Why I left everything behind and ended up in a woodshop

People ask me how a Navy guy with a master's degree and a director's chair at a public library ended up turning cedar and stamping metal in a shop in the Berkshires. The short answer is that I got tired of making things that disappear.

The long answer takes a little more telling.

The work that left nothing behind

I spent years in the Navy. After that, I spent more years in libraries, and I mean the deep end of it. I got my MLIS. I became an archivist. I ran a library. If you want to know what an archivist actually does, here it is in plain terms: you spend your days making sure that the things people made will still be here long after the people are gone. You fight rot. You fight time. You keep the good stuff from getting thrown out.

I loved that work. I still do. But somewhere along the way I noticed something about my own days. I was moving information around; emails, reports, schedules, meetings about meetings. At the end of a week, I could not point to a single thing I had made with my hands. The work was real, but it was made of air. Close the laptop, and it was gone.

There is an old line I keep coming back to. Everywhere you go, there you are. But I found an escape hatch. I had escaped a few times in my life already, and every time I escaped, I landed somewhere a little more honest. The woodshop was the most honest place I ever landed.

The first lure was an accident

I did not set out to build a lure company. I set out to build one lure.

I did not start as a kayak angler. I had fished from a kayak before and liked it, but it did not define me yet. The lures and the kayak grew up together. The more I worked my home water in the Berkshires- Cranberry Pond, Richmond Pond, and Goose Pond the more I ran into my own limitations. That is where the need for a better lure came from. The two co-developed, and making lures is a big part of what turned me into a real kayak angler.

I had a tackle box full of plastic that all looked the same and caught about the same, which is to say not much when the fish got picky. I started wondering what the old-timers threw before the industry started selling a new miracle bait every spring.

So I made one. I had cedar around the shop, the kind that gets put on a burn pile or tossed in a landfill because nobody wants it. I shaped it, I weighted it, I painted it, and I tied it on. And fish ate it. 

This is the part where most people would tell you the sky opened up. It did not. The lure had problems. It rolled wrong. Didn't swim quite right. But it caught a fish, and more than that, it was mine. Years before, I had caught a trout on a fly I tied myself, so I already knew that thrill. This was something better. This cedar lure was uniquely mine. I had made a thing that did a job, and the thing was still in my hand at the end of the day. That feeling did not go away when I closed a laptop. There was no laptop.

What the archivist already knew

Here is where the two halves of my life finally shook hands.

An archivist's whole job is built on one belief: that some things are worth keeping. That new does not mean better. That the industry will always push you toward the latest version and quietly let the durable old things rot in a box. I spent a career fighting that with paper and film. It turns out I had the same fight in me about fishing tackle.

The market wants you to buy a new lure every season. It wants your tackle box heavy and your wallet light. I think that is backwards. I believe in stuff that works longer than you do. One lure that can do multiple jobs beats ten that each do one. Less is more, and it always has been.

So I built the kind of lure I would want to leave behind. Reclaimed cedar, because the wood was already proven and already here. Through-wire stainless steel from nose to tail, so there is no weak link to fail on the fish of your life. Hand-stamped metal lips I make in the shop. Paint built up in layers by hand, then locked under a shiny clear topcoat. Every single one gets water-tested before it ever goes in a box. If you want the full play-by-play, I wrote about how a cedar crankbait is born, start to finish.

Why I pull a third of them

This is the part people do not expect from a guy who is trying to sell lures.

There are more than thirty-five hands-on steps in a single build. Roughly a third of those steps are rejection points. That means at any one of them, at any time during the process, can fail and get pulled. Another third are steps I may have to do over again to fix something that drifted off. I throw away work all the time. I redo work all the time.

That sounds inefficient, but it's about precision. The archivist in me cannot do it any other way. A pretty lure has no stories. What I am after is a lure that comes back season after season, gets handed down, outlives the angler who bought it. You do not get that by rushing. You get it by being willing to scrap the one in your hand and starting over.

So why leave everything behind

I did not really leave everything behind. I carried the important parts with me. The Navy taught me that gear either works when it matters or it gets someone hurt. The archives taught me that the durable thing is worth more than the new thing, every time. The kayak taught me patience, because low and slow is the only speed that catches the lazy giants. Big fish are efficient hunters. I have built a whole shop around that one idea.

What I left behind was the part of my old life that made nothing I could hold. I traded a desk for a bench. I traded moving information for moving cedar. I am still a maker and a keeper of durable things. I just do it with sawdust on my hands now.

If you have ever stood in your own life and thought there has to be something more honest than this, I would tell you to go make one thing with your hands. Just one. See how it feels at the end of the day. That one cedar lure rerouted the whole rest of my story, and I am not done telling it yet.

If you want to see where this all happens and what comes out of the shop, the Lost Art Lures lineup is right here.

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And here's something I genuinely want to know: what colors or classic lure styles do you think deserve to come back? Patterns that have disappeared from the market, old-school designs that nobody's making anymore. Drop it in the comments or shoot me a message. I'm always listening, and more than a few Lost Art builds have started exactly that way.

Fish hard, Brad

P.S. Those very first lures, the ones that rolled wrong and chipped, is still on a shelf in the shop. I keep it where I can see it. An archivist never throws out the things that started it all.