Spend a day running for tip-ups (also known as “jacks” in some places), and the ice-fishing muscle will reveal itself to you by throbbing steadily. With the soreness comes realization that, with the exception of the occasional bathtub mishap, our legs are unaccustomed to struggling for purchase on gripless surfaces. This muscle, then, must be the last line of defense in such an instance – the difference between a vertical and a horizontal pose.

We’ve been using our ice-fishing muscles a lot during this largely snowless winter. The ice was about 12 inches thick as of last weekend where I fish, and while we did get snow recently, for the most part we’ve been chasing flags by dashing headlong across mixed-media surfaces. You get a good head of steam on the snowy part of the lake, then hit a 20-foot run of sheer ice, then more snow, then more ice, you get the idea.

In theory, we’d be exercising our ice-fishing muscles less if we walked or jogged to the flags instead of sprinting, but when you fish with your younger brother this is impossible. As anyone with siblings can attest, you intellectually outgrow your adolescent competitive streak but the muscle memory is always there. In church, for instance, you might still find yourself subconsciously opting for a crushing handshake at the peace-be-with-you part without even meaning to. It’s sort of the same thing on the ice, where a dash to a flag is always taken at full speed and may include a hip check or stray elbow for old-time’s sake; even if once you get to the flag you take turns pulling in the fish and resume acting like people in their mid-30s.

The fishing has been good this winter and only promises to get better. We fish a lake full of perch, chain pickerel, and largemouth bass. We relish the bass for their fight and, as the law dictates, we let them all go. The perch we catch are a disappointment in a sporting sense but the big ones serve as a fine gastronomical conciliation prize. We filet the keepers right on the ice and fry the sweet meat over a camp fire. Dredged in basic seasoning, the filets curl against the cast iron pan then settle before flaking apart beneath your fork.

In all my years of fishing I’ve yet to come up with a use for the occasional gill-snagged pickerel we keep. Rumors abound that they can be eaten but in all my attempts they just tease me. I’ve thrown my whole culinary repertoire at them, but no matter how they’re cooked, I’m always left with a delicious smelling, lusciously textured slab of meat that proves too bony to eat. It’s like biting into a pin cushion.

If any of you fishermen or women out there have a pickerel-cooking trick up your sleeve, by all means share.

The cause of government wasn’t helped this week by a couple of whopper news stories that showed up in my inbox. This one from Maine, reports that the state spent millions of dollars to prop up the Old Town pulp mill while steadily fining the mill’s owner for ongoing pollution – which is sort of like giving your kid $10 to spend at the arcade, then promptly docking his allowance for spending time at the arcade.

This one reports that the federal government is fining motor fuel companies for not using biofuel in their gas and diesel mixes. The catch? The biofuel doesn’t exist. Oh, and they’re raising the biofuel quota in 2012. (In an interesting twist, the stories relate to each other: The Old Town mill is trying to produce biobutanol, a biofuel, in addition to the pulp and the excess electricity they create and sell on the New England grid.)

There’s plenty to pick on here, and it wouldn’t be surprising at all to have one of these stories make their way into a candidate’s stump speech as an example of government incompetence. But in spite of the simple answers and red meat sound bites coming off of the stump, and the cynical mood that makes us all really receptive to “they’re all a bunch of bums” logic, I find myself feeling sorry for government in these two stories. And I feel compelled to say: Yeah, but...

In the case of the Maine mills, we’re seeing perfectly predictable growing pains as a traditional, rural wood economy transforms itself into something else – and we don’t even know what the something else is yet. There’s no template for success when you take a shrinking (some would say dying) industry, throw in the fate of hundreds of mill workers, their families, their community, mix in the fact that a company has to profit to survive, add one aging, polluting biomass boiler and a site with a poor environmental track record, sprinkle with activists who promote the unarguable idea that clean air is good, add a University mandated with building a fuel that will revolutionize the world (oh, and we needed it last week), and then drop this unholy amalgamation on the desk of the Maine legislature and say: make me a delicious soufflé.

This is not to say our empathy should absolve government of responsibility for inefficiency, mismanagement, or incompetence. It’s just to say that after reading this news story, I didn’t want to shrug my shoulders condescendingly and say “there you go again, government,” I wanted to hear ideas about how government and taxpayer dollars can be wielded and allocated more efficiently. After all, government is just trying to give us what we want. We want jobs and economically healthy communities, so they’re propping up the mill. We want clean air, so they’re fining the mill as a means of trying to make it cleaner. Their convolutions reflect our own. I’d love to learn that the environmentalist quoted in the piece was concerned about the fate of the workers here, and had the vision to see what this facility could become as the biobutanol technology progresses; and I’d love to learn that the mill spokesman quoted in the piece had a long-term plan to replace that outdated boiler and a sense of environmental responsibility, because if this were the case, you’d be left with the sense that despite the speed bumps, we were at least on the way to finding a common ground (and more commonsensical) solution. You Mainers are more familiar with this story than I am, so please weigh in and tell us what you see.

