The Greatest Hits of 2012!

This list identifies only a portion of the people, places, events, and media of 2012 that have made a marked difference in my continuing education and life. These honorable mentions are not the result of evaluative rankings or sweeping generalizations, but provide highlights of a year well-spent and well-lived.

Grocery Store of the Year: Stern’s Quality Produce, in White River Junction, Vermont. 

For decades, this family-owned depot for fresh fruits and vegetables has provided the Upper Valley an affordable source for leafy greens and ripe bananas, bulk tofu, nuts and grains.  

Moderately Fast Food of the Year: Moe’s in West Lebanon, New Hampshire.  

Since its opening in the spring of 2012, this franchise has occupied one of the strip malls ravaged by the floods following Tropical Storm Irene. While the price of the Homewrecker and other custom burritos has climbed slowly, the salsa bar and copious tortilla chips—as well as the complex self-serve touch-screen Coke machine—make every trip worth every MOEment. 

Record Store of the Year: Exile on Main Street in Barre, Vermont.  

With thousands of slices of vinyl, hundreds of compact discs, and dozens of cassettes—as well as a wealth of memorabilia, 45 rpm singles, and choice books on the music biz—Exile may be one of the best representations of the Independent Record Store this side of End of An Ear in Austin, Texas or LoveGarden Sounds in Lawrence, Kansas. Owner-operated, special orders arrive twice weekly, and trade-in values on CDs couldn’t be higher. Having weathered a full reconstruction of the downtown area of Barre, Exile is an audiophile’s dream; yes, there is still a “butcher cover” version of the Beatles’ Yesterday and Today album for sale in central Vermont. 

Soft Drink of the Year: Orange Dry, by Polar. 

One of the finest blends of carbonation, high fructose corn syrup, and 6% concentrated orange juice the world has ever known.  

Take-Out of the Year: Cape Tip Fish and Lobster Market in Truro, Massachusetts.  

With the North Truro public beach access less than a mile away (and free after sundown) this summertime market provides a full lobster dinner, including steamers, butter, plates and a bib, in a massive insulated paper bag. Jennie Harriman and I enjoyed this immensely during a luxurious week in mid-August.

Automobile of the Year: the Car that Wouldn’t Turn Off.  

Embarking on a road trip that ended up being titled The American Celebration on Parade, my 1999 Subaru Legacy happily came to a stop at a gas station in suburban Connecticut—but, upon turning off the ignition, the overzealous car kept running. Why had a previous owner attached a red wire to a fuse, and where did it lead? That journey—thousands of miles—did not hold any answers, but the troublesome red wire was removed by a mechanic in Kodak, Tennessee.  

Website of the Year: Facebook. 

While much may be said for this virtual platform’s new intrusion into our hourly business, the ways in which Facebook has allowed individuals, groups, and businesses to publicize and make known to the world at large their thoughts, offers, and opinions is unprecedented; the new currents that have and will flow beneath that blue bar and have established a more volitile yet more useful culture of collaboration and communication worldwide. In the hours following the school shooting in Connecticut, every one of my 400 friends had something to say,, if anything at all; at this rate, we may only hone and improve our skills of listening and responding—beyond delivering to friends and acquaintances a simple ‘thumbs-up.’ I look forward to further incarnations and more nuanced manifestations of the "Like" button.

Peripherial of the Year: Hauppauge’s Colossus. 

For those whose visual memories are stored on less-than-digital media, and who fear the disintegration of magnetic tape may dissolve all that is left of our VHS youth, this Windows-based peripheral board permits an easy and entertaining (full-screen) archiving solution, be it of elementary school concerts or commercially-available documentaries or films, now long out of print. For those interested in producing video game walk-throughs—on any system, from the Atari 2600 to the Nintendo Wii—this board allows for composite, S-Video, and HDMI connections in absolute real time.

Political Scientist of the Year: Jon Ross. 

Not only for accurately calling the 'anticlimatic' 2012 Presidential election, but for being one of the few people who didn’t lose interest in the results.

Historian Of the Year: Robert Putnam.  

