It started with a stump of juniper.

I was camped outside Bryce Canyon National Park in a copse of ponderosa pines on the first night of what would be a weeklong solo trip across the more remote region of Utah’s canyonland country. After setting camp, I tromped off, saw in hand, leaving boot prints in the auburn sand as I cut and gathered firewood for the night.

I didn’t walk far before coming upon a silvery specimen of dead juniper on the desert floor. It appeared like sinew, like stretched taffy the color of sharkskin, a sensual adornment to the already seductive landscape. I raised the saw in my right hand and cut easily into the dead tree—rigid as dried bone, brittle as pork crackling—then carted it off limb by limb, piece by piece, 50 yards back to my firepit. The stars rolled overhead as I cooked and ate dinner. Shadows flickered among the pinecones.

Come morning I found I had burned every log from that silvery juniper but one about as stout as a hiker’s calf. Reflecting on the mantra “leave no trace,” I felt that a hand-sawn log might offend the next passerby, appear unnatural. So after packing up camp, I used a single orange bungee cord to strap the pith of that single juniper to the rack of my red Jeep Cherokee 4.0. Then I drove off into the desert.

Juniper is about as common to Utah as is dirt to a mechanic’s fingernails. In fact, the shrublike tree that grows in Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and California is so endemic to my home state that it’s called the Utah juniper. Juniperus osteosperma. So it’s not like this particular stump was special. And yet it became special as we traveled together.

I made my way to McGath Lake at 10,000 feet on Boulder Mountain, stayed a night, admired the glittering gold of late-September aspen against the military green of fir and spruce. Then I traveled downward and onward to Escalante where I slept in an ashen swale and watched ants crawl across my bedroll in moonlight. Then across Tarantula Mesa and up a few thousand feet into the Henry Mountains where I encountered a single whitebark pine off the summit of Mount Ellen—the only one I’ve ever seen—before wandering onward to the hardscrabble town of Hanksville. Then down into the hot holster of eastern Utah called Moab where I spent a night on a couch. And up again into the La Sals.

All the while that little log soaked up sunlight atop my Jeep and glistened in argentine shine. When I arrived in the city a week later, I unpacked my gear but left the juniper where it be. There it stayed for a fortnight or two or three—I can’t fully remember—as I moved from coffeehouse to corporate cubicle to trailhead to tavern. My weekly grind.

One day I unhooked the fading bungee and carried the billet into the house, wrapped it in a black garbage bag, and stuffed it under my tangerine velour rocking chair where it could dry, in case years of lying dead in the desert had been insufficient. A year passed. I removed and unwrapped the bole, sheared it with a hatchet, slicing my thumb as I did so, bleeding onto the wood, and used a Japanese pull saw to carve off a chunk about the size of my fist. The green eyes of my 11-year-old daughter loomed over my shoulder with curiosity.

Then I drilled a hole in the small chunk about the size of my thumb. Over the next few days I sat on my porch in open sunlight and used a series of files and sandpapers to shape the gift from the land of sand into a tobacco pipe stummel. After sanding, I massaged a dab of walnut oil into the stummel with my bare hands and placed it on my bookshelf. There the unfinished pipe sat for the better part of two years.

A contemporary tobacco pipe consists of two parts: stummel and stem. The stummel is usually made of wood—most commonly Mediterranean briar—and represents the shank and bowl of the pipe, where the tobacco is held and burned. The stem, or mouthpiece, is frequently made of vulcanized rubber and connects to the stummel by way of mortise and tenon. This arrangement has been used since the mid 1800s and, though other materials and arrangements are employed, most pipe smokers agree that a briar stummel and vulcanite stem result in the most enjoyable smoking experience—flavor, comfort, functionality, durability, aesthetics and metaphysics considering.

I learned this after having carved my juniper. And I didn’t care. The romantic appeal of smoking from a fragment of wood that I had cut and carried out of the Utah desert was impossible to resist. But before I could indulge my fantasy, I had to shape and attach a stem. I began reading about pipemaking. I bought a few tools, ordered some small blocks of briar on eBay. They arrived in padded envelopes with hand-signed thank-you notes from a seller overseas.

Making a pipe is not like writing, which is what I spend most of my time doing. It has a definite end-state, a clear point of completion, a place in time at which the creator can look at his work and say, “It is finished.”

This essay, for example, is necessarily indefinite. It is, by one man’s standards, underdone, undeveloped, overcooked, overthought, narrow-sighted, shortsighted, one-sided, ambiguous, vague, imperfect and flawed. By another’s, obtuse, arrogant, vain, self-centered, inglorious and insignificant. And yet to some, a solid B. But no matter how long I hold it up to the light, I will never ascertain the wheres or hows or whys of its limitations. Neither could any honest critic. No matter how much time one spends tweaking and refining language, it remains incomplete. When the medium is endlessly malleable, open to endless interpretation, the product is perpetually imprecise.

