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The chainsaw drowns out any turkey gobble. But the sweet smell of freshly killed ash, maple, and beech makes it worth it. The hunks of wood are bigger this year; fuck it, I want those big pieces on that 0-degree night when I’m tired of putting those smaller pieces in the stove.

Two weeks ago, I was going to buy wood, but then two things stopped me: The first was that I have an abundance of high-BTU firewood that is “easily” reached. I don’t use red maple anymore because it doesn’t meet my BTU cut-off. If I cut them, I have to haul them, split them, and stack them. If I can do that with a beech instead, then that makes more sense. Same labor, more heat.

The second reason is that I couldn’t face the prospect of “shopping” for firewood. I’m sure I could find “my guy,” but for 15 years I’ve been my own guy. In total, I‘ve harvested around 80 cords (1 cord = 4’x4’x8’) of firewood. If I didn’t do this, I would need to call around, find a good deal, and then make sure what was delivered was what I paid for. Then there’s the species… Since I’m a BTU snob, I’d become “that guy” who says to the firewood purveyor, “Which species do you have?” And if he made the mistake of saying “red maple” or “cherry”....then I’d have to argue about the merits of this species/BTU balance. Eleven percent of Vermont households heat with wood, a higher share than any other state.

There’s a third reason I overlooked. Being in the woods and putting together the puzzle of a forest is one of the greatest experiences and feelings I can imagine. The physicality of cutting, the physics of dropping. Planning where the tree will go, which trees are junk, and which are worth saving. Which saplings can be cut since they’re in my escape route, versus which are worth working around? Is this a safe tree? Is it a firewood tree? Will my winch reach? What will grow in its place? How much sunlight will now be allowed in? What trees will be released?

The tractor growls and the splitter churns. The wood will mold a little after I stack it in the shed, but that mold dies by July.

The split wood is wet because it’s green. Cool to the touch.

The opening I make in the sea of green is stark, but the life created by it will multiply many times from what it was before. Greedy crowns keep sunlight from hitting the forest floor. There are shade-tolerant and shade-intolerant trees. Beech is the villain in my story. Their horizontal branches are plentiful and level; they’re designed to grab as much sunlight as possible, clever and crafty.

The road I use now has ruts. Asking my forester about making ruts, they said, “keep your chains on and eventually you’ll hit rock. Then just repair it when you’re done.” He was right. It’s still a muddy mess, but I don’t get stuck. That advice was refreshing, a dose of vanishing New England pragmatism.

BOOKS & GEAR

Thanks for reading.

1. If AI can create or do whatever you do, why would you keep doing it?

2. What if AI can’t quite replicate what you do, but it’s good enough, so much so that your audience or superiors can’t tell the difference between your work and that of Claude or ChatGPT?

For a writer:

1. If AI can create writing that is as good as yours, making the two indistinguishable, why keep writing?

2. What if AI can’t quite replicate your words, but the writing it does create is actually preferred by readers?

If what I spend hours generating can be indecipherably replicated by ChatGPT in minutes, then I should stop writing that type of content.

Refusing to use AI out of principle, keeping blinders on, is ignorant. AI is a tool. It’s here.

Avoiding it and not using it would be tantamount to not using the internet, another powerful tool. Digitized content saves hundreds of hours of driving to/from the library and sifting through materials. Therefore, not using the internet is a waste of time when the same content is readily available on your laptop screen.

Not understanding its limitations or how to distinguish yourself from it means your writing (or whatever your work is) will become indistinguishable from slop.

Use AI and evolve accordingly.

The writing craft consumed by AI is like a table saw or pocket screw replacing a dovetail joint. Christopher Schwarz tells the story of Troy Sexton in his book, The Anarchist’s Toolchest. Sexton ran an extremely efficient woodshop that reflected ingenuity and hard work. Yet, in his decision to “compete with the machines on their own turf,” he lost.

Even “the most efficient one-man factory cannot compete with a factory driven by a hundred men.”

His business withered.

Schwartz blames us: “We have become a culture so obsessed with price more than any other attribute of the things we buy,” so for the cabinet-maker, “It’s difficult to compete against furniture that costs less than what you pay for your raw materials.”

I can’t help but feel Schwartz’s radical desire to resist the corporatization of a craft. It’s very romantic. Conversely, a laissez-faire approach to tech adoption is appealing since we can conveniently ignore self-restraint and mindfulness.

I look around my living room, and there’s a lot of plastic. It will be thrown out. It won’t last a lifetime.

Is there a parallel for the written word?

Writing on this paper takes time, and it’s inefficient. I’ve tried to dictate. I’ve tried to scan and OCR. Digital notepads almost work, but there’s nothing like this pen and paper.

The current AI moment is unique for two reasons.

