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| Strawberry Crater Wilderness Area, Arizona |
I dragged my big-city
first wife deep into the forest to live in an unfinished “cabin” and she immediately
began to weep. Quickly I began gathering twigs, scrap lumber, anything that
would burn. Not to torch the place, but for the wood stove, to warm her heart
and dry her tears. Thus began a long saga of scrounging wood.
Boy Scouts and family camping trips had taught me fire. A couple
years working “in the woods” had taught me about the care and feeding of chain
saws, the trees of Arizona, and the inherent laziness of ‘professional’
wood-cutters. Still, keeping that place warm seemed to consume every spare
minute.
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| Parking lot at Sunset Crater National Monument, Arizona |
Woodcutters leave knots, stumps, and smaller limb-ends, and they skip
steep slopes altogether. I’d thrash uphill through juniper, manzanita, pinon pine, and
scrub oak, then drag and heave future fires down to the trunk of my gigantic
(455 V8!) lime Buick.
When my beat-up chain saw failed, lacking money for parts I broke
limbs using rocks and physics, caveman style, and mauled stumps.
Sometimes the weather almost won--wet sticks would be drying by the fire for
the next fire.
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| Chasm Creek, Arizona |
Eventually I got to know one woodcutter well enough to work for him. We’d be out before sunrise, back and unloaded before U. S. Forest Circus officials poured their second cup of coffee. He was thus able to get about 40 cords of wood on an eight-cord permit. Not very legal but perhaps less immoral than letting your family freeze. I was usually paid in misshapen pieces rich people don’t want.
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| Perkinsville Bridge, Arizona |
I rejoined fools and family in the city a while, where heat is from
burning fossils, nuclear fission, and damned dams, payable only in cash.
Bizarre concepts, but a welcome break from scrounging wood. Then back out of
Babylon to the high desert boondocks, bought my first and only house,
with...guess which type of heating?
Electric. But also a wood stove. I could pay about $300 a month to
a bloated quasi-government bureaucracy for coal fire sent by copper wire, or
pay nothing if I was willing to resume scrounging wood. So I did.
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Without a handy nearby forest, I snagged scrap lumber from
construction sites, broken pallets behind businesses, yard trimmings dumped off
back roads, busted furniture, any burnable free object. When desperate I drove
into distant juniper-dotted hills in the late afternoon, and brought back a
pile of--what else?--woodcutter rejects, while government enforcers sat down
to supper.
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| These were already cut up, but I couldn't lift 'em. @ Petrified Forest NP |
At first my young sons were easily convinced it was fun to help
scrounge wood, until, with the sudden wisdom of teens, they decided it wasn’t.
Even so, after kicking and screaming briefly, they learned other critical
skills: how to avoid work, how to pretend to work, how to maintain a Zen-like
demeanor when cranky cheap Dad forces you to do stupid work, and in the end,
how to, actually, work.
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| This looks like fun, right? |
I also learned: diplomacy and psychological trickery, from being
outnumbered four to one by bigger/smarter sons. Dudine has very little left to
learn, but she did acquire additional dirt forbearance, a gift with which she
has already been considerably blessed, both by nature and by riding herd on
said sons.
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| Strawberry Crater, heavy traffic near housing sector |
Winter visitors are surprised at how warm the stove keeps the
joint. (Too warm sometimes, snow swirling through windows opened for a gasp of
cool air.) “Quaint...homey...how pretty,” they say. I agree, then smash the
fantasy with a litany of bugs, filth, choking on smoke, burns of hair and skin
and stuff, shoveling ashes (and nails), teetering on the roof rattling chain in
the stovepipe to clean it, and cold-arse nights when I sleep too long and the
fire goes out.
Kids grown and gone, I scrounge alone again, always one eye open
for scrap sticks. Still directly trading my own energy for household warmth.
Ancient technology at prehistoric prices, a blob of spit in PowerCo’s unseeing
corporate eyeball, and a perfect excuse to wander wherever trees breathe. Fire:
warming hearts and drying tears since 68,000 BC!
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| Strawberry Crater Wilderness Area |
%$#@!
“It used to be that
any difficulty of [military] assignment could be taken care of under the sheltering
umbrella of Duty, Honor, Country. As long as you had a casus belli like the Maine
or the Alamo you could get through any dubious expedition without agony. The
West Point formula may no longer suffice. Country is clear enough, but what is Duty in a wrong war? What is Honor when fighting is reduced to “wasting” the
living space—not to mention the lives—of a people that never did us any harm?
The simple West Point answer is that Duty and Honor consist in carrying out the
orders of the government. That is what the Nazis said in their defense, and we
tried them for war crimes nevertheless….
“When fighting
reaches the classic formula recently voiced by a soldier in the act of setting
fire to a hamlet in Vietnam, “We must destroy it in order to save it,” one must
go further than duty and honor and ask, “Where is the common sense?””
--Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989), from an address to the U. S. Army War College,
April 1971, reprinted in Practicing History, a selection of her essays.
