Forty Years of Wanderlust and Counting
Chris Fodor,
Writing from Golling an der Salzach, Austria
Do our professional lives define our achievements first and foremost? Without our loves and hobbies, life would be dull, but I would conjecture that most of us would want to be remembered for what we “built” – our professional achievements, no?
My life has been bohemian, full of adventures, discoveries, a few successes and some failures along the way. But my persistent curiosity takes pride of place. I love to analyze things and understand them better. And then, I love to explain how things work with charts and graphs and pictures. Perhaps that is professional experience from my 1984 summer job with McKinsey in Germany.
My curiosity is well illustrated with my current project, Congo Basin Pellets. This company will launch a series of manufacturing plants in four Central African countries that have abundant forests, and where wood waste is currently burned for lack of a better use. We plan to transform the waste into pellets and ship those to Europe or Asia where they can be burned in place of fossil fuels.
I knew nothing about wood pellets when I started my analysis in May 2019. In a matter of twelve months, we completed the plan for the project: wood waste supply, production technology and sourcing, financial planning, and fund-raising. The first plant will open this summer in Gabon and if the tests prove successful (no one has ever made wood pellets from these tropical woods), then we could produce a few million tons within five years.
Wanderlust
I have traveled a lot in the past forty years, ever since my active professional life started (yes, back in 1980). I shudder at the thought of my terrible carbon balance. Yet, travel is tempting. We live on an amazing planet. Discovering its flavors has always been irresistible to me.
Ten years ago, I decided to renew with one of my Stanford pleasures: motorcycle rides. I purchased a bourgeois Honda 650 Cruiser and this opened new horizons for my weekend trips, from Paris at the time. Burgundy and Normandy became easy destinations, especially now that I could bypass my most-hated traffic jams. One of my fondest memories was a weekend trip to Flavigny-sur-Ozerain, a cute, walled village with a simple bed and breakfast. At night, all the stars were out and no planes overhead since some Icelandic volcano had blown its stack.
An Old Pile of Stones
Our Austrian country house is a pile of old stones that dates back to 1690. It is semi-officially known as Kainzenhof, and lies at the foot of the first massive mountains twenty miles south of Salzburg. With Elena, my pianist companion, we discovered its abandoned shell one day whilst walking Lola, our golden retriever. Two floors, maybe 1800 square feet each, and a marvelous attic full of discarded things.
An old man, Sepp, was trimming the grass with a long scythe and we struck up conversation. Six months later we had agreed to terms for rental (sale was out of the question; family ownership for generations). For me, half the fun was restoring the upper floor with its spectacular views of the mountains. I wanted to participate in everything: electric wiring, plastering, painting, floor sanding, new bathroom, furniture hunting, etc.
Two years later, we have a country retreat with a fireplace, wood pellet stove, some nineteenth century frescoes on the walls, a massive in-wall safe that refuses to reveal its contents. But most importantly, we have the peace of the Austrian countryside, the fields full of flowers, the deer walking through the high grass, the chickens that mercilessly eat our flower seedlings, and so many hikes that it becomes difficult to choose where to go.
Remembrances of Things Past
The attic of the house is a world unto itself. All wood. Sloping roofs. Massive wooden columns and struts. The house below uses stone as bearing walls, but the attic is all wood. We have still not cleaned it out entirely. So it hosts a chaotic mix of old furniture, baby cribs, strollers, bed parts, old leather cattle and horse attachments, and probably a few mice or weasels.
The other day, I was clearing some things out to create a woodworking studio for my fast-approaching retirement days, and I discovered a cloth bag. In it was a collection of souvenirs from a 2007 summer trip to the Italian Dolomites; a small spiral-bound notebook that our daughter Antonia (then nine years old) had created, memorializing a secret club that we had created, with its own handshake, anthem, and book of rules (very important: cross all brooks with the left foot first). There were also seven cloth creatures, patched together from old shirts and a collection of buttons, used for the eyes obviously. Each creature (I am tempted to say amoeba) bore an embroidered smile. Now twenty-three, Antonia is finishing her undergraduate studies in London.
The Call of the Wild
Science usually insists on balancing things out. Action has reaction, matter is conserved, that sort of stuff. Work has almost always been fun, but it drains energy. For me, nature replenishes that. When living in New York, I would head out up the Hudson Valley. When in Paris, Fontainebleau or Chantilly offered their forests (and chateaux, and good bakeries). In Milan one could choose between mountains or Mediterranean. Beijing had poor options.
Nothing like a long walk in the green, whether the forests of Salzburgerland, or the open fields of the Beauce, or the vineyards of Bolzano. There I can find peace of mind, some stretching of the muscles, and time to think about things other than work.