Men and Wood

If you have been reading right along, you already know that I have an affinity for wood. Trees are metaphor-rich, and I love metaphors. Some of my best childhood memories are about wood, from watching Dad build first a gunning float, and then a sailing dory, in our suburban basement when I was little, to building my teenage muscle by carrying anything I could of the trees he cut down for firewood, to earning minimum wage splitting enormous elm trunks by hand during one long and memorable summer. The memories are many, and powerful. 

Half your wood, and half your hay...

This winter, having a newly-enlarged family in the house, We've been going through more firewood, and that means cutting more firewood. That work has been lightened by having boys to help, and I am so very conscious that this work is my chance to help them gain similar memories, metaphors, and strengths of their own. Just as I remember my father teaching me how to spot cherry in a woodpile by the orange color of the heartwood as it seasons, how to measure out four feet quickly by waving the chainsaw over the log a certain way, how to bring down a snagged tree safely, I hope they remember decades from now these days of learning some of the same "guy-stuff" knowledge.

Don't get me wrong; I'm all on board with women doing heavy lifting and using power tools. It's just that working with wood is one of those few remaining arenas where men can almost always find common ground and a sense of shared humanity. In the last week three different men have stalled at the store, clearly not wanting to get back to their work or errands, because we got to talking about wood. Just today I spent a full hour talking about thermal mass, drafts, recirculating masonry-stove heat, and the relative merits of pellet stoves, with a man who obviously was thrilled to talk shop with another guy. Last Friday I spent a similar hour with a man who shares an interest in music with me, but who had never stayed so long to talk about guitars even though he is in the store nearly every week.

An ironwood sprig on the woodshed when it was new.

Last summer I spent one day with friends helping them cut and carry cedar logs for their planned cordwood masonry building project. It was gasping, back-wrenching, sweat-soaking work, and I felt like a dishrag afterward. But those few hours of grinning at each other through the flying wood-chips and mixed-gas smoke, joking while carrying logs too big to be exactly good for our backs, conferring about which way to drop a particularly tricky tree, all brought Ben and me much closer than we had been before. I eagerly await a next time, even as hard a day as that was. 

I wonder if there's something to the idea of a wood-centered workshop for men and boys, where those who know, share what they know, and those who are new to tools, trees, even to varieties of wood, can learn, and build their connection to nature and to their own manliness, which is really just one of the kinds of humanity if you think about it. Cut down a few trees, learn what it is to carry a tree-length log through the woods, get the smell of bar-and-chain oil in your hair, split a bit of firewood by hand, learn to identify the most common trees in your area, and then bask in the afterglow of all that work, leaning on the result of your work, still talking wood, trees, and stoves with the guys.

Perseverance

Years ago, I went on a motorcycle trip with my very good friend Johnny Bongo. We were both fairly new to the biking world, maybe a couple of years of local riding under our belts. Part of my own preparation involved trading in my classic beemer for a newer one (still not a NEW one, just not as ancient) because I knew that my wrenching skills had some clear limitations. Both of us planned like crazy. We each packed emergency supplies, plenty of clothes, tire-repair kits, the whole deal. 

Barrier, schmarrier...

Johnny had a new GPS system, and had worked out every turn of the road to get us where we were going. Believe me, we went to some beautiful parts of the country. A couple of days in, and here's where the photo makes sense, we were scheduled to find our campsite, tucked away in the flat landscape of Ohio. The roads there are laid out like graph paper lines across a virtually flat landscape, very strange to JB and I, who live in a wooded, hilly part of Maine, where no road goes more than half a mile without a needed turn. 

So every few miles was a cross-road, and there were no side-roads, no back ways, no diagonals. Not long before dark, we came to a closed road barrier, just five miles from where we were trying to go. We knew that if we let it stop us it would mean going back, and all the way around one of those giant blocks of waving corn, several miles for each side of a square. We looked at the barriers, looked at the big backhoe parked right across both lanes, bucket to the tar, at the deep swales on each side of the road, looked at the sun going down. We were tired. We had sore asses and stiff backs. We wanted to be setting up our tents and warming up some soup. This unforeseen obstacle really sucked at that moment. Then we looked at each other, shrugged, and wordlessly agreed to just try it. 

Around the barriers we went, creeping in first gear, then very carefully, leaning the bikes to squeeze under the arm of the backhoe, over to the other side. Each bike took all of the strength of both of us to maneuver under that arm. One of us bent a rearview mount a little bit, I don't remember who. It might have been that the road was closed because it was totally impassible further along, but that wasn't the case. We felt like such rebels. The point is, though, that we didn't shrug and turn back. The road wasn't impassible. We didn't hurt anybody. And we got to where we were going, almost on time. 

Looking through old photos, I found this and realized that I had not thought of the obstacle, or of our perseverance, for years. In the moment, it felt like a big potential setback. I recall resorting to some choice Anglo-Saxon vocabulary for a minute or so. Now though, it is a distant memory. Much clearer in my mind is the gathering of new friends when we finally got to our destination, the evening around the campfire swapping riding stories.

Here's another, briefer example. My Dad has taken me, my sister, all of his grandchildren, and many others, on a hike of Katahdin, Maine's most spectacular mountain, many times. It's not an easy hike. It's frankly exhausting, much more of an endeavor than most people expect when they first get up that morning and confidently strap on a backpack.

Climbing Katahdin

See how rugged the climb is in the photo? That's Dad on the left. My point is that if you look at the mountain ahead, it looks insurmountable. If you put one hand over another, watch your step, place your feet carefully, and keep your mind on the goal, you get there. Every single person who has attempted that climb among the many excursions that I've been on has finished it. They've seen Maine from its highest point. They've walked the famed Knife Edge Trail. They've seen Chimney Pond from on high, where it looks like a tiny jewel among toy trees. That's what they remember, not the tiredness, the sore knees, the scraped knuckles. They remember succeeding.

