Dan Dustin's retirement savings is a box full of his handmade wooden spoons. He knows he'll be too old to carve them one day and figures it's better to scrimp a little on sales now and save some for the future.

"When I'm 90, the stuff'll be worth plenty," said Dustin. 58, a Contoocook resident. "In the meantime, enjoy the peanut butter."

Dustin may always retain his Yankee frugality, but a new novel by Ernest Hebert is likely to boost his sales. The book, Spoonwood, tells a story of a man who retreats into the woods with his infant son and makes a living by carving wooden spoons with primitive tools.

The book is dedicated to Dustin, who Hebert met at the Sunapee Craft Fair about 15 years ago. Hebert, an English professor at New England College, said Dustin's spoons are the perfect metaphor for the New England woods. Dustin agreed.

"There's no desire in these spoons, there's no ego," he said. "It's really the tree. The tree speaks to you through me. I stay away from it."

But Dustin hasn't lost his artistic sense of "moral self-righteousness." He won't carve just anything into a spoon. He won't chop down a tree for a spoon, preferring to take wood left behind from timber harvests. Spoons aren't made, they're found, and Dustin won't make a tree into a spoon if he can't see a spoon in that tree before he starts cutting.

"I won't make a skinny spoon out of a fat tree,"he said.

The best spoons reflect the natural curves formed in branches and trunks by a tree reaching for light, he said. Dustin makes spoons from mountain laurel (known as spoonwood), lilac and blueberry bushes, and apple and peach trees. The spoons curve according to the grain of the wood. They cost as little as $30 and as much as $100.

Dustin learned to work with wood on the family farm, which has been in Contoocook since 1822. Instead of tending the animals or crops, Dustin went to the woodshed, where his first carvings were corks for kerosene tins, he said.

He studied sociology at Bates College in Maine, and during the summers, he worked at a harpsichord shop, hand-sanding and finishing the wood and repairing antique instruments, he said. After graduation, he taught earth sciences at a Massachusetts junior high school for two years and then took the money he had saved and moved to Kennebunkport, Maine. There, he ran an ad in the local paper, advertising "Useful things hand-made of wood: What can I make for you?"

At least half of the people who answered the ad asked for wooden spoons. Dustin made them with power tools, and, although they were nice and useful, they weren't beautiful. "I was making clubs," he said. "I was making cabinet-maker's spoons."

Like the character in Hebert's book, Dustin went to the woods, where he discovered his version of spoon making. After several years in Maine, he returned to the family farm in Contoocook and eventually ended up living in a borrowed teepee in the woods with his infant daughter and wife.

"If you really want to do hand work, you gotta go back to the caves," Dustin said.

While splitting firewood one day, Dustin looked at a piece of wood and saw a spoon shape curved in the wood. He had lost all of his power tools in a fire in prior dwelling, so he carved the spoon using a hatchet and a pocket knife.

"It was beautiful," he said. "It swam, it flowed."

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