Here’s a hint: $700 billion. Here’s another: TARP.

Kashkari was the bald guy who handed out $400 billion to 540 banks and presided over another $50 billion intended to prevent foreclosures.

His color photograph was on the front page on my Sunday Washington Post, bridging the fold. This thirty-something who had once held western financial civilization in his hands was shown…splitting firewood.

The photographer is directly in front of the chunk of sugar pine about to be struck, in line with the arc of the ax head. It feels like Kashkari is about to split me in half.

Eli Goldston, a thoughtful energy company CEO I knew many years ago, was once asked what he did for exercise. He replied: “I split stocks.” Goldston died soon after at 53—a coronary, as I recall. His joke, unfortunately, was on himself.

So what was newsworthy about Kashkari doing the same sweaty-but-necessary chore that I — and many others — do every fall?

Why wasn’t my picture in the Post? I’m bald. I’m as 39 as Jack Benny was in his 60s. I hand out money right and left to banks.

Reporter Laura Blumenfeld explained that the former federal bail-out chief had ditched D.C. for an “off-the-map existence,” an exercise in “Washington detox.”

The pressure Kashkari experienced as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s head of the new Office of Financial Stability was overwhelming. Both men felt the American banking system might fail if left to the free market, from which both had come and in which both believed. They didn’t want the market to correct mistakes of greed and bad judgment, which is what it’s supposed to be allowed to do.

In 1993, Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster killed himself. He, too, was in the Washington stress squeeze. His miseries arose from vetting judicial nominations and then handling aspects of Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater defense.

He told the graduating class at the University of Arkansas Law School just a few months before: “The reputation you develop for intellectual and ethical integrity will be your greatest asset or your worst enemy. You will be judged by your judgment. There is no victory, no advantage, no fee, no favor, which is worth even a blemish on your reputation for intellect and integrity. Dents to [your] reputation are irreparable.”

Vince Foster felt ethically dented by his work in D.C. His death was a loss.

Kashkari does not appear to have been ethically troubled by his work. He thought it  important, and it was. His disenchantment came from not liking being yelled at, working with politicians and walking a high wire without a net.

So after helping with the Bush-Obama transition, the bail-out guy bailed out. He landed in a California post-and-beamer house at 6,500 feet with his wife and two Newfoundlands. He calls it a “cabin,” which is like the Newport society ladies calling their places, “cottages.”

Kashkari had no experience or knowledge that qualified him for his federal job. He had been a space engineer and then a tech-oriented banker at Goldman Sachs in San Francisco. He earned an MBA in 2002.

When Goldman CEO Paulson was tapped for Treasury in 2006, Kashkari, who did not know Paulson, asked whether he could go along as an assistant. In February, 2008, Kashkari was told to write a what-we-do-if-the-economy-melts-down plan. When the melting began a few months later, his was the only plan in town. And so, Kashkari got the job of making sure that certain chickens didn’t come home to roost in certain coops.

I think he performed pretty well at a job I think was flawed in concept. The banking system survives, not much changed. Mission accomplished.

The twist in the familiar story of go-to-Washington ambition is that once Kashkari got more power than he could have ever imagined, it left him poisoned, unhappy and fat.

I’m always interested in stories of urban refugees fleeing to the sticks in search of something more through something less. (Gwendolyn Bounds, The Wall Street Journal, “Green Acres Is the Place to Be,” December 2, 2009.)

Most of us, like Kashkari, go through times when we want to change where we are and what we’re doing. Tom Paxton’s 1964 song, “I Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound,” captured that moment of being betwixt and between.

I quickly crossed off folksinger from my might-be-bound list, because I carried each tune as badly as I played it.  I learned later that these entrance requirements were often waived by the applicants themselves. Purposefulness can sometimes make up for lack of talent.

Individuals, like Kashkari, who have the ability to put specific destinations on their career travel lists, rather than just cross off the unpalatable ones, have a big advantage in getting wherever they might want to be.

Were I to sing Paxton’s song today, it would be less about uncertainty and more about being bound by mortgage payments and waist bands.

I was interested to learn that Paulson and Kashkari, both urban Midwesterners, found themselves grounded in land, though in different ways.

