Long, long ago when I was considering trading in my old Camry for a four-wheel-drive something or other, I wondered if I should buy an old pickup truck. For various reasons, I opted not to; and though I’m glad we have the Jeep, we’ve had to make do occasionally. For example, when we built our house we fit much of it inside the Jeep and BGF. Sheet lumber, closet doors, cinder blocks, you name it.

Last fall (sheesh, has it been that long already) I was driving to work when I saw a trailer for sale just outside of town. It was older, looked home made, and had a slightly disheveled air about it; but the tires were in great shape and it was decent size (5’ x 12’, with 2’ high sideboards—enough to hold a cord of wood). Besides, we would only use it about eight times a year: six cords from the hills, and a trip each in spring and fall for manure. I called the owner and asked what he wanted for it; when his asking price was only a quarter of what I expected, I stifled a gasp and said I’d take it.

I spent the next year (!) trying to get a hitch for it. Here’s a hint: Don’t buy a Reese Towpower Class III hitch and expect their hardware will fit your 2002 Jeep Liberty. It won’t, no matter what they tell you. I ended up buying a brand new hitch and getting my hardware from the co-op in town, and it works like a charm. And now we can use the trailer.

A couple of weeks ago I took a couple of kids up the road for a load of wood. Our gravel road turns into Forest Service Road 203 less than a mile away, and our backyard (not counting the freeway corridor 50 miles south of here) contains thousands of square miles of national forest and public land. That’s pretty handy to have behind your house. We have enough firewood for this year, I think, but the leaves are already starting to turn, and I think any extra wood would be a good thing. We didn’t even make it all the way up to our huckleberry patch before I saw a whole congregation of downed trees off the right side of the road. I whipped out my trusty chain saw and, three hours later, we came grinding back down the hill in low-low gear with a six-week supply of wood (about 1 cord). Katie rode all the way down on top of the woodpile, bouncing like a spring when we went over bumps. Becca hopped out at the bottom of the driveway, asking if she could ride up on the top of the Jeep. Sure, why not? It took about a 27-point turn to get the whole kit-n-kaboodle turned around at the top of the driveway, but we finally got it aimed right and the kids and I emptied the trailer out. Now all the wood you see here is split and stacked up back by the propane tank, doing its best to dry out in the temperamental fall weather. It may not get used this year; if not, it’ll sleep under tarps and snow all winter, awaiting its turn to spill its sunshine into our warm home.

Also some of this is junk wood. I got a few lengths of cottonwood from a neighbor, which splits easily but burns indifferently and leaves a ton of ash. I also blocked up a fallen birch behind the treehouse, and I can’t use much of that. I should learn not to burn birch around here unless I felled it myself, 20 minutes ago. It rots fast. I dropped one piece on the railroad-tie stairs leading down to  the garden and it burst like an egg. When it dries, the birch will be okay. It will burn fast and hot, like cardboard.

But a lot of this is good wood. The middle section is mostly that lodgepole pine I dropped this spring, and there’s lots of fir and tamarack from around the property. If I can ever get my trailer hitch figured out I’d like to head up into the hills this summer and bring some more down. Oh well, I’ll do that when I have time. (Joke. Funny. Laugh.)

More than heat, more even than security, this woodpile is my entertainment. Some people get their thrills from video games or cooking or watching the idiot box. For me, this is my fun and games. Nothing beats a good sharp chain saw sinking down through a log, or the satisfaction of a big hulking block of wood jumping in half under my splitting maul. It’s hard to beat the feeling of security I feel watching my firewood dry out and crack in the summer sun, or smell it settle into the dry woodshed in the fall. And there’s just no better feeling than to go out to hang laundry and find that one third of your Great Wall of Firewood has fallen over.

That happened last Saturday. Cool, huh? I’m still learning.

(I’m posting today because I’ll be out on Friday. Jess and I are taking the kids to the coast.)

