Ordinary Magic and the Romance of the Commons

It's a very ordinary woodshed.

Ever take a second look at some everyday thing in your life, and feel astonished at how it works?

When the fog and clouds on our mountain have coated every tree branch in white frost and rime, including the ones underneath the main branches which are sheltered from direct snow and rain....

Why does the wood inside my woodshed stay dry? 

Your natural response might be, "Isn't that what a woodshed is for, to keep the wood dry?"

Well, yes, of course. 

But that still doesn't explain it. (Or if it did, it that would be magical thinking: believing that the woodshed works because "that's what it's for" would be like believing that it knows my intentions.  Reality almost never responds directly to my intentions, except sometimes with ironic mockery.)

So why doesn't the fog cover the wood in frost?

So why does the wood in the shed stay dry?
Is it storing summer's dryness?  
Is there something about the air movement in that simple, shed-roofed, sheltered space that is somehow perfect for its job?

The sides of this particular woodshed are solid OSB (like plywood, but cheaper); ventilation is provided by a gap between the sides and the ground, and by raising the wood up on runners made of other wood scraps.  So maybe the fact that it draws air all summer while it's dry, but then the moist air of winter fog gets blocked by the winter snow filling the gap.

Maybe the depth of the shed - 16 feet - is enough to keep the fog from swirling in there too deep.  But even the front posts of the shed don't show as much frost as nearby trees.

Maybe the overhang cuts down on the amount of moisture on the ground nearby... but no, there are snowdrifts and snowplow-piles right up to the wooden sides of the shed, and the opening has a thin layer of snow inside it for about 6 inches, as you'd expect.

It is a mystery. 
I'm glad it works so well, anyway.

Other little pieces of everyday magic recently:
- Caramel: Toasted pears that get slightly over-done taste a lot like marshmallows.  Since I don't eat sugar, the idea of a fruit-based marshmallow that can be toasted like the real thing is an exciting new experiment waiting to happen. 

- Steam: Pouring water into the neck of our dragon-shaped humidifier, when it's boiled dry, and watching the clear steam shoot out the top and the incoming water bounce and spray like a whale spout.  Intellectually, I know steam is invisible, but actually seeing it irrefutably doing its thing is pretty magical.  Especially when it's at a small enough scale that nobody gets hurt.  Likewise, watching the steam from the chimney completely disappear.

- Upside-down fire: oddly enough, this is the most ordinary, and has not seemed like magic to me for a while now.  I've been living with a rocket mass heater for the last 8 or 9 winters, and have become pretty complacent about watching the flames disappear downward into the fire box, instead of flying back up in my face.  Instead of noticing the magic of backward-flowing flames, all I notice now is to complain when Someone puts too many too-tall sticks in the feed at once, and a little wisp of smoke or flame escapes from between them.
   I did have fun whittling down a big, gnarly, forked piece with the axe; my skills are improving, so I can deal better now with cross-grained and knotty pieces.  And I do enjoy hitting the timing just right so I can put a full-size log on top of an almost-burned-through log, with the coals still hot enough that the new log catches easily, but the old coals burn down faster than the flames creep up the log. 

That's the kind of magic I believe is real, in general: knowing the properties of things well enough that you can get them to do what you want, not by mystical commands, but by dropping your efforts into exactly the right place at the right time.

I remember watching Ernie walk in to a room where 3 people have been failing to light a fire for the last 45 minutes, it's basically a smoldering pile of damp sticks and we have burned all the newspaper.  He rearranges the sticks and adds just one thing, a log or a pinecone or something, then walks away.  3 seconds later the fire goes "whoosh!" and flames are shooting up merrily like an animated Christmas postcard, and the fire burns steady and bright for the next hour or so without further struggle.

Or when you see someone who has spent a long time getting friendly with local animals, like crows or cats or songbirds, to the point where there is a rapport even when other people are around: with no words, nor effort, they just sort of acknowledge the critter and it jumps right onto their shoulder. 
(I can do this with exactly two cats at our friends' farm, who are addicted to shoulder-climbing and will swarm up a person given the least opportunity.  But it was fun seeing people's faces when I sort of cocked a knee and had the cat on my shoulder while we were all still holding hands and singing grace before dinner.)

The magic is not in some mystical power to summon fire, or cats.  The magic is in recognizing the cat, or the state of the fire, and recognizing that it needs just one subtle trigger to follow its nature.

The world doesn't always offer a trigger like that; sometimes things just take a lot of steady effort.

But when there's a trigger and you don't know enough to recognize it, you can put in a lot of effort to no avail, or it may even be counter-productive. for example, chasing after the cat would almost guarantee that it will not climb your shoulder today.

The real magic would be finding those triggers that bring out other people's ability to tune into the natural world in this way, so that we see all kinds of global crises (climage change, mass extinctions, water shortages, terrorist attacks) as simply an ill-tuned situation requiring simple, compassionate intervention. 

...
 We have come to believe the "tragedy of the commons" is inevitable; but this often-cited notion is a pretty weak argument, which largely describes the behavior practiced not by the poor or "commoners," but by those looking to benefit from privatizing the commons.

A brief history of the actual period of common pasturage and subsequent enclosures, treated as a hypothetical situation in the 1968 article:  http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enclosure-britain

Common, ordinary people are capable of behaving with honor, restraint, humility, and reciprocal generosity.  We are not inevitably rapacious.  And it was common in many indigenous societies (meaning those with a long history of dwelling in a particular environment) to reinforce those virtues with education and community governance.  We are highly trainable, and even untrained people often have moral impulses such as affection, generosity, and a sense of fair play.  

So an ongoing puzzle for me, the type of "magic" I'm studying right now, is how to better evoke that kind of compassionate, ethical, humble contribution, in myself and in others.

How do we bring out our own sense of heroic responsibility?  How do we call for "heroes in waiting," as Phil Zimbardo did at the end of his 2008 TED talk on The Psychology of Evil? How do we raise ourselves from complacent pettiness, or serving as amoral stooges to the powers-that-be, to see every day as our next chance to make a difference?  Every oddity is a potential discovery, every humiliation a chance to learn wisdom, every unpleasant or disturbing duty may be our chance to make heroic choices.  If ambition and laziness don't get the better of us, there is even great pleasure to be found in ordinary work: marvelling at the shed while splitting wood, marvelling at the abundance while weeding the garden, grinning in the teeth of the storm and sweating in the summer sun. 

How do we grow into our best potential, as good shepherds (or at least good neighbors) to all life on Earth?

Right now we seem to be a society that cultivates anti-heroes: we are drawn to the spectacle of dysfunctional celebrity as to a train wreck.  Along with this, we are easily manipulated by fear, greed, and braggadocio; the greatest deception of the 20th century may have been was convincing us to "get used to disappointment." If we don't expect much of people, including ourselves, we can accept the status quo.  Like slaves with no say in their own future, we idolize indolence and our masters' imagined luxuries.  But the opposite of slavery is not mastery - they're two sides of the same system.  The opposite of corporate entitlement is not personal entitlement - they're two variations on the same psychopathy. 
We need to rediscover real alternatives, ancestral models and new ones.  We need realistic mental images of family-scale business, multi-generation investment in a common goal, and the necessary reciprocity between peers in an egalitarian society.  And we need the exaggerated, comic, personal, romantic, and emotionally-true stories that help us learn the morals associated with those ways of living.  There is not just one set of "sustainable moral values" - the past contains many cultures, some more sustained than others, and we may need a wide variety of models to suit our different communities and climates moving forward.

