February, in the hill country of southern Germany, sometime around fourteen hundred. A farmer is felling beech while the sap is down. Every log he cuts today is close to half water by weight. Burn it wet and it will never warm his family. It will smolder, waste its heat boiling that water, and coat his chimney with creosote. That tar is the danger behind thousands of chimney fires every winter. So before next autumn's frost, he has to pull roughly a ton of water out of a hillside of wood. His answer looks like folk art. A round tower of stacked splits wearing a shingled roof of bark. It is called a Holzhausen, a wood house, and everyone assumes it is just stored fuel. It is not storage. It is a machine. And its cleverest feature has nothing to do with drying at all. Tonight we follow one farmstead through one year, the cut, the split, the build, and the quiet work of summer.
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