Paulson in private life was board chairman of The Nature Conservancy. At Goldman, he had the bank donate 680,000 acres of forestland on the Chilean side ofTierra del Fuego for conservation; some stockholders objected, as might be expected. He has given $100 million to conservation organizations and has pledged his estate toward those ends. Admirable behavior in my opinion.

Paulson thinks that the federal government should regulate carbon emissions to control warming but not investment banking practices to control systemic financial endangerment. He believes that individuals should be allowed to act freely in a market, but he also believes that public money should save the biggest financial institutions when they generate their own failures. It’s an intriguing mix.

Kashkari, on the other hand, sought a life patch by immersion into the woods. He said he needed silence, simplicity and small tasks with measurable right and wrongs.

He cleared his head through exercise and a construction project. He built a small, one-room shed, though he had nothing to store in it. He built for therapy, creating something tangible, regardless of need. Another intriguing mix.

Kashkari’s shed looks very much like the tiny cabin that Henry David Thoreau built from a dismembered chicken coop on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the mid-1840s.

Thoreau was trying to leave the “quiet desperation” of ordinary life. He was unsuccessful in most things he tried, including this escape.

After failing as a school teacher, he had to work in his father’s pencil factory and later as a live-in handyman for Emerson. His writings went largely unnoticed. He contracted tuberculosis as a Harvard student, never married (though he and his brother proposed to the same woman who rejected both) and died young.

Thoreau lasted two years in the outback of Concord. Kashkari appears to have thrown in the trowel after about six months.

Kashkari is about to become a managing director and head of “new investment initiatives” at PIMCO, a global investment-management company that oversees about $940 billion.  It’s owned by Allianz SE, a German global financial conglomerate. PIMCO was involved in running the $1.25 trillion New York Fed’s purchase of mortgage-backed securities as well as other conceptual and practical aspects of the Paulson-Kashkari bail out.

Kashkari has returned to the platform from which he sprung. He told Blumenfeld that he didn’t care very much about his work at Goldman, though I’m sure he tried to do a good job. Once again, he’s running other people’s money, and, again, at a distance from personal consequences. No one at PIMCO will yell at him very much, and he will not be flogged on the Internet.

What, I wonder, does Neel Kashkari actually know about “new investment initiatives”? Is money to be made in shed building and dirt therapy?

Forests have always brought balance to anyone — good or bad — who spends time there. They are an ecumenical overload-reset button.

But they’re not transformative, as Thoreau and, perhaps, Kashkari learned. They can patch you up, but they don’t necessarily make you different.

They landed soft about 8:30 on Saturday morning in the front pasture.

Sophie and Lucy, our two yellow Labs, barked once between them, then ducked under the porch, paws over their eyes.

Four black vans suddenly rumbled across my bridge. Forty linebackers in black shoes, black suits and shades jumped out.

Ten surrounded me as I stood next to The Cheetah, my ancient farm pickup that has found a second career as decomposing performance art. A dozen or so scoped The Cheetah for infectious diseases, unimprovised explosiveness and material defects, all of which were found a-plenty. The rest pointed automatic weapons at the five steers in the next pasture who might have been Islamic Jihadists in Black Angus clothing.

“ID,” the shadiest one demanded.

“I live here. Bub came to visit.”

He looked me up and down, from my scuffed work boots to my mended blue jeans to my gray “Oberlin Lacrosse” T-shirt now in the near-death stage of all-cotton leprosy. “You gotta be kidding.”

Bub saved me from warrantless detention. Dressed in a new denim work shirt and jeans with ironed creases, he assured the agents that I was “reasonably harmless in most circumstances.”

Bub and I climbed into The Cheetah and drove into the woods, with Lucy and Sophie in the back, barking at the convoy of shades behind us. The girls figured I had their backs. They’re nice dogs, but not bright.

We got out. “You wanna walk or work?” I asked.

“Walk and talk, maybe work later.”

“Plink?” I asked.

“Never have.”

I pulled out my rifle. Thirty linebackers buried me for a loss in my own end zone. The other 10 targeted me with stealth howitzers concealed under their suit jackets.

“Fellas,” Bub pleaded with the Secret Service. “We’re just out to enjoy the day.”