One thing that is not working is to accept the advertisers' adolescent definition of success.  At some point I got attached to some very unhealthy notions of success, or "reward," and I'm struggling to break these habits. 
For example, sleeping in is a "reward" or "treat" that I over-indulge in badly.  Is the reward for work the opportunity to lie around doing nothing? Doing nothing is definitely over-rated.  For me, sleeping late interacts badly with blood-sugar problems, and diurnal business obligations (though noctural creative ramblings are arguably productive).

The other kind of reward for work is a "treat," and the danger lies in defining what's "good for you" as unpleasant, and what's bad for you as a "treat."  If the reward for work is to over-indulge in a harmful vice, then it's self-defeating.  If the "treat" is some expensive luxury that puts you deeper in debt, then it can add stress rather than relieve it.  Have you found 'treats' that are actually good for you, and genuinely pleasurable?  I try to "parent" myself responsibly, by offering - and following through on - healthy treats that are also good for me.  Like making cookies without added sugar, or making sure I get to go for a walk or do creative hobbies after a responsible session of computer work.

And realistically, sometimes the 'reward' for work is barely breaking even: you work as hard as you can to maintain the housing, transportation, and social standing that keeps you eligible for more work.  The "rat race" it's called, and whether you over-indulge in treats or ambition, or are struggling up from untenable poverty, the result is similar: driving pressure, scarcity, and the constant fear that, no matter how hard you strive, one bad failure can drop you into the abyss.  If your work is repugnant and stressful, but you feel forced to do it by circumstances, success becomes defined by just having "a good job."  It's easy to lose perspective on how your life and work relates to the big picture, for good or for ill. 

One of the unquestioned assumptions in American culture is asking "What do you do?" as an icebreaker question: defining your status by specialized work.  Only after traveling abroad did I realize that there are other ways to define a person's station in life, such as "Are you married?  Do you have kids?" or "Where are you from?" 
The question "Where are you from" is a particularly difficult one for US Americans, as we move on average every 5 years.  Do I give the name of the town where I currently reside, the neighborhood where I would be most likely to recognize someone during a casual errand, or the region where the largest collection of my ancestors are buried?  If we have a clan or tribal identity, it's often different from our siblings and cousins (it's hard to be German-Italian, or Irish-Dutch-French-English-Scottish, without identifying more strongly with one side than another.)  If I don't know where I'm from, don't have any lasting connection to one particular place or people, how can I observe any lasting effects of my actions, or imagine my own role in the world beyond the immediate moment?
Some Americans therefore define "settling down" as a kind of success in itself.  Establishing a household, with a partner, nuclear family, stable ongoing relationships with neighbors and co-workers... this is an achievement.  Whereas staying at home with Mom is considered a failure.  This definition of success emphasizes financial "independence," being able to afford one's own everything; and it's almost always based on debt (mortgages, student loans, credit cards, and car loans).  If you have to use a credit card to buy an appliance from offshore manufacturers, which you are not entirely sure how to operate let alone maintain and repair, you are "independent" only in your ability to make this decision without input from anyone but the marketing and sales teams.

A lot of traditional cultures, by contrast, build on a stable extended family as the basic unit; you may build your own house, but more likely you'll add a room onto the ancestral compound.  In that context, "success" could be defined as being a joy to one's parents in their old age.

My own favorite kind of "success" is the feeling of accomplishment when a creative pursuit shifts from struggle to recognizable accomplishment.  Not necessarily polished masterpiece, but proof-of-concept, iterative improvement, result.  A research project that produces tantalizing results, even if the 'discovery' is that you made a wrong assumption.  A drawing that starts to have a life of its own, to capture some essence of the original idea, even as it demands you alter that imagined idea to respect the emerging whole.  A gluten-free or sugar-free recipe that comes out edible, or looking like it should (or both!).  In order to have that kind of success, you have to take risks; you have to go outside the boundaries of what's guaranteed.  Which means you also take a certain number of failures in stride as the price of success. 

As Hannah Bloch put it in a 2013 National Geographic article, "Failure is an Option,"
"Indeed, the very word “success” is derived from the Latin succedere, “to come after”—and what it comes after, yes, is failure. One cannot exist without the other."

So the higher-risk activities that result in success may also give me depressing failures.  There's no guarantee that any given day will be "happy" that way, thought the highs are higher and the overall result is satisfying.


If I'm looking for ordinary, relatively consistent happiness, it turns out that basic animal needs are pretty important.  Food, water, rest, exercise.  Getting outside at least once.  Exchanging affection several times.  I more often find happiness in a day with variety: a balance of physical and mental activity, indoor and outdoor tasks.  It doesn't do to save up all the menial tasks for one day, or all the intellectual ones, or to put off aesthetic wanderings (walks in the woods, art and music) for a once-in-a-blue-moon "reward."  I also find that social time is critical, whether it's by correspondence or in person.  An athlete might be appalled at what I consider "exercise" (I have been known to count walking back and forth to the cookie jar), but for any given person, there's going to be a particular balance that feels good and healthy, and other types of days that you just have to grit your teeth and live through it to get back to the good kind.

It can be hard to define how much "work" our ancestors did, when they were hunter-gatherers.  Do you define "work" as anything productive, and "leisure" as only those things with no direct bearing on meeting life's needs?  When does weaving a basket stop being "work" and start being "Art?"  Where do you draw the line between hunting as a means of procuring important foods, and an opportunity to refresh the soul and improve the body with healthy outdoor exercise?  Is it work if you're starving, and leisure if you can look forward to a solid dinner whether or not the hunt is successful?  Is it work if you catch something, and leisure if you fail?

Or is "work" when you do something you'd rather not be doing, and "leisure" when you have a choice of what to do and can take pleasure in it?  Cooking for family, processing a bountiful harvest, traversing one's landscape, pursuing one's goals, can all be done in a spirit of pleasure or a spirit of duty.

On Christmas morning,
a snow valentine from Ernie.

It is another variety of ordinary magic when we are able to find deep pleasure in the duties of the day: when we find our right work, in tune with our own nature and our stage of creative development. 

Snowy winters test your ability:
- to live with yourself, and your household;
- to plan ahead for provisions and chores
- to see uncompromising weather as
beauty and opportunity,
or oppressive bleakness.

As a Christian theologian once argued, in perfect submission there is perfect freedom.  We are truly free, achieve our highest potential, and enjoy the greatest happiness when there is no conflict between doing what's right and doing whatever we wish - because our deepest wishes are satisfied by doing what's right.

