by John McPhee
Without further event, the wood made its way through the back roads of Westchester, and on down the Major Deegan and the F.D.R. Drive to a Nineteenth Street alley behind Meola’s building. In a freight elevator, it was lifted to the loft.
Saw rental $ 20.80
Axe 10.39
Gloves 8.28
One-cord contract 5.20
Insurance 1.72
Traffic ticket 10.00
Tolls .50
Van rental 46.77
Total $103.66
Time, finally, to sit back and stare into the fire. Kick it. Make the sparks shoot. Change it there in its frame. Push the logs together, push up the flame. Why is the flame yellow? From sodium in the wood. Green? Copper. Violet? Potassium.
The material that goes up the chimney and out to the world weighs twice as much as the log it came from. Since almost all of it is distilled water and carbon dioxide, it is more than enough—if it could get back down—to put out the fire.
Gases, confined in pockets in the wood, will explode. So will steam. When the explosions are small, the fire crackles. When larger, it pops and throws debris out onto the rug.
Wood smoke? Unburned carbon and airborne ash. Like gun smoke. Like grass smoke.
Ash? The minerals in the wood. Sodium, boron, magnesium, silicon, copper, phosphorus, sulphur, potassium … Most trees are less than one per cent ash. White birch is a quarter of one per cent ash, and Douglas fir, among North American trees, has the least ash of all (eight one-hundredths of one per cent). In a fire, it all but disappears.
Birch and fir logs burn too fast,
Blaze up bright and do not last.
—ANON.
Black ironwood is eight and a third per cent ash, a blizzard. Black ironwood, though, has the highest fuel value of any wood that grows in the United States. More British thermal units per cubic inch. The tree is short and strong, seldom more than a foot thick or thirty-five feet high. It grows from Cape Canaveral south. The wood is a beautiful rich orange-brown, close-grained and brittle. Drop it in water and it will sink like a stone, for it is a third again as dense as the water.
Mountain mahogany also sinks in water. So does wild dilly. So does lignum vitae. So do torchwood, poisonwood, purple haw, seven-year apple, darling plum, stopper, mastic, and mangrove. All these trees grow in the United States, and the weight of a cubic foot of each of them exceeds sixty-two and a half pounds, the weight of a cubic foot of water. Firewood connoisseurs in Manhattan go to expensive lengths to obtain some of these heavy woods, notably lignum vitae, as focal points for recherché dinner parties, along with the buffalo marrow, the yak sweetbreads, the piranha mousse.
Mangrove is the second-best firewood that grows in the United States. Lignum vitae, in fuel value, is the third. The three worst—in a list of four hundred and thirty—are a yucca, a wild fig, and the giant sequoia.
The redwood made the genetic error of growing good lumber. The lumber of the giant sequoia is terrible. Be good for nothing if you want to live forever is the message of the giant sequoia.
The best of common firewoods are the ones that weigh upward of forty pounds per cubic foot. Sugar maple (43.08). White ash (40.78). Black locust (45.70). American elm (40.55). Beech (42.89). Scarlet oak (46.15). Northern red oak (40,76). White oak (46.35). Flowering dogwood (50.81). Shagbark hickory (52.17).
Eastern white pine weighs twenty-four pounds per cubic foot and bums like newspaper.
Harder than the others to ignite, or so it seems, is the black locust. Put it on a hot white fire and it burns with a low, steady flame and lasts for hours. While the rich burn lignum vitae, the poor can burn black locust. Amazing, ugly, weedlike tree, it grows as crooked as a bony finger and races for the sky at prodigious speed. Its early-year growth rings can be more than half an inch thick. Yet the wood is harder than concrete, dense and fibrous. Instant anthracite. Left lying on the ground for a decade, it refuses to rot. It makes the best fence posts, good coffins. It is enraging to split. The strongest wood that grows in the United States is nutmeg hickory (highest “modulus of rupture”). The second-strongest is torchwood. The third is black locust. The weakest is gumbo-limbo, which is even weaker than the giant sequoia.
Elmwood bums like churchyard mould;
E’en the very flames are cold.
