Hakso said he will bring the wood today. “Six cords, dat’s right?” he asked early this morning, joking on the phone in his heavy Finnish accent. He is about 70, square-shouldered, small and slightly bent, with a surprising bloom of color in his cheeks. He would arrive, I knew, wearing baggy jeans, a patched flannel shirt, suspenders, high black rubber boots and a cap that advertised “Linnton Feed and Seed” above its wide brim.
The wood’s coming, I thought, and I felt as if I were to be suddenly rich.
“Not quite six,” I said. “Bring two-no, better make it three cords. And what’s your price this year for a cord?”
“I make it $200 for you,” he told me. “Maple, cedar, some elm.”
“In that case,” I joked back, “I’ll take one cord.”
“OK,” he said, “$130 per cord. Special favor.”
No need for more right now. I’ve been scavenging all summer and still have almost a cord and a half left from the supply he brought me last year. But I put off using the good wood for as long as I can. Yesterday I burned a few chopped-up, heavy timbers from a neighbor’s torn-down shed, along with narrow posts from the deck where my good friend Claudia once sat watching hummingbirds drink from her back-yard feeder. I have more of these outside my back door in a wooden box. Painted dark brown, they look like old- fashioned piano legs, swelling and tapering, with smooth wide bands at each middle and base.
“Want some kindling?” Claudia had asked when they were about to tear apart and replace the whole deck, flooring, posts and all. Do I want some kindling? In the autumn and winter, this is like asking, “Do you want to eat?” For 20 years I’ve heated with wood. It’s work, a lot of work, yet I continue to do it. Others may wonder why, but I know why and it’s this: I sent two faxes today. I returned seven messages that were left on my answering machine. After doing some work on my computer, I checked in with world news on my on-line service. My life, in other words, moves right along at the same frenetic pace as millions of others in 1990s U.S.A.
But mid-morning, when the woods darkened as clouds gathered and a chill came over the river, I stopped everything to build a fire. Like our ancestors going back for thousands upon thousands of years, I built a fire against the cold. And it did just what I wanted it to do-it slowed me down. As I swung the ax over the big chunk of sweet smelling cedar, splitting it neatly into two parts, I came away from the Information Highway and back to this life in the body, and back to a feeling of confidence in this small, very physical, very vulnerable self who must contend with the elements.
With a smaller, finer ax I chopped kindling and, at the stove, placed the thin slices of pine carefully onto a nest of paper. Unlike the ancients, I struck a match that came from a long cardboard box. Suddenly, papers and pine flourished in a bright orange and yellow flame. The first larger piece of wood was slow to catch, then suddenly it crackled with flames. Carefully, one upon the next, I lay the split cedar. My house, cold and damp, slowly filled with the pungent smell of burning wood, pure and pleasurable, and then with the wood’s dry, clean warmth, seeping into each molecule.
In cabins in the forest, in a houseboat, in a house in the middle of the city, I’ve used wood for heat. I start looking for kindling in June-no matter how bright the sun, how distant the cold. When living on the houseboat, I have gathered my winter warmth from the river itself, both kindling and firewood.
At first I was surprised at what came floating in my direction-tree trunks, wooden pickle barrels, branches with crows still sitting on them, torn off pieces of docks and marina walkways, pilings, fence posts, wooden doors, window frames. Soon I learned to be fast enough with a motorboat and a rope to scoop up what might be useful. Rain frees all kinds of wood from the river banks, and sometimes logs break free of jams and come sailing along all alone, heading toward the sea. They’re irresistible to anyone on a houseboat who sees them twirling around out there in the current. People go after them with lassos, snag them, bring them home, cut them up on their decks, where they dry out and are good wood for this winter or, if they’re soaked through, the next.
I never thought I’d be the kind of woman to devote a portion of my life to the finding, cutting, hauling, stacking, chopping and burning of firewood. Everything in my early life pointed to comfort, to being “feminized” with that pitiless, Donna Reed vengeance reserved for girls who came of age in the 1950s. Certainly I would not ever be out in the rain and the snow snaring, chopping and stacking wood. I grew up in Minnesota and Dakota houses where you just walked over to the wall and turned a knob if you wanted a layer of heat between you and the bitter cold. I heard sad stories about how Grandpa and Grandma took turns staying up all night to watch the wood stove and make sure the house didn’t burn down because the stove was so old and the stovepipe thin and patched.
