Word: mannings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What follows is wet, dirty and boring, and goes on for hours. The truck's owner, an escaped city man who can 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...
Buying a stove is one thing; figuring the economics of woodburning is quite another. The countrified city man who got Linda stuck in the mud has eight cords of wood, harvested from his own property, split and stacked under cover. He will heat his house this year for about $100 ?$55 for chain-saw parts, the rest for saw and truck fuel as well as stovepipe. Electric heating, which is built into his house, would cost far too much to think about; for oil, he would have to pay about $1,100 for the winter...
...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...
...city man has been working out side, and his feet are cold. He takes off his boots, leans back in his chair, and props up his feet on the Glenwood's footrest. Yeast works in the bread and in the city man's mind. He decides to build a solar house. He's going to out-Dubin Dubin. Out-Butler Butler. When he's a very old man, too creaky to cut and split eight cords of wood a year, he's going to stay warm. Damn them all! ?John Skow
Marine Sergeant William Quarles, one of the 13 blacks and women released from captivity in the American embassy in Tehran in November, picked up a phone this month and heard a stranger say: "I know you feel guilty. Don't worry about it-it's normal." The man who impulsively made the call, Hank Siegel, should know. Siegel, a press officer for B'nai B'rith, was one of the 132 hostages taken by the fanatical Hanafi Muslims in 1977 when they occupied three buildings in Washington, D.C., for 38 hours. Because he had recently suffered...