The Fuel that Heats Three Times...

It has been said that heating by wood is the fuel that heats you twice... In reference to the work necessary to split and stack the fuel... but when wood fuel is gathered by bike it is the fuel that heats you thrice... is that a word?  Heat from a good wood stove cannot be beat, especially here in the perpetually damp pacific north west... There are many wonderful and advantageous reasons for living in Humboldt, County, but fuel prices are not one of them... Gasoline prices here are the highest in California, if not the country... And unfortunately to a wood stove junky, wood for the stove seems to be no cheaper... While i scour the local sources for wood not to get "burned" seems more unlikely every year...if i find a reasonably priced cord the delivery fee or the distance i have to go eliminates the savings... Fortunately, thanks to a well made bike trailer i can supplement our winter stock of wood just fine... as i weigh the options, hoping to find at least one good reasonably priced  cord of hard wood, i'm chipmunking smaller loads of wood with the Blue Sky trailer, hoping not to get caught in the cold when the real cold weather gets here... 

As With the Work of a Honeybee...

… The modern age was made possible by the freeing and concurrently the cheapening of, energy. It can be said, of course, that the modern age was made possible by technologies that CONTROL energy and thus make it usable at an unprecedented rate. But such control is at best extremely limited: the devices by which industrial and military energies are used control them only momentarily; their moment of usefulness sets them loose into the world as social, ecological and geological FORCES. WE can use these energies only as explosives; we control ends with the small amount of released energy that we are able to harness. Past that, the effects are on there own, to compound themselves as they will. In modern times we have never been able to subject our use of energy to a sense of responsibility anywhere near complex enough to equal its effects… , pg 116 “The Art of the Commonplace” “The Body And The Earth” Wendell Berry…

When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments.  Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man.  And (unlike subsequent inventions for man's convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became.  Here, for once, was a product of man's brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others.  Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle.  ~Elizabeth West, Hovel in the Hills


I can only liken the use of the bicycle to that of the work of honeybee… the only creature, I know of, that improves the environment around it as it goes about its business, As it makes its it’s “living”, with the utmost efficiency and beneficence...