On a Tuesday morning in March of 2009, Lana Vandermir stood in the parking lot of the Muning Cedar Pencil Mill in Sauk County, Wisconsin, and watched a dump truck back up to the edge of her property line and unload four tons of cedar slat scrap onto ground she had been trying to farm for three years.
The driver did not stop to apologize. He did not even slow down.
He simply raised the bed, let the load fall, and drove away, leaving a pile of thin, fragrant, pale-gold wood strips eight feet high and thirty feet wide, sitting almost exactly where her fence had stood before the spring floods took it out.
Lana was 22 years old.
She had $40 in her checking account, a used pickup truck with a cracked windshield, and a notebook she carried everywhere that was already half full of ideas nobody had asked for.
To understand what Lana eventually built, you first have to understand the woman herself.
Lana grew up on the Vandermir family farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin, on a piece of ground her great-grandfather had cleared in 1921 and that her grandfather had expanded to 280 acres before the farm crisis of the 1980s took most of it back.
By the time Lana was born in 1986, her parents were farming ninety acres of river-bottom ground that flooded roughly twice a decade, along with a hillside parcel that grew rocks better than it grew almost anything else.
Her father, Garrett Vandermir, was a methodical, quiet man who farmed the way his father had farmed and his father before him.
Row crops on the flat ground. Hay on the hill.
A small herd of beef cattle never quite paid for itself, but Garrett could not bring himself to sell it because his grandfather had started the herd, and letting it go felt like a kind of abandonment.
Garrett was not a man who spent much time asking whether there might be a better way.
He was a man who got up at five in the morning, worked until dark, and believed consistency was its own kind of answer.
Lana was not that kind of person.
She had known it since she was twelve, when she started carrying a spiral-bound composition notebook she had bought with her own money at a drugstore in Baraboo.
She filled it with observations, questions, sketches, calculations, and ideas.
Her teachers called the habit creative.
Her father called most of what she wrote impractical.
Her mother, Inga, was a quiet woman who read nearly everything she could find and rarely said much about what she thought.
She called the notebook necessary.
Lana attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a partial scholarship and studied environmental science with a minor in materials engineering.
During her junior year, she took a seminar taught by Dr. Anelm Krueger, who specialized in sustainable material cycles, particularly what happened to industrial byproducts when nobody wanted them and what could happen when somebody discovered they still had value.
Dr. Krueger repeated one phrase so often that his students eventually printed it on a mug and gave it to him at the end of the semester.
“Waste is just a material that hasn’t found its purpose yet.”
Lana wrote the sentence in her notebook.
She underlined it twice.
She returned to Sauk County in 2007 with her degree, her fourth notebook, and an idea her father did not know what to do with.
The idea began with the Muning Cedar Pencil Mill.
The mill had operated about six miles from the Vandermir farm since 1954 and produced large quantities of cedar slat scrap every year.
The material consisted of thin strips of aromatic cedar cut from billets used to make pencil casings.
Many pieces were too narrow, short, irregular, or damaged for conventional structural use.
But they were already cut.
Already dried.
Already fragrant.
And there was far too much of the material to ignore.
For decades, the mill had treated it primarily as a disposal problem.
Sometimes the scrap was burned in a permitted waste pile.
Sometimes it was given to anyone willing to haul it away.
Sometimes, as Lana discovered after she started asking questions, piles of it simply ended up on low-value ground near the mill’s rear boundary.
The Vandermir property line happened to be exactly that.
Garrett listened to his daughter explain all of this at the kitchen table on a Sunday evening in October 2007.
He listened the way he listened to nearly everything.
He did not interrupt.
He did not nod.
His hands stayed flat on the table, and his eyes rested somewhere between Lana’s face and the window behind her.
When she finished, Garrett remained silent for a long time.
Then he said, “I need to think about it.”
In Garrett Vandermir’s language, that usually meant he had already decided no but was too decent a man to say it before sleeping on the matter.