I was reminded of this by working with a single block of briar—a piece of material reality—and by drilling two misaligned holes—one for a bowl, one for a mortise where a stem attached. The result was a pipe askew. Clear as a broken middle finger, I knew I had fucked up the task at hand. Both the mistake and the correction were objective, definable, definite. I could have, with the proper tools, calculated with exactness the angle at which the mortise should approach the bowl.

This simple objective, and the difficulty of achieving it, further attracted me to pipemaking. As an amateur writer sometimes weary of the nebulous nature of words, I wanted that kind of concretion in my life. A kind of certain and, hopefully, reachable end.

I began making another pipe. I closed my vise on a block of African ebony, drew some lines with a mechanical pencil, and began pruning with a pull saw. I further shaped the block with a fourteen-inch hoof rasp, then graduated to an eight-inch wood rasp, the hardened serrated teeth gnawing the organic flesh. I made thousands of strokes with various files, and thousands more with various grits of sandpaper. I noticed for the first time a fine muscle that seems to stretch from behind the wrist, around the elbow and between the triceps, under the shoulder blade where it connects to the spine just below the neck. If such a muscle does indeed exist, mine now feels like an overtightened guitar string. I smoked while I worked, ashed my cigar on the floor of my garage.

Wouldn’t you know it, the pipe was far from perfect. That “reachable” end I had hoped for appears to be a way off, which appears to be true of every facet of my life. The places I had hoped to go. The things I had hoped to make. The life I had hoped to live. The man I had hoped to become. I carved my name in tiny all-caps font into the stummel and gave the pipe to a friend, began working on another.

They say your life flashes before your eyes when you’re dying. But they don’t say exactly what dying looks like—when it begins, how long it takes, whether or not you’ll know that the breaths you breathe might in fact be your last. It was while making my fourth pipe that I noticed my life flashing before me. Shaping a block of briar elicits both attention and inattention. You incessantly feel and stroke the wood, ever honing it toward that imagined ideal of Beauty, and the mind wanders aimlessly, freely. It is a process that is somehow simultaneously concentrative and carefree. I became aware of this focused inattention when, while sanding for hours, I noticed certain memories arise in mind, more alluring than the standard stream of thought, and play out like a film on a screen. My attention would suddenly be drawn to them.

I remembered clearing a border check in New Mexico in my Chevy van after exploring White Sands, lighting a Padron cigar, and listening to the guitar of Tommy Guerrero as I traveled on to Arizona.

I remembered rolling out of the high Uintas, steam bellowing from the hood of my Jeep, and fixing a broken radiator hose with duct tape, aluminum tent tubing, and creek water.

I remembered sitting in the street, 3 a.m., drinking canned beer with a homeless man who advised me not to follow his path, though he loved (and hated) it just as I hated (and loved) my own.

I remembered trying to sleep through fourteen hours of darkness and coldness under a new moon in late November near Topaz Mountain in West Desert.

I watched with curiosity these memories and a hundred others as they appeared like flashes from the ether and noticed that the alluring ones, the ones that drew my attention, were always of those moments when I had been alone or otherwise out on my own, seeking somehow to make myself, or find myself, or express myself on the road in the desert through the backwoods and down backwards grubby city streets with people as honest and unreliable as the weather in spring.

I savored these moments that have shaped me with a kind of sad and sweet saudade as I shaped a pipe. A tool for smoking. For reflecting. For time alone to think.

There is no question that experience shapes us, but does it shape the things we make? Without consciously trying to, I’ve spent much of my life gathering material—fodder for stories, ideas, and maybe even insights. When I took an interest to writing, I hoped that my experiences of digging ditches, clearing toilets, milling metal, swindling middeclassers, and writing copy from a cushy leather executive chair might somehow broaden my perspective. From selling Christianity in shirt and tie to shooting smack and smoking crack, from driving BMWs and wearing cufflinks to driving leaky jeeps and wearing cutoff Wranglers, I have hoped that my diversity of living could become the substance of beautiful writing. Why? To leave a mark. Interesting how we gain a sense of worth from the idea that we might be remembered, that our lives might somehow shape the lives of those around us, and that the things we make might contribute to that shaping. It’s impossible to disentangle meaning, making, and meaning-making.

Last week I smoked my juniper pipe for the first time. I grabbed it off the bookshelf, drilled a mortise, attached an unfinished and poorly fitted stem, loaded the bowl with golden straight Virginia and puffed, hoping the cedarlike aroma of juniper would enhance the flavor of tobacco. It tasted like shit. Like wet sawdust with a hint of damp grassy manure, to be precise. The old-timers are right: briar smokes best.

Still, maybe one day I will carve TRIMBLE into the stummel and give the pipe to a friend so he can set it on a dusty bookshelf. It’s certainly one way to leave my mark amidst the world of books.