Andy Hoyt: Turning and Designing His Own Life - May 14, 2011
By Scott C. Stackpole
I mean no harm, nor put fault, on anyone who lives in a vault. But it’s alright, ma, if I can’tplease him. – Bob Dylan
The presumption is that you’ll advance or a least maintain the status of your forbears. You’ll gooff to school, make sustaining connections, marry someone with a similar perspective, catch onin rainmaking profession and live according to very specific expectations.Andrew Erskine Hoyt had other ideas, and now works out of his home in Benton Falls, Maine,just East of Waterville, developing websites and turning 75 pound chunks of wood into polishedand translucent utility.
Down a straight lane lined with frame houses and attached barns is the classic upper NewEngland form is an open doorway. Andy’s there, in his mid-fifties with a full head of mostlywhite hair and a cheerful face built around the sort of long goatee you might see on a Civil Warre-enactor. Inside, tendrils of shaved wood hang like Spanish moss from tool racks. The mintysmell of fresh-cut cherry wood accents the spring air and we step around a silent array of hismotorized wood-shaping tools. Assorted turned-wood projects rest on machine beds and tablesin various stages of smoothness, waiting for their moisture content to stabilize or for a burst ofcreativity.
Andy runs through some details of his early years: the summer camps, the ski weekends inVermont, the parent’s divorce, the boot from a Rhode Island prep school when he and his friendsgot a little too familiar with a bottle of whiskey. Andy says his father, a Groton and Yale alumand former Reader’s Digest executive, pretty much gave up that day. With a matter-of-factnessthat suggests some heated dinner-table discussions and ultimately a measure of hard-won mutualacceptance, Andy explains that his father “defined success in terms of dollars. He saw megetting kicked out of boarding school as a sign that I wasn’t going to be successful.”A full grin emerges from behind the goatee. “So here I am!”
Andy admits he lacked any sense of direction after graduating from public high school in a NewYork suburb. A year off led to a couple of fruitless semesters in college, a series of local oddjobs, then an unpaid summer on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, standing thigh deep in glacial runoffworking a placer gold claim. “I had no money when we shut down,” Andy recalls, “and no planof what I was going to do next.”
He says his guiding theory was, “If you’re going to starve to death, start off with a full stomach.”So, armed with his last five-dollar bill, Andy pulled into a crowded Wendy’s restaurant inAnchorage, got a meal, and asked a blue-suited man he thought was a cop if he could share thetable.
Half an hour later, Andy was in the U.S. Navy.
“Somehow I didn’t notice the ribbons n the guy’s chest,” Andy recalls. “But it turned out he wasa Navy recruiter and he was g-o-o-d at it. I was the guy he wanted, and the next thing I knowI’m on my way to San Diego.”
Andy soon won a boot camp honor as the top battalion recruit, and that also earned him someprideful recognition from his father, who had served in the Navy during World War II. “My dadbroke an eight-generation family tradition of serving in the Army,” Andy says, “and I thinkthat’s really the only thing I’ve done that he can relate to.”
The spring sun has warmed the barn and we settle into his office there. Every surface is powdercoated with fine sawdust from the lathe work nearby. Andy details his Navy years as a medicalcorpsman and as a survival instructor at the Navy’s SERE school in Rangely, then grows moreanimated as he recounts the adrenaline-fueled details of taking his re-enlistment oath in an F-14,flying upside-down at the speed of sound about 100 feet above his ship off the coast of Norfolk,Va.
Several years out of the Navy, Andy says, woodturning and building architects’ models began todominate his time and inspired his curiosity about the Internet. “I wanted a billboard site for mybusiness,” he explains, “but it was too much money. So I taught myself, and it just grew fromthere.” He soon found he could merge his interests through Maine Woodturners, offered todevelop its website (http://www.MaineWoodturners.org), and found the group shared a selfdepreciatinghumor that dovetailed with his own satirical wit. “I did the website,” he says, “butmore importantly I came up with an attitude.”
Sensitive to the perception that his life in rural Maine is a societal escape, Andy is sure-handedabout how it suits him. “I like the upper right corner,” he says. “It’s got a little bit ofeverything.” He expands on this awareness with a story about a brief encounter a few years backwith a former classmate who’s now a “suit” in Boston. “We talked for a little while,” Andy says,“and he finally asked me, in total disbelief, ‘You work with your hands?’ You could just see thatwall go up, and there was nothing left to say.”
Back in his shop, Andy chucks up a block of ash in the lathe and begins to shape the spinningcube with a long chisel. Blond woodchips fly and he calls out above the spinning motor,“Knowing how to start and stop involves your whole body. But I find my groove and half of mybrain is solving the problem at hand – the wood. The rest shuts down and I can relax.”Andy switches off the machine and reflects on the mind-body interplay between web design andthe physicality of woodturning. “If the wood is at a point where I can walk away, I come in andlook at the computer. Both are very cerebral, both are visual, and both are creative. Thedifference is if I screw up on the web, I can hit ‘Control Z’ and start over. Out here, there’s no‘undo’ button.”
Andy’s eyes brighten again as he wipes specks of sawdust from his beard and shows me ashattered piece of cherry that was going to be a lampshade until he ground it too thin. “There’sonly what we call a ‘design opportunity.’”
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