Journal Entry #2: Carving on the Beach

There was also a wood carving establishment on the beach in San Pedro: a board set across two saw horses just under a tree. The place was frequented by a number of dread-locked men, the foremost of which seemed to be Augustus (?) Ford. Ford, as he called himself, could be seen here, always working on something, with his wares spread out on the board and on a blanket in front of it. These included standards in Belize: shark, stingray, turtle, mermaid, and cross. Most were made out of a dark tropical wood that had an almost white sapwood running through it - a striking feature of the carvings.

I don't know if Ford made all of his wares, as he claimed. I tend to think the carvings were bought unfinished from the mainland and finished by Ford and his friends. But when I asked about how he worked, he gave me a tour of his workshop (a Rubbermaid bin that he was using as a work surface). Here's what he had:

1 machete
2 half-round wood rasps in 2 sizes
1 v-gouge (with a handle designed to rest in the palm)
1 small mallet that he had obviously made for himself
1 hack saw (for cutting up old machetes)
1 detail carving knife (made of the tip of an old machete)
1 gouge or round-tipped chisel (made of the tang of an old machete)
1 triangle file
1 medium sized piece of glass
lots of sand paper, all grades

That was pretty much it. He demonstrated the use of glass as a scraper, using the triangle file to cut the edge of the glass, then using it to snap a fresh glass edge. That edge was then used to scrape a shaving from the wood. Ford said this let him skip several grades of sand paper when finishing. The finishing started with a sanding sealer that smelled strongly of turpentine (even with the sea breeze going). The process as he described it was to seal the wood, sand carefully with the coarsest grit, seal again, and sand with the next finest grit, working his way down to a very fine tooth. At the end he used a bit of 000 steel wool and polished the piece with neutral shoe polish (the equivalent of a Butchers wax).

My brother's family brought home three of these sculptures, sold to them by a guy riding down the beach: a mobile outpost, I think, of Ford's operation. One of these statues has already cracked several times from the water loss (coming from warm and moist Belize to cold and dry Massachusetts). We're hoping the other two fare better.