The Wood Duck Drum: A Father’s Measure, A Son’s Keeping

From Lightning-Struck Tree to Drum at the Cabin: A Practice of Craft and Ceremony

At the cabin, I carried a large stump into the lake and set it in the shallows. The oak had been struck by lightning. Rotting from the inside, it had fallen and begun to open through cracks where snow and water had entered.

Because wood ducks swam into the stump, I called it the wood duck drum.

I stood in cold water and worked the interior with a large Remington hunting knife. The soaked wood gave in, and I removed what was softened, scraping away rot inside. It was a big drum and heavy, about two inches thick all the way around.

The tree, planted by the water somewhere around the turn of the 20th Century, grew from natural growth cycles of sun and rain, but the drum emerged from the world of lightning, water, time, a drill and bit, and hunting knife. In the water, work carried weight and each shaving sliced up time.

The lake and its rocky bottom made an unsteady surface. I worked my knife carefully, following the grain, meeting resistance in hardened knots. The drum began there, in cold Casey Lake. I heard an eagle screech and looked up to see it circle. That’s when I knew that this drum would be for ceremony.

Its journey to my hand started with my attention to place, and the wood succumbing to forces of time and pressure. The stump, opened by lightning, became a nesting cavity and home to a wood duck brood. Cabin teaching again: a tree shattered by light and current, opened by water and temperature, becoming shelter.

And when it falls, a man finds it, imagines a drum, and in water the wood is baptised in a ceremony of time and measure. Each step follows the previous step; the work indexing the seasons and years, and then bringing it all home to meaning.

Later, I stretched a deer-hide over that large stump. I drilled small holes in the thick shell for dowels, pushed them through and glued them in. Then I roped the hide down and tied it tight. The hide was from the last deer my father had shot at that cabin. And it’s there where attention became more than coincidence.

It was ceremony.

Revealing more than what is heard, a handmade drum boils down to stories in rhythms built by practice, repetition, tools, patience, and the sound born of palms, brushes, or sticks, a story in years, months, and moments.

This is the cabin awareness, building at a human pace, a chip from the knife, an eagle in flight, drying and sanding, a way of working in which craft, place, and purpose come into alignment. The drum carries that alignment; holding the lake, the tree, the strike of lightning, the circling bird and the the time it takes to form sound and sing it out loud and clear.

Many years later, I took the Wood Duck Drum to Barron’s First Lutheran Church’s Cemetery. There, at my father’s gravesite following the funeral on a cold November day in Wisconsin, I put the ceremonial drum on frozen ground and struck it with my hand, hard and slow, once for each year of his life, it marked time in the gravity of sixty-one steady beats.

Each beat raised a grimace on the clergyman’s face, each one was a shudder in my grandmother’s shoulders, each one a shock in my right hand, vibrating to my heart. Sixty-one beats.

The beat goes on.

And the work continues.