The Hatchet Story

When we were younger my sister, my mother, and I would travel together. My father never traveled with us. We would go camping as a family of three. My mother was a very brave woman. I can see this clearly now as I look back on these memories as an adult. She was 42 years old when we took our first camping trip to upper Michigan in a tent she’d never set up before. My mother’s friends all thought she was crazy to go into the woods alone with two young children; one nine years old and the other only three years old. But she had good provisions for the trip. Prior to this trip my father had acquired a small tent by using a number of “coupons” from the Chesterfield cigarette company to “buy” the tent. He was an avid smoker.


I remember him smoking in the house for years and from each pack collecting one little green coupon and saving it in a drawer full of other coupons. The tent he had bought had always remained unused until just before our departure when we tried to set it up in the yard before embarking on our camping trip. We never succeeded at properly setting it up before the trip and would need to enlist the assistance of fellow campers when it was necessary to sleep in the tent. The small tent was called a three-person tent, but it was misnamed. It was a cramped space; perhaps only large enough to kennel a Pomeranian. It was two-toned; yellow and rust colored with nylon ropes attached to small plastic yellow tent stakes that bent a little bit when I’d try to hammer them into the hard ground with the back of my hatchet. I realize now that when my father gave me the small hatchet of his to borrow it was really a parting gift because when we would return from the camping trip he would be completely moved out and my parent’s divorce would be final.

It was on this and subsequent camping trips during my childhood summers that I further developed my interest in the natural world. The three of us would rent canoes and paddle down strange rivers in upper Michigan. I never learned any outdoor skills from the cub scouts – I learned it all from my mother. Furthermore, I learned a sort of ambitiousness and fearless naiveté from her. She would announce that we were going canoeing so I had better figure out how to paddle and steer the canoe. We needed to build fires so I took on fire building. We needed to cook dinner over the fire and we figured this out too. It was a wonderful time. She loved the water and we always found ourselves near a lake, a river, and most often somewhere on the shore of the Great Lake Michigan. So many areas we visited had miles and miles of unpopulated shoreline, and since we could not see any distant shore it felt like we were at the edge of an inland ocean. The three of us would spend all day at the beaches walking and walking and walking. We’d choose a direction and just take off. Stopping only to collect things from the beach and put them into plastic bags and into my mother’s trusty little collapsible backpack. It was the kind that you could stuff into a little sac no bigger than an avocado. It was then there my propensity for collecting was fostered.

I am still a collector and I express this through my sculptural work. I use bones, shells, rocks, sand and other things that I collect to create sculptures and assemblages on canvas.