This Harvard prof has been the subject of both sermons and symposiums this year, and may hold the distinction of being the only speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival who I heard booed by a portion of that erudite crowd. Advocating for a variety of investments in society by our wealthiest and most successful individuals and corporations, Putnam’s vision of “social capital”—described best in his work Bowling Alone—has only become more important, to all of us, regardless of income. Republicans’ allegations that Obama was inciting “class warfare” in calling for higher taxes for upper income brackets have, to some extent, been nullified by the banal and wintry debates regarding the fiscal cliff: were the government to increase revenue, instead of cutting spending from the federal budget, the unbridled gathering of wealth may be to some extent curbed. Putnam’s notion of “social capital” may provide philosophical and moral grounds for “the Buffett rule,” for Herman Caine’s flat tax, and for Stephen King’s outrage (“Tax Me, for F—k’sSake”).

Theologian of the Year: Interim Pastor Rev. Jonathan New, at Bethany UCC in Randolph, Vermont.  

Following a decades-long ministry by Kathy Eddy, Jonathan New has successfully filled some large and saintly shoes. With sermons rife with poetry and insightful guidance, New has provided the vibrant spiritual community a stimulating and invigorating climate of growth and renewal. "The school of hard knocks," he said recently from the pulpit, "is surely educational, but isn't a place I'd want to send my kids."

Disgraced Intellectual of the Year: Jonah Lehrer. 

Maintaining a cool and calm demeanor to a slim crowd at the Aspen Ideas Festival, this youthful Rhodes scholar had days before been accused of replicating material across a number of online forums, including his blog as well as the New York Times. The introductory chapter of his book Imagine: How Creativity Works (pulled from store shelves by its publisher) did serve my  students well, in a creative writing seminar—as did the explanatory and salacious article that emerged in an October issue of New York magazine.  

  

Public Policy of the Year: 'Lucky Strike Green'. 

Besides the interview that was being conducted during the Connecticut school shooting, between President Obama and Barbara Walters (summed by Matt Drudge in his headline, “Obama to Stoners: We’re Cool”), voters in Colorado and Washington state chose to establish new rules for the use and consumption of marijuana. A full research institute at Humboldt State University was established, to study the ways in which this drug might become more commonplace, as medicine and recreation. Interdisciplinarian and pro-pot scholar Regina Nelson continued her advocacy through a blog, radio interviews, and continued study at UnionInstitute and University.

Goodbye Adam Horovitz. 

One of the bold and resonant voices of my youth, and a postmodern poetic pioneer we'll be studying for decades to come. 

Nonfiction of the Year: “My CCC Days” by Frank Davis. 

I purchased this short work at the gift shop in Cade’s Cove, a scenic settlement within the Smoky Mountains National Park. Describing Mr. Davis’ enrollment and adventure as a mechanic and laborer in the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s, this work was incredibly useful in providing freshman comp students a sustained, serialized narrative during the fall semester. Crossing academic and technical disciplines, students at Vermont Technical College were engrossed to hear of the monumental construction that took place through the Carolina wilderness during the fall semester. Challenging my students’ powers of research in a composition lab, I asked them to find any contact information for Mr. Davis; within twenty minutes, they produced a disconnected phone number and a Virginia address. At my request, students wrote zealous letters to the octogenarian; I have yet to receive these back as undeliverable, but have also heard no word that they were received.  

Instrument of the Year (Acoustic): the Deering Goodtime Banjo.

Purchased on New Years’ Day 2012 from the Music Outlet in Sevierville,Tennessee, this American-made five-string machine has already traveled thousands of miles in its custom case, has been party to a number of hotel room jams, and has been responsible for more than a few mornings of successful curriculum in Sunday School at Bethany Church in Randolph, Vermont. Steve Martin was right: given a banjo, one may find it impossible to be displeased with the world. 

Instrument of the Year (Electric): the Hammond Aurora organ. 

Purchased from the Listen Center in White River Junction, Vermont (thanks, Ben!), this bells-and-whistles behemoth was manufactured by the Hammond Company in the 1970s-- after Mr. Hammond’s passing, and thus includes features the inventor would have never condoned (an integrated Leslie speaker, rhythym machine, digital replications of tonewheel synthesis, and more). Regardless of its origin, the expressive one-man-band abilities of this instrument are unsurpassed by any electronic keyboard—it is immersive, far beyond any automated arpeggio or digital syncopation. 

Local Flavor of the Year: the Demolition Derby at theVermont State Fair in Rutland, Vermont. 

