“My wife hadn’t reached the middle of her own back in years. So I carved her a cat that could.”

Why a 76-year-old wood-carver in the Blue Ridge Mountains is letting his last hand-carved cat back scratchers go for almost nothing — before he closes the bench he’s worked at for 44 years.

One of the last off Hollis Vance’s bench. Carved from a single block of basswood — the cat’s stretch, the reaching paw, the whole thing, from one piece of wood. Nothing molded, nothing glued, nothing shipped in from overseas.

There is one spot in the middle of your back your own two hands will never quite reach. For most of us it’s a passing itch. For Nora Vance, it became a daily torment — ever since the winter she slipped on the porch ice and her right shoulder never rose past her ribs again.

Her husband Hollis watched her fight it for the better part of a year. The drugstore back scratchers were useless — the plastic bent, the claws scratched her skin, and every one cracked within a month. So one January he did the only thing he really knew how to do: he carved her one by hand.

He made it from a single block of basswood, long enough to reach the center of her back, and shaped it like Biscuit, their old marmalade cat, caught mid-stretch — because a stretching cat is the exact curve an arm needs to reach its own back. Nora hung it by her reading chair and used it every day. Within a month, three of her friends had asked Hollis for one too.

What that three-dollar plastic one gets wrong

Hollis has held hundreds of the imported ones over the years — people bring them by the shop, asking if he can fix them. He can’t. There’s nothing to fix. He just turns them over in his hands and shakes his head.

“They mold the whole thing hollow so it costs them near nothing. First cold snap, the plastic goes brittle. You lean into that itch you’ve been chasing all day, and it snaps off in your hand. Into the trash it goes. Then you buy another one.”

That, he says, is the whole design: made to be replaced, not kept. The molded “claws” are either too sharp — they scrape the skin raw — or too soft to do anything at all. The handle flexes when you push on it, so the pressure never reaches where you need it. And within a year, in a landfill, right next to last year’s.

A carved stick of hardwood has none of those problems. It never had. Which is the strange thing, Hollis says: people traded something that lasts a lifetime for something built to break, and hardly anyone noticed it happen.

The man at the end of the gravel road

Hollis Vance in the workshop behind his house near Boone. The wood stove has been lit every carving morning since 1981.

I drove up the ridge on a warm morning in June. The workshop sits behind a gray farmhouse at the end of a gravel road — a wood stove ticking in the corner, the smell of cut basswood and linseed oil, hand tools hung in the exact order he’s kept them for forty years. Tacked above the bench, two sun-faded photographs: a marmalade cat, and a dark-haired young woman on a wedding day.

Hollis is seventy-six, married to Nora for fifty-one years. The cat was hers first — a half-frozen stray named Biscuit who wandered in out of a snowstorm in 1981 and stayed nineteen years. Every morning she stretched across the hearth, one paw reaching out ahead, while Hollis worked. Years later, when he needed a shape that could reach the middle of Nora’s back, he already knew it by heart.

“Nora’s the one who couldn’t reach her back. Biscuit’s the one who showed me the shape. All I did was hold the knife. A man wants to fix the one thing he actually can — and this, I could fix.”

Ten thousand cats, one at a time

Word got around the way it does in a small mountain town. After Nora’s friends came the neighbors, and after the neighbors, half the county. Hollis set up a table at the fair in Boone, and then at the fairs from here to Asheville — and for years his was the table with the cats, the one folks walked their kids over to see.

Over 44 years he’s carved more than ten thousand of them. Each one still carries Biscuit’s stretch: the same arched spine, the same reaching paw, the little carved face with two eyes looking back at you. No two are exactly alike, because no two are stamped — each is cut, shaped, and smoothed by the same pair of hands.

The face at the tip. Two eyes, two ears, cut by hand. “Anybody who’s loved a cat knows that stretch,” Hollis says. “That’s the shape my hands have made ten thousand times.”

What forty-four years taught his hands

Hollis doesn’t talk about features. He talks about how a back scratcher is supposed to be made — and why almost nobody makes them that way anymore. Four things, in his telling, separate one of his from the thing on the shelf.

The reaching paw lands on the one spot your own two hands never will. “First time I used it,” one customer wrote, “I actually laughed out loud.”

Why this is the last of them

What’s left on the shelf. When these are gone, the bench goes quiet for good.

You’d expect a man closing a 44-year workshop to blame his hands, or his age. Not Hollis — his hands are fine, and he’d happily carve another ten years. That isn’t why he’s stopping.

He’s stopping because of the junk. Somewhere in a factory in China, a machine stamps out a thousand hollow plastic cat scratchers a day — painted to look a little like wood, packed by the container-load, shipped eight thousand miles, and dumped on the shelf at three dollars apiece. The county fairs that once lined up three-deep at his table now sit half-empty. The gift shops that used to buy a dozen at a time went under, or started stocking the cheap import instead. A whole trade — men and women who carved by hand for a living — got flooded out, one container ship at a time.

“It’s not that folks stopped needing them. Everybody’s still got that itch they can’t reach. They just got trained to grab the three-dollar Chinese one at the register without thinking — the kind that cracks by winter and ends up in the landfill. You can’t keep a real workshop lit against a machine on the other side of the world.”

So this is the last batch — not because Hollis can’t carve them, but because he’s done fighting a machine that stamps out ten thousand throwaways in the time he carves one. His son builds software in Raleigh; there’s no apprentice, and never was. What’s on the shelf right now is all that’s left.

All he wants is to see them get used

People tell Hollis he ought to charge more — that a hand-carved thing, one of the last of its kind, could fetch a collector’s price. A specialty shop once offered to take the lot and sell them at four times what he asks. And a manufacturer, years back, offered to buy the design outright and mold it by the thousand. He said no to both.

“I didn’t say no to the factory to be stubborn. Some things just shouldn’t be stamped out ten thousand at a time by a machine that never met a cat. This one shouldn’t.”

He keeps the price as low as he can, on purpose. He doesn’t want these ending their days behind glass in a collector’s cabinet, dusted twice a year and never touched. He wants them used — hung by the back door, tucked beside an armchair, kept in the kitchen drawer of somebody who reaches for it every evening and thinks, for half a second, of the old man in the mountains who carved it.

Whoever takes one of these last cats is carrying home a piece of 44 years — a marmalade stray named Biscuit, a wife who couldn’t reach her own back, and one of the last honest, hand-carved things a person can still buy. To Hollis, that was always worth more than the money.

What folks say about Hollis’s cats

Sent in from their homes

What people ask before they order one

Disclosure: This article is a paid advertisement and contains promotional content. The Maker’s Journal has a financial relationship with the advertised product. The story of Hollis Vance is based on the maker’s account; some narrative and quoted material has been arranged for editorial presentation. Product details and customer experiences referenced are those provided by the maker and individual customers; because each piece is carved by hand from natural wood, grain, color, and markings vary from piece to piece. Pricing and availability are subject to change.