They call it flamework
Rob Price

My wife and I have lived in Steuben County for nearly 20 years, but we've never visited the Corning Museum of Glass. Last week, we decided to rectify that. "You'll enjoy it," a friend told us. "They let you make glass things yourself and I made a Christmas tree ornament."

That sounded cool, although in retrospect "cool" is not be the right word to use in a discussion of glass. People who work with glass learn to handle temperatures in the thousands of degrees. The resulting glass object, cooled to room temperature, may be cool to look at, but it needed a furnace to get there.

Still, in the first flush of excitement, my wife and I thought fooling around with a little molten glass might be - yes, cool. My wife especially, who walked around the museum gazing at its amazing collection of glass artifacts and every so often rushing over to my side to remind me soon we would be making something in glass.

What we would be making, according to the studio ticket I held in my hand, was a bead. It sounded simple enough when we purchased the tickets. In fact, it sounded almost too simple, and I was tempted to ask whether it would be possible to skip the juvenile stuff and proceed directly to a Venetian-styled chandelier. That wasn't on the menu, though, so I kept my reservations to myself and wondered how many children would be making beads on either side of me.

I don't know about you, but every once in a while I underestimate the downside of some high adventure I sign onto. I suppose fifteenth century sailors occasionally did the same thing, imagining the discovery of the new world would be a larky way to spend the next few weeks, and then of course no one ever heard from them again.

The last time this happened to me was when my wife talked me into shooting some class four rapids on the lower Youghiogheny River in Pennsylvania. I began to sense the trip would be more challenging than I'd imagined when the guides distributed protective headgear. Midway through the trip, our raft crashed into a rock and I fell in the river. The water was wet and pleasant, but the rocks my body kept slamming into were hard and completely unyielding. By the time the trip was over, I was emotionally shaken, not to mention bruised.

"I have a great idea," my wife said on the drive home. "Let's shoot the upper Youghiogheny next week. Those are class five rapids."

Making a glass bead through a technique known as flameworking turned out to be a little like shooting the Youghiogheny rapids. What is absolutely terrifying about molten glass is its tendency to solidify and then blow up. I don't mind the odd bang, but our instructor, whose name was Linda, advised us this particular bang would be accompanied by a wide distribution of glass shards, each one heated to about 1000 degrees.

"Don't worry, " she said. "I've never had one student who needed to go to the hospital."

But I'm the kind of fellow who worries about 1000-degree glass shards imbedding themselves in my face, and so I bent over the gas torch and rods of colored glass with, yes, a lot of fear.

How much fear? By the time Linda had coaxed me through the process of making a single bead, the muscles in my left arm had completed spasmed. I felt as if my arm had broken. I was a shaken man, and I drove our car away from the Corning Museum of Glass in the wrong lane of the museum's driveway.

"Maybe I should be driving," my wife said, remembering the occasion of our Youghiogheney River adventure. "Maybe you're not getting out enough these days."

I relaxed, though, and for the remainder of the trip my wife read out loud descriptions of more elaborate courses she and I could take at the Corning Museum of Glass. Courses with names like Advanced Flameworking and Flameworking in Style.

"We could retire from our jobs and make glass jewelry," my wife said. She thought that proposition through a little more and decided Lora, our daughter, could design and market the jewelry while the two of us manufactured it over blowtorches.

It sounded interesting. On a level with her last idea for retirement, which was becoming white water raft guides.