Today I’m enjoying one of the things my Dad passed on to me, and that’s putting up firewood. It’s a year-round, part-time commitment to buck and split wood (still by hand in my case, for as long as I can), then stack it to dry. I like to get at least a 2 or 3 year dry on our wood here, since it’s so damp all year. Part of the satisfaction in the process is when I start pulling firewood sticks off the pile at the start of woodburning season and it’s nice and dry. I could probably get away with a 1 year dry, but then I wouldn’t be out cutting wood as often, and that’s part of the addiction, I guess.
I remember when my Dad started getting firewood. He’d started a new job in his 50’s that didn’t require him to be at work all day, everyday, like it did when he owned the Olean House Restaurant for a couple decades. I was about 13 I’d guess. Like most of the old houses in Bolivar, ours was about a century old, big, poorly insulated, and heated by natural gas. Mom and Dad had insulation blown into the walls and the attic to better hold the heat in. Then Dad had a double 55 gallon barrel wood stove built. The stove was in our dirt floor basement, with a chimney going up the side of the house, and the heat from the stove simply went up the ducting already in place for the gas heat system in the house.
Dad loved getting firewood. Mainly because it got him into the woods again, where he hadn’t spent much time since he was a kid growing up hunting and fishing in Blasedell. When we co-owned the restaurant, he might get in a fishing trip to the Georgian Bay in Canada once a year to my Aunt Ruth and Uncle George’s cabin, but that was the extent of his outdoor fun. Now he went to the woods every chance he got. He also formed new friendships with it – all of them outside his earlier circle of mostly restaurant folks and AA. He traded firewood for a new chainsaw from Dave Sisson, who had started a Stihl chainsaw dealership in town, and went is now one of the biggest dealers of all kinds of small machinery in the whole area. Then Dad became friends with a small time logger, who would sell Dad the tops of the hardwood trees he harvested for $25 each. After my brother and I grew up and left the area, he got a firewood cutting buddy close to his own age and they helped each other.
Early on, we split wood with a “sledge and a wedge”. It was kind of tedious work but satisfying, and I liked it. Dad eventually got a wood splitter, which was much easier for him to use, and allowed him to split enough wood to sell to pay the expenses for getting in his own wood. That lead to more friendships with those customers. If I was home and splitting wood for him, I still split by hand, as I found the wood splitter too tedious and slow, even though it may actually have been faster than splitting by hand. And of course, could split all day. I don’t get the same satisfaction using a wood splitter, and still continue to split by hand. Splitting by hand makes the whole process last longer, and that’s a good thing. I’m not in a hurry to get it done, and it’s satisfying to see this year’s wood stack get a little higher and deeper each day. My right shoulder is starting to argue with me about splitting by hand, so I’ve learned to split with my left shoulder in the lead, and I’ll keep at it as long as I can.
Like my Dad, firewood has spawned friendships for me, too. Several years ago, a neighbor down the road – in his 80’s at the time – had a load of rounds dumped in his driveway, awaiting splitting. I had a full woodshed, and I was still itching to split more wood, so I asked him if he needed his wood split to keep me in a favorite exercise. He said “Mark, I can’t believe you just asked that. I recently had my shoulder repaired. When the doctor said what are you going to do now that your shoulder is repaired and rehabed, I said split fire wood! The doctor replied that you can never split wood with that shoulder again.” The surgery may have made his shoulder better, but the shoulder could not withstand wood splitting. So, now I had more firewood splitting to look forward to. Splitting is by far my favorite part. Bucking up rounds to split and stacking the split wood are just necessary evils to allow me to do the splitting. So when my neighbor said – “all I want you to do is to split the wood – I’ll stack it”, well that just made the job all the better for both of us. It would usually take me 3 or 4 sessions of splitting to finish all of his rounds, then I’d be done til the next year.
Then, one year I saw the rounds and told my neighbor I’d be down to split, and forgot about it for a few days. Next thing I know I see him down there splitting wood! What are you doing, I asked? You know you’re not supposed to split wood with your repaired shoulder. “I figured out how to split one handed with my other arm!” he said. And I totally got it! I left him to his devices. Now he uses a wood splitter, and still putting up his own firewood. I see him at the pool now that I’ve started swimming over the past year, and he’s sort of my model of how to take yourself into your 90’s and still get after it.
We’re in a real doozy of a cold snap in Juneau. The coldest for the longest period I can remember. There’s not many things as satisfying as sitting next to your wood stove with the fan on top going full speed and lots of dry firewood next to it, at the ready when the stove runs low. When I come in from the cold at 0 degrees with the wind blowing and that blast of heat hits me when as I walk in the door, it’s a good feeling. I’ve often wondered how I’d fare if I had to live in a warm climate or I was unable to get in firewood the part of the year when I’m not hunting or fishing or trapping or berry picking or putting up kelp or sea asparagus or smoking and canning stuff. Hopefully, I won’t get to find out.
