‘April is the cruelest month,” claimed poet T.S. Eliot “mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.” Cruelest, perhaps to some. But not to us wood-cutters, wood-splitters, wood-haulers, stackers and wood-burners.
April is the perfect month working in the woods – bright cool days, no mosquitoes, frogs croaking their mating calls from vernal pools still partly iced over, ground mostly free of snow, early spring air filling our lungs, our noses with earth smells newly liberated from winter’s lock.
Perfect for my brother who lives near New Paltz, New York, and goes down the hill into his woods to fell trees that dare to block his view of the mountains, splitting them by hand, borrowing his friend’s pickup to haul them up to his house, where he stacks four or five cords in two long rows, to feed the old wood-fired furnace that provides 100% of his heat.
Perfect for my eldest son in Massachusetts, who sleeps better knowing that the CO2 released to heat his home was captured locally in our lifetimes rather than from fossil fuels. But of course he then has to cut, split and stack it (sometimes using my borrowed hydraulic splitter).
And perfect for me, who heads out from Concord to our woods in Barrington to saw up, haul, split and stack three massive oaks that had been blown over by windstorms, now that the 17 cords of logs left me by the logger five years ago have found their way into our kitchen woodstove back at home.
“What is it about you Fried men and wood?” my New York City-reared daughter-in-law asks, bemused by how determinedly my son and 3-year-old grandson are carrying firewood from the woodshed via an ox-cart style wheelbarrow, wheeling it the 60 yards to their house, then transferring it through an open window into giant bin on wheels that my son had constructed, which nestles by their cast-iron woodstove that provides most of their heat each fall, winter and spring.
Both my brothers, and both my sons, rely on firewood at least in part, and their fireplaces or wood stoves are the place to which everyone is drawn by a primeval magnetism.
As a UNH grad student in the mid-1960s, up from New York by way of a Peace Corps stint in West Africa, I treasured Eric Sloane’s A Reverence for Wood for the atmosphere it created and the lovely drawings. It was the book that welcomed me to New Hampshire and made me feel that I belonged here.
Just about everything I’ve built, or had help building, over the decades since have been of rough-sawn pine and hemlock from local sawmills. Some holidays, I’ve cut slices with my chainsaw from large oak logs and sanded them (more or less) as cutting board gifts. Our four-half-poster bed, out at our camp, and a harvest table crafted of our oak boards during a woodworking class, are my fealty to such reverence.
But firewood is always the main course. An old African proverb, much quoted, claims that “Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice.” A massive understatement. My firewood warms me as I bend over it with my chainsaw, as I haul cut logs in my small wagon downhill to where my splitter lies (having to run fast to avoid being overrun by the log-filled wagon), then again as I roll or carry them to the splitter, split them, stack them, and then several years later, as I load them into my small truck, drive them to Concord, to load them again onto a stack in the yard and then into the house, as needed, for the final and most satisfying warming.
That’s seven or eight warmings (figuring that not every one of them actually warms me; some just provided exercise during sedentary months).
To be sure, this firewood obsession is not a totally unmixed blessing. There are the ominous hints from my back that I’ve over-exerted lifting and moving cut logs; the pained shins when a splitting log falls against my leg; the litter of bark and wood dust on the kitchen floor; the splinters I get from failing out of laziness to put on gloves; the ash pan removal (which sometimes makes it seem that there is as much ash as there was wood). Not to mention getting up on cold nights to feed it so it will last until morning (of course, now in my late 70s, the waking comes naturally); or climbing onto my roof to clean my chimney in a mid-winter thaw, and then again in early fall.
But firewood heat beats all other forms of heat. Pull up a chair and you feel like a rich guy who’s pushed the thermostat up to 85. String lines near it to dry your snow-wet clothes. Rest your coffee mug on it with some cold milk to warm it before the brewing, or to keep it warm after breakfast. Warm up plates before dinner. Cook a casserole on the top or open the side door of your stove to roast meat or fish on the coals while a cold rains falls on your outside grill.
The woodstove is the beating heart of our home. We feel its cold reproof if we fail to keep it lit on those days when the sun almost warms the house. There’s nothing more comforting, after a day outdoors when we’ve let it go, to come home and see that my wife has lit a new fire. We’re happy enough to let go of the wood hauling, ash dumping, glass cleaning, as spring advances. But, oh, the first whiff of woodsmoke when fall arrives . . .
(Robert L. Fried of Concord is the director of the New American Baccalaureate Project.)