There’s something about cutting wood that warms the soul.
Here I am, chainsaw in hand, walking across the field at 6 a.m. or so, heading for the woodlot. In the distance a red pick-up truck, wood splitter loaded in the back, goes up the road and the two guys in the front seat wave that long, slow wave of acknowledgment, like we are all in this together and good luck with your day.
Cutting wood isn’t exactly fun, but there is a certain feeling about it that sends you into another world.
You’re outside in the fresh air, you are working, albeit slogging around in the mud more often than not this time of year, and the product of your work is immediate and real: piles of firewood either thrown in a heap or stacked neatly in rows for further use.
This is not long term reinforcement, although that will come when the thermometer drops and the winds begin to howl and you reach out to throw another chunk of maple in the stove.
It is not pushing papers or waiting for stocks to rise or for the suggestions or changes you have made to take place. You cut, stack and move on, looking behind you occasionally to admire your handiwork and wipe the sweat from your brow, maybe take a break by sitting down on a stump for a minute or two.
There is also the feeling of a very real connection to nature. When the roar of the saw is silent, birds are singing and the rush of spring water in the streams can be heard.
Geese fly overhead, a duck quacks as it emerges from the swamp being hotly pursued by a drake in earnest. In a huge oak a squirrel is giving the world a piece of his mind, just in case. It’s spring all right.
Deer droppings are everywhere and I even discover a small tuft of deer hair scraped or pulled from its former owner, perhaps a buck scraping his side or a big doe who has been nipped by that same buck.
The tips of branches of a large maple dropped last fall have been all chomped off, no doubt having provided some sustenance for one or several of the herd at one time this past winter.
When I went off to college, I didn’t miss the cutting, the splitting, the stacking and the feeding of the monster furnace which lived in our cellar.
The furnace door was like a huge black mouth which devoured the efforts of our labor on a daily basis. No matter how much we threw in, it wanted more, waiting there at the bottom of the cellar stairs for our return.
Though the cast iron monolith seemed to fill the cellar, that was nothing compared to the amount of heat it produced upstairs.
My father was particularly adept at making the grate in the living room glow so hotly that we had to be careful stepping on it at times.
On any given sub-zero morning, we would roll out from beneath the yard deep layer of comforters, quilts and blankets our mother had heaped on us, slip into jeans and sweaters as fast as possible (I think I still hold the record for that feat), then hotfoot it to the furnace grate downstairs, where we could enjoy the heat flowing in waves from below.
Naturally, the trick was not to stay too long, lest the rivets in those same jeans suddenly begin to glow with heat and the denim become so warm that you feared touching parts of your legs to it at all until it cooled down.
When I first moved out after college, I thought how wonderful it would be to fill my new abode with heat simply by turning a dial, and it was, for a while.
But I also found that heat registers did not provide the kind of warmth needed after a day of ice fishing or skating or even cleaning snow off cars and getting them started in the dead of winter. There was no place to dry and warm mittens and boots. No place where you could hold your frozen fingers for an immediate thaw. No place to leave a kettle boiling with that sound of steam issuing forth, no furnace or stove to fill the air with that kind of special heat smell that only comes from wood burning.
I put in a wood stove.
Since then, there has always been a wood stove in the house, which has come in pretty handy at times, especially when the power has gone out.
Thus, wood cutting prevails. I interviewed one of the local Yankees at one point, a man in his 80s who was still cutting and stacking about five cords of firewood each year on his farm.
“Why?” I asked. “Why not?” He replied. He got his exercise, accomplished something in the process and provided heat for the winter at a reduced cost.
I assumed he practiced the usual farmer ritual of confining himself to the kitchen and a couple of adjacent rooms for the winter, since stoves were the only source of heat in the house.
Yes, he said, he did. When winter came, the upstairs rooms were shut off, as well as most of the downstairs rooms, leaving him and his wife to about four rooms, including a bathroom off the kitchen.
That was it, but those rooms were “plenty warm” for the duration of the winter season. When spring came, the doors and windows opened up and like a flower, the house began to bloom once more.
You could measure the winter by the amount of wood he cut, split and stacked each year.
But that is the way it is with wood cutting.
The above is an excerpt from the book Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sanity… by Dick Martin, a Glocester resident, former Burrillville High School teacher and contributor for NRI NOW.
Martin can be contacted at [email protected].