—ANON.
Fred Gerty, a New York State forester and colleague of Jerry Gotsch, found these couplets in the Forestry Handbook. He hands them out to woodcutters. Gerty and Gotsch subjectively agree that among the firewoods most abundant in Carmel the white ash is the best. Their second choice is red oak. Their third is red maple.
Oak and maple, if dry and old,
Keep away the winter cold.
But ash wood wet and ash wood dry
A king shall warm his slippers by.
—ANON.
Wood was the main source of energy in the world until the eighteen-fifties, and it still could be. Roughly a tenth of the annual growth of all the trees on earth could yield alcohol enough to run everything that now uses coal and petroleum—every airplane, every industry, every automobile.
The fire starts to fade. Two logs will literally keep each other warm, radiate heat back and forth. One log alone loses so much heat it cannot keep going. Thermal radiation is red, white, and blue. A wood fire, in its core, in its glowing coals, could never be hot enough to be blue, but, at its hottest, it can be white, and orange-white. Subsiding, it becomes orange and orange-red and red and deeper red and dark red, until its light goes off the visible spectrum. The heat can be banked in ash, though, for eight, ten hours—long enough to last through the night and, in the morning, begin another fire.
Ranger
IN FRONT OF THE HOTEL ASTOR, some years ago, a policeman was doing what he could to improve the flow of traffic when a tall and youthful man stepped off the curb and approached him. “Excuse me, Officer,” he said. “My name is George Hartzog, I’m a ranger from Great Smoky Mountains National Park.” It is, of course, impossible to say what ran through the cop’s mind at that moment, but something stirred there—perhaps a sense of colleagueship, however distant. Hartzog, for his part, feeling bewildered in this milieu, was attempting not to show his extrinsic fear. He had never been and never would be comfortable in New York. He gestured upstream into the river of metal that was moving south, one way, around them. “My wife is about to come down through here in a yellow station wagon,” he said. “I told her I’d be waiting for her, and she should be here any minute. Would you help me get her out of the traffic?” “Ranger, you stand right here, and when you see your wife, point her out,” said the cop. Two minutes later, the yellow station wagon appeared under the big advertising signs and moved past Lindy’s and Jack Dempsey’s and McGinnis of Sheepshead Bay and on into the zone of the Astor, where the policeman, paralyzing the traffic of the city, cleared out an acre of the avenue and guided Mrs. Hartzog to the curb.
When Hartzog was nineteen years old, he went to work in the law offices of Padgett & Moorer, in a one-story frame building on Jefferies Boulevard, in Walterboro, South Carolina. Padgett had died, and Moorer needed assistance. Hartzog, who knew shorthand, worked as stenographer, typist, and general clerk. Before long, he told Moorer that he would like to read law, and that he would like Moorer to be his law school. Moorer, a thin man in a black suit, made no immediate response, but finally took from a shelf the four volumes of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. “They’re in Old English,” Moorer said, meaning that the s’s would appear to be f’s. “Read them. If you’re still interested after that, I’ll think about it.” Hartzog read Blackstone, and Hartzog’s aspirations somehow survived. So Moorer took him across the street to the Colleton County Courthouse, got out an enormous pile of deeds, mortgages, and probate papers, and put him to work on a land-title case. Moorer told Hartzog to copy everything as quickly as he could, and Moorer went off to play golf. It was a blazing August day, followed by a dense and unrelieving August night. Hart
zog got the permission of the county clerk to remain after hours in the courthouse, and he sat there all night. “I did it,” he said to Moorer in the morning, giving him a completed memorandum. Moorer showed Hartzog another lawbook, and talked over with him what he read there. He took him back to the courthouse and had him copy more papers. This went on for thirty-three months, and then Hartzog sat for and passed the bar examinations of South Carolina.
Hartzog, Director of the National Park Service, has on his office wall in the Department of the Interior a framed admonition from George Washington: “Do not suffer your good nature, when application is made, to say ‘Yes’ when you should say ‘No.’ Remember, it is a public not a private cause that is to be injured or benefitted by your choice.” On a table beneath the quotation is a telephone console (a garden of square buttons, seventeen in all) through which application of one kind or another is made to Hartzog all day long—an office day that begins at 7:30 A.M. and almost never lasts less than twelve hours.
