The convention had started with a “kickoff” breakfast that had included a minister’s long-winded prayer about “alternative energy sources” as their scrambled eggs congealed and the coffee cooled. The minister signed off with a hearty “keep the home fires burning” and everyone fell to their breakfasts as Eskimo dogs do, rumor has it, to a fresh human turd. Then they all sang “Hi Neighbor” and made their way to separate seminars in such subjects as “Chimney Safety,” “Making Use of Lowly Conifer,” “Whither the Future of Wood Burning,” “The New Market of the Poor.” It seems that wood-burning stoves were a middle-class phenomenon and the poor couldn’t be persuaded to ante up a half grand at minimum for fifty bucks worth of cast iron, no matter the obvious economic benefits. Wood was absurdly cheap in northern Michigan and out-of-state delegates from Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, were in a jealous snit about it. Lundgren-Warlock publicly questioned the difference between twenty-five a face cord for split hardwood in Michigan and a hundred and twenty-five in the East. He was attacked roundly by an eastern contingent of woodchoppers who all seemed to own master’s degrees in creative writing for some reason. They took umbrage at his question, as if they were price gouging, which is exactly what he had in mind. Then he tried to withdraw with the witticism that there seemed, at any event, to be a nigger in the woodpile. This brought shrieks of racism, and even sexism, from a burly chainsaw freak of the feminine sex. Lundgren reddened, and pondered a strategic withdrawal. He wandered down the hall into a seminar called “The Philosophy of Woodburning.” The conversation there tended toward the more austere aspects of ecology; the American Indians who unfortunately were becoming “old” in the manner of the Budweiser Clydesdales, the sacred fires that burned ceaselessly through human history. It reminded him somewhat of the gay movement building a philosophical system out of their wee-wees. He remembered helping his grandfather who would go out to the back forty to cut wood to keep the house warm because it was cold outside.

But the self could measure the self under the most rigid circumstances, he thought. Life drew certain lines, it wasn’t some big glob of mashed potatoes. His clear view of change, of the perimeters of the future, owned a strong enough religious impulse to lead him inevitably to rule making. He took a law tablet and ballpoint pen from the briefcase.

Number One. EAT SPARINGLY