That's my message today. Know where you want to go, and don't turn aside. Take the next step. Reach for the next handhold. Pause for a breath, but don't look back. Oh, and one more thing. This one is important. Take the right people with you on your journey.

The Mead Cellar

Back in the mid-eighties, I got it into my head to try to make mead, a beverage something like wine that is made from honey. I had read of mead-halls and such, and knew generally that it was an ancient and magical beverage, steeped in lore and slyly present in literature. Heorot, Hrothgar's mead-hall in Beowulf, was the location for the beginning of the saga, when Grendel burst in to slaughter the revelers. Tolkein referred to Meduseld (Old English for "Mead-hall") as the great structure built in Rohan. The Norse legend of Kvasir is a mead creation myth. Intrigued by these and other mystical references, I wanted to make some, emboldened by my father's lifelong hobby of making wine and beer. However, searching through bookstores and libraries for any information on how to make it yielded scanty results. I made the most of it, and through trial and error developed my own system, adaptable for many varieties, that produced mead ranging from good to splendid. Since then I have taught many people how to make mead, and a good number of them have gone on to produce really fine mead of their own. One even produced a very useful E-book presenting his variation of my brewing method, The Lore and Craft of Mead.

A mead cellar is a grand treasure.

This spiritual, magical craft has been a rewarding pursuit for me for most of my adult life, and last night I reached a milestone; I bottled my 100th batch of mead! Actually I got three batches out of their fermenting vessels and into gallon jugs for settling, and in the process realized that the four gallons of Licorice Blend Mead  were batch number one hundred. In a little over twenty-five years I have used a literal ton of honey. According to Wikipedia, a quart of honey is the product of about 48,000 miles of bee travel, just to put that into some perspective. Thirty-five million miles of bee-flight...

When I make mead, I am acutely aware of the sheer wonder of all that insect work that produced the honey that I am using, of the incredible number of blossoms that were visited and pollinated by the bees, the fruits and berries that grew from that work that are cousins of a sort to the mead that I am making. It is a way to be very subtly and intimately connected to the world around me, and feels nothing short of magical. Something that I believe strongly is that, since bees are such communal creatures, since the whole process that culminates in a bottle of fine mead is so beautifully woven into the natural world around me, I should make every effort to pay homage to the bees, teamwork, and the blessings of nature when I open that bottle. I don't drink my mead (other than testing as I work on it) alone. I drink it with friends, with family, taking a bottle as a host-gift, opening a bottle when someone comes through the door for my hospitality.

Newly bottled mead.

The other two batches that I worked on last night were a special batch that I made to share only with my Honey, which I find completely appropriate, the chosen bond of love being the ultimate teamwork, the ultimate magic, the ultimate blessing, and a batch of Oak Leaf Mead. The Oak Leaf Mead is a recent creation, taking a little-known craft of making oak leaf wine, and adapting it for mead.  I find it especially pleasing, a mead based on oak leaf tea made from early growth leaves. The flavor of the tea is subtle and earthy, a bit like some green teas that I've had, and the resulting mead brings even more subtlety and earthiness. It helps that oak trees are so much steeped (heh) in lore and myth, symbols of strength, portals, and honor.

Stay tuned for the occasional bit of mead lore, recipes, techniques, etc., mixed in with all the other interests here. What do you think? Maybe next time I bring a mead-treasure up from the cellar for a special occasion I can record the experience of opening and sharing it, reflect on the changes in my life since the year that I cellared it, and share a recipe or two.

Two Wheels Move the Soul

There are any number of ways to unwind when the stresses of everyday life get to be too much, but I have to say that throwing your leg over a motorcycle, firing it up, and soaring down some twisty back-roads with nothing between you and the rushing wind but a helmet and some well-worn leathers ranks very high on my list of favorite ways.

Motorcyclists like to say, well, lots of things, but one is that you never see a motorcycle parked at a psychiatrist's office. A good long ride with your mind focused on all the details of riding safely, while going out of your way to enjoy the road, can help you put things in perspective, even if it's just because whatever worry or trouble you've had your mind spinning around can't take your whole mental bandwidth while riding. Sometimes it's just as simple as giving yourself the chance to be distracted by good clean fun.

You know that look on a dog's face when he's got his head out the window of a car, ears and tongue flapping in the wind, eyes gamely squinting away the force of the air, a big old doggie-grin catching whatever scents and tastes blow by? Bikers understand that; we revel in the changes of the air as we move from field to forest to town to lakeside, in knowing that we can reach down and touch the road with our soles whenever we want, in the silent uncritical camaraderie that is the biker-wave. (Most bikers offer other bikers a quick wave or a nod, just to say, "Hey, good day!")

Today I met with friends who were riding out for a two-week journey, off to join many other friends along the way. I've gone with them before, and will again, but this year I'm staying home and putting my energy into other things. Being able to ride partway, escorting them for a ways and yelling bon voyage as we parted was a nice way to participate just a little bit anyway. Tucked somewhere in their gear is a bottle of my mead to share with the others, too. Ride safe, Johnny Bongo, Jingles, and all the others, but put a little extra into a couple of bendy-roads for me!  

Jingles and Johnny Bongo all loaded up.

Taste the air, my friends, along your way,

For danger, roses, diner food, and rain.

Exploring's not the same as gone astray,

Connecting mountains, rivers, back-roads, plains.