It’s a lodgepole pine, 70 feet tall and 95% dead. I thought, It might as well come down now. Another year and it would be completely dead, and then a high wind might bring it down. We might wake up one morning with a dead tree in the poultry yard, in the berry patch, or even right down in the middle of the shoop. There was no wind that afternoon as I stood there, chain saw in hand; my saw was sharp, I had the time, and I wouldn’t have to contend with wind pushing the tree this way and that while I was trying to control its fall. So I started cutting.

I hacked out a wedge-shaped cut halfway through the trunk in the direction I wanted the tree to fall. Then I cut from the back toward my first cut. But like many lodgepoles, the trunk was oblong, and its long axis faced the direction I wanted the tree to fall. It would much rather fall on the shoop. But I quickly retrieved some wedges and pounded them into the slice on the back of the tree, the way our neighbor John had done last summer.

It worked. Pretty soon, the tree leaned away from me and fell according to directions, crashing heavily down as trees do, right across the old skid trail and well away from anything breakable.

The wood from this tree could provide several weeks’ worth of heat to our home next winter. Jess wanted to take my picture with it. I wouldn’t have chosen that, since I’m the least likely person on our road to drop a tree successfully. But she insisted.

It’s surprising to think of the effectiveness of that little steel wedge. It probably doesn’t generate more than an inch of lift. But when it’s is pounded into a deep cut on the back of the tree, that one inch is enough to bring the two-ton, 70-foot behemoth crashing to the earth.*

It’s analogous, isn’t it? Great trees grow from little seeds, and little wedges can bring down great trees.

*It occurs to me that some of you may be upset about my cutting down a tree. Here is a little secret: every tree falls. It may fall in a high wind or by lightning strike; it may die by insects or by fire, but like every human, every tree dies; and when it does, there is only one place for it to go and that is down. I would far rather control the time and direction of its fall, and use its wood thankfully, than otherwise. It is part of a wise stewardship.

Oh, and there’s one other cost. You have to clean out the ashes occasionally. For me, it’s less than once a month during the burning season, and I usually remove enough to fill the kindling bucket (about 2 gallons). That is, I’d guess about 5 pounds of ash for every, say, 1200 pounds of wood I burn. (This is a completely scientific ballpark guess.) This winter I found that wood ash functions beautifully as a snowmelt. It sticks readily to ice or compacted snow and won’t bounce all over the place like the snowmelt stuff you get from the hardware store. Ash is dark in color, so it attracts the sunlight and melts ice; and it’s also (what’s the buzzword?) “organic.” No artificial colors or flavors. When the ice is gone you don’t have to worry about some mysterious chemical residue like you get with the stuff from the hardware store. It goes into the ground and maybe eventually ends up in another tree. Pretty cool, huh?

Yesterday after church (and various home teaching visits) I came home and stretched out in my cushy chair. The fire was burning merrily just a few feet away. I leaned way back, put my feet up, and took a snooze while the wind blew outside. That’s the cost of wood heat.

Beats vacuuming out a furnace filter.

I know y’all live in the city and can’t do much about your heating bill. I’m guessing your landlord would frown on your building a campfire in the living room, and what would you do with the smoke? (I know; I used to be a landlord.) But you can vicariously enjoy our heat. And you can do one better: If you really want to, start planning for your own snug aerie in the woods. You don’t have to have all the answers right now; you can just grab a pencil and start planning. It’s a great time to buy land.

Clean the pipe

Warning: this is a messy procedure. Learn from my woes and surround your interior chimney with an old sheet before proceeding.

Well, since we never actually had winter around here I’ll detail this procedure and post the pictures from when I cleaned the chimbley around Christmas time. The principles are still relevant and I’ll do this same thing in the spring when I clean the chimney again, because it’s a pretty messy operation. It will be better when I staple a sheet to the ceiling around the chimney before proceeding.

Also, this operation only works if you can actually access your chimney from inside. If your chimney is on the outside and you can still get the brush up from below via the cleanout, you’re cleverer than me (most people are). If your chimbley has an elbow and you can access the vertical run from below, you can still do this. That’s how I did it in our last house. If you can’t, it’s up to the roof with you!