Myself, my partner, Jennie Harriman, and an old friend from Boy Scout Troop 292, Erik Drew, (re-acquainted through Facebook), were proud to be a part of the roar from the grandstand, as wrecked cars piled upon cars, and concrete barriers teetered as engines whined.

Single of the Year: “New York Banker” by Todd Snider. 

While 2012 saw a bounty of releases from this East Nashville troubadour, including a stellar collection of Jerry Jeff Walker cover songs, this song—found on his “Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables” LP—recounts, however loosely and inspecifically so much of the dirty dealing that has taken place in American markets and financial districts. With a vibe not unlike Creedence Clearwater Revival, the chorus is a sadly accurate description of our interest rates and bailouts: “good things happen to bad people.” 

New Venue of the Year: First Light Studios in Randolph, Vermont. 

The longtime studio of Bob Eddy and Tim Calabro, composer Kathy Eddy’s ‘new’ Steinway model O brings this second-floor space in downtown Randolph to life,  in a completely different way: its bright and bold tone reverberates across the polished wood floor, and light pours in from across Merchants Row.  

Two-Night Run of the Year (Non-Profit): the Green Ridge All Stars at Hopeful, in Braintree, Vermont. 

Having started a semi-annual tradition of improvisation and cover songs across a winter weekend, Boston’s Riding Shotgun gathered in April, for a final sendoff to the tattered but loveable cabin I’d been renting for six years. Recordings were plagued by voracious and too-loud vocals, made possible by a Shure headset microphone and an unsuccessful attempt at emptying the long-ignored liquor cabinet.  

Two-Night Run of the Year (For-Profit): Phish in Worcester, Massachusetts. 

The initial two nights of the jam band’s summer tour kicked off in grand style. Props to all those who, instead of wandering Shakedown Street between shows, found their way to the unspeakably fun pool party and bluegrass jam taking place at a  hotel franchise nearby. Props also to Tom Stepsis, for calling “The Mighty Quinn,” during which perhaps the last equilibrium left from my youth melted away. 

Best Natural Wonder of the Year: Niagra Falls with Jennie Harriman. To stand beside the power of moving water in the mist with my partner, my friend, my love was one of the best moments of the year. 

Album of the Year: “Fear Fun” by Father John Misty. 

Departing from the Fleet Foxes, singer-songwriter Joshua Tillman's debut may be one of the greatest teleological statements since Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. From the initial track’s lyrical denouement (“fun times in Babylon/that’s what I’m counting on”) and acoustic instrumental banter against subtle keys, to the endless reappearances of Misty’s ex-girlfriends, and a final declaration of modern myth (“Joseph Campbell and the Rolling Stones/couldn’t give me a myth/I had to write my own”), this work's vibe is plain and smooth-- perhaps the first great album of this century, for having escaped any of the melodrama of postmodern woe, but knowingly lurching ahead in optimism through grief and the unknown. If rock's first wave of psychedelia hadn't sought to achieve an escapism, but rather confronting the void of precedence in spiritual experience, the Byrds may have been able to make an album as profound as "Fear Fun." But-- like McCartney's first solo record-- the songs found here are of musical exhalation and frivolity; like Lou Reed at his best, Tillman talks about people, fallible and inescapably beautiful, from the world's first ladies man to the obscure and absurd novelist. Without descending into the trance-steps and day-glo synthetics of Sufjan Stevens, "Fear Fun" is a firsthand account of the music-- the words and thoughts, connections and questions-- weaving between another's lobes. Perhaps the Mayans were correct: in the coming year, maybe we all will discover the potential and determination to pursue and produce such a statement of our beliefs and melodies. 

Goodbye Peter Bergman. 

Founding member of the Firesign Theater, and one of the few individuals who have understood and embraced fully the fine art of rhetorical radio entertainment, “the theater of the mind." These were his last words, on what would be the final broadcast of his Radio Free Oz program (since 1966): 

Take heart, dear friends. We are passing through the darkening of the light. We're gonna make it and we're going to make it together. Don't get ground down by cynicism. Don't let depression darken the glass through which you look. This is a garden we live in. A garden seeded with unconditional love. And the tears of the oppressed, and the tears of the frustrated, and the tears of the good will spring those seeds. The flag has been waived. It says occupy. Occupy Wall Street. Occupy the banks. Occupy the nursing homes. Occupy Congress. Occupy the big law offices. Occupy the lobbyists. Occupy...yourself. Because that's were it all comes together. I pledge to you, from this moment on, whatever it means, I'm going to occupy myself. I love you. See ya tomorrow.

