The Observer, May 2004
Volunteer Profile: OSPRC member passionate about wood
One visit to Joe Jabas’ home in a converted auto body shop near Valdez and you know you’re dealing with a real Alaskan.
There’s a sawmill out front, and a shed by the house is full of snowmachines and other outdoor gear. At the back is a woodshop where he turns out beautiful, hand-crafted diamond-willow furniture.
“You have to be busy,” Jabas said during an interview last month in his combined studio, kitchen and living room. “You can’t be idle.”
Wood is the great passion of Joe Jabas. He has his own sawmill to make lumber for the Valdez market. And, as shown above, he's a consummate woodworker. The headboard of a diamond-willow bed he made.
That pretty much sums up Jabas’ life since his birth 59 years ago in Little Falls, Minn. He worked in dairy farming as kid, joined the Air Force in 1962, and worked food service and accounting in Thailand.
In 1966, a civilian once more, he signed on with the Minnesota Historical Society for an uncommonly interesting job that involved, among other things, underwater archaeology. The society was researching the fur trade of the region’s earlier days. Using the traders’ diaries, they determined which waterfalls had been the scene of the most boat mishaps. Then Jabas and other scuba divers searched the pools below the falls for sunken artifacts.
“There were a couple of weeks in the summer when water conditions were right,” Jabas said. “We found things like muskets, trade axes, pewter dishes and kettles.”
By 1973, Jabas was ready for a change, so he headed for Alaska. After a brief stretch working with the geology department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, he became one of the thousands of people who built the trans-Alaska pipeline system.
He worked primarily as a construction labor foreman, doing such tasks as stringing pipes and erecting the H-shaped supports that carry the pipeline across areas where permafrost prevents it from being buried. Once the pipeline was completed, he helped build ice roads in the North Slope oilfields.
He lived in Homer during this period, and worked at logging when he wasn’t up north. He acquired his sawmill in 1985.
On March 24, 1989, Jabas was helping move a warehouse from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef. He became oil-spill response supervisor at Alyeska’s tanker terminal and stayed in the job until his retirement from full-time work as a laborer in 1996.
That was when he moved to Valdez permanently and bought his place a few miles east of town on the Richardson Highway. Since then, he’s run his sawmill and taken occasional labor jobs at the terminal.
He’s been mostly out of action for heavy work since a back injury in 2000, and is just now starting to feel up to getting into it again.
His sawmill supplies lumber for local builders, both professionals and do-it-yourselfers, and he spends a lot of time on woodworking, especially on the diamond-willow furniture.
The pattern that gives the diamond willow its name.
A dining set made by Jabas.
The hardy little tree is so named because of the diamond-shaped red depressions that form in its creamy yellow-white wood, nearly always around the stub of a dead branch. The cause is believed to be a fungus.
Whatever their origin, the vibrant colors and fascinating patterns have long made the diamond willow a favorite of woodworkers like Jabas.
It’s a labor of love, though. Jabas said it took him several years to collect and dry the willow for a bed he’s working on. If he paid himself $20 an hour for his work, he calculates, the bed would be worth at least $20,000.
As he left his full-time job at the Alyeska terminal eight years ago, Jabas decided to involve himself with the citizens’ council and joined the Oil Spill Prevention and Response Committee. He believed his long experience with the oil industry, especially in oil-spill response, would be an asset to the organization.
“I have more insight from that history as to what may occur,” Jabas said. “Most people don’t consider someone who has his own sawmill an environmentalist, but I do consider myself an environmentalist to some degree. I do support the oil industry, but they have to do it without trying to sidestep the issues.”