This retired engineer's 'hobby' turns storm-downed and washed-up wood into treasure.
The two hunks of wood in Richard Kimbrell’s hands are so weathered, so fragmented, so eaten by insects or worms that they’re fraying apart in long splinters. But he sees something, when he holds them together just so.There’s lots of evidence around him to suggest that he can. A few years ago, as he began to think about retirement, he latched onto a hobby that connected him to family history.
Make that about five years ago. He’s a member of Buccaneer Yacht Club, which has a section of Mobile Bay shoreline that tends to accumulate washed-up logs, especially after big storms. Kimbrell said he was helping move logs when his wife, Sheila, asked if the wood might be good for anything. He thought it over and came back later with a drill to take some core samples, see if there was anything solid under the beat-up driftwood exterior. The results were promising.
But some of that wood turned out to be much too fine to be cut into two-by-fours. The hobby kept snowballing. He finally retired about a year ago. “I don’t know how I did this with traveling all over the country and all over the world doing my engineering work,” he says. And what he calls his “mess” has become a wonderland for any aspiring woodworker, for artists in need of raw material, or anyone looking for a mantel that can lend a sense of historical heft to a home.
Some of the most impressive pieces of wood reclaimed by Richard Kimbrell are massive beams and slabs of “beach wood.” At left is a worm-eaten beam of hickory. In the center is a beam of red cedar. At right is a slab of cypress, its color darkened by the time it spent submerged.Among the big timbers, a twelve-foot long, two-inch-thick slab of cypress that spent untold years submerged in the delta or the bay before being dislodged to wash up on the shore. It’ll probably become a mantel.
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