[accordion music]
- Luke: I always liked wood carving.
I did whittling stuff as a little kid.
I'd met a guy named Bob Siegel,
who was a master wooden shoe carver
who taught me how to carve, so when I saw Bob doing this
and it was something he needed help with,
I just kind of figured I have nothing happening right now
so I might as well help him out and see what happens.
Fourteen years later, here we are.
My name is Luke Traver and I'm a wooden shoe carver.
I carve wooden shoes at events
for basically the public to see the demonstrations,
see how this has been done throughout the centuries.
So the wooden shoe, or the klompen,
is originally a Dutch shoe.
As they were working in the fields,
their leather shoes consistently rotted out on them
and they always had wet feet.
So somebody thought about carving up a wooden shoe
which allowed them to work in a field all day long.
At the end of the day, they can put their shoe by the back door,
and it would dry out overnight.
They could have a dry shoe for the next day.
I only know of one other person that does this in America,
who lives in Holland, Michigan.
And he only comes out for the one show a year that he carves.
I haven't actually met him.
Otherwise, I don't actually know anybody else
who does carve shoes.
You start off fast and furious just knocking stuff out
and getting as much into it, throwing in the power.
That's really how,
if you're ever gonna draw anybody's attention,
you can have somebody walking 10, 20 feet away,
you start axing on a chunk of wood
and their spin their head on a swivel and figure out what's going on.
[banging on wood]
Works every time. [chuckles]
And then by the end of it
you really are kind of messing with
half inches and little things.
You're looking up to lights
and seeing if you see the light coming through.
If you're quite there or not.
You have to be really delicate by the end of it.
Getting the arch in the right place and getting the right height arch.
Getting enough space for everything to fit just right.
It kind of gets really tricky.
A lot of it is skill,
but there is a little bit of luck of wood as well.
I love the concept also that I can take
a chunk of wood and turn it into a shoe.
It's something that is still usable and still practical.
When you get right and make a good shoe,
I mean it's awesome.
'Cause you can make eight shoes in a day,
you know, a shoe every hour,
you can have two or three of them turn out.
And it's just the greatest.
[accordion music]