Year of the Wood-Carving

The Year of the Wood-Carving, or Year 11, was named for a children’s carving craze that Ish welcomed as a small but meaningful turn away from The Tribe’s dependence on the past. The name joined an ordinary year of children at work with Ish’s hope that their community might develop creative life of its own; he saw the year as a possible break with the past, even as he doubted whether the calendar name itself warranted such weight.

The Children’s New Craft

The idea arose when the children argued over what the year should be called. They had taken up wood-carving with the energy of a fad, raiding lumber yards for suitable boards of soft sugar-pine and attempting running designs of cattle, dogs, and people. Their first efforts were awkward, but some children soon became skillful. The enthusiasm later faded, as fads do, yet carving remained something they did on rainy days.

The activity recalled the changing enthusiasms of the Old Times, when bubble-blowing or mah-jongg could briefly seize people’s attention. But the carvings mattered to Ish for more than their novelty: they were something the children were making themselves, rather than simply receiving from the world left behind.

Ish’s Support and Princess’s Memory

Ish supported the children’s proposed name after a moment’s hesitation. Princess had meant more to him than she did to the children, who regarded her as an old dog of uncertain temper and little interest. In the first bad days after the disaster, however, she had drawn him out of himself and helped free him from fear. Her barking dash had led him into the house where he found Em; without it, he might have hesitated and driven on.

To Ish, Princess was now a link to a past that was receding from the children’s lives. He recognized that they might soon forget her altogether, and her place in their memory sharpened his awareness that he, too, would grow old and become an unregarded link to the past. Supporting the children’s choice did not mean that Princess mattered less to him; it meant accepting that a new generation would make its own markers and attachments.

A Year Turned Toward the Future

Ish had studied enough anthropology to believe that a healthy people needed creative outlets. He worried that The Tribe had not developed artistically and remained under the shadow of the Old Times, listening to old records on wind-up phonographs and looking through old picture books. The children’s carving suggested a different possibility: not simply preserving inherited objects, but forming skills and images through their own work.

Once Ish spoke in support of them, Year 11 became known as the Year of the Wood-Carving. In his mind, the name carried the symbolic value of breaking with the past and turning toward the future. Yet he also considered the naming a small matter and questioned whether he should attach significance to it. That uncertainty is part of the year’s meaning: the carvings offered tangible evidence of a new creative impulse, while the calendar name could only tentatively mark the larger change Ish hoped they signaled.