1. AI capabilities are very good, almost good enough to fool most people. But it’s also good enough for people not to care if they prefer AI writing for whatever reason. My biased thinking tells me it’s because of its simplicity; it’s the laminate flooring of the writing world. No maintenance, durable, and it looks OK.

This is what, understandably, many people prefer for its convenience and functionality. The opposite is the floor my feet currently rest on: wide pine boards with gaps between edges that collect dirt. The finish is chipped away in high-traffic areas: in front of the woodstove is hardest hit, where the dog sleeps and plays. This floor is impractical in that it marks easily, needs to be refinished, traps dirt, and is soft. The scars from Maya’s paws are artifacts I don’t want to sand away; I want them preserved. They would never have appeared on a scratch-resistant modern faux-wood floor.

When I put my hand on the plastic floor, I feel the artificial wood-grain texture stamped into the wood at an Asian factory. I’m touching oil that’s been extracted and processed into this durable piece of flooring. The pine, alternatively, originated from a mill and trees within fifty miles. I touch it, and the character warms: rough undulations that feel like wood. Both plastic and wood are products of the earth; it’s just that one is less removed, closer to its end user, than the other.

While AI is getting close, like the plastic flooring, to replicating wood, I don’t believe it ever will. That doesn’t mean wooden floors will continue to exist; it just means we may choose plastic floors as being good enough.

2. The second reason this is a unique time period is that a very capable AI has a full 10,000 years’ worth of human-generated data to work with. This virgin dataset is rich with nuance, experience, authenticity, and patterning. There will be no other time when AI will have such an authentic dataset to work with. Starting now, we have an increasing amount of AI-generated content. There’s the boring stuff: listicles, reviews, bland reporting. Then there are the essays and books written by AI.

So begins a cycle in which we are at the beginning of: AI-generated content that is used to generate additional AI content. What will this eventually look like? Will it be as rich as human-generated content? My feeling is that it will not. Will people care if something is AI-generated, as long as it gets across the information and is affordable, like the written version of an Ikea sofa? I’m not sure, but artificial content seems to me to represent a watering down of our collective corpus of human-made words.

I once wrote about my greatest procrastination attempt (to date): I convinced myself that I needed to build my own desk before I could begin a paid writing gig. And to do that, I needed to not only buy wood for the project, but harvest, mill, and season my own wood before building said desk.

What if I actually did that and produced an heirloom-quality desk instead of this crappy pressboard I’m slouching over?

What’s the point of creating human-generated writing or craft furniture?

I’ve racked my brain for days answering this question.

The point is that the value lies in the purpose and the form itself, almost like the concept of religion. Illogical as it is, religion serves a purpose, despite its tenets defying the objectivity that underpins our modern technological prowess.

Non-AI creation requires faith in the form we choose. And consumers of this art will know what’s genuine as long as they are committed to form. Posts from X and Notes lead to essays shrinking, an attempt to better satisfy an appetite for brevity. The conniving smoothness and cadence of an AI-generated sentence doesn’t flex my brain, but that may be OK with (or even preferred by) some people.

My inclination is to resist the complacency that comes with letting all writing eventually be authored by AI. I don’t see this necessarily as anarchy, but it does overlap with Schwarz’s description of anarchy in the context of craft: “a tendency to question the institutions that make craftsmanship and well-made furniture impossible in this modern age.”

I’d add to this the desire to keep sharing human thoughts and experience, not just that of a bot. It’s convenient to buy a chair from Ikea without maxing out my credit card, but I also like using the turned bowl my friend made from a piece of mountain ash.

Perhaps it’s futile if audiences end up preferring the too-good-to-be-true cleanliness of LLMs.

Figure out AI’s capabilities and limitations. In the end, whether by choice or necessity, all that will be left is for us to do and make what AI can’t.

BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

Blood-streaked snow formed a halfpipe that trailed down the side of the mountain, now crimson-patterned. Suddenly, all I could think of was the waterpark in northern Vermont I brought my kids to when they were younger.

Arterial blood. A quick, clean kill; the neck shot relieved a pressure, an unpluggable leak that rendered failure across the deer’s circulatory system.

New areas never seem old. What makes them new is either geography or time. I shot this deer in a tract of wilderness in New York’s Adirondack Park; this particular area was one I’d never set foot in before.

Two weeks before, I ventured into a “new” area of the Green Mountain National Forest, only to realize I’d been there 20 years earlier. I saw the exact location but through a completely different lens, a form of twisted time travel: my mind knows the place, but that memory is all that remains, no hard evidence I’d actually been there before. Every cell in my body has regenerated since then– it was “newness” all around.