Yet somehow- and yes it was the ’60s-I came to wood fires and stayed. My parents and the rest of my family, still addicted to those knobs on the wall that produce instant heat, are amazed that wood has warmed me through these last 20 winters, and since they live far away they act as if it might not be true.
“Well you have electric heat, too,” they say. “Remember you can always turn that on. I’m sure you do.”
Well, yes, I do sometimes use electric heat-as backup, or when it’s just so cold even my fairly new, state-of-the-art wood stove won’t heat my entire house. This is the best stove so far and I’ve had many. Large, pot-bellied numbers. Creature-like stoves with triangular bodies and long legs from Sweden and Norway. Big ugly Franklins with fireplace screens (or, in case that doesn’t warm you-which it won’t-awkward folding doors that close the fire in).
When I first learned to build a fire, I was 30 years old. I had purchased a tall, portly stove that reminded me of the grandfather who had to sit up all night. My stove had a hole in the top into which you were supposed to dump everything-paper, kindling, wood. It was such a dark and awkward adventure that I almost fell in headfirst more than once. On its little front door, which was rusted shut (I got the stove at an auction), a teeny window gave a glimpse of how things were going inside. Anxious about results, I treated building a fire like, say, baking bread: I wanted a recipe and got advice from an elderly woman up the road. About 14 balled-up rolls of newspaper, she said, and 16 to 20 small sticks of kindling. Get it started, wait 5 minutes, add one small, rounded, extra dry log (nothing green for God’s sake!), then wait. And hope. And try not to keep opening that little topknot thing to see what’s happening down there. Believe. Have faith.
The first time the fire worked and warmed the little cabin for hours and hours, I nearly crowed with pride. It thrilled me that my small labor had created something so beautiful and sensual and practical all at once.
One night I overloaded the portly grandfather stove with too much extra dry wood, and went to make dinner. When I came back into the living room, I saw a throbbing monster, red hot, almost pulsing. Quickly, I felt the walls alongside the fireguard. Hot, very hot. To run or not to run? I decided not to, and, holding my breath, watched the red slowly fade to black once more.
I no longer follow any fire “recipes.” Building a fire has its components, its steps, but over the years I’ve learned that it is largely an act of pure magic. Sometimes it works. Sometimes not. I’ve gotten fires going with damp kindling and green wood, and failed at fires with dry kindling and seasoned wood. I’ve gotten so absorbed in reading sections of old newspapers before crumpling them that the newspaper and kindling I’d already put into the stove-and lit-burned themselves out before I even noticed. Most of the time, in fact, the fire takes. And yes, it had better. When winter comes I am up at 4 a.m. to bank the stove. Up again at 7. Toss on another log. Start breakfast. By then the house is warm and the smell of a wood fire, as always, familiar and dear.
Later, when I go outside to the woodpile that Hakso will have replenished with his maple, cedar and elm, I’ll watch the blue feather of smoke rise up out of the chimney and drift away into the snowy woods. The fire that I build and warm by today and tomorrow and the next day connects me to everyone and everything that came before my fax, my computer, this rushed life. Like those ancient hands, my hands are callused. And my shoulders ache and my lower back buckles at times with the strain. (My chiropractor will shake his head wearily at me when I walk in the door.)
Yet, when my friends tell me it’s too much trouble to heat with wood, that they don’t know what they’d do without their gas or oil furnaces, when they joke about how once upon a time (in the ’60s, of course) they went “back to the land” but boy, are they glad those days are over, I think: Trouble? A wood fire? What other small and tender act can bring me so quickly home to myself? What other simple task can I perform that slows me and calms me so completely as the laying of a fire? And what other work do I do, with computers and a car and a fax and a phone, that puts my strength to the test?
To build a fire is not a sacrifice or a burden. It’s a ritual act of beauty and strength and knowledge, a little daily performance in the solitary theater of my life. It brings with it not only the practical side effect of warmth, but a confidence that I am the one who can make myself warm. I am the bringer of my own fire and keeper of my own flame, not to mention the innocent who, each time, is as proud and moved and even thrilled by the fire magic as I was the very first time.
