked if we would start a school for returning vets i'm suddenly seeing that there was there was a rhyme and a reason for it it just wasn't the rhyme and reason i thought there was i'm at a point in my life and my craftsmanship now that i get that feeling when i see the young people but i tell you something they're going to take us places that i never even dreamed of in your filming every film that you ever make has got two stories what's the film about and then what's the film really about it's about the pride of making something it's about the pride of doing for yourself and i go back to the golden gate bridge story and the pride of those craftsmen that built something that everybody in the world knew full well could not be built at the end think think of what they must have thought when the first carriage ran over that thing what a hell of a deal in the whole world there's only two kinds of jobs there's a job you take a shower before you go to work in the morning and there's a job that you take a shower when you come home from work at night and the world needs both of us you

Channel: The Documentary Network

Views: 490,900

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Id: otgjdSa6ceA

Length: 9min 57sec (597 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 16 2013