Wood Heat

Here's an essay I wrote about 10 years ago, for the publication The Post-Careerist, which no longer exists. I'm posting it here because a post on the Audio Asylum reminded me of it, and I wanted to be able to link to it.

April 14, 2000

Wood Heat

My son was born in late December, 1997. When I went home to get the house ready for his arrival in early January the temperature outside was three degrees Fahrenheit, and the temperature inside the house was forty-three degrees.

When I went inside that day I panicked a little. It was freezing in there. I didn't want to take off my minus-twenty-rated down parka. How could I bring my new little boy (seven pounds, fourteen ounces) into that frigid house? Just for a minute I thought about getting a hotel room.

Then I wadded up some old newspaper and put it in the wood stove, added a few sticks of softwood kindling and a couple of small, dry chunks of birch and oak, and lit a match. The hardwood was well aged, the chimney drafted well, and the fire caught right up. by the time I put my groceries away, straightened up a bit, and vacuumed the floor, the temperature was at fifty-eight and climbing steadily. I added more wood before I left for the hospital, and when we brought my son inside and put him in his crib the house was cozy and warm.

We don't have central heat. There's a small but effective direct-vented space heater in the family room, and another one upstairs (to keep things from freezing when we leave for a few days), but most of our heat is provided by a large wood stove, which sits in the middle of the living room.

There are times when I'd kill for central heat, like when I get home at the end of the day and I've got to haul firewood into the house. Or when it's two a.m. and zero out and I admit to myself that those few small embers are not going to keep the house warm until morning, and I have to trek outside to the woodpile. (I did it once in my underwear at minus five. We live in the country with no neighbors to call the police, but I doubt I'll do it again.) When I haul wood into the living room I always leave a trail of bark and dirt that has to be cleaned up; I don't even want to talk about the mess cleaning out the ashes makes. On the other hand, we've got a broom and a really good vacuum cleaner, and now that I've got the routine down it isn't so bad.

We keep a wood rack in the family room. It holds about a sixth of a cord of wood, and needs to be refilled about once a week in the spring and fall, twice a week midwinter. It only takes twenty minutes to fill it up if I work hard, a dozen or so trips to the woodpile, but often when I get home after work in the afternoon I just don't want to do it.

An interesting thing happens when I do this chore after a long, stressful day. When I start, I'm watching the clock. I'm counting sticks of wood, counting trips to the house. At a certain point I lose track: was that the fifth load or the sixth? Not that it matters, it's just a nervous habit. What's interesting is that when I start losing the count it isn't because I'm daydreaming. I'm not brooding about this little problem or that. I lose myself in the work, not in my thoughts. When I'm done I always feel better than when I started. The rest of my day goes better. I'm more relaxed, more engaged.

There are other advantages to wood heat. It's good to have a source of heat in the middle of the room, a place to gravitate towards when you come in from outside to warm your hands, to pull up a chair, pull off your boots, put up your feet, and stare at the fire. I never met anybody (except a cat) that huddled up to a ventilation duct. It's funny that they call it "central heat" when its defining characteristic is that it's not central - it's dispersed. A wood stove really is central.

There's a bar near my home, in my favorite small city in the world, Portland, Maine. It's called Gritty McDuff's. They brew their own beer there. I don't go there much because I'm not a big beer drinker and I live a ways outside of town. But whenever I walk by it I notice something interesting: many tables are empty but the bar is crowded with people, three or four deep. People gravitate to the bar, the central point, especially when it's cold outside. The bar, like my wood stove, brings people together.

Less than a week after we brought our new son home, in those first days of 1998, the region was hit with an ice storm the likes of which hadn't been seen for a hundred years or so. My son was one week old. We sat in the living room and listened to the trees falling in the forest - on average, one tree every minute at the peak. It was like a war zone. Nearby, television, radio, and cell phone towers crumpled under the weight of accumulated ice. The pole at the end of our driveway collapsed, taking the neighborhood transformer with it. We were without power for two weeks. To our surprise, our phones still worked, so we called our friends in town, who lived in modern houses with "central" heat. They were huddled in their bedrooms under down, eating tuna fish and Vienna sausages. We made big pots of soup on the wood stove - we even baked bread. We were cozy, warm, and happy. When my son got hungry and woke in the night I got up and stoked the fire, added some wood, lit a few candles and oil lamps. My wife got the baby out of the crib and took him to the sofa. I helped them get settled in and we sat on the sofa as my wife nursed our baby back to sleep.

That would be a great place to end this article, but I can't do it because it's not finished yet. I have to be clear about what I'm saying. I'm no survivalist. I don't think you should get a wood stove so that you'll stay warm during the next big ice storm, or whatever public-service disaster awaits. We got through Y2K, without a hitch. I'm not saying you should get a wood stove at all - that's up to you. What I'm getting at is that sometimes things that seem like a lot of trouble, that seem like a nuisance or a complication, are really some of the very best things. I read an interview the other day with Jerry Yang, one of the guys who started Yahoo. It laid out a picture of the future that I didn't much care for. The interviewer, a web-zine called Context, asked:

I can imagine that when my six-year-old becomes a teenager, I’m going to have very different conversations with her than I had with my parents when I was that age. I’ll say things such as, Shannon, how many times do I have to tell you that when you finish a box of cereal you have to debit the pantry? How else will our home network know to order more?

Yang's answer isn't important. What's important is the Jetson's-like world the question implies. I'm no luddite. Heck, I love technology. I spend hours every day parked in front of a computer, and for the most part I enjoy it. I'm just saying that sometimes it's hard to figure out what the best part of your life really is. Beyond the obvious things like friends and family, it isn't always easy to know. If people eliminate all the inconvenient, bothersome stuff from their lives, they might end up with no life left, and that wouldn't be a good thing.