I can't say that I consistently follow this path, but I'm certainly enjoying myself more now (writing this blog post, which has been on my mental to-do list since December 23), compared with playing online games earlier.  I was getting increasingly grumpy with myself for not getting much done today, which spilled over into irritability with Ernie and the dog.  So much for the benefits of "leisure."

  We are happiest when we are in harmony with our household, our tribe, reasonably caught up on our duties, and using "spare" time for creative or learning opportunities that may contribute in one way or another to a better future.

Sometimes (as in my last post) I wonder if it's naively optimistic to believe that human beings have the capacity to work for a better future.  But I do think so. And I think the best future is one with no regrets, because you did your best all along.


Ian Angus makes a good point about the tragedy of the commons in his article for the MRzine Monthly Review, "The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons." http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/angus250808.html

Basically, he points out that the entire concept argued in the famous 1968 paper "The Tragedy of the Commons" is a circular argument: if one assumes the (unproven) premise that "rational herdsmen" naturally and categorically seek to increase their herds, without regard for the common welfare, then they will naturally and inevitably strip common resources bare for personal gain. 

This attitude, of prioritizing the owner's profit over community health, is commonly seen in corporate finances, but less often in actual farming communities. 

I agree with Angus, and would add that in my personal experience, small family farmers are social beings, and often have a much deeper relationship with the local landscape than urban writers can imagine.  Astute observation, love of the land, and dedicated stewardship are arguably more common in longstanding farming communities than in agribusiness corporate farms, or even in urban "environmentalist" cliques (who may academically support environmental issues, but often have little notion of the actual costs or consequences of, for example, biodiesel grown on palm-oil plantations in former old-growth rainforest). 

One of the problems with corporate "personhood," and the modern legal structures which make large corporations relatively easy to form and fund, is that corporate behavior can generally be described as psychopathic or sociopathic. If the corporation were a person, their behavior and decisions suggest they are intelligently aware of reality, but they lack social conscience or moral instincts, and are unable to feel genuine emotional connections like empathy, love, or affection.  Corporate entities may be superficially charming, but most are consistently amoral, see themselves as entitled to anything they can get, and do not scruple at dishonest or deceptive tactics to get it.  See for example the 2011 Psychology Today article "Why Corporations are Psychotic," by David Niose.  Please note that the living, breathing human beings involved in modern corporations are not necessarily psychopathic, but they are obligated and rewarded by the rules of corporate structures to consider profit above ethics in their corporate roles. 

Some small and well-regulated corporations may be governed by their owners' personal ethics, but larger corporations answerable to shareholders are rarely so constrained.

So the tragedy of the commons does indeed apply to modern, corporate behavior - ironically, to the very entities who generally receive control of "privatized" common assets.  To accept environmental degradation as the inevitable consequence of human "freedom" presupposes that all human beings are as psychopathically greedy and profit-driven as modern corporations. 

Angus ended his article on by quoting Fredrich Engels, who called the argument "repulsive blasphemy against man and nature."

Human nature is better than that.  We're better than that.  And nature is more resilient than that.  While the scientists are undoubtedly correct that we are facing catastrophic and irreversible climate change, they are also inevitably going to be wrong about some of the details.  In those details, many lives and livelihoods hang in the balance.  We still have the option, for example, to choose between a world that is or is not paved with radioactive fallout; we may have the option to choose between a world with recognizable seasons and one with chaotic, completely unpredictable weather.  Those outcomes may depend on equitable, honest, and humane negotiations with our fellow human beings about how we are collectively going to handle this crisis, and our ability to honor those agreements well enough to earn each other's trust.  In short, they depend on our ability to act like human beings, not psychopaths or short-sighted corporations.

So let's stop taking life-as-we-know-it for granted. Right livelihood is both work and pleasure.  The rewards for active stewardship are intrinsic: the recurring sense of wonder and satisfaction as we expand our capacity for knowledge, power, and wisdom.

Maybe instead of "tragedy," we should call it "the drama of the commons."  It's only a tragedy if we succumb to our tragic flaws, rather than outgrowing them.  If we focus on the social aspects of the commons, the way that common stewardship calls for self-recognition, mutual affection, personal maturity, the dance of trust and mistrust, reciprocity and adaptability, and shepherding shared dreams through setbacks and blossoming opportunities, it could even be "the Romance of the Commons." 

If you have any sense of adventure, there is no better time to be alive than right now, today.  This minute.

Welcome

Welcome.  We are Ernie and Erica Wisner (mostly Erica, writing this).  We like a lot of different things.  We have a website at www.ErnieAndErica.info, which introduces us and our work.

If you like what you see here, please sign up for updates on this blog (right sidebar), or sign up for our general newsletter.
Or just leave a nice comment (we love that!) and come back when you feel like it.

You may know us from our work on rocket mass heaters and related earth-and-fire technology.  If you want to catch new developments in this field, only, you could sign up for our RMH Builder e-mail list. 

Ernie also has a long-standing commitment to Pacific fisheries conservation and maritime heritage, including boat-building, ocean ecology, and taking care of our beloved coastal communities. The long-term goal is to build a sailing catamaran as a live-aboard platform for education, research, and coastal disaster relief. We have a dedicated mailing list for that, "The Passages Project."

We are currently based on a snowy, semi-arid mountain in the Okanogan Highlands, about as non-maritime a climate as you care to find.  We are part of a local permaculture study group, and sometimes help out our neighbors with their farms, herds, and fire protection.

We also regularly participate on the forums at www.permies.com.

What's causing the warming?

This is a companion to the "How Big Is It?" post.
It concerns global warming.  It's a thing.

The Bloomberg.com website has a nice, simple, graphic article showing the factors contributing to the gradual warming of our climate over the past 125 years, including human-produced effects and volcanoes.  It's titled, "What's Warming the World?"
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/

Is it natural causes, like volcanoes, the earth's tilt wobbling, or solar energy?
Not really.

Crappy print-screen version of the animated graph,
with apologies to the authors.

Mostly, it's greenhouse gases.  Other environmental effects of human behavior (like deforestation and factory aerosols) are actually holding back the warming somewhat, and ground-level ozone is a slight contributor on the warming side.

print-screen version of the animated graph

(The article is simply and beautifully formatted for smartphones and devices, with active graphics.  Please look at the original; my "print screen" graphic doesn't do it justice.)

I showed this to my friend Barbara today.  She liked it - it's very clear.  But she also said she'd recently found a quote from the now-80-something author of the Gaia Theory, who figures we're already past the point of no return.  He considers it unlikely that plants will adapt fast enough to survive in the new climate, which means most of our food supply will not adapt (not to mention problems with pest-predator balance).  Which means human life as we know it today is a fleeting thing.  He says we might as well party; he's giving it 20 years max.

Depressing thought.  Both Barbara and I are not ready to accept the idea that it's all over, or that because one is late taking action, it's better to embrace counter-productive vices in some kind of nihilistic end-game.  This is not a game.  Nobody really knows what's going to happen (all the witnesses to previous sudden climate change events are long-dead, after all; and the sharks ain't talking).  So we might as well keep doing the things that we figure might make a difference - reducing impact, moving resilient plant species into higher and cooler niches, breeding and sharing heirloom seeds that have good genetics for drought-tolerance, extreme temperature tolerance, and so on.