As for the biofuel story, it’s the easiest thing in the world to see this as the intrusive hand of government unfairly messing with industry, and yes, it is unfair, and yes, those in charge ought to be asked to explain how something that’s patently unfair can be good policy. If I was the head of the National Petrochemicals Association, I’d be pissed too. But if we all agree that our fossil fuel addiction is a bad thing – and whether you’re an environmentalist concerned about carbon emissions or a defense hawk concerned about national security or a conservationist working to promote the working landscape and sustainably managed forests, we probably all agree that diversifying our energy portfolio is a good idea – there’s a great opportunity here to use local wood resources in a way that betters society. So how do up-and-coming biomass/pellet/cellulosic ethanol producers gain a foothold in a marketplace where fossil fuel production – i.e. the competition – is being subsidized by the government? If subsidizing a fuel source that doesn’t exist is as stupid as it sounds, what’s a smarter alternative considering this reality?

These are the question I’m interested in learning more about, in debating. And so my exasperation comes not from the headline, or in the government’s contortions, but in the fact that in this election season it’s hard to find an intelligent discussion that examines any issue in much depth.

She’s asked me for advice on what used stove to buy, and like most men, I have plenty of opinions to offer on the subject.

For instance, I think that it’s perfectly acceptable to buy an old, dependable, dirty stove (dirty meaning it was made before states began mandating that new woodstoves include emissions control) if money’s an issue. But as nice as some of them are, if you have any environmental conscience, such a stove should probably just get you through a winter or two and shouldn’t be a permanent solution to your home heating needs any more than a gas-guzzling 1973 Chevy Caprice station wagon should be the car you commute to work in every day.

Of all the old pre-EPA stoves I’ve known in my life, the Fisher that we have up in deer camp is by far my favorite. It takes enormous wood, which is really nice. And it has these great front dampers that just bombard the fire with oxygen. It goes from 0-60 in no time at all, which I guess makes it more of a Corvette than a Caprice. And once the fire’s where you need it, you can damp it down to nothing in no time – it’s like a thermostat. Man, I love that stove.

As far as the new EPA-approved stoves go, I don’t like the catalytic ones. (For those of you who don’t know, catalytic stoves were the first generation of clean-burning stoves to hit the market; they feature a catalytic converter that has to be engaged when the stove gets up to a certain temperature. The converters have to be replaced on a somewhat regular basis, which is an expensive hassle).

The catalytic stove I have in my life – a Vermont Castings Defiant that sits in the Northern Woodlands office – just doesn’t burn that well with the converter engaged. And I never know whether the converter should be bypassed at night when you damp the fire down and drop the stove temperature, which if you do, sort of defeats the point of having it, and if you don’t, means you’re running it too cool, a supposed no-no.

Far better, I think, to go with the more modern stoves that send the smoke along an internal hot corridor where any unburned components are ignited and consumed. The one I have in my home is a Vermont Castings Aspen, which is a fine stove except that it’s hard to get started and it’s too small. My house is only 600 square feet, so when it’s going it throws sufficient heat. It’s just that it’s a real pain to cut 12- and 14-inch wood, and to empty an ash pan every morning, and to have to play Tetris to fit your wood into the firebox, and to use a lot of kindling in the fall and spring because you don’t have a sufficient coal bed. I think that wood size is one of the key things new stove owners overlook, especially those who plan to cut their own wood. Go big. Your back will thank you.

But all of this is one man’s opinion. I’m positive that our readers have their own experiences and can improve the quality of information here. So what’s your take? What do you think of your stove? What are your thoughts on wood stoves in general? What advice can you give someone looking to buy a used woodstove?

But the further out we expand from our own experiences and our own little slice of earth, the more unclear things become. I don’t know for sure about the forest health across town, let alone statewide or regionally. Or what animal populations are up and what’s down where you live. This uncertainty makes our magazine and our community of readers valuable, as we can talk to each other about these things, share anecdotes, broaden each other’s perspectives. But at the same time, this uncertainty can make big picture public policy discussions about environmental/conservation issues seem baffling and very far away.

