26
ing, expresses disappointment that there are no
openings at the plant where his father works,
Don finally joins in:
“Yeah. The last administration did a lot to
destroy the industry.”
“Coal?” I ask.
Don nods. He works as an engineer in the
nearby town of Tyrone, making particle
reduction machinery for the mining industry:
“We crush coal, basically.” Samuel perks up,
offering various examples of inconsistencies in
“the data you see from Al Gore and that crew.”
Climate data goes back only to the mid-1600s,
he explains, “and they try to draw conclusions
from ice cores, but I don’t think it’s enough.”
“Do you know where Al Gore’s family
money comes from?” Don asks me.
I shrug, having no idea.
“Mining. I wonder if he’s going to give that
money back.”
For a moment, I fear our conversation is
going to veer into politics, marooning us on
either side of the MSNBC/Fox News abyss.
I’m also unsure how and to whom former
Vice President Gore would return the family
fortune. And then, Samuel surprises me.
“We heat our house with sustainable
energy,” he announces proudly.
Isaac joins back in. “We actually heat it with
the sun and the air, right?”
I look puzzled.
“We have a wood-fired furnace,” Don
explains, pointing out the window to the
tree-covered acreage behind the house.
“... and a very efficient wood burner,”
Samuel overlaps. “We get our heat from the
woods, and our syrup from the trees in the
spring, and we’ve found a good balance of
how much of our resources we use to maxi-
mize the efficiency of our property.”
I have liberal friends, environmentalists in
their own minds, who do less than the Mills are
doing. Whatever their views on global warming
and fossil fuels, it is clear the boys enjoy how
their steps toward sustainability prove wrong
those critics who might want to equate climate
change skepticism with energy gluttony.
About then it occurs to me that the house
I’m sitting in, a crisscross of wooden posts andbeams tying together the first floor with the
second floor, and connecting the walls with the
ceilings, might be part of the family’s sustain-
ability effort as well.
“Did you build this?” I ask Don.
He smiles, glad that I came around to the
realization. “Started excavating in 1995, the day
Samuel came home from the hospital. In 1998,
the day Isaac came home, we raised the frame.”
Isaac and Samuel joke some about growing
up in the handmade house, how the network
of posts, beams, and pegs formed a perfect
climbing playset for two restless young boys.
For a moment, they seem ready to jump up out
of their chairs and illustrate.
But it is time for me to go, so the Mills can
have their dinner. Rhonda walks me to the
door, says she will be praying for me and for
the success of the article I am writing.
“I don’t have all of the answers,” she shares,
as I duck out into the chilly evening. “We
can’t have all the answers, because God is God
and we are not. And I’m fine with that.”
I’m fine with that, too: I’m not God. And
to be honest, I’m not entirely sure how I
even feel about God. I turned my back on
organized religion in my late teens—like
Groucho, I’m suspicious of any club, or
church, that would have me as a member—
but all of this had to start somewhere, right?
You know, if there really was a Big Bang,
who lit the damn match?
It seems clear—to me, at least—that neither
science nor religion has the ultimate answer
to the gargantuan question “Where exactly
did we come from?” So, maybe a modicum of
both faith and rationality are in order.
Or as Samuel Mills rightly points out, many
Renaissance scientists were motivated by the
desire to understand God’s plan in nature. Why
can’t the two views simply coexist?thirty or so miles down the road, at
Standing Stone Coffee in Huntingdon, Penn-
sylvania, I meet Deb Grove. Huntingdon is a
railroad and manufacturing town, besieged, like
most of the region, by the disappearance of blue
collar jobs, but the coffeehouse sits near enough
to Juniata College to have a hip campus feel.BEYOND THE PRIMORDIAL OOZE | DINTY W. MOORE