May the Forest Be With You

As the horrific “fire season” begins again, I want to throw my vote in with Arthur Firstenberg (My View, Sunday April 8^{theSanta Fe New Mexican}  http://www.santafenewmexican.com/LocalColumnsViewpoints/My-View--Arthur-Firstenberg-Controlled-burns-a-prescription-for) who stated a strong case against “controlled” burning.  In addition to all of the things he said, the reality is right in front of us; are we going to be a part of nature and work in the forest or are we going to let the ways of the city rule us? (None of our presidents and most of our representatives have almost no background or cultural contact with the forests; they are city folk, plain and simple…no offense to them, of course).   There are millions of young people out of work or faced with hardships of all sorts (including obesity) and they are the natural inheritors of the forest and the natural choice for who can help fix them.  Sweden gets 40% of all of its energy from biomass (forest products) and we appear to be basing our economy on resisting being a part of the forest; we give  lots of jobs to firefighters, yes, but not to forest thinners, forest tenders or careful forest products gatherers, or research (our favorite thing) and training.  It is so beyond the scope of reason that we still charge people to go into the forests to help thin them (firewood gatherers).  Consider the sheer numbers of BTUs that go up in the fires like we are seeing all over the west and southwest (and even the east now).    It puts the science of global warming and the practice of ‘no burn days’ to absolute shame.  To consider that what we are seeing in front of us is nothing less than an  apocalyptic  sign of not a religious sorting out, but a sorting out of the basic underpinnings of our value systems; we are so afraid that we cannot control forest raping from large corporations and interests such as did the original damage, that we refuse to notice that we must learn to cure our own nature deficit disorders just as we begin to heal the wounds created in the past and also pave the way for a future whose economy is based on carefully, thoughtfully and stridently using the solar and renewable energy that the trees are just standing or lying there waiting for us to recognize.  Forests and clean water represent our wealth.  Period.   If biomass is not economical, then why do so many of us go out into the forest every year to gather firewood; and if that is so bad in terms of smoke,  then why do we stand here and allow the skies to fill with smoke every spring, summer and fall.  I personally ran up our hill three times last summer, shovel and cell phone in hand; ready to fight a fire that ‘must be just over the hill because of the ash and smoke in the air’, only to realize the it was, again, the huge fire on the Arizona/New Mexico border, close to 200 miles away.  The ‘environmentalists’, bless their hearts, sit  speechless with hat (and a lawyer, maybe a camera) in hand.   We have and can create the green and sustainable nature-based methods to do this.  Hey, kids, have you ever seen the cool equipment they use to do biomass work around the world; you can throw away your game boys  and thoughts of joining the army and join the war against foolish forestry.  You can design really cool access roads for smaller rigs; do induced meandering  work in the upper watersheds, invent and work superior energy producing systems that create heat, compost and methane; find beauty and peace up in the hills and mountains of the world; find ways to use those batteries, electric vehicles, steam engines, wood fired vehicles, on the spot wood charged electric chainsaws and electric dozers and pick-ups.   Spend the spring, summer and fall living with your  cool comrades of both sexes and do something important at the same time.   Build trails and learn about one-rock dams and study biology and economics and do accounting, study and do agriculture and controlled grazing experiments…in the field.   Let the controlled burn be in a woodstove or generator.  I also want to throw in with Aldo Leopold and the concept of developing a “Land Ethic” and a forest’s “Bill of Rights” as we do this.   May the forest be with you!

-Thor Sigstedt (60) now climbs the escarpment on his property every year and harvests firewood;  climbing up with a rope and  rolling the logs down.  He has done controlled grazing, forest products gathering and watershed restoration of all sorts for  a few dozens of years , as well as routinely creating rustic art and furniture.

VasaOrden

Finding my roots (written after listening to my friend Linda’s poems of Ireland)

My father sent mixed messages about the old country-Sweden

My Grandmother made up the genealogy on her side.