Because there are always doom-sayers, and they're usually wrong.
Life as we know it has ended numerous times already - "we" would not recognize the social mores, language, or geography that was familiar to our great-grandparents.
My Depression-era grandmother kept calling our cell phones "wrist phones" like from Dick Tracy.  Her father wrote poetry about his friends among the loggers who cleared southern Wisconsin - today's dairy country was deep pine woods in their day.
Her grandmother rendered her own boot black from skunks.  I cannot imagine my housemates' reaction if I were to suggest popping a skunk in the oven for a few hours so we could take better care of our shoes.  (Though my wonderful husband probably does know enough about mustelid anatomy to butcher a road-killed skunk without puncturing the musk glands, making the idea more practical for us than for most of our contemporaries.)

Life as we know it changes continuously, sometimes suddenly, sometimes irrevocably.

As I've described before:
I told my grandmother about Peak Oil in 2007: "They say there's only so much oil in the ground; it's getting more expensive to get it out, and that means a lot of the way we do things is going to have to change."
She laughed, "They've been saying that for years."
"And did it change?"
"I guess...."
Depression, WWII, early graduation and traveling 1000 miles from home to take a 3-week welding course and spend 3 years building Victory Ships... marrying a haunted veteran half-again your age, and raising 4 children in 27 different houses while he helped build the hydropower dams that transformed the Western states (with impacts on electricity, irrigation, fisheries, and massive cultural displacement for both the work crews and their families, but more importantly, for the former inhabitants of the flooded valleys and the new communities growing alongside the altered landscapes).

How much of that change was due to oil prices?

At the individual level, the biggest impact on our personal lives can be attributed to a novice driver losing track of which pedal did what.  This changed our paths more than the insights and career changes of overseas travel, more than the 2008 recession, arguably even more than meeting each other (without that terrifying trial by fire, we probably would not be fused together in quite the same way).

Was that driver caused by oil prices?  Not any more than Ernie's reaction was caused by his military service.





The recession affected my ability to find work after Grandma passed away.  But Ernie's injury affected that even more - because it was difficult to work enough hours to make ends meet and still be home enough for caregiving and chores, unless I could work from home.

What we forget when assessing our collective responsibility in these big-picture scenarios is that we never had the option of a life "without change."  History is one long series of scene-changes, with empires rising and falling and writhing, dramatic weather changes (though perhaps none so big as the ones we can expect in the near future), and of course our own individual choices and circumstances that alter our lives even if we escape being a direct part of the big-picture statistics (being born above or below stairs; how to respond to that intolerable co-worker; whether to let that no-good charmer lure you off into a dark corner).

There was never the option to "freeze frame."  Our weather records only go back to the 1880s, the heyday of the steam era.  How long had we been burning coal and forests before that?  How many of the Ice Age animals were already gone for good?
The gardens of Babylon were already salt-encrusted wastes; Ozymandias already long forgotten and re-remembered.

If we wanted to go back to a real "before," before we started on this path that has resulted in the changes perceptible to the current generations, we'd have to go back a long way.  Before oil was discovered in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania?  Before coal mining?  Before the massive deforestations of the Age of Sail and the exploration (1400s, both in China and in Europe).

Have you ever read any original literature from the 1400s?  Most of us would be trying to talk to ancestors who spoke a different language - who had no word for "extinction," let alone "cell phone." Mine in England would have used the word "nice" to mean "precise and fussy," and "pet" to mean "ill-tempered tantrum;" in Ireland, would have a Gaelic oral tradition due to centuries of being forbidden schooling under Norman and English rule; others would have been hearing Cinderella in the original French, or reading the Gutenberg Bible in German.

They could not predict our future from 125 years ago, let alone the 500+ years you'd have to go back before the expansionist Western industrial era.

We can speculate about rising sea levels (the coast lines will not stabilize again within our lifetimes), but we don't really know what will happen.  Each region will have specific events that punctuate that change; we don't yet know the names of the unprecedented storms, ruined power plants, mountain eruptions, and landslides that will become the historic markers of that change, or the massive public works projects that may stave it off.  Will San Francisco become the gatekeeper of dikes protecting the Central Valley?  Or will the Sierra foothills become coastal farms?  Or will The Big One render previous measurements irrelevant, moving the coastline somewhere else entirely?

We can speculate that life will be harder in the future - but all we know for sure is that it will be different.  If it's harder to travel, it may also be easier to stay close to family.  If it's harder to keep the lights on, it may be easier to get a good night's sleep.
Human beings, and life on earth, are remarkably adaptable.  I've heard some remarkable interviews with people who say "it's probably for the best" after the most appalling misfortunes (the original drummer for the Beatles, who left the band before they became famous, comes to mind).

And while many people will die, in various ways (most of them unpleasant), when all's said and done, the history books will be written by the survivors.

We don't even know if they will be "human."

But there's no call to deliberately make things worse; all you can do is the best you can do, one day at a time.

Pie, frost, and friends

Super-easy apple slicing

Making Pie:
I was working on book edits and basically missed Thanksgiving.  I've been waiting for the right day to bake a make-up pie for Ernie's folks, and today was that day.

Making Friends:
I was inspired in part by a great conversation with some folks who are very into home cooking - we started the conversation as acquaintances, and by the time it was finished I think we're definitely moving into the "friends" category, if not some Anne of Green Gables mushy title like "Kindred Spirits."

Wilson and Chaya from Pantry Paratus (www.pantryparatus.com) were asking about hiring us for help on a water purification project.  Wilson's in nursing school, and going down to South America for an infectious disease prevention course.  He wanted to scope out options for doing water purification - a boiler, a distiller, maybe something else?  And of course, Ernie has dozens of ideas on the topic, it's been on his back burner for several years now. 

And then Chaya and I got talking about running a web-based business, and raising kids (she also organizes a home-schooling group; I used to do a lot of work in hands-on education including homeschool group support), and the nature of the human brain, and so on. 

It's funny how when you are doing a preliminary conversation about a consultation, you are thinking "OK, this is about an hour, we have a game plan and we should count this hour as billable. Do you want to keep talking now on the clock, or do our homework and come back?" 

But when it switches gears to connecting on topics of mutual interest, like how to keep the family healthy while running a small business .... how to balance the time-suck factor with the promotion and mission-related aspects of online business.... what it's like being "the conservative one" to all your liberal friends, and "liberal hippies" to your conservative friends and neighbors.... swapping good book recommendations, insights, and so on ... you can spend like 4 or 5 hours and not notice the time going by.  It's mutual pleasure, intrinsic benefit. 

Pie!
"Someone" couldn't wait for the picture....
oh wait, that was me. ;-)

I'm hereby adding Chaya to my list of people to have tea with by phone.  Possibly with pie.