I “chiropracted” my remaining limbs back to their approximate original positions, and we started off. Sophie and Lucy blasted ahead, sniffing and poking around for dead stuff like reporters looking for vanished TARP billions.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

He laughed. “It could be worse. If we don’t get the banks acting like banks again, except better, we’ll be into temporary nationalization where we don’t want to be. Can you imagine FEMA running our 30 largest banks?  Anyway, tell me what I’m looking at.”

“We’re walking on an old logging road. We cut some timber about five years ago. What do you see over there?

“An ugly pile of tree branches with a lot of thorny brambles all mixed in and around.”

“They’re tree tops — called, slash — from the logging. Look closer.”

He stopped. “Ah! I see four, five, six saplings, each about 10-feet tall.”

“The seedlings survive because they’re in that mess which protects them from deer. Slash also helps bunnies and that crowd.”

“Don’t diss Bambi and Thumper. My kids love ‘em.”

“Too many Bambis are bad for their habitat and themselves too. Bambis are real people, so to speak, not cartoons. That’s just the way it is.”

Bub pointed to a monster sugar maple with weightlifter limbs rising from its trunk like a hydra on hormones.

“Well, you might call that old growth,” I said. “Maybe 150 years.”

“It’s falling apart,” he said.

“Each tree species has its own life span. They’re more susceptible to breakage, insects and disease as they age, just like us. An old-growth forest around here has health problems, but we like to protect them even so. You’re looking at a mixed-age forest, heavy to maples lower down and oaks higher up.”

“So this isn’t close to wilderness, what I’m walking through?”

“No, it’s just some west-facing woods at about 3,000 feet that have been used for timber since the late 1700s. Genuine wilderness is almost impossible to find in the East.

I bring The Cheetah up here for wind sprints and to listen to my latest list of grievances and outrage.”

“What’s that stump?” he asked, pointing to a huge grey carcass with red rot inside.

“That’s what’s left of the American chestnut. See how high the stump is, about four feet. They took it down by hand with two on a crosscut saw. Probably in the late 20s.  The chestnut blight fungus killed something like four billion trees. You can see it was about five feet in diameter, enormous by today’s standard for eastern hardwoods. A century ago, this hillside was thick with chestnut. So throw a few bucks into bringing it back if you want to do something for your great-grand kids.”

“Why are those trees dead?”

“They’re hemlock. A little bugger called the woolly adelgid killed them a couple of years ago. Some survived, but with a lot less green.”

“Is this a healthy forest I’m looking at?”

“It has issues. The dirt’s in good shape, and there’s little soil erosion. But the trees are vulnerable to non-native diseases and insects. The fire hazard’s pretty low, because there’s not a lot of dead wood. But remember, this would be considered a managed forest even counting that I’m the manager. The woods that are most vulnerable are the public lands, yours, in a manner of speaking, particularly aging wilderness areas.”

We stopped in front of a cut bank. “Wanna shoot?” I asked.

“You wanna get tackled again?”

“You mean you’re not going to take home a genuinely wild, totally organic, free-range, sustainably-raised-in-Nature woodchuck for Michelle’s supper?”

“She’s learned to live with many disappointments in our marriage,” he laughed. “Maybe the kids and I will plant a tree or two at the White House.”

“While you’re at it, plant a couple in a National Forest where they will be part of the country’s sustainable energy future.”

“You know what? I might like to be remembered as the first green President more than the first black President.”

“Well, you could do both.”

We walked back to the road where the shades were blaming each other for allowing  POTUS to ride around with the likes of me in the likes of The Cheetah.

“I like this woods stuff,” he said.

“Next time you can drive.”

“Deal,” Bub said, as 40 shades shook their heads no.

We begin 2009 afraid of what’s coming. Most of us are scared about our income. So we are spending less and beginning to horde. Cash in hand feels like a good long-term investment.

Franklin Roosevelt told Americans in March, 1933 that “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” He said: “This Nation asks for action, and action now.”