What I heard was, “your grandfather was the best woodcarver in Sweden”

“He carved the Royal Barge”

“You go back as far as Alfred the Great”

I became a woodcarver myself and a “Builder Boy” ; as Belle’s friend called her husband.  Having battled  the family disease,” the snake that is still in Ireland”, as Linda talked about it; alcoholism which had devastated my grandfather’s brother and business partner in their furniture business and now I had come out on the other end ;  ready to see the world.  So here I was;  travelling to Norway,  home of the “Good” Vikings;  Stockholm, old home of  grandfather Thorsten; Salisbury, home of Stonehenge and the Roman Road, I became educated about these items. I always pictured “the barge” to be a flat bottomed affair, like a super fancy skow of some sort, that Alfred the Great was French and, to be honest, I didn’t much think about the Roman Road at all.

Earlier, I had met a young and talented  Swedish woodcarver, Jogge Sundqvist,  in New Mexico and he showed me with great heart, poetry and formality - how a Swede presented his business card to another person; holding it with two hands and presenting it and making sure to look the recipient straight in the eyes and then formally shaking hands…..very impressive and civil, I thought.

So this is what I found  out:

The Norwegians thought very little of the Swedes, casually  reserving all sorts of derogatory remarks just for them and so, after spending a few weeks in Norway, my thinking was tainted.  My father had also said that Thorsten left Sweden to “get away from the Swedes”, so I was pre- prejudiced some, as I hung on his words.  He talked about how the Swedes tended to be vicious fighters and eventually scared themselves so much by the drenching themselves in blood  that they decided to shift away from warlike thinking.  Some Swedes were though, in fact, cold, from what I could see;  I met the head of the Vasa museum and he tossed me his business card from across the table (I could not help but mention jokingly my artist friend’s instructions) and he was not amused.  I started to feel like I stood out somehow.  In fact my visit was rare for other reasons;  I am the only person in my family to have ever seen the royal barge, the Vasa Orden (my father was turned away from seeing it when he was there in the military in the 50s; don’t forget this is the “Royal Barge” after all and exclusive, etc.), and then  I stood in front of tall steel doors of the “Boat House” on Scansen Island on the one day it would be opened to the public and heard the chains clank and rattle and stood in my suit coat with a bolo tie with a silver burst pattern with a piece of turquoise in the middle, first in line (though not much of a line) and gawked and took photos of it until  Belle finally dragged me out of there.  It was not flat but a huge, sleek blue row boat with 19 oars and a fancy seat for the oarmaster and a very fancy cabin with crystal windows and gilded rococo carvings all over.  It sat there with a bunch of other vintage boats and motors and other mariner-type museum objects.  I presented the nearby Vasa museum with some original writings by my grandfather; talking about what he thought and experienced while he was carving the decorations, “with one hand on a chisel and the other on a magnifying glass”; looking at old photo details of the original  which was carved in the seventeen hundreds then it  burned to the ground, so to speak, in the early 1900’s.  He was chosen to carve the duplicate replacement  and he was a Swedenborgian and he thought that the ornamentation was reflective of the Swedenborgian religious symbols of the Kingdom of Heaven and that the original design must have been influenced by  Immanuel Swedenborg because he lived in that era.  I suspect the Protestant establishment that I had presented the writings to were somewhat horrified to hear this news.  They were oddly discourteous  as they took my stuff and did not return copies as I had requested till I called the Swedish consulate over a year later.  It was ……. surprising.

And I saw, in Stockholm,  the magnificent and unforgettably dynamic and beautiful woodcarving of St Michael slaying the dragon from his horse, on Thorsten’s written recommendation, it being, “the best woodcarving in Europe” according my grandfather.  It was carved in memory and celebration of the Swedes fighting off  the Danes ……and I bought one of Jogge’s spoons.

