It wouldn’t seem our day could have gotten any better, but the sun hadn’t set yet, and we were going to drink in the last few hours that were left to us, right down to the bottom of the hourglass. We had seen a website for a pottery (the studio, not the vessel), and decided we would try to find it. Well, of course you know that for me, that was already something special, but an hour later, it had become almost otherworldly.
The Quyle Kilns Pottery sat on a shady hilltop surrounded by gardens, lush maples and tall pines. After talking shop with owner Pamela for a while, I guess we proved we were part of the clay clan inner circle, because soon we were whisked away on a tour of the entire enterprise, built of brick and native stone over 80 years ago by her grandfather as barns and stables, then passed on to her parents who turned it into a pottery.
For decades the family has mined granite runoff in the Sierras, mixing it in giant vats, pushing it through an ancient and enormous filtering press, then on to the pug mill and extruder, to be bagged into ready-to-use clay. Just that morning, as every morning, the 80 year old fellow that has worked there since Pamela was a girl, hand shoveled 4,000 pounds of clay dust into the vat to begin his work day. Pallets of bagged clay, the fruits of his efforts in vivo, rested before their journey to faraway stores where simpletons like me will casually buy them, never knowing of the skill, labor and pure history used to create them.
Talking so fast we could barely keep up, Pamela took us through her glaze mixing room, built into what has one been horse stalls, it’s cool stone walls splashed with faded, unfired glazes. She flipping casually through her handwritten glaze recipe book in front of shelves laden with huge colorant-filled antique butter crocks marked by labels like “cobalt oxide” and “copper carbonate”. This felt like the vault of family secrets.
Next, she wandered us through the throwing studio, the hand building areas and past walk-in kilns and dozens of racks of pottery in various stages of new existence. We were then led on to the casting room, it’s shelves balanced high with plaster molds. A light layer of white clay dust rested on most everything, the sign of a well used but mostly tidy studio.
Eventually, we stepped out into the courtyard and then snaked back through a side door to what I could now see was the heart of the pottery. It’s walls hung with old posters of past shows, uplifting quotes, cartoon strips and artist cards from ceramics festivals gone by. I told Guy that every pottery I have ever been in has had a wall like that. Now Pamela and I were like old friends, exchanging banter freely, as though I was standing in this room for the hundredth time.
Back in the gallery, Guy and I easily agreed on a Naked Raku style pot to bring home, and I asked for a bag of that precious clay. As we said goodbye, I felt deep appreciation and simultaneous shame. I bought my first bag of clay when I was 14, and have bought scads of them since, never once considering the people and the work that went into making them for me; the eighty year old man shoveling clay dust at 6 am. I’d just grab a bag off the shelf, throw it into the van, open it, use it, and claim the results as my own, as though it was all my effort alone. These folks are the orchestra behind the opera, the toiling farmer for the acclaimed chef (not that I am or ever hope to be the caliber of opera or chef, of course, but now you understand). I was humbled.
“I am ashamed that I have been taking my clay for granted all these years, never thinking about the people behind it,” I said, suddenly misty eyed. “I’ll never do it again. It will be an honor to use this clay, and I hope I’ll do it justice.”
"We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours."
12th century theologian and author John of Salisbury
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