Duane Noyes loves trees. He loves the feel of the wood, and the images trapped in the grain. And he especially loves giving new life to wood rescued from discard piles at log sorts, logging camps, construction sites, and junkyards.

As a retired logger, Noyes has spent most of his life around trees. His first job was as a tree planter and “cone picker” with forestry giant MacMillan Bloedel. “I never felt guilty about harvesting trees, because first, I planted.”

Noyes got his start as a carver in the logging camps, where in their spare time he and his father both worked with cast-off wood from the trees they felled. Along with the gnarly twisted “butt cuts” (logs deemed too ravaged for marketable timber) and cedar burls, they grabbed up waste wood from wire cable spools (usually fine mahogany or other rare Asian woods) and truck decks. Their carvings from this material that would otherwise have been consigned to the burn pile went home with bunkhouse mates as gifts for mothers and sweethearts.

Loggers tend to collect cedar burls, and Noyes says that most bunkhouses had (and may still have) piles of these growths under them. Here is the source of Noyes’ favourite bird’s-eye yellow cedar.

“Burls are like cancerous growths,” he says. “In some stands, they are quite rare, while others have lots and lots of these burls. You can stare at the wood and see all kinds of images of good and evil, if you will.”

Noyes revels in the character of individual woods. “I love the feel of yellow cedar,” he says, brushing his palms over the smooth surface of an unvarnished bird’s-eye cedar ball. Warm and soft, the wood seems to pulse with remembered life. A similar ball, varnished, is very attractive but loses that tactile warmth completely. “I don’t like to varnish cedar, but because some people are allergic to it – there are legal reasons why it’s necessary. Maybe I could just put a warning label on it,” he muses.

In his shop, he demonstrates how a cedar burl can be sliced, then opened to reveal mirror images in the grain – a wooden Rorsach blot. “But it’s rare wood, so I call it ‘Raresach’ Art.”

Along with a love of wood and skill in carving, Noyes picked up the reclamation habit from his father. “My dad and I used to go to the garbage dump and grab up the old TV cabinets. They were oak, teak, mahogany – beautiful wood just being thrown out.” The dump, share shed, and roadsides are rich sources for material which Noyes turns into chessmen, custom golf tees, and abstract shapes that eventually come together in wooden sculptures, or are finely crafted into elegantly inlaid wooden boxes with ornate turned handles.

Noyes’ boxes typically contain two to three different woods, and are designed to showcase the different grains and rich colours of their medium. Designs range from tiny round boxes surmounted with a cross, to larger caskets topped with minaret-like spires. No two boxes are alike in design or construction.

However, it is what he terms the “arty pieces – things created just for beauty” that set Noyes apart as a woodcrafter. “Sure, the utilitarian pieces have beauty too,” he says, indicating an inlaid knife rack on his kitchen counter. “But they are not as much fun to make. With a table, you know where you’ll start and where you’ll finish, but creating an art piece that grows – it’s therapeutic, cathartic.”

Noyes is also a gifted storyteller. His tales of camp life – with its comedy as well as its hair-raising dangers – as well as other short stories and poetry, have been printed in Raincoast Chronicles, Westcoast Logger, and Gardens West.

But he’s still a faller at heart, and misses logging “the way it used to be.” He might be out walking the dogs in a pristine stand of timber, look at a vigorous cedar and calculate “yeah, I could lay that sucker right along the fence there….”

Products from Duane Noyes’ Raresach studio are now on display at Tradewinds and WindSong galleries in Sechelt, and at his kiosk in Mosaic Market at Davis Bay.