Purcell Wooden Toys

The temperature outside was barely above freezing. The girls’ cheeks flushed pink in the cold, their faces fogged in clouds of breath. Our fingers went numb; our noses ran and we didn’t even feel it. I held the baby, leaching warmth from him. Corrinne and Chris kick the balls with the girls.

Later the gray sky turned darker. A monochrome sunset quickly faded to black.

Our friend Chris was in town. Once upon a time Chris was always around. Then he went north. It happens sometimes, even to me.

Chris is a toy maker, a craftsman of the sort of toys that simply do not exist much anymore.

He brought some gifts for the girls (and the baby). Genuine Purcell Toys handcrafted wooden cars and trucks.

The girls think they’re the best toys ever. Even I play with these things. I mean come on, the dump truck has moving parts.

I think the evolution of toys starts with what is still the greatest of all toys — the stick. Then the stick gets refined, carved into more fixed forms. Suddenly there is no longer the endless possibilities of the stick, but a kind of craftsmanship begins to emerge. Fast-forward and you have the beautiful craftsmanship you see in these images.

These toys are at the apex of a toy family tree that goes back literally to the roots.

Because without roots you have nothing.

Stainless steel, plastic and glass get all the attention these days, especially glass that glows. Everything these days feel either cheap like the crap at the big box store or slick and cold like the crap at the Apple store. Then again, when pressed, even the most gadget obsessed among us turn out to still love wood, the humble stick.

Wood has warmth. Wood lends itself to the kind of heirloom things like these trucks and cars. I’ve always been fascinated by wood. The textures, grains, colors. Every piece of wood is a map of history. The rings, the width of the grain, the spacing of the knots, all the records of a tree, but also the world around it. Every piece of wood is its own story.

A short memory of wood: Great wood has a way of sticking out. To me anyway. I remember very few details about the Southwest Research Station in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona which my father’s friend Wade ran for many years. I don’t remember what the nearby campground looked like, have only the dimmest recollection of the mess hall where we occasionally had dinner with Wade and all the visiting scientists doing research there… I do, however, have a crystal clear memory of the coffee table in Wade’s house.

The coffee table was an overturned stump of black walnut whose roots spread out like dark, obsidian eels beneath the glass table surface. The tallest of the roots held the glass up. What really blew me away though was that each individual root had been sanded to a glassy smoothness. Some of the roots were as thick as my arm and several feet long, others were no bigger than my pinky. It didn’t matter, all of them had been sanded smooth as glass.

I remember being somewhat spellbound, trying to wrap my head around the skill, craftsmanship and effort it must have take to create that table.

I feel the same way about Chris’s toys. I feel that way because I’ve watched him make them, but I think anyone who see one or handles one will feel the same way. These are stories in wood. The beginnings of stories. You get to write the rest.

Get one for your kids and they’ll give it to their kids and their kids will give it to theirs and so on, like roots spreading out across the soil.