October 28, 2006

• Weird Firewood

  Doug had gone to bed before I got up
  yesterday morning.  After I awoke, one of my first acts was to
  check the status of the fire in the woodstove.  It was okay,
  plenty of wood in there, indicating that he’d gone down not long
  before.  When I glanced at the wood box to see if he left me
  plenty of wood to last until he was up again, I noticed that in his
  last load he had brought in a piece of the long twisted root I’d
  brought home with me after my trip up to Lois’s Bake Shop a few days
  ago.

  I have mentioned gleaning “stray” chunks of firewood out of the yard,
  without explaining how the yard had become littered with stray
  wood.  These pieces I was picking up this month were all
  nonstandard sizes and shapes which Doug had left lying there in
  preference to hauling them in.  Nonstandard wood presents
  problems at two stages.  First, when he carries the wood in he
  piles it high on one arm, leaving one free for opening the door. 
  The pieces that stack best are squared off and uniform in length. 
  He would have to make extra trips if he were to bring in all the bits
  and pieces that aren’t compatible with that single high stack he
  prefers.

  Then, the most efficient way to fill the stove is with squared-off,
  uniform pieces of wood.  Odd shapes and sizes tend to leave voids
  and retard burning, make the door hard to close, or cause fiery wood to
  fall out when it is opened.  Efficiency and economy, in this case,
  are often at odds.  This year, we have been unable to find anyone
  selling cut firewood in this area.  We could buy log lengths and
  haul them ourselves to chainsaw into stove lengths at home, if we had a
  truck and the desire to use that chainsaw we haven’t used since my
  health crisis seven years ago.  I was the chainsawyer in this
  family, and I can no longer bear either the exhaust emissions or the
  physical exertion.

  After weeks of looking for a wood seller, we looked at the wood pile
  left from last year and decided that it might get us through the winter
  and, if not, we’d deal with the emergency when it became one.  To
  help us get through the winter without buying more wood, I started
  gleaning all those pieces and bits of wood that Doug had been leaving
  behind through the years.  Recognizing their unstackability, I
  tugged a plastic crate around and filled it, then asked Doug to carry
  it in for me.  The open sides and stackability of these crates
  make it easy to construct a neat stack of drying wood off in a corner
  of the living room.  There’s even room on the flat top of one of
  the water pots on top of the woodstove, for a quick-drying crate in
  that warm spot.

  A few days ago, having cleared away every usable bit of wood in the
  yard, I remembered that there was another wood source near by. 
  Someone has used the turnaround at the end of our cul de sac as a
  dumping place for the debris from some land-clearing.  There are
  stumps and chunks of wood, tree roots and brush out there, as well as a
  pile of gravel that looks as if it’s the spoil that comes up when a
  well is drilled.  There were also about half a dozen charred
  pieces of regular firewood, the remains of a fire some of our neighbors
  built for a party a few years ago in the middle of the turnaround.

  When I came home and called Doug out to see what I had in the hatch of
  my car and instruct him on what to do with it, he reacted with
  amusement.  His reaction to one particular item was more like
  bemusement.  It was a long, knotty, gnarly, curved and recurved
  hardwood root.  He remarked that it wouldn’t fit in the stove and
  I replied that if he would whack it in two right *here*, both chunks
  would fit.  He looked a little doubtful, but he whacked it anyway,
  and stacked it — or more accurately, balanced it on top of the stack.

  It wouldn’t have fit in the stove when I first got up yesterday, even
  though the firebox wasn’t truly full.  That irregular root
  required a fair amount of clearance all the way from front to back,
  because its curved form would only fit one way and would wind about
  across the full expanse of the firebox, side-to-side and
  front-to-back.  When the fire had burnt down sufficiently and I
  winkled it in there, I took the picture to show Doug that it had in
  fact fit and, I suppose, to illustrate that a woodstove can indeed look
  something like a campfire after all.

  

  He still hasn’t seen this picture, but
  I’m thinking it might get a laugh out of him.  Last night just
  before I went to bed and handed over the fire watch to him, I called
  him in to take a look at the fire I had constructed.  That wasn’t
  showing off.  I wasn’t trying to be funny.  I only wanted to
  show him that the one final small block I’d placed in there to fill a
  void center front could pose a falling-out hazard.

  He laughed, long and hard.  I took another look at the open stove and started laughing, too.  In my family I am famous
  notorious for fitting ten pounds of anything in a five-pound
  container.  I had done it again.  That final hand-sized
  rectangular block filled a void, yes.  It filled the only void
  left in a complex arrangement of wood filling the entire firebox. 
  It was kinda funny, I guess, but I guess you  had to be there.

   
   

  • 1:24 pm
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