How to Keep Warm

This Personal Environmental Narrative was produced in Andrea Scarpino's seminar on the humanities, in Union Institute and University's Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program, during the spring 2011 semester. 

I bought my first copy of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album at a yard sale in my Pennsylvania hometown; I was fifteen years old. As I listened to “Black Dog,” “Going to California,” and “Stairway to Heaven” among other anthems of teenage rebellion, I marveled as much at the cover as I did at the music: a photograph of a smiling, bearded English vagrant with patches on his knees and a derby hat, hunched over in a field, carrying on his back a massive bundle of sticks. As a child and adolescent, I had never known such circumstances, not even on camping trips—in the picture, these were likely the vagrant’s firewood for the night, the result of his day’s work, some collected, stolen treasure of resources meant to keep himself from freezing. Whether or not the album cover reflected the blues and hard rock contained therein, I have never forgotten that hunched vagrant, moving his fuel in daytime, across a field still green. He is braced for conditions to come; at fifteen, I sought to be similarly braced, but had never known such high stakes, such hauling and hard work, for heat.

In science class we adolescent suburbanites learned of mass and weight, displacement and conversion, real and potential energy. The last two concepts helped me understand the sticks on the man’s back: firewood is literally potential energy, waiting to be released. I knew little of such physical labor, however, having never been challenged to amass a resource to ensure my own survival. In my family’s modest suburban home, mysterious metal grates in the walls connected duct work to each room, and forced air kept out the cold. All we kids knew of the furnace in the basement was that it burned something expensive and besides heat, gave off a deep whirring rumble at night.

I have sought, in my adult life, to develop and redefine my relationship to the sources of heat that have kept me from freezing; I still want to rely upon a philosophy of warmth: knowing where the heat of my homes has come from, and how its production relates not only to my own existence, but how larger economic and social structures are changed, because of how I choose to keep from getting cold. Believing “authentic” heat may come from sources less mysterious than the oil truck I recall as a child, my journeys through Vermont have allowed me opportunities to experience different systems of home heating. While political and economic demonization has and may continue to motivate society to discover and embrace alternative energy sources for home heating, through personal chronological narrative this essay seeks to establish only my own philosophy of warmth. The most difficult distinction in my evaluation of heat comes as individual structures are briefly critiqued for their ability to hold in any source of heat: favorite blankets aside, this discussion is as much about the places in which I have come out of the cold as much as it is about the virtuous, discernable ways in which I keep warm.  

Rampant industrial development began in Delaware County, Pennsylvania shortly after the Revolutionary War; I am privileged to have grown up in one of the most industrially-developed regions of the country, a place where factories and big business have long been the norm. The banks of the Delaware River, long been relegated to heavy industry, once included large-scale oil refination and massive shipbuilding facilities to support the import and export of crude oil. One refinery alone in 1892 covered “some sixty-five acres of ground, with pipe line supplies requiring forty or fifty acres more, employs two hundred men and uses one hundred thousand of barrels of crude oil every month” (Garner & Wiley, p. 250).

My parents’ parents were the children of immigrants, only the second generation to inhabit this suburban southeastern corner of the state. My mother’s grandparents met on a ship coming to America in the early 1920s, Lena Wydra from Lithuania and Spiridon Karplick from Russia. Within months of settling in suburban Milmont Park, Spiridon found work at Sun Ship, as a cook on tankards’ long voyages across oceans; he supported Lena most often from afar. During the Great Depression, Spiridon fished often from the back of the oil tankard as they traveled far and wide, bringing back to Lena whatever exotic sea creatures he caught. After his death in 1956, the sale of Spiridon’s valuable stock in Sun Oil allowed my grandfather to leave his own position at the refineries, to start his own career as an electrician.

