With the solstice a couple days behind us, I can feel earth’s tilt away from the sun in the guise of breath-stealing cold and wind. Looking out a window, I find my thermometer stuck in digits lower than I’ve seen for the better part of a year. The media spice their forecasts with wind chill factor readings that more accurately describe the shivery weather. But inasmuch as the sharpness of any given moment depends also on the amount of sunlight and cloud cover, a true measure of cold seems elusive. So, I like to gauge the frostiness of the days by the state of local woodpiles.
A house heating with wood is easy to distinguish from its neighbors. You don’t have to be invited inside or pull the assessor’s file to know who lacks a fireplace, has an occasional aesthetic fire at their hearth, and who actually heats with wood. Even in summer when chimney smoke is a distant memory, the woodpile is a revelation.
A woodpile is a year around reminder of winter, evidence of what it takes to keep warm through the vicissitudes of New England’s harshest months. By early November woodpiles are usually at their apex. The rate at which they disappear and their orderliness are measures of the season’s rigors.
On a sleety March evening in 1943, a young fighter pilot bound from Long Island to Bradley Field died when his P-40 fighter crashed into a wooded Norfolk hillside so remote that it took almost a month before he was accidentally found by two Yale students surveying timber. The military cleaned the site and the forest healed. By the twenty-first century’s turn the event had faded to a faint, if colorful rumor. But for the sleuthing of Jody Bronson, a bearded bear of a man who is the forester at Great Mountain Forest, the event might be forgotten today.
Using woodsman’s instincts as he looked for crown damage and other signs in the forest, Bronson found a cigar shaped trench on a rocky slope where the fuselage had burrowed into shallow soil. Nearby he discovered part of the control panel, a piece of Plexiglas, hydraulic hose and metal shards. With the help of others, Bronson has given the story new currency and a three foot tall, 640 pound granite monument now stands beneath tall maples, birch and beech deep in the privately held woods.
It was a sudden out-of-time experience, or at least a clash of chronologies. In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for Remembrance Day, a solemn occasion marking the anniversary of the National Cemetery’s dedication and President Lincoln’s poetically haunting Address, my son Josh and I were innocently enjoying dinner after a long day of travel when we were suddenly overtaken by some kind of a time warp.
On the evening before a long parade of reenactors would march through streets lined with cheering crowds and thousands of luminary candles would be lit at dusk along the orderly rows of sober military headstones in the cemetery, we sat down to dinner in the tavern of the Farnsworth House. It’s a solid brick building on Baltimore Street a couple blocks from the hallowed graveyard and monument-dotted battlefield. The building is a surviving witness to the battle and bears the scars of some hundred Minnie ball craters pocking its exterior.