It’s as easy as 1-2-3. It’s almost as easy as cleaning a chimney from up on the roof, without all that life-threatening stuff. Unless, of course, you don’t surround the interior chimney with a sheet and you get soot everywhere and your wife threatens your life. If you don’t protect the environs, you’re safer to go up on the roof. This is pretty messy, did I mention?

1. Disassemble the chimney and screw the brush to the first rod.
2. Push the brush up the pipe, adding sections of rod as you go, brushing clear up to the chimney cap.
3. When all is sparkling clean, pull the brush out and reassemble the chimney.
4. Clean up.
5. Clean up.
6. Clean up.

Let the soot begin

Cleaning the lower stovepipe

See? Easy as 1-2-3. Of course the last few steps won’t be necessary next time when I hang a sheet from …oh yeah, I mentioned that. The advantage of cleaning the chimney from roof is that all the gunk falls straight down to the smoke shelf inside the stove. Then you take apart the stovepipe and vacuum up all the gunk from the smoke shelf. (The disadvantage, of course, is the risk of a short-term trip to long-term disability.) The inside method is lots easier. You just remove the pipe first instead of last, with the result that all the soot and pulverized creosote floats out and coats the room. If you hang a sheet first …oh yeah, I mentioned that.

You’ll need to get a wire brush to fit your chimney and enough fiberglass rods to reach all the way to the chimney cap. Both of these depend on your chimney setup. I use a 6” circular wire brush and three 4’ threaded rods. Your local fire department may have everything you need available for free checkout, like the library. Ours did, and I did that when we lived in town, but it’s less hassle to have your own.

And either way, you save yourself a $150 visit from the chimney sweep.

Here’s our winter heat supply as of the first week of the new year. I’ve used up just over two rows of the seven rows in the wood sheds. Here you see the cross brace I put on the shed to steady against this year’s anticipated-but-elusive heavy snows, and a 2x I braced against the stack since it was leaning. (Go figure.) You also see the trouble light I hung up to help me out when I have to gather wood in the dark, which so far I’ve only had to do a couple of times this year.

Hereafter would traditionally follow a bunch of boasting about how wood heat is so great and free and yada yada, but that makes folks jealous who have to live in a third-floor apartment in the big city, like we used to do. If you hafta live in the city you hafta, so no yada. I’ll just say I’m grateful to be living a toasty-warm lifestyle for ridiculously cheap, and to be just over a quarter through my fuel supply at halfway through the burning season.

Fire needs fuel, air, and heat. Reduce any of these three sufficiently and you’ll kill your fire. So we always have to make sure the fire will have plenty for the first two ingredients, and have ample chance to generate the third. If the fuel’s wet, it takes more heat to dry it out than a small fire can generate, and it will die. If the wood is dry but too packed together, the air can’t get to get to the flame and it will die. If the pieces are too far apart and the flame gets chilled, it will die.

Since small pieces take less heat to ignite, we start with small pieces. (I usually use about three.) These will light larger pieces, which will burn long enough to ignite big pieces of wood, and then—as long as you supply the three ingredients—your fire will burn indefinitely. It doesn’t take much to start a fire; just plenty of air and a little dry wood.

The first thing to do for a successful fire is to build your house with the chimney inside the house and give it as vertical a rise as possible. If not, you’ll always be fighting physics.

Let’s assume your house is already built. The next thing is to open the damper so the fire has air. Our stove (a Lopi Endeavor, but that’s not me in the picture) also has a smoke valve thingy to help with fire starting (I never use mine). If your fire struggles to start and you have one of these extra valves, you may want to open it to see if that helps.

For fuel, I like to give the fire a good, solid wall to snuggle up against—a larger split piece of wood that will lean over the flame. I angle this piece in the stove and wedge it up against the firebrick to keep it from moving.