A day earlier in New York, I committed to a buck that I saw only once, exactly at last light. By “committed,” I mean I said to myself, “ I’m going to follow this deer until last light, no matter what.” Often when I do this, a deer will make a circle back to some form of civilization, like a trail, road, or even my own truck. Shooting hours end, and voila! I’m five minutes away from heated seats. In this area of the Adirondack wilderness, that wasn’t the case. The buck kept going deeper, further from anything resembling a trail.

Leaning into freelance, consulting, and stay-at-home parenting, I continue to take advantage of the opportunities it affords. It’s a path I chose to go down, not knowing where it would lead, a known-unknown. Professional and household structures and systems were created and entrenched, with the primary purpose of cocooning and protecting for 18 years.

On the second day of committing to a buck track, I made the same conscious decision to follow it no matter where we went. The night before, I spent about two hours getting out of the woods, hitching a ride back to my truck via state highway. It was colder the next day– about 15 degrees Fahrenheit. Cool enough to have numb toes but not overheat.

Steady marching, no standing around.

Again, I was on the scent of a wild buck, unlike the homebody buck who likes to stay near the roads and houses. After three hours, his tracks were as crisp & clean as if he just stepped there. Freshly bitten maple shoots and wafty brown hairs settled on the snow. He was feeding. He was close.

While cobbled-together freelance work and parenting often mix in a beneficial, harmonious way, the trajectory isn’t certain. I’ve been okay with that, yet instead of the usual nebulous future uncertainty, it is now. A parent must be there day after day for 18 years, until, abruptly, that requirement ends. I followed the path, and it led here.

When something sublimates, it changes directly from a solid to a gas, skipping the liquid stage. That’s what parenting an 18-year-old feels like: we skip an in-between stage that we otherwise expect based on the natural order of how parenting worked before that point: gradual, slow, and dillusionally prepared.

Gazing at the handsome buck, I made my peace, holding my open palm against his chest, feeling his earthy-brown coat, thinking of the dislodged hairs I had followed all morning. I couldn’t pause long because I was wet from sweat. I put my stiff gloves back on after getting him ready to leave his wooded home. Hands warmed from his insides, I trusted the drag would thaw things out.

Later that night, out of the woods, I recalled how hopeless it seemed to chase a wild animal straight into an unfamiliar wilderness. Thankful for the success, to be alive, and for the friendship of a buddy who met me halfway to help drag.

When the day-to-day logistical responsibilities of parenting shift, the purpose remains, but a chasm opens between what’s needed now and what was needed then. Hunting came into my life because it matched my passion for the outdoors and wilderness, but, logistically, like freelance work, I built it around my parenting responsibilities and the unpredictability and inconsistency that parenting entails.

That changed last June, so I asked myself, “How will I fill this chasm of time and logistics?” Write more? I don’t like to write just to write; I must do to write. And I hate sitting in an office for long stretches. This almost-empty nest coincides with a new era for writers. AI handily generates gear reviews and how-to articles that are nearly as good as any. I recently received a rejection letter from a magazine where I pitched such a piece. Mostly out of curiosity, I finally gave in and asked the latest GPT to generate an article from my rejected outline. I can’t blame the editor for the rejection. For $20/month, an editor can generate plenty of readable (or scrollable) pieces on countless outdoor themes without managing the niceties, administration, and editing obligations of hiring someone like me.

The article ChatGPT produced was excellent in terms of providing useful and readable information. Of course, there was no voice, no sincerity, no story. Yet I imagined myself sitting at the airport, delayed for a flight, scrolling on my phone out of boredom. If I encountered the GPT article, I probably would read it. Perhaps it would save me additional scrolling of search results if I were trying to figure out a new piece of gear to buy.

Four days later, the splendor of the Adirondack Park had faded slightly into my memory when I grabbed the 80 lb dummy out of the smoke-filled window and walked it down the extension ladder. Placing it a safe distance away, I charged back up the ladder, bailing through the window, onto the hallway floor of the training building. Despite the smoke, our four-person company cleared the second floor for other “victims.” I inconsistently desire the certainty of a trail, and my gaze now rests on the body of knowledge I feel the need to learn to do the job of a volunteer firefighter proficiently: part trail, part path, uncertain outcome.

Hunting for both purpose and deer is uncertain. Each is an inward hunt, full of choices about commitment, fear, and hope. There are paths we follow, laid out before us, perhaps by need, evolution, or the divine. These differ from a trail, and my favorite distinction between trail and path was written in 1840.

“...one is a matter for the eye, while the other is little more than scent.”

- The Pathfinder, James Fenimore Cooper

Well-worn trails are ubiquitous, but infinite paths lie ahead with only a scent to show us the way.

A deer roams the woods. A five-year-old lets go of their dad’s hand to go down the waterslide for the first time. I accidentally put out four plates for dinner, but I only need three.

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BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT