THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 19, 1995 TAG: 9511170890
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 20 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHRIS KIDDER
LENGTH: Long : 164 lines
EACH MORNING, Nick Sapone can be found in his garage workshop, where he spends his days turning blocks of juniper wood into plump pintail, bafflehead and ruddy ducks, Canada geese and snow white swans.
His specialty is a Canada goose decoy made with a carved, wooden head mounted on a canvas body stretched over a wire frame. It's a difficult craft to master, he says, and few do it well. He learned by taking old canvas decoys apart and putting them back together.
Sapone, a former engineer, is from a new breed of decoy makers. He didn't take up carving to continue a family tradition. And he's never had much time to hunt.
``I like working with my hands,'' he explains.
The canvas and wire frame design is a regional style, credited to an unknown Currituck County waterfowler who had more scrap sail cloth than good lumber to use.
Sapone favors the simple ``working'' decoy, also called a gunning decoy. These decoys are broadly interpreted to fool birds on the wing but lack the meticulous detail that some decoy carvers now invest in their work.
The quality used to judge detailed ``decorative'' decoys is perfection, Sapone says. The coloration and detail of the bird is everything. Working-style decoys are judged not only by how they look but how they float and bob on the water.
``I try to make a good looking bird, but also one that works well,'' he explains. ``I know my limitations. You have more artistic license with a gunning decoy.''
Sticking with what he does best gives Sapone a good deal of job satisfaction.
He's won a roomful of blue ribbons for his work.
He was invited to demonstrate his craft at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in 1988, just eight years after he carved his first decoy.
``Everyone likes to be admired for what they do,'' he says.
Sapone has successfully joined ranks with dozens of other coastal craftspeople who make their living carving, shaping, sanding and painting the waterfowl of the Atlantic flyway.
Art is only a piece of their work; each carver is part historian, part performer. The challenge of reviving and preserving an old craft is at the heart of what they do and why they do it.
To sell their work, carvers open their workshops to the curious and to collectors alike. They demonstrate their skills with a knife or a paintbrush, and answer questions about what they do and why they do it.
In the fall, they take their show on the road to Chincoteague, Currituck, Harkers Island and other places where the heritage of hunt clubs and decoys runs rich and deep.
The hunting decoy was a Native American working tool, a facsimile of waterfowl made to trick the avian eye. European settlers in the New World took the decoy, made it their own, and for more than 300 years used it to put food on their tables.
The tradition of waterfowling with decoys was particularly strong along the mid-Atlantic coast. From the beginning of Indian legend, millions of birds had darkened coastal skies on their fall migration. Thousands of ducks and geese wintered in the marshlands and tidewater estuaries.
Until the late 1800s, the hunting of these birds along the Carolina coast was not done for sport or profit. Fisherman, farmer, boatbuilder and lighthouse keeper all kept their raft of decoys and their guns close at hand. Hunting was something they did when the stew pot was empty or when an opportunity presented itself.
The carving of decoys was an incidental craft. It was a way to pass time in bad weather or to keep idle hands busy during neighborly visits. The skills needed to shape wood into an adequate duck or goose were passed from generation to generation along with a strong, sharp knife. It was man's work, like mending a fishing net, sharpening a scythe or building a crab pot. It was survival, not art.
Between 1857 and 1931, wealthy sportsmen established dozens of hunt clubs along the Outer Banks from Currituck to Down East. For the first and probably only time, there was a living to be made from waterfowl. The clubs hired local men as caretakers and guides; one of their jobs was to carve decoys.
The hunt clubs died out. Families were fed from the shelves of the local grocery store. Government regulations, declining populations of wildfowl and an evolving culture that, in turn, has embraced spectator sport and animal rights, pushed hunting from the local vernacular.
But Victor and Ellen Berg, Kill Devil Hills carvers, are exceptions. Vic has been hunting since he was a child, Ellen says. He works as a hunting guide and runs one of the few surviving hunt clubs. They both hunt to eat.