Lena died days after I was born; my grandfather’s career as an electrician grew into a business, riding the continuing wave of suburban development installing traffic lights. I grew up without direct present-tense familial connection to the refineries—but also never came to know a truly darkened night sky until I moved away. Above the complex refinery towers and industrial complexes, an orange flame burns brightly, the top of a smokestack lit and forever glowing above the physical din of refineries along the Delaware. Burning off unknown noxious byproducts of the oil refination process, the light in the sky has always been a sad economic and environmental presence. In elementary school, we were told by our teachers to be worried if the flame ever went out. We repeated rumors and stories of underground caverns full of oil, with leasing rights owned by Sun (BP); we marveled at the barbed wire that kept us from climbing the fence and investigating the mysterious tank farms on the edge of our suburb.

All of my schools consumed oil for heat; my elementary school was demolished during my senior year of high school for, among other environmental factors, high levels of carbon monoxide emitting from the heating system (two other elementary schools in my school district were repurposed facilities built to accommodate Nike missiles during the Cold War). After the mechanics of oil refining were explained to us in science class, we didn’t ask many more questions: many of our parents worked at the refineries, or at the service industries that supported them. We understood the difference between gasoline, kerosene, heating oil and lubricating oil; we could watch the ships dock at the processing plants, especially when crossing the Commodore Barry Bridge, to New Jersey. On a family vacation at a former World War II fort that guarded the entrance to the Delaware Bay, and my hometown  and its industries farther upstream, an old timer and informal park historian told me: if it wasn’t for the oil that came out of Delaware County, we would have lost the war, and that if the Axis forces were to attack anywhere, it would have been up the Delaware Bay. Concrete bunkers were sinking back into the wide dunes; ships moved across the horizon and became distant shadows, and might as well have been carrying my great-grandfather.  

We drove home and the vacation ended; winter came and the oil furnace kicked on. My friends and I spent our nights in high school—those last few years before everyone dissipates into a new beyond, beneath that familiar orange glow—between the goalposts at band camp, or outside tying knots at Scout meetings, on parked on suburban Lover’s Lanes. We came to accept how the glow meant the wheels of some elusive industry were spinning, in one of the regions of the country where industry had been spinning the longest.

At home in winter the thermostat was changed often, trying to conserve oil while trying to keep ourselves more comfortable. Like any bill, my father complained about heating costs; for a time, a kerosene heater occupied a reverent place in the living room. The strange new caged device threw a different heat into the room, intended for “only on the coldest of nights,” said my father. He bought the kerosene from a special pump at the gas station, filling a big white plastic tank with the thick purple-red liquid. All night—at least up until the moment us kids went to bed-- the round metal contraption held in its core a small yellow circular flame. For only a time, my family had found a method that allowed us to turn down the thermostat that controlled the oil furnace.

A different kind of warmth entered my parents’ house, with the arrival of the kerosene heater in my childhood: it required work, maintenance, monitoring, the attainment of fuel. While my father stopped using it when its wick lost its structure and almost “burned the house down,” I had seen my first evidence of a heat more authentic than having a truck pump black crude into a tank in a basement: like a neighbor, whose wood stove smoke curled from their chimney on the most rare of occasions, we had a chance to participate in what heated our living room.

Kempton (1986) identifies two interesting “folk” theories regarding home heating system thermostats: one “holds that the thermostat senses temperature and turns the furnace on and off to maintain an even temperature,” while the other “holds that the thermostat controls the amount of heat… a higher setting causes a higher rate of flow” (p. 78). My experience in communities, who share the characteristic of keeping from freezing together, helps me understand how a “rate of flow” theory works—the heat is available over having to be generated to keep out falling temperatures. While Kempton dismisses both theories as prone to “types of operational errors and inefficiencies” (p. 78), my own most recent experience encourages me to advocate for Kempton’s former theory of residential thermostats, one in which the interior of the home stays a consistent, preset temperature.

I left for Vermont without knowing much about how to keep myself warm; I brought plenty of blankets, not knowing what to expect. I chose to go to college in Vermont to escape the orange glow, hoping to make more sense of it from afar. A good friend went to work after high school at a BP station, selling the freshly-refined crude produced down the street, while I went off to college, where I was relieved of most all duties of self-care, including having to provide your own heat.

