Firewood

 

Firewood: A Meditation on the 2024 Election

Copyright 2024

Joe Baker

Like most old farts, I harbor numerous anachronisms. I text and email in complete sentences with punctuation, I fish and hunt and can process dead creatures into food, I pronounce the second “t” in “important”, I grow a garden and frequent farmers markets, I read books, I can play several acoustic musical instruments, I have mechanical skills, and so on. These all used to be common practices, but I got old, and here we are:

I woke up one day and found myself quaint. Ain’t that something!

I still heat my residence, in part, with firewood. I have done this since the 1980’s at several homes I’ve rented and at the one I own. It’s dirty, inefficient, dangerous, and seasonally labor-intensive. That said, I love the warmth, the cost-efficiency, and the magnetic charm of the fire visible through the glass front of my little cast-iron stove. It also pleases me that the fuel is renewable and isn’t the product of a drill rig or a pit mine. For years I cut and split it myself, but at 68 it’s too much for me, so I buy it now. Firewood procurement and preparation, and logging in general, is some of the hardest, most dangerous work there is. Chainsaws, trees, vehicles, shitty roads, skidders, and log splitters kill and maim innumerable people every year, and the heat, cold, constant bending, lifting, and toting wears bodies out quickly.  When I worked in the woods for various federal agencies, I rarely saw a sawyer older than his mid-40’s. By that point either family or health considerations got them out of it, or they died young in any number of shocking and horrible ways. I still stack my own firewood and do any necessary supplemental splitting or sawing as needed, and that’s hard enough.

I usually start looking for wood in late summer, and this year I saw an ad from a local guy advertising split oak at a good price. I messaged and then called him, and delivery was arranged.  The wood was excellent, dry and aged a year or two, and split to usable thicknesses although about a quarter to a third of the billets were a little long for my stove and would require additional sawing on my part. As interesting as the wood was the sawyer.

As soon as he opened his mouth, I could tell he wasn’t from Pennsylvania. He hailed from Charleston, South Carolina with the distinctive low country patois of that corner of the world.  He appeared to be my age, but much to my surprise I discovered he was a decade younger than me. A life of managing Type 1 diabetes and hard physical labor had not been kind to him.

I helped him unload the wood and asked him how he came to live here, and that’s when I got the blast of hateful BS. He and his wife moved up here to be closer to her family in 2020 because “The blacks and a bunch of stupid white kids were burning everything down. Charleston ain’t Charleston no more!” This was, of course, a reference to the protests that erupted all over the country in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a bunch of Minneapolis cops. I got quiet, started steaming up, and kept chucking wood out of the truck bed, maybe a little harder. It probably would have been fine if he’d have just stopped there, but he couldn’t help himself and began bashing Joe Biden, then asked for my reaction. I eyed him steadily across the truck bed and after rejecting the more combative responses, told him “We ain’t going there, OK?”

And we didn’t go there. He needed the money and I needed the wood, and neither of us needed this to escalate. When we emptied the truck, he went back to his place in a mountainside development nearby and left me to start processing the wood and my thoughts.

I was surprised how angry I was. It wore off a bit with the heavy labor, but Trump and his lickspittles really piss me off. Presently, it occurred to me that that’s sort of the point.

The whole MAGA thing, and the Tea Party thing before it, are about being pissed off and not giving a fuck who knows about it. This is a necessary first step on the path that power-hungry authoritarians like Trump or Putin want to take people. Outrage is a prelude to dehumanization, and dehumanizing or “othering” your political opposition is a requirement for violence. If you think of your enemies as people like you, it’s almost impossible to do those things to them. Most of Trump’s shtick is about making people angry, and yes, it works on me too; the capacity to take that first angry step down that dark road is within every blessed one of us. I confess to a certain amount of satisfaction when I heard he’d nearly been assassinated in Butler PA, and I’m not alone.  It embarrassed me, but I felt it. I am a first generation American, and my immigrant mother was subjected to great heaping doses of bigotry and shaming by people just like Trump. It is a trigger for me, and Trump pulled it.

Last October, after the appalling raid by Hamas into Southern Israel and the beginning of the vicious Israeli response to it, in the space of 24 hours I heard both a Hamas spokesman and Bibi Netanyahu refer to their enemies as “animals”. I remember hearing both Al Queda spokesmen and Bush use the term after 9/11. The frightening thing about every instance of truly savage violence in our long history on this planet is decidedly not that any of the perpetrators were monsters or animals.

The truly frightening thing is that they weren’t.

I was at dinner in a bar in a really rural part of the north central PA woods a couple days before my birthday. There was a table of old boys behind me, talking about Kamala Harris’s interview on Fox. One of them blurted out “I couldn’t even understand what the hell she was talking about!” Cue the drunken guffaws from the rest of the table.

I’m much too old to back out of a bar, so I kept my mouth shut and I didn’t say “That’s because you’re a shitheel who runs a saw all day, gets shitfaced in this ginmill most nights, and barely finished high school.”

But believe me, I thought it…

I have lived and worked in really rural places much of my adult life, and I’ve been around folks like my firewood guy and the guy in that bar for decades. Hell, I’m related to a bunch of them. A lot of them are the salt of the earth. They’ll pull you out of a ditch, have your back in tough spots, volunteer for all kinds of good causes, give you the shirt off their backs.

Watching them get behind a damaged and pathetic person like Trump has been somewhere between fascinating and horrifying. Maybe they figure all that vitriol and hate he directs at immigrants, his political enemies, minorities of various kinds, “libs”, etc. will never be directed at them or their families. Christ is that dumb. Maybe they’ve bought into that whole American exceptionalism thing so completely that they assume the fascist violence he is now openly espousing could never happen here. That’s pretty dumb too.

I suppose the closest comparison is watching a friend or family member you care for in an abusive marriage or relationship. They’ll often defend a mean, unfaithful, dishonest, and/or crazy spouse or partner right down to the bitter end, even when they know deep down how F’d up that person is. Sometimes they figure it out, sometimes they don’t.

Nobody ever wants to admit a serious mistake, me included.

In the end, I think I mostly feel sorry for them, and for the rest of us too.

I have decided that to the extent possible, I’m not going to get and stay pissed off. I will try to replace anger with some level of understanding. While a lot of my neighbors and friends and relatives have said and done things in the last few years that I never thought I’d ever see or hear from them, I recognize that they have been exploited by someone who’s been in the flim-flam business for a very long time and they've had their triggers pulled. I choose not to hate them.

A surrender to anger is exactly what Trump is selling, and I ain’t buyin.

Instead I voted. You should too.