Friday, December 26, 2008

Maine public radio

Maine Public Broadcasting (MPBN) announced that it was shutting down its transmitters in Calais and Fort Kent on account of the economic recession and the ensuing crisis facing the station. This is a betrayal of a public trust.

While it doesn't affect me--I can get the stations from Bangor and Camden clearly enough--it affects two counties the combined size of Massachusetts and Connecticut. That is a pretty large area.

No doubt the folks from Washington and Aroostook counties who contributed their hard earned dollars during MPBN's most recent pledge drive, last summer, where they raised more than $200,000, an amount four times that of the contributions of listeners in Rhode Island, must be wishing they could get their monies back. Fat chance. And fat chance that they will soon contribute again. What is MPBN thinking?

Perhaps they're thinking that the state legislature will step in and give them more money. Fat chance again. The legislature is mandated to drastic budget cuts themselves. Besides, many resent MPBN's firing, last year, of Robert Skoglund, aka The humble Farmer, a state treasure, a Maine humorist who had a show on MPBN Friday nights for more than 30 years, and who did it voluntarily for almost all of that time.

humble was asked to sign a loyalty oath, that he would not inject political humor into his monolgues. Imagine if Mark Twain had been asked to sign such an oath! Or Garrison Keillor? No way. And so humble was fired. And so listeners withheld $180,000 in contributions. No wonder MPBN is hurting.

It's mismanagement of a public trust, plain and simple. Throw the Board of Trustees out. Throw the executive managers out. Bring in a new group that will be responsible to the public trust, re-hire Skoglund, and usher in a new day for Maine public broadcasting. If money needs to be saved, cut back on television.

Yes, television. Public television in Maine is pathetic and has been for decades, increasingly unable to compete with cable channels, losing its audience while radio is gaining.




Cedar Waxwings

Cedar waxwings made an appearance migrating through the day before Christmas, Marta wanted me to note. I've seen them most winters I've been here, usually more than there were a couple of days ago; but they are a sweet sight no matter how many.

Monday, December 22, 2008

Blizzard

No sooner had I written that we'd avoided the big snow thus far, a northeaster and a blizzard arrived Sunday afternoon. Monday morning we woke up to fifteen inches of new snow, some of it blown to more than two feet. The town plow, which usually comes up to the end of the road and turns around in our circular drive, for the first time I can recall simply gave up and backed down. And so I had a date with the snowblower to make paths and clear away around the vehicles and then clear the drive down to the town road. This took all morning. In the afternoon I shoveled around the cords of wood stacked on pallets and covered with tarps.

The snowblower is a powerful attachment to the BCS 735 walk-behind tractor, and when everything is working right, as it was this morning, it is a joy to work with. What was not a joy were the 30 mile per hour shifting winds, which got me in cloud of snow from time to time.

It would be nice to be in the South (I have lived in Virginia, Georgia, and Kentucky) instead of northern New England at a time like this. Some of the wealthier residents of this island head south for the winter--snowbirds they are called. You can often tell them by the Florida plates on their cars. I understand they establish a residence in Florida because they then pay no state income tax, whereas the state income tax in Maine is among the highest. Florida holds no attraction for me, at this time.

The next winter difficulty will be ice, as when it warms up the precipitation falls as rain, and then it freezes and stays. This happens in southern New England as well, of course, but the layout of this plot of land and buildings means that the ice stays and walking can be treacherous. I have spent winters here and avoided falls, but as someone who does not care to be indoors all or most of a day, winter here concentrates life unless a particular effort is made to be out. One of the ways to be out is cross-country skiing, and I intend to do that tomorrow.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Cold and heat

The past week has brought cold and snow, normal here for this time of year, though not so much snow as by this time last year. There's still not quite enough on the ground to ski on the old abandoned roads and the trails nearby. Inland there's been more snow.

The cold and snow (and ice, at times) concentrates movement around the buildings. The woodbox is constantly in need of replenishing. Outside there is the wood split and stacked under tarps, and the snow must be thrown off before it can be dug out and moved to the large woodbox on the porch, which holds about a 3-4 day supply that gets moved gradually into the smaller woodbox inside, and then into the stove. It's an old airtight Jotul 118, in the green enamel, which takes a 2-foot stick.

These Jotuls, and their smaller cousins (the model 602) were imported by the tens of thousands in the 1970s during the energy crisis and its aftermath, and put into the old houses that countercultural refugees from the cities moved into hereabouts. Even more popular among this segment of those "from away" who moved here then were the Vermont Castings stoves, which were advertised in a manner calculated to serve the values of this countercultural population, with an emphasis on fine craftsmanship and hints and tips on felling trees, splitting and stacking wood, and so on, for the do-it-yourself wood burner. In the long run the Jotuls proved more robust and reliable, but that is neither here nor there.
Woodstoves, despite their appeal various grounds, are worse polluters than oil furnaces; and the recent increase in outdoor wood furnaces is particularly troublesome, with neighbor complaints and local ordinances multiplying.

Later generations of transplants favored the more expensive stoves with the glass fronts, but as oil prices rose precipitously last spring and summer, many on the island and throughout the state as a whole bought wood pellet stoves, which promised an easier time of it: instead of having to work one's way toward stacked, split wood, one could buy bags of wood pellets that could be stored inside and set to feed the stove more or less automatically. There was a shortage for a month or two when the stove buyers who spent more than two thousand dollars for their stoves found demand for pellets had outstripped supply; but as this fall's drop in oil prices occurred, pellet bags were more easily gotten, and those who had planned to save a lot of money buy purchasing a pellet stove when the price of home heating oil was five dollars a gallon are going to have to wait until the next oil crisis comes around--possibly not very long.

Wood is cheaper than oil, of course. A cord of good hardwood will give off as much heat as 200 gallons of oil. When heating oil was $4.50 a gallon this summer, 200 gallons cost $900 while a cord of wood, cut, split, and delivered, cost a little more than $200, less than 1/4 of the cost of oil. Now that oil is down to $2.50 a gallon, wood is still less than half as expensive as oil. If you fell trees from your woodlot, buck them, and split them yourself, your only cost is labor time plus your investment in a chainsaw and splitting maul, axe, and wedges, while a woodstove is a lot cheaper than a furnace and ductwork, baseboard heat, and so forth.

But a woodstove will not, in an old and uninsulated house, keep it very warm overnight, so while you're asleep the temperature drops and in the morning it's either cool or cold when you rise to start the fire again. The airtight stoves like the Jotuls do hold a fire overnight, to the extent that hot coals remain in the stove in the morning and the next load of wood can be laid right over them and will start right up, vented all the way open for the first twenty minutes to burn out any creosote, then damped down. If it's a little chilly then you just bundle up and after an hour or less the house is comfortable again.

To me the best part of heating with a wood stove is the warmth of the radiated heat, which simply feels better than heat from any other source. Reading or sitting with a laptop computer and feeling the radiant heat is a kind of pleasant comfort, whereas heat from a different source is just there, unnoticed. The savings are an added bonus, as is the good exercise I get in felling trees, bucking and splitting wood, stacking it, moving it, and so forth--though on a very cold morning like today, digging it out from under the snow-covered tarps, tossing it into the cart to move it to the woodbox on the porch, and then moving it into the house is a lot less convenient than turning up the thermostat on an oil furnace.