Fernwood Hollow · Meet the driver

Butter Brick

At the wheel: Ruth Holm

Volvo 240

The shape of a useful thing

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Ruth Holm spends her week designing wooden boxes for awkward objects. She knows what everyone thinks of a square Volvo and has a blocked Saturday calendar to prove that she doesn't mind.

Four good corners

Each spring the little museum sends out the old telephone exchange for a school visit. It goes in a crate Ruth built to fit through the original stairs. The first time she made the lid, the museum director asked if the whole job had to look so much like a carton of butter. Ruth said he could carry his telephone exchange in a sack if the crate embarrassed him. That was twelve years ago. His hand still finds the handle in the dark.

She bought the Volvo 240 with a dent in the rear threshold already square enough to put a packing slip under. She started bringing small objects home in it: a lever handle, a stool with four different feet, a box of wooden taps nobody wanted to date until they could see how it worked. Empty, the wagon looks as if it is early for another job. The first people who saw her report for a practice slot assumed the very same thing.

Door that goes up instead of out

Among the first figures she worked out were how wide the 240 was and how far it could lean before a wheel troubled a track edge. She might have arrived at the second figure sooner if she'd stopped taking dimensions of all the toolboxes used to close the gap in her boot. Her husband Eli had been watching her at the back door while he put a new pane in a cold frame. He asked what she planned to carry around the turn. She said a toolbox. He took it out and waited for a better answer.

Ruth tried it empty and turned in too gently. When she finally set it up early enough, the wagon moved up onto the edge of a little camber and felt as deliberate as it ever had under load. She saved a page in her old work notebook that describes this feeling as four people coming through a narrow door with a table.

“If it's a butter carton, don't carry it sideways in the rain.”

Ruth Holm · To the museum director about the telephone crate.

A question with no handles

Mara from Iron Wagon knew what it was like to show up and be handed spares instead of being asked what you came for. Ruth asked which had happened first: had someone given Mara a job, or had Mara gone looking for one? Mara did not answer that afternoon. Ruth spent the first part of the drive home feeling clever about it and the second realizing she hadn't answered the question herself.

She took a bit of advice from Bea at the harbor. Bea won't discuss anybody's choice of car while there are plates in her hands. Ruth began telling people she wanted help with a test and waiting long enough to say it again without a joke. The first person to take her up on it was Dalia from Crimson Crush. Dalia asked what the Volvo needed. Ruth nearly went all the way back to the garage to find a spanner before she admitted that the answer was space.

Busy Saturday

There is a museum piece that needs to travel the same weekend as the long practice Ruth has picked. It has its own straight-sided crate. Ruth has put instructions for loading it in the office and left her telephone number off the envelope, which Eli found funny. She wants the wagon to change direction in less space than she thought possible when she bought it. She has set aside a morning to find out.

At dinner she offers to lend Eli a square for a join he's been putting off. He opens the kitchen drawer where she already laid one. They look at it together. The loading instructions go in the drawer beneath the square until Monday.

“Plenty of places to set tools in that car. That doesn't make every one of them a reason to stop.”

Ruth Holm · Asked what she carries at private practice.

Mic at the pits

Handle in the dark

Mack What's in the butter box?

Ruth Holm Normally, a telephone exchange. Today it's the stuff I'm taking out of my wagon before I try to turn it properly.

Mack Very modern telephone.

Meet the voice behind the microphone