Carved Cedar Peace Poles
Click pics to enlarge
I
prefer to make things that last for generations. A cedar peace pole lasts about
thirty years. So I stopped making them. However, my brother makes a few from
time to time. He does not sandblast them. He carves them with a "V" bit,
which is like typesetting in wood. It makes very nice text. But we end up
throwing a lot away when we carve in cedar because cedar chips during carving, unlike, say, maple. But cedar is bug and rot resistant and lasts a long
time outdoors. So that is what is used.
Pictured here are a couple that currently are for sale. We got an order for an 8 feet tall wooden peace pole with eight languages on it. He didn't like the way the first one turned out, so he made another. Then we figured out that one of the translations was not oriented properly - something you would notice only if you spoke Hindi. So he made a third. However, we now have the first two he made with the Hindi laid out wrong. Owning either of these would be like owning a parlor game and quizzing people to see if they can find the mistake.
The translations on these two poles are Odawa/Ojibway, Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, and Swahili.
The original pole we sold for $750. The two we still have we would sell for half price, $375 each plus $60 for shipping.
In both photos, the two on the right are the ones for sale. If you want to see photos of all the languages on them, click here.
Once in a while I tell him that he should make ten of them at once with the eight most commonly chosen languages because he can make them less expensively that way. Perhaps if these two sell he'll try it.
* * *
If you are looking for a smaller wooden pole for an indoor location, at this link you can see a forty-two inch tall, five-sided, maple pole we made for a chapel.
Less expensive wooden ones used to be able to be purchased from carvers in Bali at http://balipeacepoles.org, but that was a project set up to keep them from starving during an economic downturn. Their economy turned back up and the carvers got other jobs. But who knows, maybe one of these days they will be back at it.
* * *
If emotion did not play such a large role, these poles really should be made out of redwood instead of cedar. Most redwood (all the redwood we'd use) is farm-raised in a section of California that is as large as the state of Ohio. Western red cedar is not farm raised. It is cut from old growth forests in Canada. So ecologically redwood would be better. And redwood carves better and looks better. But people go berserk when they hear "redwood," so we use cedar.