Over the last four months, we, too, have acted. Of the $350 billion made available under the Bush Administration’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), 116 banks received $250 billion for one thing or another; $40 billion went to an insurance company—American International Group (AIG); $20 billion went to the New York Federal Reserve to cover possible lending losses to owners of securities backed by various types of debt; $20 billion was invested in Citigroup on top of its first $25 billion and in addition to $5 billion to cover loans; and $13.4 billion went to GM and Chrysler. (Jeanne Sahadi, “How to spend $350 billion in 77 days,” CNNMoney.com, December 19, 2008.)

And what have the banks and AIG done with this money? No one’s telling. Of 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in TARP money, the Associated Press reported that not one would provide specific answers to how much was spent and on what, how much was held in savings, and their plans for the rest. Matt Apuzzo, AP, “Banks mum on where TARP money is going,” Rutland (VT) Herald, December 23, 2008.)

With TARP money in their hands, banks were supposed to begin lending again. But the Treasury Department never required them to do so or even report what they did with it. So TARP-bank lending still seems to be stuck in low idle, and no one seems to know where the money has gone.

I’m not an economist and I don’t play one on TV, but it does seem that “acting” in this manner has been slightly lax and less than overwhelmingly effective.

The 2009 round of pushing public capital into the economy will probably avoid dropping more money into the black hole of banks and focus on bricks-and-mortar projects that goose employment. As President-elect Obama says, things will get worse before they get better. Real estate will continue to be under the recession’s thumb for the next six-to-nine months. What, then, might this period of lag present to rural land buyers?

Desperate sellers are softening. Unlike residential prices, rural land prices did not erode much in 2008. But during the last month or two, some asking prices came down as stale inventory clogged website after website.

Rural land, as a whole, has appreciated steadily for two decades without the crazy price bubbles that eventually blew up “hot” urban, residential markets like Phoenix and Las Vegas. Still, some farmland was overvalued because of the get-rich-quick lure of corn-based ethanol. And a lot of timberland was priced up as second-home property, which overvalued it for timberland buyers.

Asking prices for rural land seem to be above where they should be by 15 to 20 percent overall and as much as 50 percent for timberland in spots, according to the extremely advanced survey-research technique I use–Poking Around 3.0.

My sense is that that many sellers will accept big discounts on properties they need to move and know are overpriced even though their asking prices have not been lowered.

For example, I looked at a 30-acre, second-home-type, non-farm farmette that was priced at about $290,000 for most of 2008, then reduced to $270,000. I offered $147,000, which I thought was generous, considering the property’s problems. A few weeks after I was rejected, it sold in the mid-$170,000s, more than 40 percent off the original asking price.

It’s painful for sellers to watch their hyped-up expectations deflate. But it’s the only way to get things sold. When market conditions force price reductions, both buyers and sellers should remember it’s business, not personal.

Money is available.  Credit unions and local banks operating in small towns and rural areas remain accessible sources of mortgage money for land and country property. Generally speaking, these lenders are not in trouble with their mortgage loans.

The Farm Credit System (FCS) is a federally sponsored, tax-favored network of coops that lends on a wide range of rural properties and agricultural needs. I checked FCS sites this week for quotes on a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage. I found rates ranging from about 5.3 percent with one point to as much as eight percent.

Year in and year out, credit unions offer the best mortgage money, if only because they are not taxed as profit-making organizations.

Interest rates will be as low as they’re going to get. The Federal Reserve has stated (not hinted, not suggested, not whispered) that it will keep interest rates as low as possible in hope that people will borrow and make our economic engine turn again. Fixed rates on long-term mortgages are not likely to be better than during 2009’s first six months.

Inflation will work its dark magic. The federal government is printing and  borrowing money to fund the bailouts and the stimulus packages, present and future, which may ultimately approach $2 trillion. We will deal with inflation later, when we have to, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernancke has said.

Land investments bought in 2009 when prices are pressured will benefit from the inflation that looms in the future.

No investment is free of all risks. Buying land involves three types of risks: 1) paying more than the property is worth to the buyer; 2) not knowing something about the property that would have negative future consequences; and 3) being buffeted by deteriorating personal finances or economic changes that force an untimely sale.

