The Good Part

I think I may have died and gone to heaven.
The other night I spent a wonderful hour tuning up my brother's big jack plane, getting all the rust and crud off it, not much really, and then putting it through the whole kosher three-stones-and-two-strop sharpening cycle. I was aware, for that hour, that I was as fully engaged in the love of pure life experience as I have ever been in my long strange life.
This afternoon I finished the fourth of the eight rip cuts on the mast blank. I  have learned a lot in these twenty-four feet of sawyer work, mostly how to pay attention and be honest with myself and check shit out with the instruments. I live too much of my life on autop[ilot and self-assurances that all is fine, a kind of magical thinking that I know without actually looking, whether or not I am operating correctly within acceptable parameters. Usually I am not, and the feeling of knowing has absolutely no correspondence with the facts.
So I now know how to make a twelve foot cut accurately with a handsaw, which is harder than it looks. The key is to check with the try-square whether the sawblade is at right angles with the face of the work, and  every foot or so to roll the work over and cut from the other side. You cut at an angle, so when you roll over you are then cutting into your kerf so the under side of the blade is now following the cut you made while looking at that line, and you guide the blade on the line on your now side and things don't wander off too far and hey this last slab isn't too bad at all.
And this is what we call a good time at my house.
Just now, in laying out the guidelines for sides 5 through 8 I had occasion to try and even up some of the more egregious wandermarks from the time long ago when I was still in denial about magical thinking and mystical knowledge and the cut kerf wandered around like, as Reggie GIlmartin used to say at Bandon Erection, like a snake on a rock.
I will tell you one thing: That fucking jack plane is sharp as shit. Sliced that old doug fir like greasy bacon, and one more thing, too.
This here old growth fir is beautiful stuff, rich and peach-red, grain so close together it looks like the edges of the pages of an old and well-written book.