Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Round Pond

When it comes to finding subjects to write about, there’s a stream of consciousness thing or perhaps just a meandering of my attention that gets me exploring around to who knows what. When there’s some specific task in my little brain, deciding what to write a book about for example, the wandering can be pretty frustrating, though I try to take it in stride as more than once there’s been unexpected fruit in these tangled bushes.

For the moment, writing about road cuts is on my mind. Road cuts after all may be the longest lasting remains of our civilization. And of course I’m working at my computer so there’s the world wide interweb at my fingertips. I find reference to a few notable road cuts - Mugu Rock, Hookers Cut, Sideling Hill and Pikeville Cut. Interesting place names and for better or worse some incredible alterations of the landscape. But there’s just so much to say about road cuts.

The wanderings then take me into train schedules and the weather forecast and motorcycle batteries. Spring is in the air in New Mexico and das motorrad has been sitting in the garage for a long, long time. Then a particular road cut in my old home turf comes to mind and I turn to Google Maps for satellite imagery and there it is. This would be exit 8 from I93 north near Manchester, New Hampshire. The first time I took it, years ago - whoa! The ramp sweeps around and smack dab into a hill of solid granite. In the blink of an eye you’re confined by jagged rock walls of a curving box canyon and then as quickly you’re out again and on Wellington Road, a suburban main drag indistinguishable from any other. W-what happened?

Zooming out a few clicks I have a look at the southeastern portion of the state. Satellite imagery is so cool, we get to live vicariously the life of soaring birds. It takes another couple of clicks to learn Rüppell's Vulture holds the record for high altitude flight at 36,100 feet above sea level. About half way between Manchester and another of my old haunts, the seacoast, is a very distinct circular puckering in the land. What’s this? Zooming in, it looks like a volcanic crater with a neat lava dome in the middle. Funny, I never associated volcanic activity with the features of the New Hampshire landscape, but, duh, granite is an igneous rock if there ever was one. The crater is in Pawtuckaway State Forest and I zoom in some more to the perimeter, and there is Round Pond.

I send an email to the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services asking for information on my find. Lee Wilder gets right back to me, Yes! It is the badly eroded remains of a Jurassic age volcano ( ~180 MYA). There are several of these in NH. It formed as Pangaea was breaking up and the North American Plate was drifting over a hot spot.” And (a few emails later) it turns out Lee Wilder was my Junior High School science teacher and I was one of his disciplinary problems. Small world. Brave soul, Mr. Wilder.

Oh, Round Pond… when I lived in New Hampshire I spent a lot of time there. It’s a beautiful little body of water in the woods, with big glacial particulates scattered all around, one of which is a balancing rock, perched, waiting for something… it’s a magical place. I have Nordic skied Round Pond Road at night, have canoed the pond, skinny dipped in it, painted watercolors by it, and sat quietly and watched an Osprey dive for fish in it. I visited an ash tree by the shore beavers were cutting down, each time there would be more chips on the ground, and the stick became thinner and then one day it was fallen into the water. There were some 125 annular rings in the splintered stump.

I got lost in those woods in the failing light of a late autumn afternoon. My mother once told me when lost in the woods we have a propensity to walk in circles. To test this I set a cairn of rocks on the ground and walked off with my best intention to get back to the road. Sure enough I walked back to the cairn. It may still be there.

I’ve crawled around in the last bit of open field of a nearby abandoned farm site to dig day lily bulbs. The smaller than usual flowers were a beautiful wine red with golden throats. For my toil, I ended up with a few bulbs and the nastiest ever poison ivy on my forearms. Hiking into the pond for a dip, I found jewelweed growing in a marshy spot and discovered the juice does in fact make the itching go away just like that. Thank you Euell Gibbons.

Having been drawn back again and again to the edge of an extinct volcano has me wondering. Every place on Earth goes back the same amount of time and every place is the result of many, in this case geologic, events. If we ascribe significance to a particular place or event, what if anything is there to it? Are we connecting to something beyond us or is that just our wish?

Gordon Bunker

Image courtesy of USGS

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

It Started With Milk

Innocent ideas like, “let’s put a window in the guest bathroom,” have been known to turn into the addition of entire wings, so I suppose I got off easy on this one.