And I'm also hereby making a plug:
We got the cool apple-peeler above ("Apple Master") from our friends' business at Pantry Paratus.  http://pantryparatus.com/

They are a niche retailer for homesteading equipment - mostly drool-worthy kitchen stuff, but they also have good general info like animal-husbandry books, wild-crafting, etc. 
If you are still working on a Christmas gift list, or gearing up to do your own holiday cooking, I definitely recommend them.  Not just because they carry good products and give reliable advice about how to use them, but because I like them personally, and I want to see them succeed. 

They are the kind of people whose success tends to cause other people's lives to get better too.  Dedicated, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, making-a-difference-as-we-go-along caretakers. 

My wish for 2016 is that both our businesses have so much self-maintaining cash flow that we can get together for a couple of weeks and just tinker around and research the best ways to promote clean water in remote mountain areas - as always, with a big-picture plan that helps reduce pollution as well as improve daily quality of life.

Hoarfrost on pine

On our way down to take the pie to his folks, Ernie pointed out that the hoarfrost is thicker up at the tops of the trees - they catch more fog and wind, apparently.  It's not obvious on all of them, but you can also see it sometimes where the tips are whiter than the inside branches.

It's probably for the same reason that snowflakes are pointy, and boats have tall sails, and your fingers and nose get cold faster than your belly button: there is more air movement at the edges of things.  More moisture moves past the exposed edges of things, and they the wind blows harder higher up where it's not broken by brush and land contours.

"Dendrites" - branch shapes - are formed naturally in snow and other crystals when the exposed points grow faster than the sheltered stems.  And trees and plants evolved to grow in similar, feathery, branching shapes, because this gets their nutrient-collecting leaves and roots out where they can swap more of what they need: exchanging carbon dioxide and oxygen from the air; exchanging water, sugars, and minerals with other soil-dwellers at their roots.  Rivers have this branching shape too, as their main channels like stems gather the moisture that arrived in the area as dispersed vapor and precipitation.  The branching structure does something cool when there's a transition between liquid and vapor, or vapor and sold, or dispersed and accumulated concentrations going on.

There might be a case to be made for temperature differences due to biology, as well.  Our fingers get short shrift when our body is conserving warmth for the core.  Air that filters through the interior of the tree gives up its moisture relatively quickly, and may just be a little more tapped-out like it would going through a snowflake, but the tree might be a scosh warmer on the inside, too.  Our pines and firs tend to have dark trunks, which may help them warm up the sap when it's time to photo synthesize in winter.


Regardless, this is a big reason why we have more forests higher up our mountains: they collect their own water.  In a quiet breeze, you can hear the hoarfrost tinkling to the ground, home-made snow these trees are scraping out of the clouds whether or not there is enough water for "official" precipitation.

Here's to making your own rain.

Review copies of our book, anyone?

Wow, it's been a long time since I posted.  This is my confession (for those who don't follow with bated breath) that I am back-dating a few posts to describe all the marvelous things that have been keeping me away from my desk - but there really was a gap from March to November ! (yikes!)


The question that drives this post is:

Where should we send review copies of our book?

There are two criteria:
1) The reviewer needs to already have an audience.  A blog or email list with, say, 1000+ readers would count, as would regular book review columns, local newspapers, etc.

2) There should be a reasonable chance that they would actually review the book. Even better if they might like it. For example, they have reviewed other books, host natural building workshops or sell books, or might have an existing bias toward rocket mass heaters.

So:
If you read book reviews on alternative living, how-to, appropriate tech, survivalist tools, or sustainability, please let us know some of your favorite book reviewers!

If you have an audience of over 1000 people, who might enjoy hearing your opinion of the Rocket Mass Heater Builder's Guide, would you like an early copy of the book sent right to you?

Oh, and we'd need a mailing address.  I think our publisher (New Society) would be especially happy to get copies of the review, if/when it comes out.

Who knew it could be this easy to get an early copy?

Pyronauts in Montana

We had an amazing time, again, at Wheaton Labs near Missoula, Montana.  All of last year's innovators made the trip again, despite some crazy tight schedules in some cases, and there were some tremendously interesting projects.  Here are some quick highlights from the last couple of days:

Mini Mouse, exterior

Peter van den Berg set the tone with his whimisical names for two small space-heaters, with 4" J-style and batch fireboxes set into a larger barrel.  These had a surface temperature safe enough for relatively low-clearance installation, and could be lowered even further (and made to hold heat for longer) by filling the space in the barrel with brick.  Unfortunately the second load of reclaimed brick turned out to have bitumen paint all over it, which melted and contaminated  the barrel, so despite everyone's best efforts at cleaning up the mess, he was not able to get a true reading of the emissions performance on that project before the end of the week.

Mini Mouse interior - 4" J-style firebox.

Fat Rabbit - and
what is Peter looking at?
(see end for answer)

The Minnie (Mini) Mouse - 4" J-style Dragon Heaters core, sawn-off heat riser, in a 55-gal (200-liter) drum, with 5" stovepipe.

The Fat Rabbit - 4" batch-box made by Peter from vermiculite board, in a custom rolled-steel cylinder designed to mimic a larger-size shipping barrel that's commonly available in Europe (but not in Montana, perhaps due to the very long distance between the Rockies and most shipping ports).





So Ernie named his project with the recycled quartz-glass test tube,

The GlowBug.

Dis-assembled Glow Bug, showing nice simple manifold. The special glass tube, blackened with smoke, is in the background.

The Kitchen Rack
left: oven,
center: hot water,
right: covered griddle / BBQ smoker

I don't know if Tim Barker bothered to come up with a name for his 3-in-one kitchen: a scale up of his previous 3-function cooking experiment, this time with a custom rack hosting a rocket oven and a rocket griddle with separate, removable fireboxes, and both exhausts feeding to a central rocket hot water heater for comfortable washing-up.

I suspect it will just be called "The Kitchen," soon enough.

I spent the whole time noodling on two designs problems - one a submersible heater for a rocket-fired hot tub, the other a portable, small-space heater suitable for boats and camper-caravans.

I got paralyzed not knowing how small I could make things, and decided to take some time off and just make something TOO small.

Improvised 2" rasp for interior of heat riser.

We had some unusual insulating brick, made with diatomaceous earth, that was hard enough to hold shape but soft enough to work with hand tools.  Fun stuff.  It was good we could cut it with hand tools, because at that point, we did not have a tile saw or wet saw on site, and people were queueing to use all 3 grinders, continuously, for both masonry and metal work.

The first version of the firebox, we cut into 4 bricks; the second version (shown) was extended a bit using scraps of insulation board, for a longer firebox and longer chimney.

Names for this 2" batch box ranged from Peter's offer to transfer the title of Minnie Mouse; or to christen it with an even-smaller new name such as "The Roaring Flea," or "Barking Flea," to which Tim Barker could not resist returning,
 "More like 'the farting gnat.'"

If you look closely you can see
the intact ash shape of
a hemlock cone
just inside the mouth.

Big ambitions, small but shiny achievement.

The 2" core burned surprisingly well (that is, it did actually burn at all), and we learned some very useful things about what does and doesn't scale.

