My father worked for the Forest Service in the US Department of Agriculture. He specialized in renewable forestry techniques and sustainable wood products. Once we went on a road trip to Florida to visit Grandma and Grandper in Avon Park. On the way I remember stopping by a lumber yard in North Carolina, a harbinger of the time I would move here some 35 years in the future. As lumber is prepared for use it is dried in large kilns, which basically bake out the moisture in wood. We went inside one of these structures, and I have never before or since experienced that kind of heat (140 to 170 degrees Fahrenheit). I guess I could say it was a *dry* heat so not so bad, but I would be lying. It was bad — like the surface of Venus bad. The dry smell of raw timber was somehow primal, marking its passage from forest to function. Given a choice I would have preferred the living tree to those planks and boards there in the heat and the dark. But humanity makes use of the things it sees, converting the natural world to its particular form of nature.
whoisfenton 