R and I had commented we’d like to get a microwave for the kitchen. They’re perfect for warming a small quantity of milk, or melting butter or R claims, cooking bacon. The Sunset Microwave Cookbook R scored at a yard sale, one of those filled with glowingly optimistic color plates, claims fillet mignon is within the realm of possibility. I almost choked on that one, the notion, not the steak. The book reminds me too much of a menu at Denny’s, and anyone who has dined at Denny’s knows the photos in the menu never bear any resemblance to the grim realities that come from the kitchen.

At any rate, a while back when friends Kathleen and Tom mentioned they had a microwave to give away and wondered if we knew who might like it, R’s hand went up like a shot. The next time we got together, Tom had it in the back of their car and in the dark of night we made a parking lot transfer to my car. We got home, plugged it in and bingo! It was like new and just the ticket. But then we realized given limited counter space, we had no place to put it. The microwave was thus relegated to the garage while we hemmed and hawed on what to do. ¡Carpe mañana!

Every time I went into the garage, seeing the microwave languishing in the corner bugged me. Then one morning a couple weeks ago we had oatmeal for breakfast and it really bugged me to dirty another pan to warm a half cup of milk. Could you maybe guess I’m a Virgo? Finished with the oatmeal I jumped up from the table, got my measuring tape and waved it around in an open spot between the kitchen and dining area asking R, “Sweetheart, how about… here?” And we talked about me building a sideboard table and what it would look like, and made sure we could still walk by with the refrigerator door open and there’d be space below for the cat to eat.

I made a sketch and by the afternoon we were off for the saw mill. Over the past couple weeks, well, there’s no such thing as one trip to the hardware store. But the table got built and is, to everyone’s delight except the cat who at first freaked out, now installed and in service. The microwave has a home and we’ve used it for various pan-less warming duties. Thank you Kathleen and Tom! R christened the butcher block top, cutting an orange into sections on it. And then there’s been pizza and vegetables… very handy.

Through the whole process, we didn’t even get close to talking about adding onto the kitchen, which of course may change if we decide on another countertop appliance.

Gordon Bunker

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

130 Rings

The dusty slab of ponderosa pine in the shed leaned against the wall among all manner of odds and ends. It was four inches thick, nineteen inches wide, eight feet long and it hadn’t been sawn from the middle of the tree. Dave Lindsey, owner of Spotted Owl Timber, the local sawmill R and I were visiting said, “That slab’s been standing there eight years. I remember the tree it came from, a blow down from the Jemez… it had to be at least forty inches in diameter, probably forty two.”

We were looking for lumber to become the top of a butcher block sideboard I’m building for the kitchen, and a section of this slab would be just the ticket. After we negotiated a price, Dave picked it up as though it were a two by four (and Dave, like me is not exactly a spring chicken anymore) and carried it across the yard to the resaw, essentially a giant bandsaw to cut it into two two inch thick slabs. In less time than it’s taking to write about, the cut was made.

I then selected the best piece for our purposes - looking at the grain and color and knots - and with his daughter’s help Dave surface planed it and cut a rough length so it would fit in my car. Clearly Dave was pleased with having his daughter helping him. “She knows how to operate the resaw…” he said, and then went on with a long list of other machinery in her repertoire. And it is cool to see a woman working in a primarily man’s world kind of business. R and I were pleased as we could be with the result, and while I don’t get too wrapped up in the soul of the tree thing, using this piece of lumber feels right and good.

A couple of days ago, well into building the sideboard, I was trimming the pine slab. Taking a moment to count the annular rings in one of the end cuts, I came up with one hundred thirty.

And so, 130 years + another 20 for the edges already trimmed away + 8 for the time the piece stood around in the shed… a seed germinated and took hold in some favorable spot in the Jemez Mountains and stood quietly and grew for the better part of 160 years; in the changing seasons, by day and night and through snow and rain and sun and drought and wet and likely through a fire or two. The tree stood in the same place through all this for that long, growing, until one day a wind came along it was no match for.

Gordon Bunker