I attended a public policy meeting recently in Vermont, where foresters were appalled by the deer damage they were seeing on their woodlots and hunters were appalled by the lack of deer they were seeing in the woods. One group wanted less deer, the other more, and they were letting government officials know it. That same afternoon, I had lunch with a dairy farmer, and when I told her I was worried about the declining number of dairy farms in Vermont, she responded by pointing out that where once Joe Farmer had five boys who went on to own five farms, today, one big farm supports six families, they make better money than they used to, and each family gets to take a vacation. Her feeling was that her dairy was doing just fine, thank you very much. That very same evening, I read an editorial in Northern Logger magazine where loggers in western New York were saying there’s too much competition and overcapacity was flooding the market with logs and driving down prices, while mill owners were complaining that there’s not enough loggers out there and they were being forced to pay too much for a limited supply of wood.

So who knows, right? Everything is relative to everyone’s individual reality, and often times, contradicting narratives can be equally true. The whole thing makes me empathize with the people – the politicians, the entrepreneurs, the men and women who sit on these think tanks – who are charged with steering public policy. It makes me wonder how they deal with being intellectually whiplashed everyday by opposing viewpoints that can be equally valid. Imagine being in charge of a state’s deer herd and having to perpetually find a compromise that won’t make anyone happy? Or being charged with coming up with solutions to buoy a forest products industry that doesn’t look the same from one state to the next, or one town to the next, or one person to the next.

There’s no epiphany here, just an observation.

I saw the first oak seedling on our land four years ago, having seen zero in the previous 18 years of our ownership. Last year I noticed another one, and this year I’ve seen about 50 here and many more in the neighborhood. Their red leaves, two or four deep, are still hanging on and they’ve stood out, maybe more than usual in the warm, more or less snowless November we had. Being southern trees “they haven’t yet perfected the deciduous habit,” a phrase I read way back that sticks in my mind – unlike the name of its author.

Our neighborhood is not entirely oakless, but it’s close. Two high, rocky sidehills a couple of miles to the west of us each have a small patch of mature red oaks; their broad, brown-leaved crowns are visible from a long distance.

In the fall, blue jays eat and cache acorns and they are known to carry them in an expandable esophagus for 2.5 miles. The energy obtained from an acorn snack is used to transport the next nut – so both tree and bird win. Interestingly, jays can’t live on acorns alone as the high tannin content interferes with protein digestion. An acorn diet supplemented with acorn weevils, on the other hand, will sustain a jay and it’s been suggested that the weevils, usually considered to be bad for oaks, may instead benefit these trees because they make the acorns more palatable to jays, and not all acorns are infested. Jays are kind enough to bury the seeds, as well as to disperse them widely.

Red squirrels and many other animals are fond of acorns but none of them carry them any distance from the parent tree. Still, if it’s blue jays who are responsible for peppering the woods around here with little oaks, why did they wait until 2010? Someone’s going to say “global warming,” and, yes, I’m a believer, but, in the case of oaks, I’m a skeptic. Until someone has a better explanation,  I’m sticking with the acorn fairy.

Trev missed a rack buck on the first day, and on the second, he and I pushed a steep oak cobble where we figured Mr. Big might be bedded down to ride out the heat. The cobble stuck out like a birch burl from the mountain face – maybe 50 acres of crevasses and boulder fields, the oak and beech clinging for dear life at seemingly impossible angles. Trev snuck up a stream and took a stand on an escape trail at the south end of a prominent set of ledges. I came in from the north, swinging sapling to sapling up the vertical hillside and into the heart of the bush. (That last line’s a touch too proud of itself; had a monkey been watching my clumsy ascent, he would have felt lucky that his kind hadn’t followed us humans down the evolutionary off-ramp.)

In the thick of it now, I paused to admire some bobcat signs near a series of small caves, and, my momentum broken, considered stopping to take lunch. I had a south-west exposure here and a book full of Breece D’J Pancake stories in my pack, an author our new assistant editor Meghan Oliver turned me on to. Real good writer who wrote – he’s dead – nice, fractured, coal country stories about rural Appalachia. Anyway, it might have been a wonderfully relaxing afternoon up in God’s country, eating and reading, dozing and quote-unquote hunting. But then, out of nowhere, I heard Trev shoot, and several minutes later a buck came tearing through the draw. I shot him and he dropped. Later, upon reconstructing the frenzied few minutes, we learned that Trev had hit the deer’s horn, in fact, took the end of it right off, which probably makes him the only man in Vermont to have legally harvested a one-pointer, or, a one point anyway. We’re going to make him his own plaque for the antler tip.

All joking aside, it was an awfully special hunt for the fact that I got to share it with my brother. Hunting’s generally a solitary pursuit in my tribe, so to team up in this way and be successful will make this buck especially memorable.