Insulation doesn't scale.  I carved a cute little pinch-point handle in the vermiculite-board-scrap door, and almost burned my fingers trying to use it.  Turns out, 1/4" of vermiculite between you and a 1200 degree fire is still 1/4" of vermiculite board, no matter how cute the firebox is.  In fact, you could argue that insulation scales inversely: if you want to make a functional firebox half the size, and you would usually use 1" of insulation, you may need 1.5" or 2" to get the same performance from the smaller firebox because it will lose heat more rapidly due to greater surface area compared with the volume (and weight) of the fuel.

Fire doesn't scale.  You still have to light a real fire even in a miniature firebox.  We got it down to about 1/4 sheet of newspaper, a full load of matchstick-sized kindling, and then promptly refilling with "big" wood (short-sawn pieces of medium kindling, less than one stick in some cases made a full fuel load).  Not surprisingly, fire also doesn't burn very clean when you only use 15 minutes of kindling, the dirtiest phase of the fire.

I suspect the flame length doesn't really scale, either, or at least not linearly.  We did a to-scale 9" heat riser at first, and the flames came out the top a couple of inches.  Then we put on a couple more feet of various-sized heat riser using the smallest stovepipe on hand (3"), and the flames filled the whole stack and came out the top by about a foot.  I think there may be some maximum flame length that all fires can achieve, forest fire fighters will estimate flame lengths at about 4x the height of the fuel, and putting a chimney on it draws this up a bit longer.  But I don't think even a small fire can be expected to burn clean with less than about 2 feet of total flame length, or some equivalent stay-time at adequate temperature.

Wood racks do scale nicely, however.  You can stack a lot of 4" to 6" kindling in a cute little tangle of wire, and it's very nice to have it handy as your matchstick-tinder "kindling" burns down very fast before you can prepare "big"-kindling-wood.

And Peter's double-vortex, or rams-horns, does seem to scale even down to this tiny size.  We were able to get it going in the bottom of the heat riser, but even that wasn't enough to guarantee a clean burn.

I spent some more time noodling on the boat-stove design, and didn't make much progress.

I laid up an elaborate design including a 1-loaf oven, tilted heat riser, 4-french-toast griddle, and double insulation on the sides.  I was enjoying the symmetry and multi-function, and excited to see if it worked as a cooker/baker that could burn clean.  I considered calling it The Shrimp, as the firebox-and-kicked-heat-riser reminded me of a curled whale-tale only much smaller.

But it seemed like even so, it was getting too big, with multiple insulating bricks on each side, and more courses in height than I had hoped for.  It seemed it would be difficult to stabilize and make shock-proof.
I invited three of the experienced sailors in the group to critique it.  After beating about the bush a bit, they basically agreed that in order to survive life on a boat, the stove should basically be able to be bolted down, turned completely upside-down and end for end, and continue to function (ideally throughout the process, but certainly after being turned back right-side-up).
There was much gesturing of the shimmying, juddering, jolting drops that happen when a boat is wallowing and running her nose ahead of herself in heavy seas.  (And that's considered recreational sailing... a "bad day" at sea can include a complete capsize and self-righting, which is not the same as a shipwreck, on account of sometimes you can still collect the broken pieces and motor home by yourself, and on rare instances with over-built rigging and zealous furling, you may even be able to continue sailing after the storm passes).

So my design would need to be re-worked to meet the newly defined, upside-down-drop-kick standard of ruggedness for marine applications.

I think something similar may be required of stoves for campers, which, though they rarely undergo complete capsize, are sometimes seen to wallow and jolt their way up winding mountain trails where a sensible person would not take a donkey cart.

I switched tracks to the submersible heater, and may have accidentally solved both problems.

Peter helped simplify the design - I'd been thinking about a refractory-lined pocket rocket, maybe casting refractory into barrels, or using a combination of brick, cob, and a cast-refractory or tile feed.

Background note:
Pocket rockets are a scrap-steel proof of concept for rocket thermosiphon fireboxes; their main drawbacks are that the fire is hot enough to chew through about a third of the metal feed tube in a matter of months, and few barrels last more than a year - I think about 3 or 4 years is the max.  A stove that eats itself is not a safe thing to install in your home, nor is it particularly appealing to a dedicated environmentalist like Paul Wheaton, which is why they've been banned from the labs after a winter of far too many excited, and terrifying, experiments.

So my goal was to make 1) a pocket rocket that didn't eat itself, and 2) could be safely lowered into a container of water as a dead-simple immersion heater.

We did some preliminary figuring and realized:

1) it would be nice if, in case the barrel might rust through and admit some water leakage, nevertheless the lining material or metal outer layer should not explode from trapped steam when a fire is lit inside.  This suggests either a double-lined metal construction with an easily-inspected-and-replaced outer barrel, or at the very least, not using any of the castable refractories that are noted for steam spalling.

2) It would be nice if, when lowered into the water tub, the heater did not float up and tip itself over, swinging its hot chimney about in a terrifyingly random orbit, and/or drowning its own fire.  This means the weight needs to be about the same as the barrel would be, if filled with water - for a 120-lb grease can, about 100 to 120 lbs.  (Peter calculated it independently with a metric tape measure at 50 to 52 kg, which is pretty darn close.)
That's a reasonable two-person lift, but tends to rule out doing any much bigger versions as a lift-in, lift-out heater.

Tim suggested we could do a couple simple things to get around this - mainly to make a separate side tank or barrel, and plumb it to the tub with a thermosiphon so that you would not need to move the immersion heater every time you wanted to warm up the tub.  This is an excellent and civilized notion, which would require me knowing rudimentary plumbing skills, or assuming I could pick that up from present company, also would require me having the foresight to order some parts for the purpose.  Neither of which were particularly the case, and I was getting tired of hanging around asking present company for ideas and help.  So I regretfully rejected the solution.  But I did take his idea far enough to use a barrel of water for the testing vessel, since we were also having difficulty re-assembling our second-hand redwood hot tub enough to re-create its alleged, former capacity to hold water.

Peter pointed out that casting things was a complicated way to make a first prototype, in any case.
Much simpler to line the thing with fire bricks, and see what happened.  We tried a test-fit, and it looked like 8 or 9 split firebricks would line it pretty nicely, with room for a dividing wall of full brick.  We cajoled Paul into buying a masonry wet-saw (at substantial expense) so I could cut 20-degree angles on the corners of a large collection of split firebrick, completing the shape with a couple of angled full-brick wedges. I would prefer a symmetrical feed and firebox, but this is a good tight fit and much simpler.  (Peter kept encouraging a tighter fit, and suggested changing the orientation of the lapped joints so that the bricks really helped jam each other in there.)

Larger opening on left is updraft, small on right is feed.

Detail showing brick joins (no mortar)

Caddisfly beside its insulated water-tank for testing
(got up to about 140 F in a few hours,
sounds nice and hot, until you think of
how much water a hot tub contains -
mix that half-barrel of nice hot water
into a hot tub full of cool, and
you are still a long ways from luxury.)

The Caddisfly (or Nymph), named for a small elongated larval creature that glues rocks to itself and lives underwater.

We lit it, and it burned so clean, so quickly, that I did not look up in time to see any smoke.  it's possible it smoked for a moment, but it was cleaner than most pocket rockets I've ever lit, which is already clean compared to most improvised wood-burning stoves.

