Recent wildfires ravaging forests across the West have left mostly loss and lament in their smoldering wake - but now and then even the worst infernos give rise to something of beauty.
Case in point: a special table that rose from the ashes of the 2003 Aspen Fire near Tucson.
The kingly table - some 16 feet long with seating for up to 18 people - was hewn from a ponderosa pine that was killed but not burned up by the fire.
Salvage of the tree and construction of the table were the ideas of Richard and Shana Oseran, owners of Maynards Market & Kitchen, 400 N. Toole Ave. The table now occupies a prominent place in the market area of Maynards and serves a variety of purposes.
"We were able to salvage something beautiful from the fire," said Shana Oseran.
"We wanted to include a community table when we were getting ready to open Maynards" in 2008, she said. "We obviously needed something big for that and we wondered: Couldn't we use something from our own mountain - maybe something from the fire?"
The ponderosa pine, Oseran said, was "a natural fit."
"The tree was already dead. We didn't have to cut a live tree, and it was a way to salvage something good from this terrible disaster."
FROM TREE TO TABLE
The Oserans, working with a Tucson lumberman, located a fire-killed tree that was available for harvest and had it transported to a lumberyard in Tucson.
Dan Hostetler, owner of Tempus Fugit Woodworks, was chosen to construct the table - but there was one obstacle standing in the way. Even five years after the Aspen Fire, the trunk of the dead tree still retained a very high moisture content.
That was a problem because a table built while the wood was so moist could crack or split when the wood dried out.
"The lumberjack said it should be put in a kiln to dry," Oseran said, "but there was no kiln available that was large enough" for the harvested segment of the trunk, which was about 20 feet long.
Happily, there was an alternative.
Hostetler said the tree was air dried using a "kind of tricky process" over a period of more than two weeks. Part of the time, the tree was covered with a plastic tarp to help control the rate of drying.
"We got it down to 14 to 16 percent moisture content," Hostetler said. "It would be best to be about 5 percent, but I did some woodworking techniques to allow the wood to contract without splitting."
He used two planks from the tree - joining them together and hand-planing the wood to produce a table 16 feet long and 31 inches wide.
"I built the base for it out of the same wood," said Hostetler, who later finished the table with oil and varnish.
A REPURPOSED PINE
Far from its one-time mountaintop home, the reshaped ponderosa pine now serves both as pleasing decor and a traditional community table.
"People come in and have breakfast at the table, and others check their email while having coffee there," Oseran said. "People sit there for business meetings. They bring their kids and have pizza.
"We have birthday parties there," she said. "We've had a bachelorette party at that table. People come and have a family dinner. Vendors do demonstrations at the table. … Once a month, we have a farm dinner with all local foods, and the table is used for that. The chef has wine tastings there. It's a real multiuse community table" - a practical piece with a poetic past.
Did you know?
The Aspen Fire of 2003 burned 84,750 acres in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson, destroying much of the picturesque mountain community of Summerhaven.
On StarNet: See photos of Aspen Fire and recovery at azstarnet.com/gallery
Contact reporter Doug Kreutz at dkreutz@azstarnet.com or at 573-4192.
