In part 2 of the series "answering Emerson's questions", let me discuss the wonderful substance of peat. Incidentally, Emerson asked me why I hadn't mentioned peat in my blog yet. This is simply because there isn't much peat being burned here these days -without wanting to sound like an ethno-pornographic pastoralist, much less than 6 years ago (when I was here for the first time) or even 2 years ago (when I was here during the summer, but it was so cold the houses needed to be heated in July).
Anyway, if you didn't know before, peat is an earthy brownish-black substance that is the next step down from crude oil. At one point in time, this island was apparently covered in several feet of it -as a matter of fact, they found the not-as-famous as-Stonehenge standing stone circle on Lewis in layers of peat (of course, if you believe the Free Presbyterians, these 10 ft tall stones were planted there by satanists much like the bones of dinosaurs were).
Every spring (not that this is marked by a change in the weather, it is simply a calendrical event), people used to go out in big groups and cut peat from their peat banks. Given that these are not marked, heaven only (and maybe the Free Presbyterians, too) knows how people knew their own personal peat bank. FIrst, you have to remove the top layer of heather, moss and other organic matter and set it aside to later cover up where you robbed the bank of its peat. Then you started cutting down through the muck, in nice slim slices, much like over-sized Kraft singles cheese. While one person cuts, another person picks up the pieces from the peat-cutter (the gaelic name for which is one of the few Gaelic words I continue to remember) and throws them onto the ground next to them while simultanesouly avoiding finger amputation by the sharp blade.
Throwing freshly cut peat is not only back-breaking (each slice is like a giant sponge of a Scottish year's worth of rain water), but also a bit of an art, since the slices are supposed to partially overlap in one long line. This is so the peat slices can dry with the wind going underneath it. Of course it's a bit of a futile enterprise to dry things in a place where it rains every day (see my post on drying laundry below). But the good people of Lewis won't be deterred by laws of nature (those are probably a satanist conspiracy as well). So, they continue to flip the peat slices again and again in order to dry them in the rain. When they are reasonably dry (it's all relative), they get stacked on trailers pulled by tractors and brought to the house, where they are stacked into small hut-like edifices, where they continue to dry in the rain.
This whole process lasts several months. When you think about the relative energy-inefficiency of burning what are essentially dried mud cakes, the energy spent in procuring such dried much far exceeds that released by the fire, even when you take the giant picnic everyone eats after cutting the peat into account. But now that I've been really cold, I understand that any heat is better than no heat.
Of course nowadays people have central eating and oil stoves and burn coal fires in their living rooms. It's only rarely that one smells a peat fire while driving through the village and the smell has become so unfamiliar that every time I do, I think my car is boiling oil and about to explode. I suppose a peat-burning engine would be a solution to many dilemmas (including sky-rocketing gas prices) on this island.
