Energy Solutions

Whenever we’re working on the outside of a home—the roofing, siding, or site—my uncle Chris will remind me to think like a drop of water. Mentally tracing how a raindrop is likely to travel down a building, and including details to move it off and away, is a simple exercise that is too often ignored.

Today, though, we’re going to talk not about water but about air. I have a new exercise to propose to Chris: think like a wisp of air.

I recently caught up with where the rest of the world was in 2005 by watching the hit documentary “March of the Penguins.” It’s been on my list for a while but when evening arrives I’m much more prone to watching films about people — people like James Bond, for example. But my wife and I had a baby two weeks ago, and suddenly movies narrated by Morgan Freeman seem like more appropriate family fare.

Nobody speaks of this contest but everybody knows who’s winning. It’s how we get out the competitive impulse in rural Vermont: we race to have the neatest woodpile. Admit it: even as you’re reading this, saying “that’s not me,” you’re mentally comparing your woodpile with the neighbor’s.

It is well understood that formations of flying geese ride on a wave of air piloted by the leader of the group. As described in the excellent book “Sensitive Chaos,” by Theodor Schwenk, “The beats of their wings follow the ups and downs of the wave and simply make visible what, as a vibrating aerial form, surrounds and bears them all in the arrow formation.”

The Large Blue Butterfly, found in Europe, lays its eggs on a marsh gentian leaf. Its larva (a caterpillar) hatches and falls to the ground and emits a scent that smells to certain species of ant just like its own larvae. The ants carry the caterpillar back to their nest, where they not only care for it as one of their own, but as one of their own that is going to turn into a queen. Meanwhile, the caterpillar is eating the actual ant larvae and growing large.

I had the honor of being within a few feet of a barn owl this weekend at the wildlife festival at the Southern Vermont Natural History Museum. Kept alive after being injured years ago and now a frequent visitor to classrooms and museums, this bird of prey was perched on the arm of a handler, who wore thick falconry gloves.

Saturday found me helping a friend install new batteries for another friend's off-the-grid solar power system. We had fun getting the system back up and running and watching the solar-powered watts come in on a beautiful September day.

At one point my friend asked me to use his multimeter to read the voltage of the batteries. No problem: I put the two testing probes in place on the batteries and got the desired reading. He then asked me to reverse the probes to see if the reading also reversed, as expected.

Author's Note: Please see the comment thread at the bottom of this article for more discussion on the width of the ridgeline road. Since posting this article I learned of other permitting documents indicating a much narrower road than discussed in this article.

One of my favorite pieces of Vermont trivia has been that the tallest man-made structure in the state is the Bennington Battle Monument, at 306 feet tall — and construction of it was completed in 1889.

A lot can change in two hours. At 8 a.m. Sunday, I walked the length of our half-mile driveway here in southern Vermont, checking the culverts and water bars, all fortified and cleared the day before. All good. The brook next to our driveway was raging, but staying within its banks. The Green River was doing the same across the town road.

I have been having a lot of fun feeding worms my garbage. We have something you could either call a “worm bin” or a “home vermicomposting system,” and we throw our food scraps, banana peels, melon rinds, moldy bread — you name it — into that. There are a couple pounds of worms in the bin, and they gratefully accept the waste, eat it, and turn it into worm castings, which is basically organic matter that is broken down in such a way that it’s very good for our garden.