The surface was a disappointingly warm temperature - hot enough to be quite comfortable standing next to, and even to touch briefly, but I was concerned that it would not put out enough heat to do much good in the big hot tub.

Peter was ecstatic, however, pointing out that this was a very excellent solution to his original problem, and my earlier one, of a small, compact space-heater with safe temperatures for reduced-clearance installations.

It turned out, the bricks were fit so tight, that we could move it on a hand truck at 45- degrees or more, with no noticeable shifting.  So with a good clamp-on lid and flexible top shim, we may be close to solving the upside-down-drop-kick criteria for boat and camper stoves, too.

The Caddisfly doesn't have the cooking or baking capacity I was hoping for in a tiny-space heater, at least not in this version, but it may be possible to add something on later.  Some kind of plug or shelf in the feed tube, or even a cleverly designed feed door, could give some pot-heating capacity, and there might be a way to add a chimney-stack oven on to the back end.

The stove does put out too much heat out the chimney for true efficiency, so some kind of compact chimney-heat-extractor would complete the puzzle.

Lasse, pronounced like NASA

Sidewinder with warm bench and happy campers

Further out in the yard, while all this was going on, Lasse Holmes and his fellow Alaskan Greg were steam-rolling through a demonstration of his Cabin Heater which tried out a new stock door (not his favorite, as the air feed wasn't adiequate), and a new small warming-oven feature, and showcasing some prior innovations with adobe-block cob bench construction, and the side-winder adaptation of the batch box which allows a compact block design with a bigger cooktop.

Ernie had a simultaneous team working on a rocket kiln, or roasting oven, of some kind.  I don't know if either of those had cute names, but they were impressive anyway.  Nate, Steve, Thekla, and Glen worked on those with great dedication in teams over two weeks.

Kiln in progress

Kiln completed-
(and what happens when you thicken plaster with extra clay.)

And Weston was building timber-framed skids for the future hot tub platform.

And Randall was welding custom parts for Peter and Tim.

Why is this handle on fire?

On a different note, the morning after the longest night of work and play at the end of the week, we saw sobering evidence of a near escape:

At some point in the past year, someone attached wooden supports to the temporary door, made of refractory insulation, on Peter's 8" batch box beastie (a big heater prototype from last year's event).  With this temporary door propped in place, it has been run as the main shop-heater for most of the year.

This event involved a lot of extra shop hours, plus evening hangout time in a warm space, and it may have been run as much as 16 hours on that last, long day and night of work.
(Peter generally recommends stopping after 4 hours or so; the permanent designs have thermal mass to carry you through between firings.) 

Someone left it running with the door slightly off-center, which exposed a screw to the full heat of the fire, which resulting in this dramatic charring of the makeshift handle, which was still smoldering the next morning.

Jocelyn and I were very, very glad that the crew had swept up most of the sawdust piles after Tim's comments about the fire danger of combined wood-working and metal-working shops (sparks from grinders and welders, plus sawdust; and sawdust fires are notorious for subtly smoldering  a long time before they finally catch).

A sobering reminder that just because a prototype works for a while without incident, doesn't mean it's "safe."  Fire is never safe - but it can be used safely.  It's like Gandalf: the most dangerous thing in the room.  The important question is not whether it is dangerous - of course it is - but whether it is friendly.  Or in the case of fire, whether you have reached a mutual understanding.

The 8" beastie needs a permanent door, usually a $500 or so job for a good craftsman.  It's not an innovation, just a completion detail.  Failing that, it needs a better temporary door (with no wood involved).
Or does it?
Traditional ovens had wooden doors that were soaked in a pail of water, then used just for the baking cycle, then replaced when they charred beyond usefulness.  But traditional ovens were not left in the hands of inattentive visitors, who are accustomed to self-tending stoves and furnaces. And they're traditionally outdoors, away from other things that can burn.

When firing a heater long hours into the night, would you expect a gathering of "pyronauts," no matter how tired or distracted they may be, to have the common sense to notice the door is on fire?
Would you have noticed?
It may never have burst into flame; the fire would have started as an oxygen-starved coal right around the metal screw, and could have continued undetected long after the fire was out.

Our token efforts at cleaning up flammable debris are the only defence I can raise that we ought to be trusted again with someone else's shop space.  Luckily, in this case, that token defence was sufficient to prevent the fire spreading.


And ... and ... and ...


It was impossible to take it all in, nearly impossible to concentrate with all the interesting things going on in every corner, yet all these new things were made which clearly required great concentration.

Some worked perfectly as planned, a few prototypes were discarded unfinished or fell short of their original goals.  Both failures and successes also impressed us with new lessons and new discoveries (both promising and dire).

I give full credit to Daniel for trying to get cameras on everything at once.  He even had a flying camera drone, and his pilot's license to operate it.

(And that's what I think had caught Peter's attention, way back at the beginning.  Either that or he is doing math again - which is often accompanied by a tremendously amusing ticker-tape "blooplooplooplooplooploo" sound effect from his mouth, which probably stops people interrupting him while he is working on the answer to their prior question.)

Morocco: the Center of the World

 We have done international work before, but were still extremely excited to get our first invitation to North Africa.
(Technically, I think it's our first actual trip overseas - we've consulted on projects from Costa Rica to Mongolia, but many of them drew the line at paying our travel costs to come help them in person.)

Our hosts in rural Morocco did pay the plane fare, and put us up in some lovely, new, earth-walled buildings on their farm.  Which also has 100-year-old olive plantings.  They have been there 3 years so far, and hosted 15 different international experts in permaculture and sustainable technology to give courses, here on the farm, and in at least two different villages in the region. 

The first step (aside from a crazy 3-taxi fiasco of a trip from the airport, and being served a bunch of good food) was to look at the local materials, and see what could be done with them.

See the cracks in the fired bricks (top)
from one long test-fire.  Our perlite-adobes
(lower down) seemed to hold up better.

 The pink, hand-made, low-fired clay bricks that were the closest thing to split fire brick that our host was able to find locally were not high-temperature material. Nor were they square enough to stack on edge.

The villagers can make better brick than that by hand.  So we did.  We robbed a bit of nice local clay and finely-chopped straw from the plastering team, and mixed it with perlite to make an experimental "vernacular insulative ceramic," to be stacked raw and fired in place.  The first test fires were promising, with a solid "tink tink" terra-cotta fire on the inside, and fiber remaining intact (lending strength) on the outside.  So we used this improvised refractory insulation to build other heaters in both villages.  We are devoutly hoping that it holds up as well as we think it will.

Abdilah, Zacaria, and a mysterious hand
checking dimensions

Our expert translator had a schedule conflict, so we made do with my two years of high school French, the locals' 4 to 12 years of school French, and of course our hosts and some other European guests put us to shame with 4 or 5 languages apiece.  By the end of our two weeks there, we had a working pidgin of French, Darija (local Arabic), and Franglaise (English-with-a-French-accent) covering most of the essential building terms.
"Tobia" is a brick or block. (D)
"Traub" is earth. (D)
"Tain" is either clay, or clay-plaster. (D)
"Mizem" is measured - mizem l'ma, water level, mizem al height, plumb bob, "mizem?" "is it measured?" (D)
"Melange de perlite" was the word we coined for our insulating mixture (Ef)
Our host graciously informed me about halfway through the workshops that I was saying "noon" when I meant "half," but other than that, it went pretty well.

