thermostatic paradise
This is the time of year when I usually bring in next year’s firewood. Actually, the year after next’s…. Just about the time the first nettles poke up out of the leafmulch, I start to panic. In a month they’ll be a foot high and vicious. In two months they’ll sting through my jeans. I need to get the trees cut, split and hauled away before the nettles grow fangs and claws and can pull down unsuspecting prey.
Most winters I’m picking up the blown down trees from the autumn storms. Usually that’s all I need, although occasionally I have to fell some alders to top off the woodsheds. One stormy year I had to build extra sheds just to accommodate the 30 cord of wood that was knocked down. 30 of these, split and hauled out of the woods by hand, is a helluva lot of wood. A cord is a term soon to leave the language, probably when us oldtimers die or when we all move to propane or electric heat. It’s a stack of cordwood 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet. Or about what fits in a Chevy pickup with high rails. It sounds like an exact measure, but folks who buy wood from gyppos or woodscroungers will tell you, it’s more than slightly inexact, just like the quality of each cord varies from green to half punky, alder to doug fir. I’m a maple man myself — it splits easy, it’s clean and being a hardwood, it burns hot — but the missus’ll tell you I burn anything that’s flammable, rotten or not … and she’s correct. As usual.
When the burn bans come more often, we’re one of those exempt in the disclaimers the newsguyz give: Sole Source Wood Heat. Not gonna make us any new friends with the neighbors, but I don’t complain about their generators during power outages. I suppose guilt will eventually make me reconsider our heating strategies, especially when the neighbors become more plentiful than my trees. At least that’s what I’ll probably use as my excuse when my aching back and shoulders and legs get wore out from the sawing and the splitting and the hauling and the stacking.
Be nice, maybe, to turn a thermostat and help save the environment too. You know, if you don’t mind fracking or damming the rivers or burning coal or creating nuclear waste to get your heat. Maybe by then I won’t.
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