Time To Split

By John Skow

There was a time in the mid-'70s when wood-stove bores were a serious environmental hazard at parties, the way bullfight bores had been three decades before, sports-car bores were a bit after that and college-tuition bores are now. Some self-pleased gasbag was always bombinating lengthily about his new airtight Jotul 118 or Vermont Castings Defiant or Fisher Papa Bear. (Yes, suburban trendies, from South Carolina to north of Boston, would actually buy, and get all gooey over, a 200-lb. hunk of welded steel that some marketing genius had called a Papa Bear.) This ecological wonder, the braggart would assure other wood burners waiting their turn to boast, would oxidize for 18 hours on a couple of pieces of wet popple. The speaker, newly emigrated to New Hampshire from the burbs of Westchester County, N.Y., was always careful to pronounce poplar "popple" to distinguish himself from flatlanders.

That, as seems to be said more and more these days, was then. I believe that I am now the only wood-stove bore still active on my mile of dirt road. My neighbors have concluded that full-time wood heating is dirty, dangerous (chain saws are worse tempered than alligators), economically foolish, a champion time waster and brutishly hard work. In this they are correct.

It is no longer true, alas, that the wood-stove bore can warm himself twice, once by bragging about the money he is saving and again by preening at the perfection of his environmental posture. Heating oil, for the moment, costs less per gallon than bottled no-lead spring water. Never mind economy, however. There are congested localities such as Aspen, Colo., and Missoula, Mont., where wood burning is immoral, toxically wasteful and severely curtailed. The sweet-smelling, picturesque blue-gray smoke rising from Grandma's condo on a crisp December morning simply loads the air with too much additional junk.

Thus the wood-stove bore is without defenses, except to say that his obsession is unlikely to melt down New England and that it adds no net CO2 to the atmospheric greenhouse (a fallen tree gives off the same amount of carbon and oxygen whether it rots or burns, and a new tree that spreads in its place takes CO2 out of the air as it grows).

Wood burning in the late '80s is no more sensible or righteous than mountain climbing. There was an old gent in my town, died a couple of years back, who split and stacked huge piles of wood well past his 80th birthday. He had plenty of money and an unused oil furnace, but wood splitting felt right to him, made sense. For a time, during the trendy days of wood stoves, he was a hero. After wood stoves lost their vogue and he continued to split firewood, he was thought mildly eccentric. Then he died.

I remind myself of the old man. Myself and I, as it happens, are having a dialogue, somewhat testy, thoroughly familiar. It is 7:35 on a chilly morning in late fall, and I am swinging an 8-lb. splitting maul, breaking up oak and birch trunks. Myself is feeling sorry for himself. Our back is stiff from yesterday's firewood fun. Our right wrist, broken years ago in a skiing accident, signals that it is time to stop. Middle-aged men drag themselves through life like wounded bears, it occurs to me.

"You bet they do," says myself, who has grown bear-shaped, strangely top- heavy, after years of splitting and heaving wood. "Time for coffee. Time for sticky buns." "Yeah, yeah, in a while," I tell myself. We have five cords of dry firewood, or a bit more, stored under the deck of our house. We need eight to be sure of getting through the mid-May snowstorms without burning the guest-room furniture. Myself and I, working together for the moment, stand an 80-lb., 2-ft. section of a red-oak log on end. A thin, spidery crack traces through the heartwood, then out through 80 or 90 years of growth rings to the ridged, slightly greenish bark. That is my target. I drive my maul downward as hard as I can swing. Sometimes the maul head bounces, as if the wood were hard rubber. Get the wedge then; get two or three, in fact. This time the oak cracks: pock! My eyes blur briefly from the effort. One more swing, and the section of oak trunk falls into two halves, wet as rain -- oak is like that -- two new red surfaces no one has ever seen before.

Who cares? Nobody.

I do. I split the halves into sticks of firewood, throw the sticks to the top of a pile as big as my pickup truck and lean on my maul handle, winded. The mail deliverer arrives in her Volkswagen as I rest. My dog, as she does every day, brings the mailwoman a gift, a stick of firewood stolen from my pile. The dog is a principle of disorder; she has distributed my winter fuel over several acres of pasture. Such disorder, like wood splitting, is obsolete. More city people move into the country and pass more dog-leash laws. Young couples look for houses and apartments, even in what used to be farm country, and find nothing but ads that say NO PETS. In a few years, tour buses will stop in front of my house. Here is a geezer splitting wood, the guide will say. Here is a dog.

My mind, wandering, turns to the mail. Yesterday a catalog arrived from a New Age clothing house, offering "crystal-powered pants." This was even more interesting than the smoldering catalog from Victoria's Secret, offering sullen young women in lingerie. The pants, so I am assured, have a small, perfect crystal sewn into the back seam to energize the wearer. Right, I think; I'll take a dozen sullen young women and a pair of pants, large, with crystal.

All right, I'm stalling. Our back aches. The dog, myself and I climb into the four-wheel-drive truck and head toward the sticky-bun store. Public radio plays Mozart out of the left-door speaker. The dog barks heroically out of the right window at a German shepherd. Back home, an aluminum-siding salesman is calling my number but getting the answering machine. All, or nearly all, is right with the world.