Djelloul Marbrook

A massive ice storm last Saturday brought down power lines across eastern New York State and New England. We lost an elegant white birch tree. As I mourned its fall I decided to pay homage to the little tree by having a local carpenter cut it into five eighteen-inch lengths and drill holes in each length for candles, just as Boy Scouts often do. I would have done it myself, as I have before, but I had an accident with a saw recently and am wary of another.

It wasn’t as easy as going to Wal-Marts. We needed a drill bit of the right circumference and the holes had to be measured and angled exactly so that the candles would be straight. Greens had to be collected and wired to the white logs, and the bottoms of the logs had to be shaved flat. And of course there was a lot of brush to be carried away.

The carpenter, James Bates, and I sipped hot cider in the barn as he took his measurements. Both of us are Navy veterans and had served at side-by-side Navy bases in Rhode Island long before meeting each other in Germantown, New York. James had been a Seabee and I had been a deckhand and then a Navy journalist.

It was not like elbowing strangers at Wal-Marts, stampeding to spend money most of us no longer have. It was a harking back to earlier days when making something was more meaningful than buying something made in China. The birch and James’ skills were both homegrown, and there was a connectedness to place in our simple work in a cold barn that we haven’t had time as a nation, as a people, to mourn.

Globalization has taken more from us than jobs, it has taken a way of life, a connection to place and people. That’s why, when fuel prices were soaring last summer, I took heart in the news that commercial traffic on the Eerie Canal had increased, that factories in the Mohawk Valley had tooled up again, all in an effort to localize commerce and thereby combat irrational energy costs. The situation seemed to promise a revival of local industry and perhaps small farming, too.

But now greedy OPEC, recognizing that it had scared us into conservation, has lowered its output and fuel prices are tumbling again, threatening to encourage us to forget the lesson we learned last summer, and threatening to dilute our commitment to alternative energy.

This is what I thought as I trudged from the barn to our house, watching the sky haul in another winter’s storm and, with it, possible power failures and all the misery that comes with them. —DM