Word: birchings
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...opponents. The press, awakened to this event perhaps by Carter himself, proclaimed the Georgian's Iowa results a surprising victory, and a bandwagon started rolling. Actually, Carter did not win the Iowa caucuses four years ago at all: "Uncommitted" did. Carter got 29.1% of the delegates, Senator Birch Bayh 11.4%, former Senator Fred Harris 9%, Congressman Morris Udall 5.8%, and the remaining vote was scattered among also-rans. No matter. By the time of the National Convention in July, Carter uncommitteds had sorted themselves out and he had 25 of the state's 47 delegates...
...splats against wheel wells. The transmission howls. Linda Ronstadt, a half-ton Chevy pickup with a ton of yellow birch cordwood aboard, has sunk to her rusty frame in a mushy patch of logging road. Linda has four-wheel drive and a lot of heart, but this is a Sargasso of mud, the kind that bogs the wood lot every year after the leafless forest trees stop drinking water and the October rains come. Linda's friend and owner disembarks to consider the problem...
...sound irritatingly smug about the rewards of living in the country, is angry now at the cordwood, the mud, poor mired Linda, and himself. He is spinning wheels, wasting time. Great deeds remain undone, great orthodontist bills are unpaid. Awash with self-doubt, he heaves the birch chunks out to lighten the truck, then jacks, wedges, winches and ponders. At last Linda groans free, and all that remains is to retrieve the half cord of jettisoned birch. There is never a thought of leaving the firewood behind: in darkest February, it will heat the woodsman's ten-room New Hampshire...
...Hampshire, the countrified city man has thrown a day's accumulation of junk mail and the sports section of the Boston Globe, fine sources of energy, into his antique Glenwood woodburning cookstove, along with some dry birch kindling and some twelve-inch splits of coarse grained red oak. He has watched the ancient oven thermometer, as reliable as the day it was made 80 years ago, climb to 425° F. That's a little high. Fiddle with the damper. Now pop in three bread pans full of cracked-wheat dough...
...friends of consumer protection such as Ted Kennedy, Birch Bayh and George McGovern are largely in hiding or otherwise engaged running for election...