Sitting on a jerry-rigged table made from a crude slab of Douglas fir positioned atop two stumps, Ken Otter explains how his mobile milling business helps West Marin residents give their fallen or dying wood a second life. He holds up his hands, which lack the calluses and folds that most carpenters have—“computer hands,” as he calls them. He’s had many careers, and woodworking is the newest. He says it’s a meditative practice, but one with practical applications.
“Working with the mill has become a practice of mindfulness for me,” he said. “It takes so much thought and precision. The debate over how to perform the cut, the position—it helps me to focus and relax.”
Mr. Otter, a native of Orange County who has lived in West Marin for the past 30 years, recently retired from teaching leadership courses at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga. He said having more time out of the office has allowed him to get closer to the things that mean the most to him.
Last January, he bought a mobile mill, inspired by the beauty of the forest around him and, specifically, the Inverness Park lot that he and his wife, Taira Restar, have turned into an outdoor preschool.
On one side of the couple’s three-acre property sits Emerald Heart Forest School, a nature-based program run by Ms. Restar. The property is scattered with handmade wooden huts, tables and chairs, and a big, bright shed that houses school supplies for the students.
Opposite to the school sits the mill. In the filtered light, the machine glows like a shrine, surrounded by stacks of logs too large for any person to carry alone. Though he says he has never been too comfortable around heavy machinery, the mill has required Mr. Otter to learn how to wield chainsaws and other power tools. “Soon I’ll need to get more equipment,” he said. “A forklift. Trailer. To make the process more manageable.”
The couple had their eyes on the Inverness Park property for years before buying it, with a dream of building a house from wood gathered from the land. When they finally purchased the lot in early 2019, it was littered with overgrown brush and fallen bay laurel and Douglas firs that took nearly two years to clear. Between the property and neighbors’ lots down the road, Mr. Otter collected 24 huge fir logs to use for a house. But financial setbacks brought on by the pandemic thwarted the project.
Still set on making use of the wood, last spring Mr. Otter hired a sawyer to mill the fir and build the shed for the preschool. Working closely with the builder Ryan Hett allowed Mr. Otter to learn some of the foundations of milling and carpentry. After months of studying and learning the industrial saw—aptly named the “Super Slabber” for its ability to cut massive boards from trunks up to nine feet wide—Mr. Otter placed an ad in the Light advertising his work. Neighbors came to him in haste, looking for their wood to be repurposed.
Mr. Otter markets the business around the idea that, for the same price as hiring a company to haul trunks off a property, he’ll mill it into dimensional lumber. Between dying, fallen or PG&E-cut trees, there is no shortage of wood that needs to be dealt with in West Marin.
When neighbors approached new Inverness resident Cameo Wood about the nearly-dead 150-foot firs that towered over her house, she reached out to Mr. Otter after seeing his ad. “I’m really lucky I met him so soon after moving here,” Ms. Wood said. “He’s orchestrated a tree-cutting team, the milling—even managed to find me a good plumber.”
Mr. Otter advised Ms. Wood on which trees had structurally sound wood and how to store and manage the wood over the winter so it wouldn’t warp. Ms. Wood plans to use it for fences, steps and an outdoor storage shed.
Mr. Otter said he has nearly 25 days of milling in Inverness Park before he can start his next major project in Woodacre: a lot’s worth of lumber that he will mill for a new home. It’s a busy life for a recent retiree, but he feels grateful to be working with his hands in a forest he says has accepted him in serendipitous ways.