The single most highly valued possession that I own happens to be a timeless article of vintage camping equipment.
Tonight I was reunited with it.
As regular followers of TPCE may know, a big driving force of my build is the memory of my father. Dad didn’t always buy me birthday or X-mas gifts, but he did far better than that with this back when I was a young lad.
It is his old boy scout hatchet from when he was young. He was tinkering in the basement, like he often did, but unbeknownst to me, he was spending what must have been a great deal of his time lovingly embellishing this with all of the love and craftsmanship that I could have ever asked for.
He removed the old handle, polished the head, which is clearly stamped PLUMB surrounded by a rectangular border. Mind you, this was formerly a painted steel head, and he polished it to the point where it looks like it is stainless steel or even nickel plated. Then he honed the edge until you could shave with it. It’s showing some abrasion to the shiny finish from use, but there isn’t a spot of rust on it after at least 17 years in storage, and it is a tool that was always meant to be used.
Then he fit a new handle that he stained with very subtle milk like stain, or perhaps ‘driftwood’. By the way, the handle is fit perfectly to the head and shows no signs of cracking or looseness.
The pièce de résistance is the hand crafted leather sheath. Leather work is a craft that I would like to someday follow in my father’s footsteps.
This is the hatchet that I used on the original Poet Creek camping trips to make kindling for the camp fires. When bored I would replicate something I learned from the Boy Scout demonstrations given at the LA County Fair long before I was ever old enough, or had any thought of becoming a boy scout. You can stand a strike-anywhere match up in the axe marks of your chopping stump, then strike the match with a chopping stroke of the hatchet.
Why did it take so long for me to be reunited with this? Well my old family home is a Cape Cod style with crawl space type attic and some of my stuff was still in there when my sister moved back home from CA. A bunch of her stuff got moved into my old room, blocking access to this space when I was moving out after getting married. Now that my sister and mom are going thru and cleaning out, it got to be my turn.
I can’t believe, and am quite thrilled that it looks exactly like the day I put it away, has to be 20 years ago or more.
This is the most valued object in the world to me and no amount of money could ever replace it.