Vic Berg's keel-bottomed gunning decoys are recognized up and down the coast, admired for their utility as well as their craftsmanship. While 75 to 80 percent of his decoys never see a salt marsh, some of them really do make it out to a hunt.
Like most Down East carvers, Harkers Island decoy maker Curt Salter works in a small shed behind his house. He sits on a stool surrounded by hundreds of tools, small and large. Stacks of simple patterns hang on the wall, testaments to how long Salter has been carving the ducks and geese that line his garage. Some Salter drew himself, some he traced from other carvers.
``There are no secrets between carvers,'' he explains.
Once a carver cuts a pattern out and begins shaping, the work becomes his own. Even when you try to copy another carver's style, it's hard to do, he says.
Salter's shed is layered with sawdust. Wood shavings crunch underfoot. The air is thick with the smell of cut tupelo gum wood. A dozen pieces or more are scattered around the work room, each at a different stage in its transfiguration from scrap wood to duck.
In the midst of his own creations are older decoys, well used or long forgotten, broken, split, in need of paint. Salter calls out the names of the men who carved them. These were men who made art from necessity, he says. He's honored to restore their work and keep their names alive.
David Lawrence is another Harkers Island carver. He began carving as a teenager. His family hunted and his first decoys were functional, not decorative. ``You didn't waste time to fool a duck,'' he says.
Lawrence understands that few people can afford to hunt with handmade decoys these days. A basic, working-style solid wood Canada goose decoy might cost $100, he explains. You can buy a plastic one for only $12.
Lawrence, who retired from law enforcement two years ago to devote his time to wildlife painting and carving, now spends more time on detail. His decoys are bought by collectors looking for something in between the working style of his youth and decoys he describes as so detailed ``they look like they could fly away.''
Such lifelike detail can command a price in excess of $1,000; you can buy a signed David Lawrence decoy for around $400.
It's hard to figure, says one decoy carver, why people put more stock in decoys as art objects than in how well they work.
But no matter. Most of the carvers are not doing what they do for the money. They carve because they love the work and because they find satisfaction in preserving a piece of their heritage. They share what they know with anyone who will listen.
And Americans are rediscovering their roots. The old ways are being revived for the sake of the craft, with the hope that somewhere in the doing and telling we will find a key to our futures.
Decoys - simple enough to fool a duck, beautiful enough to charm the human eye - have become cherished icons of coastal life.
There's no better place to learn about the heritage and craft of the decoy than at one of the many festivals held in the mid-Atlantic region each year.
The Currituck Wildlife Festival, going into its 15th year, is held each September. Proceeds from the show go toward the Wildlife Museum being established at the Whalehead Club in Corolla. This year, dozens of carvers and wildlife artists participated in the two-day event.
But the most popular of North Carolina's shows - the Core Sound Decoy Festival - is still to come. It's held ``Down East,'' on Harkers Island near Beaufort, the first weekend of December.
Seven Down East carvers, including David Lawrence and Curt Salter, formed the Core Sound Decoy Carvers Guild in 1987 and held its first festival in 1988. The festival, staffed by more than 100 volunteers, drew 8,000 people last year.
This year's festival, Dec. 2 and 3, will feature 120 exhibits along with decoy painting and head carving contests, a gunning decoy performance contest, a loon calling contest and retriever demonstrations. There will be a fund-raising auction of old and new decoys and other wildlife art. MEMO: All the carvers featured in The Coast this week exhibit at the Core
Sound Decoy Festival. For more information on the festival, call (919)
728-1500.All the carvers featured in The Coast exhibit at the Core Sound
Decoy Festival. For information on the festival, call (919) 728-1500.
ILLUSTRATION: Staff photos by DREW C. WILSON
Victor and Ellen Berg of Kill Devil Hills have carved a career in
the production of finely detailed decoys.
Victor and Ellen Berg's keel-bottomed decoys are admired for their
utility as well as craftsmanship.
by CNB