Otherwise, I’ve seen surprisingly little wildlife in the woods over the past four days. Plenty of red and gray squirrels, a few red-tails, a few barred owls, a mess of corvids, but that’s about it. The buck was the only deer I saw in those four days. No turkeys except for the boys in camp. No canids, or mustelids, or anything exotic. Even the Bruce spanworm moths were noticeably absent. Probably the heat had everything bedded down on a southwest hillside, wiling away the time with whatever the animal equivalent of a Breece D’J Pancake book is.

What have you seen out there, hunters?

To say the tension is ubiquitous is not an overstatement, as many of us are internally conflicted about this issue. I don’t want a 12-lot subdivision in the meadow I walk through in the evenings, but I do want the housing market to pick up somewhere else so my friends who are in the logging and construction trades can pay their bills and take their wives out to dinner on a Friday night. There’s just no winning a philosophical argument if you’re having it with yourself. And it’s not just me: just look at the tortured thinking of our politicians and rural think-tanks. They want high-speed rail and high-speed internet to connect rural regions to urban centers and make the Northeast more job-friendly. They also want to limit sprawl and preserve small town integrity. That the two sets of goals are antithetical is rarely, if ever, discussed.

The New York Times wrote a story this week about an environmental group using condom wrappers as a way to connect human overpopulation to environmental issues. (Wrap with Care! Save the Polar Bear!) And while our more jaded readers will roll their eyes at the idea that a cutesy slogan on a condom can change anything, the fact remains that the human footprint is something that every one of us is reckoning with so we may as well talk about it. And we may as well think about where it’s all going to lead.

So what’s your take? Is 7,000,000,000 and counting the elephant in the room? We’ve added five billion people to the earth in four decades – where’s it all going to lead? Extra credit will be given to answers that are hopeful in nature and scenarios beyond: “we’re screwed.”

Jamie killed the bull a mile and a quarter back into a roadless wilderness area, and after we’d said our prayers, the work began. A steady rain had begun to fall.

We dressed the animal then made for town, procured ice, called in B. David the horseman, Hiya-Kiya, and Kenny R. We re-adjourned at the trailhead, where Hiya and I struck out to ice down the carcass. An hour later, the other men joined us with Shirley, a draft horse, and Kelsey, a border collie mix.

The harness jangled like singing birds as B. David backed Shirley up to her load.

“Booo,” he said, not sharply, like you’d say during Halloween, but slowly and more drawn out, like the way cattle bawl. She was uneasy with this task. Mist hung over the forest floor, the air swollen with moisture and rich with the scent of the kill. Shirley’s dilated pupils sparked wildly as she smelled blood. She exhaled sharply through her nostrils and bobbed her head, stamped her back leg, in her eyes a pride of lions on some ancient grassland, her forebearers scattering like blown leaves.

“It’s OK, honey,” said B. David the horseman, his hand soft against her flank. Her trust for him was stronger than her flight instinct. She backed slowly to the moose and stood at attention as we hooked the chain to a draw bar. Then “hy-ah!” and 2,500 pounds of horse and moose were barreling through the forest.

The motion was less a drag and more a series of lurches. When things were going well, men were clear of the load and jogging to keep up. Kelsey, a herd dog, tried vainly to keep the group together, concern etched on his pale blue eyes. When things were not going well, the party would lurch 20 feet before a shoulder or an antler would snag on a tree or boulder and the whole caravan would whiplash to a halt.

The landscape was stark and unyielding: the highlands a boulder field, the swamps a quagmire of bottomless bogs and fir thickets. We tried to stay high, scabbing side hills and boulder-strewn ravines, the witches hobble snagging at our feet. Darkness fell hard. Four hours passed and we were still a quarter mile out, breath ragged, headlamps pointed towards the raw, soaked earth.

Hiya scouted the trail ahead and came back with grim news. There was a path, but it was littered with glacial debris. The footing was treacherous at best. The hill crested then fell into a slough before rising for a quarter of a mile at a steady clip to the truck. Shirley looked beaten, her head down, mane hanging in soaked, matted strands. She stood on three legs, her back right leg bent at the knee, as if to show us her shoe. B. David whispered something inaudibly to her.

“I’m sorry, guys, but I won’t push her,” he said.
“We wouldn’t ask you to.”
“We’ll come back in the morning if you want but for now she’s done.”

Ten p.m., then. We portioned the moose. Sixty-five-year-old Hiya and B. David trudged off together, Shirley in tow, the moose antlers splayed out like an oxen yoke along Hiya’s shoulders and arms. Kelsey circled us twice and barked to urge us on, then seemed to recognize the change in plans. The party’s headlamps cast cylindrical patterns into the darkness before the hill fell and the light disappeared and the night seemed to swallow them whole.

