Many people have relaxing hobbies, hobbies they perform when they watch movies and chill out, like building model airplanes or knitting sweaters. But Max Johnson knits cold, hard steel into chainmail — as in what King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table wore.
“It’s exactly like knitting, only it’s manly knitting,” said Johnson, a third-year multimedia student.
Johnson’s hobbies are not limited to making and designing chainmail, however. He is also an artist, a video producer, a raver, a fire swinger, and a self-proclaimed and self-acclaimed geek.
“I am in a major that requires me to sit behind a computer for every class. I play Dungeons and Dragons and video games. I think I am a definitely a geek,” Johnson said. “But I also go to parties and do things other people do.”
Johnson, 20, moved with his family to Indonesia when he was eight. His father works as a geologist for Freeport-McMoran Copper and Gold Inc., the primary copper mining company in Indonesia. He lived in a small rural town surrounded by thick green jungle. Johnson said he believes this separation from U.S. popular culture had a lot to do with how he was raised and the perspectives he formed.

“Instead of running through the city throwing rocks off overpasses like some kids, we would go dashing through the jungle swinging on vines” he said. “In the big picture, being cut off from the fall of M.C. Hammer and the rise of Vanilla Ice was not such a big miss-out for me.”
When Johnson was in the 10th grade, he moved back to the states and attended a private Quaker high school in Maryland. His parents remained in Indonesia.
During his senior year, he became interested in 3-D computer programs and multimedia design.
“I just started messing around with different programs and really liking them,” Johnson said. “I went online and started checking out colleges with good general education programs and good multimedia programs. The University seemed like a good deal.”
Johnson spent his first two years at the University in the residence halls, but he now lives with four other people in an off-campus house. One of his roommates, Ben Brown, met Johnson during their freshman year, but now, three years later, Brown said he still doesn’t entirely understand Johnson’s personality.

“Max is a difficult person to figure out,” Brown said. “Sometimes he’s completely open and outgoing, and sometimes he seems to retreat back into his own interior world and sort of peek out at the rest of us from behind his eyes.”
Perhaps Johnson is hard for his friends to figure out because he’s so many things. During his first year in Oregon, he attended an outdoor rave in Salem. There he saw his first real fire jugglers, known as poi swingers; on the East Coast he had seen similar demonstrations using glow sticks and string.
“I was like ‘Oh my god, that’s so cool,’” Johnson said.
Johnson talked to several people at the rave and learned how to put together the swinging chains of fire.
“It’s basically just a chain and a wick,” Johnson said. “The first ones I made were super heavy, but now I’ve got ones that are a lot thinner and easier to control.”
Johnson is now an accomplished fire swinger, and his friend Jessi Macklin says he is getting “really amazing at it.”
Macklin has known Johnson for about a year and said when she met him, she immediately thought he was a person she would like to know.
“Max is the kind of guy who has an individualized look,” she said. “When you see him you just think, ‘Wow, that would be a cool person to be friends with.’”