Firewood Then and Now

Our woodshed ready for new green wood from Storm Helene

We moved from Oak Park to Fern Prairie in Camas, Washington in the summer of 1967, and the new house—the first and only house Dad and Mom ever bought—had a brick fireplace with a steel firebox around it and vents that allowed air to passively circulate through a chamber and add to the radiant heat.  One of our chores was to split firewood and bring it from the woodshed into the house in the wheelbarrow.

Though my parents’ seven acres, which was surrounded on two sides by the Fern Prairie Airport, had trees—mostly Douglas Fir and one lonely oak—I don’t recall it ever being a source of firewood.  As my uncle worked for the US Forest Service, we had good information and we sometimes collected firewood from windfalls and the rejected logs after logging operations.  One memory is of sawing up and loading rounds from a Western Red Cedar, which made the perfect kindling.  With its straight grain and other characteristics it would pop open and split seemingly at the mere touch of the ax. And then the aromatic smell that would fill a room!  Our only hardwood to burn in those days was alder, and my dad always thought it was special, because he never lived near hardwood forests where we have abundant oak, hickory, locust and all the rest.

One firewood memory is slicing up Presto-logs outside for my great-grandmother’s Monarch trash burner that she kept in her kitchen in Washougal.  My dad did the work and I might have picked up the pieces and put them in a box. Or I might not have.  I don’t remember, but I was there.  I say “slicing” because the “logs” were like sausages and one little hit with a hatchet was all they needed.  I have that same trash burner in my possession now.  I bought it from the estate for $35 when I was in my early 20s and brought it to North Carolina years later.  Someday I’d like to install it in a little cabin we have.

My grandparents the Dears owned the beautiful little red brick house that once stood on three acres at the top of Leadbetter Road.  Their primary heat source was the wood furnace in the basement.  The heated air, pushed by a fan, circulated through ducts and warmed every room, so much that it was usually far too hot for me as a child.  I think my grandparents bought firewood that was delivered and dumped it on the driveway next to the house.  It was a family project to toss the wood onto a wooden chute that funneled the pieces though a small window.  Probably what helps me remember this so well is one time I got hit in the head with a chunk of wood.  The basement was always fragrant with the pine, and probably the fungus and mold as well.  A smell that brings back fond memories.

Another NW firewood story:  Dave and Bonnie Deal are Raku potters.  You may have heard of them, and if not, I’m posting a link to get you started.  I visited Dave many years ago up on Livingston Mountain where they lived and owned property.  I’m not in touch with them much anymore, but back then Dave fired his work only with wood he himself cut by hand (sans chainsaw).  I remember seeing his massive kiln in the woods at night, orange-red lines of fire glowing through the gaps in the brick.  It took 24 hours for a firing and Dave would sit up awake all night and the rest of the time attending the kiln and feeding in more wood.

In the 1980’s a couple years after I got married, we moved to Western North Carolina where I took a teaching job in a small rural school.  The rental house—more a cabin—was near a lake, and had a low ceiling, like, seven feet high, and it had no heat source other than a fireplace.  So, we needed a wood store.  I wanted a Fisher Baby Bear, found one in Kentucky, brought it home in the little 1966 Datsun pickup that had been my grandfather’s, and installed it and stove piping that we ran up through the chimney. Bought a chainsaw. One time we got a permit and cut a load of firewood in National Forest.  Upon driving out, we found a locked chain blocking our way.  It had been open of course when we entered.  It was getting dark and I proceeded to dig out one of the posts and had freed the concrete anchor, but I couldn’t lift it out of the hole.  I was facing spending the night in our pickup with my wife and a baby.  But the chain was next to the highway, a two lane rural highway, and someone had seen us and called the someone who had the job of locking the chain at night. He arrived to free us, and it was, amazingly, one of my students!   A responsible person as 16 year olds go, and one of the school’s bus drivers.  Yes, they let 16 year olds drive school buses then, the big yellow ones, on the rural roads.

Our next wood stove was a few years later in Swannanoa in another rental house.  It was, however, not a woodstove, but for burning coal, and had a tiny chute.  You couldn’t “build” a fire in it because you could neither place anything or even see inside.  You just stuffed in paper and kindling, dropped in a match, and hoped for the best.  Likewise, you just dropped in small pieces of firewood.  Once, one of our children dropped in my car keys.  That may have been the time when I perfected my searching process skills.

We lived in that house for four years and two of our children were born there, in the bedroom.

We at last bought our own house a few miles from Swannanoa and moved the Baby Bear into the basement, the stove being our primary source of heat for the next 30 years.  We cut and hauled most of our firewood and bought some as well.  When Y2K rolled around, we had enough for two winters.   I still have the Baby Bear, and the house as well.

