summer on my andirons

The title requires some explanation. This story starts during January 2009, when my good friend Joy went on a winter camping, skiing, cooking, and all-around fun class, where Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac was a course reading.

Fast-forward to August 2009, when Joy and I were sitting on a train which was zooming from Stuttgart, Germany to Tønder, Denmark. Although I was lugging 30 pounds of books with me, I had finished reading every one, and Joy lent me her copy of A Sand County Almanac. She had brought it along to finally finish after all those months away from snow camping and required readings (who finishes a book when it's required, anyway?).

What a wonderful book! As Europe got flatter and flatter, Wisconsin and the Sand Counties became more and more detailed. Aldo Leopold's easy prose and careful descriptions were a perfect complement to the rocking of the train. After that, when visiting (yet another) bookstore (70 pounds in a backpack, including 30 pounds of books, just wasn't enough to last me through Denmark and Norway, apparently), I skipped the John le Carre section and headed straight for the dusty old Natural History shelves in the back, looking for another author as magical as Aldo Leopold.

Now, fast-forward to yesterday, when I was greeting cars in the parking lot ("Hello! Welcome to the Preserve...") and I got into a conversation about how the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve (my current place of employment) has a commitment to sustainability, and the visitors I was talking to said they really wanted to listen to the Ranger talk on Building Green. First of all, NO ONE wants to go to Building Green. We are lucky if we get 1 person every day. Secondly, these people had arrived ten minutes late already, and because our parking lot was full, as usual ("Our parking lot was built purposefully small so that the trails don't get too crowded...") they were going to miss the entire talk, so I agreed to give an impromptu Building Green while they waited in line in the lot. They wanted to know about how the Preserve consumes and saves energy, and we started talking about renewable energy sources (which provide 75%+ of the Preserve's power). That discussion led the gentleman I was talking with to mention that he wished he could have some sort of efficient energy-storing device, a battery, that would store summer's heat and release it slowly throughout the winter, so he could feel June in December.

In comes Aldo Leopold, and an excerpt from "Good Oak":

"There are two spiritual dangers that come from not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

"To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue.

"To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from...

"This particular oak now aglow on my andirons grew on the bank of the old emigrant road where it climbs the sandhill. The stump, which I measured upon felling the tree, has a diameter of 30 inches. It shows 80 growth rings, hence the seedling from which it originated must have laid its first ring of wood in 1865, at the end of the Civil War. But I know from the history of present seedlings that no oak grows above the reach of rabbits without a decade or more of getting girdled each winter, and re-sprouting during the following summer. Indeed, it is all too clear that every surviving oak is the product of either rabbit negligence or of rabbit scarcity...

"It is likely, then, that a low in rabbits occurred in the middle 'sixties, when my oak began to lay on annual rings, but that the acorn that produced it fell during the preceding decade, when the covered wagons were still passing over my road into the Great Northwest. It may have been the wash and war of the emigrant traffic that bared this roadbank, and thus enabled this particular acorn to spread its first leaves to the sun. Only one acorn in a thousand ever grew large enough to fight rabbits; the rest were drowned at birth in the prairie sea.

"It is a warming thought that this one wasn't, and thus lived to garner eighty years of June sun. It is this sunlight that is now being released, through the intervention of my axe and saw, to warm my shack and my spirit through eighty gusts of blizzard. And with each gust a wisp of smoke from my chimney bears witness, to whomsoever it may concern, that the sun did not shine in vain" (A Sand County Almanac, Good Oak, 6-7).

This blog is going to be my good oak, my renewable memory-storer of summer's sun and summer's work, as I have another twelve months of summer adventures: four months in the mountains and eight months in Majorca. I'll be warming my shins by the andirons!