Then we went to England and stayed in a 400 year old thatched- roof cottage with a real live conservatory  in the “quaint” little town of Pitton which sported a magnificent Beech tree off a trail between some farmlands.  And Stonehenge was a feast for my sensibilities and I fell head over heels for that testament to positive and negative space and massings in-the-round.

And our Norwegian friends and hosts had earlier suggested we don’t bother looking up some relatives of our Santa Fe friends, being probably a waste of time in view of all the fantastic sights we could see.  But we opted to give them a jingle and then took a bus to meet them, being met by a tall older man in slightly grimy white jeans and on foot.  He picked up bits of garbage as we strolled back to his farm, which turned out to be a quintessential British country estate complete with stables and gardens and marble all over and , yes, another conservatory.  And “Uncle” Michael decided to give us a jeep tour of the 700 acre property where he showed us the 30,000 trees he had planted over the last few  years and the nearby town of Avesbury and their big boulder “circle” and rich history.  As he drove along he mentioned that right here was the old Roman Road, barely visible to the naked eye and discernible by squinting your eyes and trying to find a straight line leading to a cluster of trees on top of the hill and right here, he said casually glancing aside, “is the ditch where Alfred the Great fought off the Danes”!  “Stop the car” I blurted as I went into a flurry of thoughts and emotions and wonder, of course.  So he stopped and I took a picture of the barely discernible ditch (like an ancient abandoned grassed- over acequia somehow) and I thought about the Danes being fought off by my ancestors in so many countries ; about how I found out the Alfred was not French and the Roman Road was right next to the ditch, the road that, perhaps,  Jesus of Nazareth traveled on during his mysterious years as he plied his trade of “tinsmith” (not carpenter)  as some think (with a few miracles to prove it and a claim that the tinsmiths around there chant, as they hammer and tinker with  their seams and bends, “Jesus was a tinsmith”), perhaps going right here past Stonehenge and soaking his bones in Bath.  It was all too much and it turns out he (Alfred,  not Jesus) was a pretty good king, as kings go, and had his own story about “Alfred the Great and the Cakes”; it seems he went incognito and stayed in a peasant’s cottage during the Danish warring time (near that aforementioned ditch) and the woman of the house asked him to mind the cakes that were cooking in the fireplace while she left the house on an errand and Alfred agreed but then was so engrossed in his thoughts of battle and strategy and the like that he forgot the cakes and they burned.  When the woman returned, he, like George Washington and the Cherry Tree story, admitted his mistake and apologized for the misdeed.  Well, this does serve as a teaching tool for our family, I think, and we can be proud of our shabby and humble  little king and his popularity and success in fighting off the Danes, right there in “My Ditch”!  I couldn’t be more proud of my heritage as it unfolded in front of me, giving depth and breadth to our mythology as it rubs up next to the heart wrenching beauty of our planet.

