TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/012389/01238900.000

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 109 lines

ESSAY, Page 72

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.