Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

The first crooked knife I held was given to me by Michael Kohout, as I and some friends began helping him build his 25th birch bark canoe. I didn’t know what it was, had never seen one before, and did not know what to do with it. He showed me, pulling it towards himself with […]

  I often dream of doing things that have been done a million times before.  Actually, in general, that’s mostly what I want to do.   I’m not really into innovation, or discovery, or whatever.  I just want to walk on the ice and through the snow many many miles in the cold of winter, eat […]

I’ve been wanting to make a toboggan by scratch for a few years now. No power tools, no sawmills. Just hand tools – ax, draw knife, crooked knife, and hand plane primarily – and rawhide. My desire to make a toboggan comes from old-timey reasoning: I use one in the winter. So I wandered around, found […]

My finished snowshoes I am currently reading “The Survival of the Bark Canoe,” written by John McPhee in 1975, about Henri Vaillancourt, the most well-known modern birch bark canoe maker. I have been looking at it for many years, and people keep asking me if I’ve read it, so I thought maybe I should. All […]