Then I give it a friend on the left side. The two form a “V”. If you were a fire in the middle of the V, wouldn’t you feel cozy in there?

Then a sheet of Wall Street Journal (it’s big, lightweight, and doesn’t have much color ink) gets rolled up and stuffed in the V, not too tightly. I toss on two or three pieces of kindling; dry bark works nicely. The split piece shown here came from a short end of log I cut last summer. I pop those short pieces in half or quarters and let ‘em dry all summer; in the winter I break the dried pieces into kindling with a hatchet and they work handsomely.

I like to slide a skinnier split piece on top of the V to keep the heat together. Note how I’ve left plenty of gap here to let the air in freely. Also, as the newspaper burns down the kindling will settle, giving even more space for air to flow in.

Now apply fire and close the door.

I usually don’t have to do anything else at this point. The chimney’s strong draft will pull the fire along until it’s running on its own. Then I close the damper down for a steady burn. I have a weakness for watching fire, and sometimes as I gaze dreamily at the rolling yellow flames I’ll see where a piece of wood may need to be scootched over or another one added. Usually though, five minutes after I’ve first opened the damper I can be in the other room, getting ready to go out for my morning run.

Following these steps, a 12” galvanized bucket o’kindling will take me several weeks to go through, and I try to use not more than six matches a week—less than one a day. That’s because I’m a cheapskate and don’t like to waste anything.

These trees grew on our mountainside in the sunshine and rain during their dozen years of life. They were brought down by weather or a chain saw, coming though the quiet woods to thin out the stands of weak timber to let sunshine reach the ground again. Their branches and sawdust went back into the soil when their blocks were released by my chainsaw. My hands stacked the round or split blocks into fine long piles, and all summer they sat baking in the sun and drying in the wind. Birds came and landed on them, and flew away again. Spiders crawled up into the hollows, stretching their webs and catching their food.

Gradually the pieces split and turned dark. The bark loosened and fell off. The rains fell on them, and dried up again. Then, in the fall, they were lifted again and stacked in the woodshed. They sat, dark and dry and waiting, for they knew not what.

Last Saturday they were lifted from their comrades in the shed and stacked in the small wood dock behind the back door. Last night they were hauled into the house.

It was warm in there, different than anything this wood had ever experienced. Overnight they acquired the temperature of the room, which was provided by their brethren. And in the dark this morning, I padded down the stairs, lifted them from the wood box, and arranged them atop the coals of last night’s fire.

With a few pieces of kindling and an open damper, the pieces soon ignited. And all the sunshine of their outdoor life was released in hot yellow flames, bringing sunshine again into our warm cozy home while the snow fell thickly outside.

I came in the other day from a chilly evening outdoors and thought, well, summer’s over. I’m building a fire. And I did.

I love heating our home with wood. I love every aspect of it (some more than others). I love dropping a dead tree in the forest and blocking it up in bright rounds amidst the spray of sawdust. I love to split it down; for me there’s no more satisfying form of play than splitting wood with a maul. I love watching the wood stacks dry and crack in the summer heat. I love the feeling of security that comes from having our heat source secure, of stacking dried wood into a dry woodshed (even if the stack collapses later). I love building a fire, from the crinkling of paper and stacking of kindling to the striking of a match, and watching the heat catch into the edges of the wood, and the light and heat ignite the bigger pieces, until I can toss round logs into the burning mass and feel the heat rise like comfort into our cozy house. There is no delight on earth quile the the flicker of firelight in a dark room, when the music is softly playing. I like polishing the clouded window until the fire gleams brightly again (all you need is a damp paper towel dipped in cold ashes). I even like cleaning the chimney, because I only have to do it once a year, and there’s a pecuilar delight in cleaning something out that is really dirty.

Maybe I’ll get old and decrepit one day, and won’t be able to do all the work that’s entailed in the entertainment, satisfaction, and low bills of heating with wood. But my friend John is in his 70s and he still does it with gusto. Maybe in that sense I can be like John.