In the early 1960s, my father was an adopter of two things that would later become mainstream and then commodified marijuana and craft. He made handmade leather goods and sold them jackets, bags, belts and one small item in particular stands out in my memory a leather pouch he called a pot stash. Bushcraft people today would recognize it as a kind of possibles bag, but his was made for weed, not flint and steel.
He was a deeply curious and active thinker. His shelves held books on Hinduism, Daoism, shelter building, and design. He was immersed in graphic design and interior design, always thinking visually, structurally, philosophically. Craft for him was not just making things. It was worldview, identity, resistance.
During the hippie era, handmade goods were a reaction against the industrial machine of the United States. Making something with your hands was a statement of integrity. It said I am not just a consumer. I belong to a lineage older than factories.
But cultures shift.
When John Lennon was killed, something changed. When yuppie culture emerged money, status, ambition polished into a uniform my father cut his hair and tried to follow it. He began chasing financial success instead of craftsmanship. He leased a Mercedes Benz. He opened a business in Manhattan that tried to combine antiques with modern design. His heart was not fully in it, and he did not truly understand the game he was playing.
The business failed. He lost our family home. That collapse sent me down a difficult path of my own.
After that, he drank hard. He smoked heavily. Somewhere along the way, he lost his center.
For a long time, I carried resentment toward him. But now I see his life differently. I see him as someone crushed by a cultural transition he could not metabolize.
I think about early humans stone tool makers who had mastered flint knapping, who understood the language of stone. Then copper arrives. Some adapt. Some do not. Some love the stone too much. They do not disappear because they lack skill. They disappear because the world moves on without caring what they were good at.
My father lived through a similar shift. Handmade leather was once a countercultural strength. Later, it became nostalgia. Then fashion. Then mass produced again. Some people rode those waves successfully. Others never recovered.
He had three kids. And maybe handmade leather jackets were not the safest way to support a family under that kind of pressure. I understand that now. I have compassion where I once had judgment.
What is tragic is that not long after, leather jackets came back into fashion. And even today, the bushcraft and mountain man movements never really disappeared. There has always been a quiet current of people who value hand skills, wood, steel, fire and shelter. He could have found a way to stay rooted in his strengths. He almost did. But he did not trust them enough to endure the lean years.
That is the part that still hurts.
When I graduated high school, I wanted to be a famous painter more than anything. If there had been a devil offering a deal, I would have signed it. Instead, I took a different risk. I hitchhiked across the United States and found Taos. That changed everything.
Taos gave me space to keep my hands busy and my spirit intact. I found wood carving. I found bushcraft. I found Tai Chi. Those practices became ways of staying honest. Ways of keeping my soul tethered to something real. I still carve wood today. I am not successful as a seller. But I am still carving away.
That is where I feel the lineage split and also where it reconnects.
My father lost his way because he could not identify what truly mattered to him as a human being. He believed money would restore meaning. It did not. He died early as a result of his drinking and smoking.
I do not tell this story to judge him. I tell it because I understand him now. He was not weak. He was displaced.
And maybe what I am doing carving wood, practicing tai chi, walking instead of running is my way of staying on the narrow ridge he fell from. Not chasing success at the expense of integrity. Not abandoning craft when culture devalues it. Learning, slowly, to measure life not by applause or profit, but by whether I can still recognize myself in the work of my hands.
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