Editor’s note: This is the third draft of the introduction to “The American Peasant.” It’s much closer to a polished piece of writing worth publishing. But it still has some rough spots (that joke about a “Fraiser” reboot won’t survive). Some sections will seem familiar. Some are completely new. The photos are some of my favorite sewer covers in Cincinnati.
This book started with a handful of slimy dirt in an old German farmhouse. The “dirt” was the roots of psilocybin mushrooms that I’d purchased legally in a store in the Netherlands a few hours earlier. It was my first time with any drug stronger than alcohol, so the friendly store clerk guided me to a strain that was good for first-timers. And she gave specific instructions.
Instructions: Don’t eat for four hours beforehand. Eat the mushrooms quickly. Wait for the nausea to pass. Eat something. Then wait….
The roots were bitter, nasty and tasted nothing like mushrooms. I gagged them down and – sure enough – I immediately wanted to throw up. This, I thought, was a dumb idea.
Instructions: Be in a safe place with friends. Go out into nature.
As the nausea faded I looked up at my friends Klaus and Rudy across the kitchen table. I ate a few potato chips and, probably with my mouth full, said: “Let’s go for a walk.”
We strolled along the low fields in almost complete darkness, and I soon felt a warm wave of euphoria wrap around me. Plus the tingling you get in your lower spine when you enter an old building illegally to check out its interior.
We were deep in the farm country of Germany, so we visited some cows. They were rightly suspicious of the three of us.
And… that was it. No hallucinations. No meeting the creator. No talking woodchucks with Zen koans.
A few hours later I drank a beer and went to sleep.
As we drove our rental van back to Munich the next day, the three of us began talking about the chairs we were planning to build when we got home. And, like someone sticking a palette knife between my brain lobes, an idea for a chair design came to me.
I was driving the van, so I couldn’t sketch it. So I began babbling about it in hopes I would remember its general outlines. Three legs, extra wide seat, plus a lot of details about the arms and sticks.
During the next hour on the highway, I also concocted a new finish recipe (which I continue to refine, is non-toxic and is quite promising). Then one of us said the word “peasant.”
Suddenly we were all chattering about starting a magazine called Modern Peasant with tips on decorating with dung and lord knows what else. And that’s when this book – “The American Peasant” – came into immediate focus.
I’ve long been obsessed with vernacular furniture forms and have spent a lot of time examining pieces in the U.S., the U.K. and Western Europe. But in 2015, Peter Follansbee introduced me to the work of Tamás Gyenes, a Hungarian woodworker who builds beautiful arks and coffers with an impossibly small kit of tools.
That led me to gather books on Eastern European folk furniture and to follow antique dealers who specialized in it, such as John Cornall. Through these doors I found a hoard of pieces that I wanted to build. And while the furniture forms were beautiful, it was their low-relief decorations that intoxicated me.
I am not much for whimsy or superfluous ornament. I appreciate it on pieces made by others, but I don’t have much interest in carving or veneering. I like stark, functional pieces.
But this low-relief carving was something else. It was composed entirely of straight lines and segments of a circle. Nothing more. A little reading turned up that these grooved patterns carry great meaning. They represent plowed fields, farmers, families and expansive ideas about life and death. They are a story. Or perhaps a spell… a wish for harmony, health or a long and lovely life.
While in fifth gear behind the wheel of a giant Volkswagen van on the Autobahn, everything you are about to read came into almost painful relief. A book of vernacular furniture forms. Adorned with spells from the past. Plus new ones for today.
The old spells are lovely:
The fishing net offers protection from disease and evil doing.
Plowed fields promise bounty.
Eternal love.
A reminder of time passing – so you don’t waste it.
Reminders of the people in our lives, especially our family.
What spells do we need? Here is a partial list:
Privacy.
Community – or a lack of isolation.
A ward against homogeneity.
Independence from the will of large corporations.
A connection to the natural world.
Physical labor.
To avoid being prey or predator.
A ward against ugliness in everyday life.
So when I made a wedding coffer for my older daughter in 2023, I added engravings to help remember what’s important in life: put down the screen, walk outside, use your body on occasion, find others who like you.
The coffer for my younger daughter will have different spells.
Perhaps this is what the mushrooms were whispering to me the night before. Or perhaps they were the jumper cables between two brain cells that caused a cascade of ideas to shower through my brainpan.
This intense and creative period lasted a few weeks then began to fade. I returned to home and my daily routine. But I kept a careful list of all the ideas that took root after that evening on the farm in Germany.
To be clear, I’m not an evangelist for drugs – what you put in your body has nothing to do with me. But I am fascinated by the idea that naturally grown mushrooms and I have so much in common – we both need dead trees to thrive.
We’d just never talked about it until recently.
For the Peasants
So let’s talk about the word “peasant.” You might think that it’s a loaded, political word. Perhaps derogatory. Nope. Peasants are just the rest of us. People who don’t own land or factories or social media sites. They just work there.
And despite the lack of a clear path to anything better, they survive and thrive. And they have their own particular way of living that is not like the lords or viscounts or CEOs of tech companies.
Whether you accept the word “peasant” or not, it’s impossible to deny the growing inequality between rich and poor in this country. You can use the Gini index (look it up) like a proper sociologist or economist. Or you can count the number of billionaires in the world. We had one in 1916. Now we have more than 2,200. According to an Oxfam report, the eight richest billionaires control half of the world’s wealth.[1]
I’m not saying this is good or bad. I’m too old to be an activist. But I am not yet ready give up entirely.
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