Finally, I remember standing in the cool darkness on a lonely railroad platform outside of Stockholm right after we landed on the plane and talking to a local Swede, quizzing him in my semi- tongue- in- cheek way about whether this was my “Motherland” or “Fatherland” obliquely begging the question of how the Swedes behaved during the Great War.  He said it was both and added the non sequitur, “but you will be ‘surprised’”!  And, again, he added that I spoke with a Dutch accent.  Later I realized that he was dissing me because the Dutch, it seems, are famous for being curt and brash and harsh.  So I guess I am glad that we left and perhaps, correctly, to get away from the Swedes, somehow and also glad to see the fantastic barge, the beautiful (though surprisingly bleach blonde) people and  really surprised when I rushed outside one evening to do some hurried photography as the sun was setting, as I often do here at home; having often only seconds to catch that rare and special golden light before the sun dips away and leaves the camera and me in darkness and disappointed that I missed the shot; only to notice that something was different, radically different, in fact; the sun was not setting.  I was not in Kansas any more; to sleep at this time of year, one must draw heavy curtains tight over the windows and then, only then, one might dream of lions and dragons under some sacred beech tree along the fork of the river Avon, just down from Bath and a hop, skip and a jump from Stonehenge, where they seemed to understand the sun in a way that I had not before. I heard that the coastline along the Fjords is in fact infinite due to the deep and profound fingers of the Fjords, so that to comprehend them on first glance is naïve and it is best to begin to see that the surface is just that; deceivingly superficial.  The strongest image, in some ways, was when we went down south in Norway to the ancient family farm and painstakingly started up the one-lunger boat in the little boat house on the fjord.  This boat belonged in the museum in Stockholm in the adjacent room to the Vasa Orden.  This boat was how people got around in the old days; going to church, to market, to visit with the family.  Rick put the Norwegian flag in the socket and we headed for a town down the fjord, having jumped in the water earlier to gather blue shell-mussells- and now wanted to have some hot chocolate in the little town.  As we approached the warf,   there were more boats; mostly younger and faster boats scurrying around.  I noticed that just as some youngsters were about to make some wisecrack about this ancient skiff and its pfutt pfutt pfutt sound, they stopped dead in their tracks and realized they were watching the proud history of a supremely rugged people float by and……held their tongues and gave homage in silent acknowledgement  as we drifted by.  We, the inheritors of profound and proud history that is unfolding right in front of us like the interplay of rocks and air mixed with the birds flying  around the  Stone Henge as I gazed in wonder walking the circular trail……..    

E. A. T.! Everyone Ate Today!

Not sure when I realized we were poor; how early in life;

Stories and events popped up pretty soon; like sleeping in the car;

Like having an outhouse; like my Father getting arrested for hitchhiking from Aspen;

Like me hitchhiking with my Stepfather; like having no electricity or running water;

Like struggling up the path at what seemed like late at night carrying a gallon glass jug (you know;

The ones with the glass loop for your finger and below it another for the other finger)-

Out after dark by myself while god knows what was lurking in the moon shadows, at 5 years old; going to the spring for a jug of water (being told to do so-

I assume). I was scared and excited at the same time; a feeling I would have often….

I knew I had to work; Mother with her history of a broken back, teaching children folkdance part time

And then no dads at all. We were so poor we couldn’t even afford a Dad!

I loved staring at the bubbling, burping cereal as it cooked on the stove; I learned to eat raw potatoes (with salt) and whatever else we could come up with; we followed the goats around and ate what they ate.

“Desperate” was a household word; dimes were squeezed and scrutinized…literally;

And not by me but by her. My best friend Robin and I once mailed a twenty dollar bill to her anonymously. Times were hard. Not exactly Grapes of Wrath, more like……………

Hansel and Gretel;

My grandmother, (’The Witch’, bless her heart), lived in a two story house on the side of a mountain

In the Ponderosa Forest with ice cream and milk delivered every few days by a handsome guy with an official looking cap and a white jump suit with pink stripes.

Her balconies were Swiss Alpine style with cut out gingerbread balusters

And her house was full of dolls behind glass, and music boxes galore, and musical instruments;

Organs and pianos, a mando-chello and zylophone and a life-sized Steif stuffed Santa Claus.

When Mother asked for help, she said she would say “No money, but I will take the boys…..”

And she had us use a wringer washer to wash our own clothes (even though she had

An automatic washer upstairs in the kitchen). But, of course, I already knew how to use a wringer, (having survived having had my arm caught in the wringer already),

She was cool, too; she built us a tree house!

She was rich, so it seemed, and in so many, many ways; words were a cinch, travel was a way of life, common sense was obvious, horses, dogs, gardens, fruit trees, tools, saddles, jeeps and lots of food……She was heavy then…. like I am now at her age……..

I loved Laina; she loved big breakfasts with orange juice and tea and shredded wheat and grape nuts and bananas and big lunches with toast and butter and peanut butter, soup and salad and good hot dinners with lamb chops smoking up the house as they roasted to perfection in the broiler.