He sits beside the console in a leather armchair. He punches one of the buttons. “Yes, sir? … How are you? … Fine … . Put any kind of restriction on me you want to, and I’ll come back for oversight reporting and all the rest.” He punches another button. “Joe, it’s cheaper than transporting ’em to jail. If it’s good, why should you quit? And if it’s good, why shouldn’t you do it?” Hartzog lights a Garcia y Vega cigar. He uses a silver-trimmed walnut cigar holder, and the entire rig extends about twelve inches from his mouth. As he talks, he smiles and grins, as if his gestures as well as his language were going out over the line. All this smiling has put crow’s-feet in the corners of his eyes. He is in his early fifties, and his face is still youthful, even delicate. The skin is soft. His eyelashes are long. His eyes are bright, and they do not move when he is talking. In Washington, he has become overweight to the point of medical concern. Most of the excess is concentrated in the space between the arms of his chair. His hair is thin, and he is growing bald at the temples. He wears a dark suit, a white shirt, a striped tie, and a shell-inlay Indian ring.
Hartzog’s deputies—his deputy for legislation, his deputy for operations—sit down with him at eight-fifteen. The Director expects everyone else to work as long hours as he does. They talk about a ribbon-cutting in Maryland, a photographic safari in Wyoming, exposure, publicity, and wilderness. “Is wilderness a zone of use or is wilderness a physical state?” Hartzog’s voice is loud—signifying nothing more than animation, but to people who don’t know him it can sound like anger. “Don’t pass over my question,” he says when someone changes the subject, but the question is really rhetorical. Wilderness, as seen from this corner of the Department of the Interior, is a zone of use. Hartzog puts down his cigar and lights a cigarette. The meeting expands into a conference room, where pictures of the Secretary of the Interior and the President hang side by side on a wall. The top of the Secretary’s head is hung so that it is level with the President’s chin. Twelve people, Hartzog’s central staff, now surround the Director, and he lights another cigar. In all, some thirteen thousand people work for him, and these vary from Washington policemen to wilderness rangers, naturalists, historians, and men who pick up papers on the ends of sticks. Hartzog is the administrative overlord of one one-hundredth of the United States. His dispersed domains cover nearly thirty million acres. He has not only the national parks, and territories equally remote, but also parkland and other properties in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, and eight thousand acres of the District of Columbia. He is the janitor of the White House. He runs the Statue of Liberty, and all the national monuments, cemeteries, seashores, parkways, battlefields, military parks, historical parks, and recreation areas. The clock above the door says 9 A.M. Hartzog picks up a paper clip and bends it open so that it resembles a propeller. While he talks, leaning forward, forearms against the conference table, he spins the paper clip. “Justice wouldn’t file the suit because there was no money. I waited a year to have some paper in your hand so you could agree with Justice.”
“We have supporting data.”
“That’s what you told me last year. How’s the pay cost? Does it hurt or is it just annoying?”
“We can live with it.”
“There’s a disallowance of pay-increase values. If the savings didn’t come about through lapses, we would have to have a reduction in force. I just don’t think you can get an item like that through Congress. They’re not going to give you any Washington-office support costs. I want to get the thing to the Office of Management and Budget, though. I don’t see any point in fiddling around with it. That’s what stripped the gears last week.”
The National Park Service is more than fifty years old and has had only seven directors. Hartzog is the second to come up from ranger. His two principal goals are to maintain the park system’s vast existing apparatus and at the same time to give it a new emphasis toward cities. Implementing his programs, he attempts to inform, influence, entice, flatter, outguess, and sense the mood of congressmen, senators, and various members of the Administration, including his own overlord, the Secretary of the Interior. There is much laughter around his conference table, shot through with moments of high-pitched intensity. The men seem to care a great deal about what they are saying, and they apparently understand one another, although their language, to the laity, is unintelligible.