Institutional heating systems built to withstand Vermont winters are themselves industrious affairs: running hot water to dozens of buildings through underground passageways unintentionally melted the snow from the sidewalks that led to our dorms at Green Mountain College. We thought little of the heat, except when it was simply too much for us to bear, which was often. Hot water flowed through pipes in our rooms, radiating and providing easy explanation for the weird noises we heard at night. The main boiler plant, which was fueled by oil, was located out by the parking lot; when we opened windows for cool air on nights when the system wasn’t regulating itself properly, we might as well have seen some of the environmentally-detrimental orange glow I knew from back home, creeping into the edges of the sparse Vermont sky.

I came to know that system, its passageways and nuances well, as well as the oil-burning centralized hot water systems of two other Vermont colleges, through full-time, year-round positions in residence life. From this, I have had the chance to see dorm rooms fully coated in ice, the result of windows left open over vacations, and the resulting frozen and burst pipes; I’ve helped relocate whole dorms full of people due to heating system failure, on the coldest winter nights. I’ve seen systems so inefficient that the water in the toilet is unnecessarily warm in winter—gross misuse of energy, the product of unregulated “rate of flow.” Institutional heating isn’t intended to provide those it warms with any sense of authenticity: while other purposes take precedence to those individuals located there, heating systems become less of a priority.

The heat I can recall from campfires on Boy Scout weekends, however needless or inefficient, may always be my favorite example of community being formed around a source of heat itself: large-scale residential heating systems seek no such community or shared virtue of staying warm. If systems function properly, the act of staying warm may be accomplished alone, requiring individuals to not leave their respective, assigned rooms.

Dormitories share this characteristic, but little to no labor is involved—seldom are individuals offered even access to a thermostat. My career has helped provide me perspective on institutional warmth derived from oil, and my first few apartments were the similar: one had a bathroom sink that had been dripping hot water for so many years, that the unregulated “rate of flow” had worn away a stripe of the ceramic finish, right down to the cast iron. Another rental, a house I shared with three friends after college, had a woodstove, but my roommates and I were too broke to pursue the tools to process the cords of fuel necessary—and we didn’t know how anyway. We stayed warm, because we lived on couches, beneath blankets, watching too much television; we bought tanks of oil cash-on-delivery to kept the pipes and ourselves from freezing.

Heat is a commodity, not always readily available; sometimes far more complicated of a transaction with the non-human world is required to stay warm through winter than merely adjusting a thermostat and paying a bill. While domestic and private use of heating systems that rely on oil have helped create a culture that may support a “rate of flow” (Kempton, p. 78) folk theory of heat (one that employed my great-grandfather and grandfather alike), realities of keeping warm have led me away from this notion. Efforts of energy efficiency—from sealing up windows to wrapping pipes in insulating foam—may be seen not only as efforts to hold in heat, but to fend off the cold.

Because the cold will always take over, and win. My biggest learning about heat has come from my current domicile: built in the 1930s as a hunting camp, I’ve rented this structure for over four years from its owners, who purchased it for a song in the 1990s, after it was relatively abandoned. While it’s been improved a great deal, including a complete new roof and wood stove, the lessons in keeping out the cold have been, for me, immense, the stakes no higher.

Two sources of heat at this cabin characterize Kempton’s opposing theories: a Vermont Castings wood stove and a kerosene-fueled monitor heater with digital thermostat. Over four years, I’ve learned to use the woodstove constantly and the kerosene sparingly at best, not only for economic reasons, but for general efficiency and localism. Most of my firewood comes from privately-owned forests, whose owners process and deliver the split 18-inch sections themselves: after initial investments in gas-powered log splitters and reliable trucks, only their labor is required to turn a profit. The kerosene is delivered by a local company, and in over four years, I’ve used less than 100 gallons; according to its manual, the heater will consume one gallon over twenty-four hours of steady use.

The need for heat is never steady; the need to keep out the cold, and to keep the pipes from freezing is what necessitates the kerosene monitor. Setting its green digital thermostat to a desired “room” temperature, the warmth at the end of a two-foot probe wire determines how and when the kerosene will be burned. As an extra measure of efficiency, a special mode seeks to raise the air temperature around the probe by ten degrees above the setting on the thermostat.  When I’m not home for extended periods of time, however, the kerosene monitor has failed to heat the house sufficiently—to the extent that the pipes would not freeze. Last winter’s emergency repairs in this imperfect autonomous structure debunk Kempton’s “rate of flow,” as the small, candle-like flame that eminates from within the kerosene monitor system has rarely served to make this cabin inhabitable: the air around the heater may reflect the desired temperature, but farther corners are less warm, more susceptible to the ever-encroaching cold.