Kenny held the flashlight and I sliced between the second and third rib. Jamie worked the meat saw through the moose’s forearm-thick spine. It was 50 degrees and we were 18 hours from the end of this ordeal. Any hunter with a soul feels sick at the thought of meat spoiling before his hand and Jamie wore this sentiment all over his wrinkled brow. Rain fell in torrents through his clothes, in his eyes, down the bridge of his nose. “Be careful what you wish for, right?” joked Kenny, but Jamie didn’t hear him. Just cacophonic raindrops in puddles on tree limbs and dully against exposed meat. Just the sound of that bone saw, frantically now, back and forth, back and forth.

I’m reminded of this now as everywhere the apple trees are loaded with fruit. Again, it looks impossible, both from a nutritional and an engineering standpoint. It sent me back to looking at Design in Nature, by Claus Mattheck, a wonderful book. It must be pretty good, because I love it even though I can only understand a small fraction of it.

The overall message is that trees and other things in nature, such as bones, illustrate what Mattheck calls “biomechanical self-optimization of shape.” With minimum weight, they achieve maximum strength. When he asks his sophisticated computer to design something to hold a lot of leaves and keep them in the sun, the computer comes up with a tree. And when the computer is given a structure that leans, it corrects the lean just as a tree does, using reaction wood and a slow progression back to a vertical position. When light is available off to the side, leaning isn’t necessarily a mistake, for all trees must balance the sometimes competing needs of standing up straight and seeking light.

According to Mattheck, both the apple and the maple are designed so that stress is uniformly distributed. This “axiom of uniform stress” means that stress acts uniformly over the surface of all components; as a result, all loads are evenly distributed. When stress is distributed in this way, there are no locally excessive stresses and all areas are fully loaded – which means there’s no wasted material.

Before too long, the trees will shed their heavy apple loads. But at the moment, they stand as shining examples of biomechanical self-optimization.

I have long admired Northern Woodlands and the work of the foresters, loggers, landowners, and naturalists who both contribute to the publication and subscribe to it. Despite my admiration, I find myself in new territory with some of our subject matter. With a background in writing and wildlife rehabilitation, chainsaw maintenance, for example, is new on my radar screen … but I’m ready to learn.

My joining the magazine comes at a momentous time in our region’s history. Just a few weeks prior to my first day on the job, Tropical Storm Irene ransacked many parts of our readership area. The morning after the storm, I grabbed my dog and walked up and down Route 100 in my hometown of Plymouth, Vermont to see what I could see. The deep, rocky gouges on either end of my road made me come to a fast and hard realization: I was stranded.

Living alone in a rural town, there’s an unsettling feeling when you realize you cannot simply drive your car away; when you realize power will be out for days and there’s no way to make a phone call; that there’s no water to drink, and you smugly did not stock up on food because a hurricane in northern New England surely couldn’t amount to much.

However, I soon found out that being alone in this disaster meant not being alone at all. A neighbor checked in on me right after the storm; I borrowed five different cell phones from friends and strangers to make calls over the next week; I was supplied with meals and water from area residents who had generators and food to spare; and moral support was shared among new friends I met at daily town meetings or simply walking along my road. I felt so proud to be a part of a community where the people were genuinely kind to each other.

Fast forward to today. With this new job comes the need to move, as the Northern Woodlands office in Corinth is a solid 1.5 hour’s drive from Plymouth. And yet, I wonder, how can I so casually leave Plymouth behind, a town that was so good to me in a time of need; a town whose yawning valleys and loon-laden lakes have provided me respite like no other place; a town where I saw my first (and second and third) bear?

Yet as someone prone to looking at people and places through rose-colored glasses, I know reality can paint a slightly different picture. Things weren’t always so great in Plymouth. Winter often meant frozen pipes and no water from the spring-fed system, and I barely ever made it up my roller coaster of a driveway once the snow flew. The lake from which I derived so much pleasure was also the only thing dividing me from a man who broke my heart, putting a pretty big damper on the view out my windows for a time. Those are some things I don’t mind leaving behind.

I read once that when it’s time to move on from something you love, but you’re having trouble, you can start by letting go of the object of your affection while keeping the love for it in your heart. So, I’m packing up my dog, cat, and chickens, and moving on to a new job and a new home in a new Vermont town, taking with me fond memories of Plymouth and its people and a head full of lessons learned.

Symbolic life moments aside, I’m so pleased to be a part of Northern Woodlands, and I look forward to getting to know you – the readers – as time goes by. anytime – I’d love to hear from you.