“Supplemental itself does not give you positions,” the Director says.
“We’ll understand it better when we get more feedback,” says one of his deputies.
“The report has been surnamed. We’ll know something soon.”
“We want to get something down that’s serious as a foundation for budget figures.”
“A talking document
“It will smoke out Management and Budget.”
“Every time we try to do something, they ask for another study. They’ve been studying the hell out of me for seven years.”
“You won’t know anything if there’s insufficient input.”
“Or if you don’t understand what the broad parameters are.” Laughter.
“O.M.B. won’t put up money for experimental programs.”
“Are we the lead agency?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll need to supplement our in-house capabilities.”
“Amen.”
“Then we’ll be able to monitor the full flow of the effort when it is in gear.”
“We can tool up to do this by 1972, particularly if we reprogram it.”
“We’re spinning our wheels.”
“Be careful,” Hartzog warns. “If you send them a tentative figure for 1972, that becomes your ceiling, and at this stage we need that sort of thing like a Buick needs a fifth hole. Any more questions?”
Hartzog is a master of transitions, from subject to subject or meeting to meeting. He keeps a conversation in flight just as long as he feels it is getting somewhere, and then he puts it down. “Take the numbers out of the back of it,” he concludes. “Put a new map with it, write letters, and say, ‘Here it is.”’
The persons, populations, and places beneath these punchcard blocks of language gradually emerge. What these people have been talking about—among other things—are a group of islands in Lake Superior, certain areas of the City of New York, the south-Florida ecosystem, and Everglades National Park. The Park Service is making a national lakeshore of the Apostle Islands, an hour’s drive from Duluth, three hours from Minneapolis. Local speculators, as is frequently the case, are gumming the procedure. The Park Service would like to establish a vast recreation area among beaches and islands around the entrance to New York Harbor. Problems there only begin with speculators. But the Apostle Islands and the gateway beaches of New York are near people—nearer, that is, than Yellowstone—and the park system needs to go to the people now. Yellowstone National Park was established in 1872 and was the first thing of its kind in the world. It set an international example. But Yellowstone is a long way from the East
River, and another example is coming. Hartzog wants to clean up and, in a limited way, to develop big areas of beach and harbor front, and then to connect these places to Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant with a fleet of fast-moving boats that charge no fares. The plans are well along. Meanwhile, he has to protect what he already has. The Everglades are drying up, because something called the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control District—a project of the Army Engineers—is intercepting water and diverting it to agricultural use. For two days, Hartzog has been on the phone to senators who are holding hearings on the subject. Further threat to the Everglades appeared in the form of a stupendous jetport to be placed in the swamps near Miami. The Park Service and conservation groups—not always friends—joined to block the jetport, and they were successful, but, in compromise, a jettraining airport has been established instead, and it is now up to the Park Service, protecting the swamps, protecting the Seminoles and the Miccosukees, to monitor the various forms of pollution that come from the site, including noise.
“What is the psychological effect of noise on an Indian?”
“Who the hell is capable of doing that kind of research?”
“The University of Miami.”
“It will be in the environmental plan.”
“O.K. Photograph the draft and let the task force on Big Cypress have it.”
Hartzog puts out a cigarette and unhurriedly lights another cigar. He is like a man with a rake, steadily burning leaves.
Word of crisis reaches the room. The roof beams at Wolf Trap Farm have sheared. Wolf Trap Farm is in Fairfax County, Virginia, and there the Park Service is building a performing-arts center that includes a theatre big enough to accommodate more than six thousand people. Invitations have been sent to the First Lady, a large piece of Congress, various Cabinet members, and ambassadors from countries on all levels of economic development to collect at Wolf Trap for a ceremony focussed on the topping out of the roof, the beams of which—laminated, six feet thick—have just cracked. Joe Jensen, Associate Director for Professional Services, quietly explains to everyone what queen-post trusses are and how, under excessive strain, they may shear. Slowly—or so it seems—the import of what is being said comes clear in Hartzog’s mind, and then he speaks rapidly and his voice is sharp and hard.