Splitting firewood by hand for me is a spiritual exercise, a non-combative martial art.

Which brings to mind those “Kung Fu” experts who would break bricks, wood, and other building materials with the sides of their hands.  I’m pretty sure it’s pretty fake, however, because I’ve never actually seen this done on real construction sites.  I can imagine it happening though.  A guy calls down from the rafters, “Okay Bruce. Next one, 14 feet-2¾ inches.”  Bruce carefully stretches his measuring tape, pulls a pencil from behind his ear, makes a V mark, takes the hand square from his belt to flick the V into a clean line across the board with the pencil.  He then cracks his knuckles, rolls his head around to loosen his neck muscles, stands back, concentrates all his focus, and WHACK!  The task is done.  He passes the perfectly cut board up into the rafters.  Saves dragging a saw power cord all over the place or recharging those batteries.  If this is a real thing, those guys should have their own labor union.  But I’m positive Karate Chops working up a really well-seasoned chunk of ash is not even remotely plausible.

But seriously, splitting wood with a maul and wedge is an art form.  First surveying the chunk of wood for knots and checks to learn the obstacles and splitting pathways, I look for checks to see where the wood is already splitting naturally.  Then the lift and swing.  It’s not easy hitting a round of wood in exactly the right places, over and over.  Nor is hitting a wedge of steel with a four square inch target.  (And sometimes you hit the side of the wedge and send it flying at your ankle.)  My children and wife have wounded or broken many a hickory or ash handle.  You use both gravity and centrifugal force, keeping your eye on the target.  Once after I had some professional tree people take down an enormous Tulip Poplar tree for me, we, I and the children, held wood splitting races.  The competitors each would have their own set of tools and we’d compete on who would split their rounds the fastest.  The trick was to split pieces completely with one swing, stepping around the work as you went.  Somehow 14 seconds sticks in my mind.  Tulip Poplar, by-the-way, is easy to split when it’s green.  They’re thinking about making this an official sport in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

A proper stack of firewood is also an art form, especially a free standing one with the “log cabin” criss-crossed ends of a row that’s expertly tied into the main stack for stability.

Now.  Now after Hurricane/Tropical Storm Helene our five acres with a house we finished building a few years ago is a firewood farm.  At this point about half of the lost trees are safely flat on the ground thanks to help from three of my sons, some Eco-Forester volunteers, and a chainsaw crew of eight young Mennonite men from Ohio, who came under the auspices of the non-profit Plain Compassion Care Response.  Half the trees are still “leaners” (caught in other trees) and thus require technical assistance, like tree climbers with ropes. We saved out 17 foot logs from the best of the larger trees, like mulberry, hickory, and wild cherry.  I wish we had a black walnut go down, but alas.  Someday I hope we can get a portable sawmill in here.

In the meantime, after the insurance settlement payout, I could afford to buy a mechanical, gas powered wood splitter, which in my mind will assist an aspect of “Debris Removal.”  I shopped around and settled on an Oregon brand machine.  Oregon.  Yes, emotion is an essential factor in decision making.  Not the only one, but if we depended upon reason only we’d be parlayed because it’s impossible to process every tiny detail of information to make the “best” decision.  The Oregon cost more than the China-made ones, but it’s from a unique small local business and not one of the giant retail chains.  And this local business will be able to do repairs and maintenance.  I picked it up yesterday and towed it home.

The mechanical wood splitter will help process a lot of wood in a short time and should be great as a family work project.  We’ve done this before, but I’m hoping we can do a firewood splitting-hauling-stacking day at our property over one of the upcoming holidays.  With as many of our children and grandchildren as possible.

For me, the machine will never give the physical, mental, spiritual, and aesthetic satisfaction of splitting firewood by hand. One of my heroes, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about how in the Soviet Gulag he would go out in the “frost” of a sunny winter day and split firewood with his shirt off. I tried that once myself. My favorite time to split wood was in the evening before supper as it was growing dark. And at Christmas, while we played the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on the radio live from Kings College of Cambridge (performed every year since 1918), I’d split firewood in the front yard.

Hurricane Helene brought up tropical Caribbean weather in its wake and it has persisted far too long.  I look forward to the seasonal cool fall weather, and then winter, and lighting fires in the woodstove.  There’s nothing like wood heat to warm the bones.  One of our sons spent a month hiking 300 miles in Norway last summer.  I learned that the Norwegians are said to be “the happiest people in the world.”  How can this be with the long dark winters of the north? 

You know what?  I’ll write about this next time!