We make a muddy but functional mess,
and they keep serving me elegant tea.

I was sometimes not sure how to act: we don't have the rich traditions of hospitality and courtesy to guests, and I'm also used to leading by example in mixed company.  The farm crew was accustomed to mutual respect between the sexes, unlike some later city encounters, but there was still some times when I was self-conscious about being the only woman in the room.  When I did go play with the women, as one morning helping make raiffe for breakfast, there was a huge language barrier and we had to get by with grins and shrugs and pantomime.  Once I started working with mud, and we could make jokes about my "cooking" things you can't eat, it seemed to go OK.  (There were women on the local plastering and gardening crews; one of them, a deaf-mute, was one of the easiest people to understand our whole first week there.)

Our youngest crew member, Miryam,
and the client (her mother)

I also enjoyed playing with the kids at one of the village project sites, Zacaria's mother's house.  After playing an extended game of "please sit down" in pantomime, Zacaria's little sister Miryam showed some interest in plastering, and once I got her started, he pulled out some classic big-brother teasing of the best kind (faster, faster!  More water!  Gotta get it done!")  He and another worker shoveled plaster in her direction, and showed her the ropes, and the bench accidentally got plastered a full day earlier than planned. 

Gratuitous picture of a donkey (still the main transportation in these parts).
This is a light but awkward load, apparently one donkey can carry almost as much as the roof rack on my Geo Metro, if you can get it lashed on there. After a few minutes trying to secure it, we just carried the longer pipes on our shoulders and let the donkey carry what fit in its baskets.

Our host's courtyard in the village
- pomegranates, limes/lemons, and figs are common. 

There was exotic scenery along the way.  Patient beasts of burden, plastered haystacks, traditional earthen-floored courtyards.  I noticed very few fences, certainly not the miles and miles of hog-wire that we have in the rural American West.  Instead, there were "drover's fences" of thorn-bush or cactus lining the main routes, with a few patches of wire, wood, or masonry fence here and there.

We also saw drover's bridges over the highways: long ramps where livestock could be led or herded over the pedestrian bridge, between fields and forests of cork-oak.  Donkeys or other beasts would commonly be hobbled or tethered, left to graze with their saddles nearby in "donkey parking" areas outside the farm or village.

My sister Corinna remembers this cactus
being called "foreign girl" in the Berber dialect,
the same word sometimes applied to her
while she was in the Peace Corps there.

The more impressive vegetable gardens would have rather stout thorn fences and a gate with a latch or rope tie; a lot of fruit trees grew "indoors," in the home courtyard (pomegranates, limes and other citrus, figs, some magnificent grapes). They would be economically watered with dish-water, or hand-washing and other light cleaning done with a jug of water directly over the planter bed.

There was plumbing to the kitchen, courtyard, and washroom in one village.  In the other, the well project had failed, and most water was carried by donkey or hand from a more distant well shared between two villages.  People were generally very conscientious about water for drinking and "impure water" for washing or irrigation, but I still had a little difficulty adapting.

A few hours away by elegantly-maintained taxi, our second destination was a village school overlooking a magnificent mountain valley.
It took a little longer there for the crew to gel, and to establish communication (since our working pidgin was, after all, almost entirely invented amongst ourselves in the first group).  But we gained the help of a masterful local builder with a good eye for equipment - he would raise an eyebrow and bring us his magnetic level, or a good steel tape measure, any time he saw us making do with an inferior tool.  I think his family had originally built the school, a generation or two ago, and he was taking a keen interest in the remodel and revival of it.  It didn't hurt his motivation when his grandkids dropped by to see what was going on, either.

All in all, our crew and students built 5 working heaters in just under 2 weeks, and each one fired up like a charm.  They sent us home exhausted and inspired.

The off-duty school teacher surprised us
with Raiffe pastries for afternoon tea.

We did our share of ordinary touristing too - with just enough clean clothes left to stand up in, we visited the old market at Casablanca, and indulged in some olive-and-craft shopping.

The longest casual conversation I had was with my translation-buddy, Abdileh, whose home we stayed in during our time in the second village.  He has been to university, how much I don't know, and serves as the groundskeeper and permaculture educator at the village school.  As I understood his french, "the kids get tired of being inside with the lady teacher, and they come outside, and then I get to show them things."

That whole school is based on voluntary attendance: there is a public school in the village, but for kids who want an alternative, they can drop in and learn at this new school.  It reminded me of the kind of excellence I had to learn working for OMSI: in that case it was paying customers, and our exhibit design team told us we had 3 seconds to about 30 seconds to engage someone's attention before they would go elsewhere.  If your audience is not interested, they just walk out.  There is very little coerced attendence, aside from the occasional parental encouragement: there is no truancy officer, no principle's office to send unruly students.  The main hold the teacher has over the students is that natural authority that comes from continuously proving yourself worthy of your students' respect, time, and attention.  Those accustomed to enforced authority may find it surprising how much can be taught in this way, even topics considered too difficult or "boring" for regular school.

I got some perspective on Abdileh's life over lunch at Zacaria's house one day, during our third project.    During lunch I had tried to excuse my awkward learning phase in Moroccan-style table manners.  I bragged in broken French that I can "eat with sticks like the Chinese," trying to make the point that I know new things take practice, while gratefully declined their prompt offers of a separate plate and spoon.  (Shoukhram, saffiit.  Thank you, this is enough.)

Abdilah told me of some friends from university who studied Chinese - he went to that course for a few weeks, but his friends stayed for 3 years, and now they are in Peking - you know, the Capitol of China?

He was obviously proud of them, but made it clear that he is not jealous.  "I am content with my situation here - I learn a lot from these visitors, the work that goes on at the farm and the school is very interesting." 

Pointing to the center of the symmetrical tablecloth after the meal had been cleared, he explained:

La table, c'est le monde.  Et ici
(where the beans are in this picture),
c'est Maroc.  Tu comprends?

"Morocco, you understand, is the center of the world."

With a twinkle in his eye, he continued,
 "Our cuisine is African, European, Arabic.  All the ancient empires were based in the Mediterranean - the Romans, the Ottomans, the French, even the British hold onto Gibralter.  And now that America is a big power, true, it's over there across the Atlantic, but where does send its ships when it goes after oil in the Middle East?  Right past our gates."

I couldn't argue with the history; not even the modern part (knowing Navy veterans whose "Mediterranean tour" included time in the Gulf wars).

So why should Abdileh not be content?
One day, he might consider travelling.
But for now, the world comes to him.

It is certainly humbling trying to teach anything, even a new thing, in a context where the collective memory may be comparing you to recollections of Rome.  On the way home, we passed briefly through Fez, home to the oldest university in the world.