"Darkness is Good for Us": A Contrarian Idea About Winter

I had planned a post to review some promising new rechargable flashlights we used on farm, when a story caught my eye on Firefox's home screen. At first I thought it clickbait, until I spotted Atlas Obscura. The word "Darkness" intrigued my roving eye, and I clicked. 

My class had just finished reading LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea, a fine book for younger readers about a talented young man's journey to wisdom, focusing on his Taoist realization that darkness and light need to exist in balance. It's a contrary approach than that taken in much fantasy literature, where a Manichean division exists: Sauron vs. Aragorn, for instance. Darkness in Tolkien is usually metaphorical and dangerous. It tempts us to power over others, rather than power from within.

But Tolkien rises above moral dualism; he loved the natural world. In his books we get dark skies full of stars that the Elves enjoy. That literal sense of darkness as awe-inspiring and necessary brings us to a lesson from Moffat, Scotland that we might employ in our lives. To a small degree, we have been trying it where we live.  This quotation, by "Astrophotographer and dark skies advocate Josh Dury" struck me as particularly wise:

“If you squeeze the whole of human evolution into a single day, artificial lighting has been around for a minute,” says Dury. “Exposure to light at night can have serious health implications.” He adds: “It can particularly affect our body’s hormones, including the production of melatonin, which is responsible for maintaining sleep patterns and nocturnal rhythms.” 

Read the piece for inspiration. Moffat succeeded where other communities continue to blot out the sky, at enormous cost to our natural sleep cycles and the stability of our climate. Even low-energy LEDs require power to run, so they are far from carbon-neutral.

Even if we dim our own small lights, not all of us live in places where we can turn down community lighting to see the Milky Way arch over our suddenly tiny heads. We are puny, compared to the panorama overhead.

What can each of us do to bring back some darkness? I don't always succeed every day but:

• Steering clear of all screens for an hour or more before bedtime
• Leaving house lights off in rooms that are empty
• Avoiding the American trend of spotlighting a house to show it off at night
  
• Replacing interior and exterior lighting that blots out the night with task lighting where possible, and where not?
• Installing security lighting triggered by motion. Always-on means always injected carbon dioxide into our air.
  
• Considering where all lights point. We replaced large floodlights with equally bright but lower-energy LED floods pointing downward. That way, when we need to check outside during the time when Copperhead snakes roam our yards, we can see them. Once back inside, out go the lights.

Winter remains my favorite season, partly for the lack of hot, humid weather and the orderliness of a winter landscape, but also for the power of the dark sky. It's perfect for stargazing. This year I learned a few new winter constellations that I can, luckily, see where I live. Cassiopeia, Andromeda, and Perseus became nightly companions. 

In town, it was Orion. That was about it. During a trip to New York City? Nothing except the Moon. Times Square is magical at night, but I'd not be able to live in a large city again for more than a short while. I'd miss the dark too much.

I hope that in years to come, we'll rediscover how powerfully darkness helps us, as creatures who evolved to benefit from both light and dark. 

Next time, the flashlights!

image courtesy of Wikipedia.

A Woodpile Essential

I love heating with wood, and I love managing a woodlot. We cut out crooked saplings, fell a few leaners, and cut up fallen trees from thunderstorms and ice-storms. I burn it all, soft or hardwood.

That can get some woodstove owners into real trouble, if they burn too much green wood. Creosote will build up, increasing the chances of a chimney fire.

Most hardwoods take a year to be ready, if you keep them dry. Pine can be ready sooner. That said, I'd not burn a stick if I didn't check it first for moisture content.

Enter the inexpensive moisture meter I picked up from Amazon or eBay (I forget) for under $50.

To burn well, the wood should have less than 20% moisture. I trust Cornell University's advice on this. A reading on a newly cut log of 100%, this site claims, means that a log's weight is half water!

Their information contends that indefinite storage can be managed, but in my experience, wood that is too dry may as well be cardboard. It goes up fast and bright without generating too many BTUs. I discovered that with an estate-sale load of firewood, mostly white oak, that I got at $20 for a full cord. It burned but the lightness of the wood told me it had been stored for many years. I was happy to be rid of it.  The R value was less than year-old pine.

Conversely, a few years back we bought half a cord of red oak that was under-seasoned. It was the first heating season in 10 where I had to buy some wood. We did not have our meter then, so I mixed the oak with seasoned wood and waited for spring, rather anxiously, since we didn't want to run our furnace and spend money that way.

The following fall, the remaining red oak burned bright and hot, and it warmed our house well. Still, I don't want to buy from that seller of "seasoned" wood again. He haphazardly covered his piles, and that's not enough to properly season wood, without air circulation.

So I recommend something like our Tavtool. I use it in the woodpile and check several sticks on the sides and the ends. The ranges vary considerably, and the values on the scope tend too rise as one goes deeper into the log. At first, this reading was 13% but it dropped fast as the tool wiggled. Still, it's in the right range to burn.

The images show a log from a small tree that came down a year ago in an ice storm. We cut and stacked it in March, in a south-facing shelter that holds about 1/4 cord of wood (4' high by 2' deep by 8' long). Here's the end of the same log.

I have never seen readings vary more than a per-cent or two, unless one part of the log had been rained on. If you are unsure, split a piece and measure inside one of the pieces. That will give you a heartwood reading.

Finally, keep your wood dry. We build wood-boxes out of construction scraps. Shelter is key to good firewood, as is stacking for air circulation. Piles on the ground can molder even if covered with tarps and around here, harbor Copperheads in the warm months. No thank you.

 

May your woodpiles stay dry until Spring. And it's not too early to start stacking wood for 2023-24. We've burned about 2 cords, down from last year, but I need to replace them and one more to have the barn and wood-boxes full.