There are few things in this world more satisfying than making firewood. Well, there’s the Cubs missing the playoffs. And if Donald Trump loses the next election, yeah, that would be better.
But this time of year I could make firewood without end. I’m like the guy described in Jim Harrison’s novel True North, set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where my wife and I have a cabin.
Harrison wrote: "If I hid in the woods it was because the woods fit my character. The U.P. was a virtual hotbed of cranky hermits to whom the public culture was unacceptable and unendurable. I had met one in my wanderings who had cut and stacked three hundred cords of wood. He was at least fifteen years ahead on the heat supply for his shack, somewhat like a nuthatch who stores up more than a dozen times its required food supply for each year. ‘I like to split wood,’ he said."
I read that a few years ago and thought I had found my calling: cranky north woods hermit. Guy who splits wood.
So, this last weekend was heaven. Sunny and seasonably chilly in the U.P., I went up there all by myself to do pretty much nothing but lay in the winter’s supply of firewood. Contractors had cut down some big maple trees on our property to make way for a garage and they had neatly stacked the big rounds already cut into pieces about two feet in length. There was a long, stout wall of them.
The only unfortunate part about that was that I didn’t have an excuse to use my chainsaw. The cutting had been done for me. But I did get to use a hydraulic log splitter, borrowed from one of our neighbors. Picture an I-beam laid flat with a maul on one end attached to a telescoping hydraulic arm. You put a log on the I-beam, snuggle it up against a metal plate at one end and pull a lever, which starts the maul slowly pushing into the log and splitting it. For a piece that comes from the trunk of an old tree you might have to do that a half dozen times to get pieces the right size for your fireplace.
I need to stop right here and note that for some this is heresy. My fellow Isthmus contributor Bill Lueders, for example, has a sweet piece of land in the Driftless and he eschews the automatic splitter.
“I mainly use a maul to split wood, although I do sometimes use an axe for smaller pieces, turning them to kindling,” Lueders wrote me. “My neighbors have offered to let me use their gas log-splitter, but I have no desire to do that. Splitting wood is one of my favorite activities. It's a big part of why I own land. I split my first log in my thirties, and ended up getting a home wood stove and collecting wood wherever I could find it. Over time, I yearned to own a parcel of land to make this easier, which it has done.”
In other words, Bill seems to have purchased land mostly so that he can split wood on it. I know people who have purchased land to grow organic vegetables, or to hunt, or they buy land on a lake to fish or to just appreciate the view. Bill is the only person I know who owns land for the express purpose of making firewood, but I can relate. It’s a worthy endeavor.
Part of it is the smell. As recently cut maple breaks apart it gives off a faint sweet scent that anticipates the smoke that will come out of the fireplace chimney on a cold January night.
And then there’s the good feeling that comes with knowing that you’re storing something away that will keep you and yours cozy on those bitter winter evenings. I imagine squirrels feel the same way about burying nuts. Very primitive. Very elemental.
Also, a big part of it is the aesthetics of the stacking. Basically, you stack wood rather than just leave it in a big pile because you want the air to circulate through the stack and dry it out. If you can get the stack out of the shade and facing south, so that it bakes in as much sun as possible, that’s even better.
This is no small matter to Norwegians. A few years ago a Norwegian writer named Lars Mytting wrote a book titled Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way. It stayed on the Norwegian bestseller list for over a year.
Then an eight-hour television program based on the book (that’s right, eight solid hours on firewood) riveted a million viewers — about 20 percent of the Norwegian population. The program sparked bitter controversy with the nation evenly split (bad pun, sorry) over those who believe in stacking their wood bark side up and those who subscribe to the bark down theory.
For the record I’m with the bark up crowd. My view is that this will keep your wood drier when it rains or snows as the bark is more resilient to moisture from above. You can direct your vitriolic disagreements in the comment section below.
But regardless of your views on the bark up or down controversy, there is something soothing about looking at a neatly stacked cord of wood catching the low angle of a late fall afternoon sun. I spent a lot of time just looking at my work as Picasso might have looked at a finished painting. I wonder if Pablo ever said to himself, in moments like that, “God, I’m good.” I know I did.
