About a week ago, two friends and I hit the road and drove through the Midwest. This was a well-deserved vacation for me; my neighbor Joe Hamilton, who works on yards-to-gardens projects in our little corner of Baltimore; and Arthur Morgan, who runs an urban-agriculture group,
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About a week ago, two friends and I hit the road and drove through the Midwest. This was a well-deserved vacation for me; my neighbor Joe Hamilton, who works on yards-to-gardens projects in our little corner of Baltimore; and Arthur Morgan, who runs an urban-agriculture group, Hamilton Crop Circle. (It’s named for a Baltimore neighborhood, not our traveling buddy Joe.)
Now some people go to the beach on their vacations, but we’re odd. We visited a series of sustainability-oriented places -- mainly agricultural sites -- picking up whatever information we could gather.
Our first stop was not agricultural, but certainly focused on sustainability and localism: We attended the 11th firing of the kiln at Saint John’s University, in Collegeville, Minn. Last year, I wrote about the kiln and profiled the artist who built it, Richard Bresnahan, for The Chronicle Review.
Mr. Bresnahan’s pottery is composed of materials taken almost entirely from the land around him: The clay -- some 300 years worth -- was excavated many years ago from the site of a road-construction project. The glazes are made from the ashes of local plants, like elm wood or navy-bean straw. The wood fuel for the kiln consists of culled trees and deadfall from the surrounding forests.
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This is the largest wood-fired kiln in North America, and it can hold some 12,000 pieces of pottery. The firing is quite an undertaking, requiring an army of people to feed wood for 24 hours a day for 10 days. It is truly a community effort that reinforces the importance of local connections and interdependence. The firing feels a bit like a family reunion -- former students, fellow potters, neighbors, and others who have known Mr. Bresnahan for years convene once a year (or more recently, once every two years) to help him stoke the kiln.
You can see what a stoke is like in the video above. The stokers wear gloves and masks to protect them from the intense heat coming from the kiln -- it could be 2,500 degrees inside. The video here was taken late at night, about five hours into a six-hour shift, on the ninth day of firing, so people are spent. But the students who wandered down from Saint John’s University and its sister institution, the College of Saint Benedict, seem to give everyone a boost of energy.
Tomorrow I’ll post something about our travels through Wisconsin and Iowa.
Scott Carlson is a senior writer who explores where higher education is headed. Follow him on Twitter @carlsonics, or write him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.