Disciplined buying can prevent impulsive, emotional overpaying for property. The price a buyer should pay is based on what the property’s assets and problems are worth to him in light of his resources and plans. The buyer’s price has nothing to do with the seller’s asking price, appraisal number, tax-assessed value and the seller’s opinions of value. Research can almost always discover defects in a property and establish the true values of its assets. These two risks, accordingly, can be minimized through research and analysis.

The risk of changed circumstances cannot be controlled. It runs with everything we do, and don’t do. It should be factored in to every decision to buy property as in: What do I do if something bad happens? Dismissing the risk of changed circumstances because it’s hard to forecast and quantify doesn’t diminish it. Lack of planning for the worst case simply increases the cost if things come to that.

I have shelves of books written by “real-estate gurus,” most of whom I consider borderline Bernie Madoffs. They approach buying property as a testosterone competition to “git ‘er done.” Buying something was their goal, not buying intelligently. Any idiot could “git ‘er done” in recent years, and many now regret having done so.

Smart buying is a matter of getting the right property done at the right price and terms with no surprises. It’s a matter of thinking through, of discarding 100 possibilities to find one that works, of knowing how to determine a buyer’s price.

The 2009 buyer’s market does not relieve buyers of the responsibility they bear to themselves to act prudently when the smell of seller fear fills them with the scent of opportunity.

Using one’s head in real estate is usually a pretty good rule to follow.

’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

Not a ’puter was stirring, not even a mouse;

Round the tree, our few presents there we had heaped,

As we cursed the economy bleep, bleep and bleep.

The last nickel of ours, like a star on tree top,

There it shone and inspired amid the Great Flop.

When out on the lawn, I heard such a racket,

Like gnashing of teeth going up in tax bracket.

I flew to the window, my heart was a-throbbin’,

Expecting the worst, maybe even bin Laden.

When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,

But sleigh Henry Paulson pulled by eight Wall Street Peers.

With a beardy co-pilot so Fed-up and cranky,

I knew in an instant it must be Bernanke.

Now, Freddie! Now, Fannie! Now Citi and Goldman.

On Merrill! On Fargo! On WaMu and Morgan.*

“‘Our markets are failing,’ from the housetops we shout,

We need all your dollars, for us to bail out.”

So up to the roof they flew with a clunk,

Then down our chimney like snakes they did slunk.

Paulson he stammered, he hemmed and he hawed,

Then demanded our money, to give to the flawed.

“How now,” said I. “From whence did this come?”

“From ‘geeks bearing formulas’; boy, are they bums.”

“But you are so smart, so kingly and rich.”

“Our work was for others, for us not a stitch.

We lent to you poor, we opened our ARMs,

Then we jacked up your rates, and you’ve caused us great harm.

O’er swaps and loans toxic, we’ve booed and we’ve hooed,

Tho’ we sliced and we diced, they’re just bad I-O-Us.”

“Cheap, talk is,” said big Hanky the Hammer.

“We’re taking your Christmas so don’t even yammer.”

Then they spoke not a word, but went straight to their work,

Grabbing each gift with a grin and a smirk.

My Keogh they snatched and my 401(k),

They emptied my wallet and Roth I-R-A.

“Things will be worse if we don’t take your money,

Depression you’ll get, which is no milk and honey.”

“But what will you do with the cash you do rake,

After giving us jive and the old shake and bake?”

“Not telling. Not telling,” Hank said with a smile.

“Plans R not us. Don’t mess with me, pal.”

Hope flew out my window like the down of a thistle,

When all at once I heard a loud whistle.

A fat guy in red, appeared like Colossus,

Then noogied their noggins and bent a proboscis.

Hank and the Peers knew they were licked,

So away they ran for more treat and trick.

“I think,” said the fat guy, “they misunderstood,

It’s giving, not taking, that’s down in this hood.

“Help is ok for Hank and his crew,

But sooner or later free lunch is a screw.

Twice we will pay for their greed and their schemes,

First now, then away, it will stalk all our dreams.”

“Who knows what to think?” said I, on the fence.

“Get something for helping and use commonsense.”

Stood he there, my Knight, in noble relief,

“No remorse do they have. What a Christmas. Good Grief.”

*TARP recipients can be found at http://bailout.uslaw.com; and www.valueplays.blogspot.com/2008/11/current-tarp-recipient-list.