My education regarding heating with wood has come almost entirely from my experience living in this rented cabin. Over four winters, I’ve had three different stoves, the first being a inappropriately small coal stove, and the second was a mammoth Jotul stove, built to accommodate a structure three times the size of this cabin. The last and current stove was installed recently, to comply with insurance regulations. Each had its nuances, like any imperfect mechanical device; regardless of these differences, each has utilized the same renewable resource, one that remains in abundance in this region. 

Thoreau, in his journal, details the multitude of blessings he derives from his source of fending off the cold: “I deal so much with my fuel, — what with finding it, loading it, conveying it home, sawing and splitting it, — get so many values out of it, am warmed in so many ways by it, that the heat it will yield when in the stove is of a lower temperature and a lesser value in my eyes, — though when I feel it I am reminded of all my adventures. . . . “ (p. 30). Thoreau’s ability to develop a dynamic relationship with the fuel that helps him fend off cold is rewarding to such an extent that the actual temperature change of the room becomes less important. A more authentic source of heat comes in Thoreau’s comprehension of the interrogative details—mostly,  his—and the reward is inherent.

The wood stove helps identify what ‘authenticity’ may be construed from a source of keeping warm, far beyond Kempton’s theories of thermostat use in domestic systems: all of the interrogative information regarding this source of heat is available, including who, what, when, where, and why. The dryness of the wood—how long it’s been since the trees were fallen and the logs split—is critical, to avoid excessive creosote levels. Where the wood came from dictates its makeup: maple, ash, birch. With the delivery of each truckload comes a giant rushing motion, leaving behind an avalanche of fuel to be quickly stacked, prompting a flurry of human activity before any further weather hinders the stacking and proper storage of fuel.

My own dynamic relationship with my source of heat flowered when I became responsible for the care of this autonomous structure in central Vermont, one whose walls deserve new insulation, at least. Prior to this valuable experience, I kept warm by relying on larger systems; through the meditative process of stacking and making use of between three and four cords each winter, I have come to understand my previous reliance upon and assumptions regarding heating oil. Like Thoreau, I seek to obtain “many values out of” my fuel, and seek to participate to whatever extent possible in the production and renewal of these resources.

I have not, however, sought to fully embrace my winter’s fuel: my chainsaw sits idle except on rare occasion, and my splitting axe stays sharp and new. I have chosen to purchase my firewood from a handful of local individuals, conserving my time for tasks I’m more likely to accomplish. My ability to keep from freezing in winter is a skill, built first upon a tradition of home heating oil. 

Individuals who seek to participate in one’s environment may discover unexpected benefits: from the vagrant on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, to my own frosty and amateur experiences stacking firewood mid-winter, to the story my mother told me: in a town not far from the one of my youth, a man argued with his girlfriend about a lack of heat before building her a fire in the center of the living room, catching the building on fire and nearly burning down the block. Evacuated on a cold December night, those people entered into the street beneath that pale orange glow in the sky, the reflection of the refineries’ seemingly-eternal flame, a constant visual reminder of larger industries’ presence. As I grew up, I learned about the source of that orange glow, and sought to see it from afar; in that journey, I have come to understand, through practical experience alone, the need for alternative fuel sources—and the psychological and spiritual shifts that may take place if that refineries’ flame should ever go out.

Bibliography

“Album-Led Zeppelin-Led Zeppelin IV.” Retrieved from http://www.amiright.com/album-covers/images/album-Led-Zeppelin-Led-Zeppelin-IV.jpg

Garner, W. and Wiley, S. (1894). Biographical and Historical Cyclopedia of Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Retrieved from: http://books.google.com/books?id=khQVAAAAYAAJ&ots=ctkDUbbmvL&dq=biographical%20and%20historical%20cyclopedia%20of%20delaware%20county%20pa&pg=PA250#v=onepage&q&f=false

Kempton, W. (1986). “Two Theories of Home Heat Control.” Cognitive Science. Retrieved from: http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/1986v10/i01/p0075p0090/MAIN.PDF

Thoreau, H. (1906). The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journal. B. Torrey, Ed. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=UvURAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA18#v=onepage&q&f=false