The recent cold snap kept me busy tending our wood-burning stove – a 1979 Vermont Castings Resolute that came with the house – and along the way, there was a realization that there is a paradox in heating with wood.
The idea is to produce a warm, cozy environment where you can ignore what’s going on outdoors. But in the process, you find yourself connected to the outdoors in ways you can’t ignore.
Start with the wood. It’s not a generic commodity. Every bucked piece (cut to stove length, but not split) that arrives from my supplier has distinctive characteristics. Spruce and cottonwood are light; ponderosa and aspen feel about right; pinon and scrub oak are heavy. They split differently, whether I’m working them with the 8-pound maul or borrowing my neighbor’s hydraulic splitter. They burn differently once inside.
In other words, they constantly remind me that they were once parts of diverse living organisms from the outdoors. There’s nothing standard about my cordwood, from combustibility (some of it is so full of pitch that it ignites almost instantly) to BTU production (the main virtue of scrub oak).
Every piece, then, is a distinct connection to some growing forest nearby, and I need to stay mindful as I select pieces for the morning restart or the just-before-bedtime “hope it will keep going all night” load.
Despite the traditional virtues ascribed to a woodshed when it comes to the discipline of children, we don’t have one. The wood sits in a random outdoor heap, waiting for me to organize it, which never happens.
Getting the wood from the backyard pile is another connection to the outdoors. The daily excursion generally involves trundling the wheelbarrow from the front porch back to the alley zone, splitting some wood and filling the wheelbarrow, then back to the front porch, where I’ll bring it in an armload at a time – five or six chunks – as needed.
Since I don’t want to get any colder than I have to while fetching wood, I watch the day’s conditions closely, hoping to find a time when that part of the yard is sunny and the wind is minimal. When it comes to outdoor comfort in a Colorado winter, the air temperature doesn’t matter nearly so much as staying in the sun and out of the wind.
So again, one’s desire to be able to ignore outside conditions leads to one’s paying close attention to outdoor phenomena like cloud formations and swaying tree-tops.
Once the wood is on the porch, there are the trips to bring some in. If it’s been snowing, I should bring in several armloads so it can dry before burning. But I worry about bringing in too much, because the warmth might inspire resident spiders, ticks and insects to emerge and start wandering around our house, consuming carpets and woodwork while spreading contagion.
On the other hand, doesn’t it make more sense to be flapping the front door in the relative warmth of the afternoon than in the chill of night? There’s another of those outdoor considerations that connects with indoor comfort.
Then there’s the fire itself. The colder it is outside, the more frequently the fire must be fed. When the wind gusts and the room is quiet, I can hear the fire change inside the stove, drawing more or less air through the intake. What’s happening outdoors controls what’s happening indoors.
The stove is an air-tight without an ash pan. This means that about once a week in the winter, I have to let the fire go out as much as possible (hot coals can persist for many hours, though), then scoop out the ash. That means watching the extended weather forecast for a relatively warm day for stove-cleaning.
It always amazes me that six or seven wheelbarrow loads of firewood, at least 30 cubic feet, end up as ashes that don’t even fill a three-gallon bucket. I dump the ashes into a metal barrel with a tight top. Then I don’t know what I should do with them, for the days have long passed when an ashman made the collection rounds.
Should I take up natural soap-making by running water through the ashes to get home-brew lye? Spread them out in the woods to return minerals to the soil? Use them to augment garden soil that’s already rather alkaline? My current course (when the barrel is full and cold, empty it into our Dumpster) is doubtless improper.
From start to finish, this whole wood- heat process brings the outdoors to my indoors when I’m trying to insulate myself from the outdoors. But there are times when I’m sprawled next to a warm stove on a cold night that it all seems worth it – until the cats arrive and try to take the best places for themselves.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
