Local smith keeps ancient trade alive

Fire, brimstone, heat and smoke: Large hammers, iron men, and a perhaps a few women, are what make mere mortals into blacksmiths.

That’s the impression one gets visiting Solstice Forge and talking with owner David Curl of Naselle.

Curl stands next to his small 110-year old forge in a shop that might once have been a two-car garage. “Blacksmithing is about history," he said, “and there are no trade secrets.”

His leather gloved hand turns a small crank that simultaneously spins a bellows fan that injects air into a bed of hot coals. “It's about 1700 degrees in there,” he said, gazing down into the coals, “just hot enough to bend steel but not melt it.”

As you watch him work, you know you’re watching an artist in the truest sense. It takes an artist to mold raw steel. His brush is the 2000-degree forge. His muse lurks inside him somewhere, glimpsed only in the reflection off his eyes as the red steel glistens and the sparks fly across the room.

“I’m not sure why I want to create metal art; it’s just I have this drive to create, to make things that last a very long time,” he said.

The crank turns. The coals brighten, first red, then yellow and then out comes the piece he’s working on today.

“I’m making a fork for a set of barbecue tools,” he said as he chuckled and carried the glowing steel over to an anvil.

The hammer on the anvil is large but comes down with a gentle ‘tap’ on the side of the flat bar handle of the fork to be. “This is a great old anvil. It was given to me by one of my clients. He said he found it in his barn and thought of me.”

Curl started his metal career as a welder after a short training course.

“My wife was already a welder and we tramped around together working in power houses and steel mills,” David said.

Curl settled with his wife in Naselle after she became a yoga instructor, and he now teaches welding at the youth Job Corps in Astoria.

“Teaching has given me more opportunity to develop my art and I have a more rewarding job,” he says.

Curl often travels to different venues giving blacksmithing demonstrations. He said he and his wife--she’s his “striker”--get the crowds laughing, “We’ll do a show together and I’ll say things like, ‘When I nod my head, hit it honey’, the crowd likes that kind of stuff.”

It wasn’t long after his stint in the Air Force that Curl decided he wanted to be an artist and took classes at Clatsop Community College. He said being an artist gives him the leeway to express himself in different ways that people can understand.

“What being an artist means to me is the freedom to be. I have my own style and I don’t copy anybody else’s work. Really, for me working steel on a forge is meditative in its simplicity, to make the piece the way you want,” he said.

Blacksmithing is old, ancient in fact. The name comes from the first men to dig out and smelt iron ore, which turned them black. The word smith comes from the root word smite, or to hit, hence the name blacksmith.

“I was reading the other day that they have found forged scalpels in the pyramids,” Curl said. “So far blacksmithing can be dated back to 5000 BC.”

Blacksmithing is hard, hot, often dirty work, and the blacksmith persona revels in it. Blacksmiths take pride in knowing their history, lore and the legends of the smithing trade. Curl says he enjoys the connection between the history of his craft and its modern day applications.

“The ancient Romans had the fire god Vulcan. The Vikings had Thor and the Greeks had Hephaestus, the god of forge and fire,” David said.

“The legend of Hephaestus is that he was tossed out of Olympus because he had a deformity, but he was such a master craftsman that Zeus brought him back to make his lightening bolts.”

Curl stood at his anvil and looked down the edge of the barbecue fork he was working on. After a few strikes, he turned it over and reached for a little bigger hammer lying under his anvil. There are about a dozen different size hammers, and Curl said they each have a different purpose.

“The real beauty of blacksmithing is that if you make something really ugly out of the steel, you can always turn around and make something beautiful,” he said.

There is a lot of misconception about blacksmithing, Curl said. The trade was not just about making horseshoes and nails. He draws inspiration from nature.

“I like to copy nature, and like the curves, shapes and shadows found in leaves and limbs,” he said.

Curl makes all kinds of art for people and some of his standards include lamps, candelabras, wine racks, garden tools and wall sconces.

“One of the real beauties of all this is the hammered look," he said. "You can just look at a piece and see where the smith struck it and each strike of the hammer is the history of the blacksmith.”

There are side benefits to this kind of art and Curl likes to joke about them with his clients. “I like to tell people I will guarantee my work for at least three generations,” he says with a smile, “or until I’m dead.”

Curl doesn’t want to turn his art into work so he plans to keep his “day job” for a few more years.

“You know there is a story about King Arthur and the blacksmith,” he said.

“Once upon a time the king called his craftsmen to dinner. The king went down the line asking each man what they had made for him. Each craftsman in turn said, ‘Why sire, I made your tapestries; I made your bridles and saddles; I made your armor; and finally the carpenter said, Sire, I made your fine tables and chairs.’”

“The king thought for moment then said, ‘Carpenter who made the tools that carved this fine furniture?’

"Why sire," said the carpenter, "the blacksmith."

The, king thought a moment longer and turned to the blacksmith and said, "Sir by hammer in hand all crafts do stand, please come to the head of the table.

“Well this angered the carpenter,” said Curl, “because he had to move to the end of the table.”

The tale continues that the carpenter took a pair of scissors and snuck under the table and cut a fringe in the blacksmith’s leather apron.

“And to this day every blacksmith cuts a fringe in their apron,” and with that David walked over and points to the fringe cut in his apron.

“Oh by the way, this is for you,” he said and handed me the barbecue fork he’d just forged.