It wasn’t until graduate school that I made a friend whose family heated entirely with wood. She’d return from weekends home in the mountains smelling of sweet smoke that permeated her long hair and wooly sweaters and wafted down the halls of the department, connoting campfire, I suppose, for the suburban-raised or the scent-curious.
At the time, I found the allure something of a novelty, having grown up among Midwestern plowmen and women who’d toiled for generations to acquire the magic of a forced-air furnace. I’d tease my friend fondly about it, in the way woodstove bigots will, for how was I, a so-called scholar still in his twenties, able to properly plumb the depths of his own prodigious ignorance? At the time I reckoned only this: when one leaves home smelling of something, that something has officially become part of you, as the pig farmers of my youth will attest.
This winter the smoke rings come full circle, as I now count myself among the woodstove-converted. I find myself suited to the interdependence my stout iron pig requires; I stoke it, take the poker and scratch its belly a bit, and eventually, with a little coaxing, it warms up to me, and I to it. In an hour or two I have it glowing red with affection, and I sidle up, proud that in tepid middle age I can still conjure such a flame. I won’t suffer selfies, but I do confess to having texted a couple of glamor shots of my little beauty at the ecstatic moment when its flames flicker and dance with the delicious super-liquidity of the Fireplace Channel seen in high-def.
The sages of our digital age insist that most of us do not know from whence our food, fiber, and energy come. We tap, swipe, chip, or charge, and it’s ours. The furnace responds at the touch of a button or, these days, by digital handshake made via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. We flip a switch and the faux gas log ignites to appreciative huzzahs. It’s ambience-on-demand.
Not so with a stove, especially if one cuts, splits, and stacks one’s own wood. In recent years I’ve put up perhaps a half-dozen cords. I’m no prepper, mind you, but rather your run-of-the-mill Middle American fatalist. So when the fire runs low these chilly spring nights, I grab the flashlight and head for the woodshed, where I sift through the stacks I’ve made, looking for a keeper. Seeing my collection of eccentrics fall within the circular beam of the flashlight takes me back months or years to the fairer days when first I deigned to cut them—sometimes sawing them too wide or too long to avoid a burl or a branch. Of course, I grokked their marginality way back in that careless moment when I chucked the deviant pieces in the “good” pile. Now, on the dampest nights, when the ego demands that just-right slice be as near to hand as a Snickers bar at the check-out aisle, my original lack of discernment comes home to roost.
Most of my fuel is deadfall or the product of my own selective pruning. It’s oak and therefore not the sort of stuff one cuts down willy nilly, Lorax style, without a serious come-to-Jesus. Still, when I feed the odd piece I recognize into the flames, I feel something akin to the pang childhood friends described when their 4-H prize pig ended up on the dinner table.
Contrary to the civilized hearths of Victorian novels, I know the woodstove to be a decidedly messy business, and not at all a gentlemanly affair. For just because the wood is cut does not mean it’s not still a brimming biomass, home and habitat to termite frass and the occasional smattering of rat or bat shit or any of the other common fertilizers called to mind as first-class epithets. I knock the worst of the dross off outside the shed, but still I leave a breadcrumb trail of larvae and bugs and worms on the way back to house. By the time I’ve closed the front door behind me, the early arriving bluebirds are making a meal of it.
Make enough of these back-and-forth trips, and the mind moves inexorably toward metaphor. Musicians and writers “woodshed it” when they master a lick after a long period of trial-and-error. Joe Biden claimed on multiple occasions that he’d relish the chance to take Donald Trump “out behind the woodshed,” a widely understood euphemism for delivering a good whoppin’ where there aren’t likely to be any witnesses.
I do not mean to glamorize the woodstove, Lord knows. I am sufficiently smoke-woke to know that the chimneys and stacks of an industrial age blackened lungs and darkened skies. I’ve heated with wood for a winter, and I am pleased to do so, but it’s backbreaking labor to warm this way for a lifetime. My hair reeks of smoke, my lungs burn in the morning, and my sinuses protest. I’m self-conscious at the store, fearing those in my odiferous wake will assume I’ve just taken a permanent gig charring whiskey barrels.
Still, I appreciate holding homegrown energy in my hands and having a modest role, by those same hands, in rendering it into the homeostasis that is my own imperfect domestic ecology. I prefer using the energy near at hand to receiving natural gas via transnational pipeline laid by eminent domain and dubious lobby, or liquid propane delivered by truck into a holding tank where I pay for it dearly, by the gallon.
So I regard my little pot-bellied wonder with all due affection. And forgive me: if I do anthropomorphize, it is out of fondness, and because he and I have a history together of symbiotic needs duly met. I call him paleo conservative; he calls me soft. Together we have solved the world’s problems, or at least ruminated over them for long hours of little to no account, which surely makes us friends.
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