We were some sort of royalty, it seemed, but it felt more like Russian royalty-after the revolution;

Something happened to turn our blue blood upside down and inside out.

But before all that; before she took us boys-I learned to take on jobs by the time I was 7 or 8,

I learned to collect coke bottles on the way to school so I could buy lunch!

. We sneaked to neighbors and stole eggs,

Shoplifted……..raw shelled green pumpkin seeds in a huge bin in the walk in in Hemet…and got caught!

I learned that if I wanted something, don’t ask; work for it or don’t expect much at all.

I envied Glenn; his mother was the cafeteria cook and he was just a little stronger, smarter and

Faster than me. He had good meat on his bones

I learned to scavenge stuff from the well-endowed trash cans of La Jolla with the dawn surf in the background and then great scavenging on the beaches for shells of all sorts. I found my first camera in a cave up in those hills.

I loved to wander through the culinary arts store and gape at all the cooking utensils.

I loved to go to other people’s homes and eat with them; and I made sure I was invited back;

By being polite and helpful; I made a child’s living of it; sort of Dickensonian, don’t ya think?.

I watched with wildly mixed emotions as the car drove up around Christmas time and opened up their trunk and pulled out boxes of food; cans and what not and green vitamins and household rejects of various sorts. Robins family and mine both got trunk loads that year.

As gentility, though shabby, it seemed only fitting to go to Prep School or the fancy junior high in the Springs, by the Broadmoor built like a country club…..

Problem was; I had to try to work my way through prep.

Then there was this pivotal hour, back then: Just picture it, if you will….

I was an alert strong boy and so I got on the soccer team here in Santa Fe, but I didn’t have any shoes (cleats),

So the coach had me babysit his kids so I could earn the money for them; he must have known…

And the big soccer trip to Colorado from Canyon Road was fantastic, with great meals in exotic prep schools,

Hotly contested games and dry mouths and lots of oranges to ease the dryness.

Everything was going real well, it seemed, until we hit a steak house the other side of Pueblo:

I had not calculated this in my budget, as much as a twelve year old can budget.

Now, I knew I was poor and not one of them and I must have known it in a deep place because

Well….a rich kid would just borrow money from one of the other kids without even blinking an eye,

But I must have hit a shame spot that afternoon and stayed in the bus and pretended I was sick and then

The Coach came back to the bus and I started to cry and he must have snapped, finally,

And eased me into the restaurant for some food to Eat.

This played itself out again in college, as I was kicked out of the dorms for lack of funds and sometimes slept in my old 1 ton truck in the parking lot after a late seminar.

…..And when my kids went to prep school, ironically; I bought a fake cell phone so I did not look like the only person around there driving a smoking pickup truck…and without a cell phone! I talked on it as I cruised into the drop off area…….shades of Pueblo. What on earth was I doing there? I wonder what my kids must have thought…..

Now I have doodled the word “EAT” ever since, in school while the teacher was talking;

In the margins. I must have doodled it carefully forming the bold outlined Capital Letters-hundreds of times.

I even made a large scale sculpture of the three letters a few years ago and the foundry class and

My friends got a real kick out of it and some even remember pouring it in cast iron in an open-

Faced mold and the twinkling, living phosphene-like lava-esque molten metal danced in golds and oranges and so bright it blasted your eyes and so very very hot it made you want to drop it and run away. Then it dulled and went cold and black; very exciting from beginning to end.

So now I realize something that proves I am fairly mature in my thinking, and having lived on both

Sides of this issue; It Is Psychologically Damaging for Both the Person Who is Eating Next to Someone

Who Isn’t as Well As The One Who Isn’t! We are in this together.

I know these scenarios play themselves out daily around us right now (I have heard about it recently)

The mature sixty year old person in me now says,

‘Make the challenges of my youth become the basis of my strength as an adult and a way to give a gift to the community’.

“Let’s sort this one out”.

another one..................