Bill Hughes is 61 years old now, and he has figured out what his ideal life would look like.
In the mornings he'd teach flute-making. In the afternoons he'd make his own flutes.
Along the way, of course, he'd be elevating the art of flute-making. He'd teach a new generation what a well-crafted Native American flute looks and sounds like. A well-crafted flute, as opposed to the kind you see at tourist shops. Also, in this ideal existence, he would be filling the world with flutes.
Sitting at at worktable in his flute shop, Hughes says, "I am certain of one thing: The world is not in this mess because we have too many flutes."
There are some days — days when he has students, and maybe a friend drops by to bring him some wood — when his life feels perfect already.
Walk in to his shop, a little room next to the larger wood shop owned by the Granite School District, and the first thing you notice is the smell. It's a clean sort of smell.
Then Hughes starts demonstrating his craft, starts sanding a flute, and the Alaskan cedar releases its spices. The air gets thick with scent. You sniff and sniff. Hughes smiles and says, "I don't finish the inside. So it retains that smell. You can always stick it up to your nose . . ." But scent is just one of many nifty attributes, in his view.
"The Native American flute is the only two-chambered flute in the world," Hughes explains. His voice is calm and teacherlike as he points out its features on the open half of a not-yet-glued-together flute.
When you blow, gently, the air comes into the first chamber, which dead-ends, forcing the air to turn a right angle and exit through a small round hole on the top of the flute. A flat piece of wood, a flue, covers the hole. Under the flue, "the air flattens out into a little ribbon," Hughes explains. The ribbon of air gets funneled back down into the second chamber and past the tone holes.
As air streams against wood it gains a sound, a haunting sound, a music like no other. "The quality of the sound of a Native American flute brings out something in us," Hughes says.
He likes other indigenous instruments, the drums and rattles. But the flute embodies the soul of the Native American, he says. His praise continues: The flute has only five holes for your fingers and little more than an octave range, and you don't need to read music to play it. You can figure out a tune. "The music is in you somewhere," says Hughes.
It is all so simple. "Kids really take off with these flutes," says Hughes. "They go nuts."
Hughes is a family therapist by profession. In the past, with funding from various social services grants and contracts, he has helped about 75 kids make a flute. Often, after a youngster makes one flute, he or she will ask to make a second.
Hughes explains why some need two flutes. He often works with youth-in-custody students, the kind of kids who have given their mothers a lot of grief. As they craft a flute, they get into a "tremendous quandary," says Hughes. They want to keep it, but they also want to make amends. "So far everyone of them has resolved the dilemma by giving their first flute to their mom," he says.
The moms cry, says Hughes. The kids are proud and want to make a flute for themselves. "Flutemaking is therapy," Hughes says. Especially when you plane and sand by hand. "Making a flute lifts you."
More than the talking kind of therapy he also does, Hughes likes the therapy of working with wood. He likes acting as a grandfather to youngsters who have no dads.
Hughes talks gently to his students. His voice becomes even more soothing when they get to the delicate work of gouging and filing and tuning the tone holes.
For a time, last year, he and his friend Nino Reyos also taught flute-making at the Indian Walk-in Center. Reyos, who is Ute, and also a therapist, began playing the flute long ago.
Hughes came to flutes eight years ago when he and his wife, Beth, were on vacation in Tucson and he saw a pretty flute in a shop. "The only music I'd ever done was when I was a kid," he says, "a terrifying experience with an accordion."
Well, he may not have made much music, but he had done woodworking. That first flute split and when he went looking for one of a better quality and could not find it, Hughes decided to make his own. He found some books and some wood and started carving, sanding and gluing.
He figures he's made about 600 flutes, ruined 100 of those, sold some (for between $80 and $250) and given away hundreds.
During the week before the Olympics, word got around that Hughes made the flute that Reyos would play in the opening ceremonies. The people in charge of the ceremonies liked its sound and asked Hughes to make flutes, as gifts, for all five native flutists.
Hughes worked faster than he'd ever worked before. He started seven flutes, ruined one, but completed six in 48 hours.
Though he has reached the point where his own flutes are nice enough to sell (and he's started a company called Windrivers Flute) Hughes says a flute doesn't have to be perfect in order to sound good. The chambers must be routed with precision, yes, but much of the rest of the flute can be what it will. "Part of the therapy is accepting imperfections in the wood and in the kids and in ourselves."
If there is no such thing as a perfect flute, then there is probably no such thing as the perfect life. There is only this life, which Hughes continues to craft.
He has a small private practice — talking, not wood therapy. But happily, this week, he'll meet a new group of youth-in-custody students. He'll work with them, four or five at a time, until they've made a flute or two. In a few months, when the contract with the youth-in-custody ends, Hughes hopes for a grant to go back to the Indian Walk-In Center, he and Reyos.
Meanwhile, has his own shop in his garage at home. He also has a network of sources for gorgeous wood. Redheart, yellowheart, cherry, walnut, bubinga, cypress. He has dozens of rectangular pieces lying about — wood just waiting for him or one of his students, waiting to reveal the beauty of its grain, its fragrance and, of course, its sound.
E-mail: susan@desnews.com