Theory

I woke up to rain Thursday morning. Julie was already up, and she had already reached the Genius level on the New York Times’s Spelling Bee.

It had rained Tuesday, too, putting the Ross Fork fire on the back burner, as it were. I drove to the Stanley Ranger Station and purchased tickets for five cords of firewood, officially acknowledging the arrival of firewood season, exclusive of the weather. It cost me 31 dollars, which is not a bad price for being able to think you’ll have a warm woodstove all winter. I put the tickets and firewood map in the pickup.

Wednesday, I had filled the chainsaws with gas and oil, sharpened them and tensioned their chains. I had fired them up to make sure their fuel lines hadn’t clogged or rotted away over the summer and had put sharp edges on the axes and shovels with the grinder.

Theoretically, firewood cutting is easier when your tools are sharp and your chainsaw works. But at preliminary stages, the sharp edges and tight chains and proof-of-concept chainsaw starts are mostly boosters of morale.

I was hoping for even more rain, even though it’s dangerous to cut firewood that is wet, slick, and heavier than it’s been all summer. It’s dangerous to step on wet deadfall. Dead limbs get rubbery instead of snapping off at the base when you hit them with the axe. If it rains enough to soak through your sweatshirt and turtleneck, it’s best to let your woodpile remain a concept. We could do that if we had to. It just wouldn’t be a warm house in January.

 

Practice

After this fire season, I hope it doesn’t quit raining until it snows, and then I hope it snows enough to quench every last bit of the Ross Fork fire that’s lurking in the roots of burned-out stumps.

A fire in the woodstove won’t be an urgent matter until November, although Julie and I like to have all our firewood stacked and split by October. It’s possible. It doesn’t take long to get in a winter’s worth of wood once you stop thinking about it and start doing it, whether you have to work in the rain or not.

If it’s rained, we can overload the pickup with four-foot lengths of wood in an afternoon, drive it home and unload it. We dump it next to the driveway, where I cut each 4-footer into three 16-inch blocks, and split anything too big to fit in the stove. Julie wheelbarrows it to the woodpile where it can dry out between now and the first snow. Cutting, splitting, and stacking a full pickup load—almost a ton if it’s wet—requires an occasional stop to rest.

We’ll burn maybe three tons of wood by May. A ton of wood, once burned, will have created 1.8 tons of CO2. Our woodstove has a catalytic converter, which makes it more efficient and cuts down on smoke. But we’re still adding 5.4 tons of CO2 to the air. It would be something to feel guilty about in these days of 420 ppm at the Mauna Loa observatory, were it not for the sheer scale of the wood burning going on in national forests in the American West these days.

I don’t know how many gigajoules of energy the Ross Fork fire put into the atmosphere, but I do know that each burned acre produced far more than 5.4 tons of CO2 from the fuel it contained.

Until we get rooftop solar augmented by a bulb hydro powerplant in the river behind the house, we’ll heating with wood. If the choice is between guilt and warmth or a satisfied self-righteousness and wearing a sleeping bag all day, we’ll choose warmth. Satisfied self-righteousness is no way to get through life anyway, no matter the season. It puts people off, unless they’re more self-righteous than you, in which case they’ll put you off.

We do regret losing out on enough firewood for ten thousand winters, and the exercise that goes with it.

 

Observation

On Friday we went to Hailey for grocery shopping and lunch. It’s astonishing to be able to write that statement in these days of pandemic and fire-closed roads and hunkering down before the onslaught of tourists, but we simply got in the car and drove up and over Galena, ready for whatever the big city had to offer. It seemed like a jailbreak until we got to Dang’s Thai Cuisine. Then it seemed like a trip to Bangkok, country music and all.

We encountered heavy fog on our way, and when we got to the burned area we couldn’t see much, except that every side road in the burn area was closed. The smell of a million wet campfires penetrated the car.

When we drove into bright sunshine a mile from the bottom of the summit, it was a shock. We could see the burned upper slopes of Abe’s Chair. Some of the slopes within the fire boundary were still green, which was good news. The bad news was that other slopes had burned down to mineral soil.

On our way back, we stopped for a moment at the overlook. The fire had burned less than we thought, leaving a classic mosaic of burned and unburned areas. Here and there among the green trees, a column of smoke rose into the blue sky.

We could see how close Smiley Creek had come to burning. A few hours more of wind, and the town would have been gone. The north side of Galena Summit would have burned, and maybe the south side as well.

Our summer had been a wet one until mid-July, when abnormal heat and drought had hit hard. In a matter of six weeks, forests that wouldn’t burn had become forests that would burn uncontrollably once they got going. Eight hundred firefighters, accompanied by fire engines, scooper planes and helicopters, had attacked the fire. It had taken all that and two rainstorms to control it. Without the rainstorms, and with the addition of one more windy dry cold front, we’d still be looking at pyrocumulus clouds every afternoon, wondering how far the fire would go by nightfall.

 

Proof of Concept I

Saturday Julie and I put on our work clothes and loaded the tools and chainsaw in the pickup and followed the SNRA map to an area where it is legal to cut. Firewood cutting is limited to a small area, compared to the size of the SNRA, and we had to drive some distance to find dead trees. There’s plenty closer, but that’s not where we can go. The Forest Service is adamant that the map is the territory, and since they’ll be managing firewood in our neighborhood at least until Trump is back in the Oval Office, we go where they tell us to.

(I should note that I don’t want Trump back in the Oval Office. But plenty of the public are so angered by Forest Service policies that they will vote for him even if it means the end of the country. I’m hoping there’s not so many of them they’ll swing the election.)

We found a spot with some dead standing trees and a bunch of deadfall, and I started cutting just as a giant thundercloud came over the peaks. It started raining. Then it started hailing. Then lightning flashed and thunder—loud thunder—followed. We waited out the storm in the truck, then got back to work.

When you’re cutting a bunch of eight-inch logs into four-foot lengths, it doesn’t take long to get a load. The pickup was sitting low on its rear springs by the time we left, and the steering was a little light for comfort. We took it very slow getting to the highway, and then went 45 mph all the way home, pulling off when we could to let people pass. The rear tires were warm when we stopped, which isn’t a good sign, but we made it. After we unloaded it, we decided not to load it so heavy next time.

 

Proof of Concept II

On Sunday we awoke to sunshine and fog, which can be a nice combination. Julie left to play pickleball in Stanley. I opened the garage door and put the chainsaw in a sunny spot on the concrete, and sharpened the chain again. Then I attacked the giant pile of wood in the driveway.

Theoretically, you can put two logs on the ground and pile five logs, in a three-two-one pyramid, on top of them. Then you mark the top log at sixteen and thirty-two inches, and saw down through the pile at the sixteen-inch mark until the bottom logs start to sag. Then you saw down at the thirty-two inch mark, but this time you cut all the way through. You go back to the three logs that still need to be cut all the way through and gently touch them with the saw. They fall apart into blocks. Firewood.

When you actually try this, the logs go all over. The pyramid collapses and you have to wedge it in place. Logs go askew and you cut them at wonky angles. Logs aren’t all the same size and they refuse to stay piled on each other. Your saw gets bound between blocks. The same remedy never works twice. The saw gets heavier and heavier, and the big blocks get harder and harder to split.

By the time Julie got home, I had stacked four wheelbarrow loads in the woodpile. We had lunch. Julie put on her work clothes and grabbed the wheelbarrow. I cut and she hauled and stacked until, suddenly, three hours later, we were tired but done. It started raining again.

I take things apart. Julie puts them back together in new ways.

I had created a pile of sawdust. Julie had created a beautiful, stable woodpile, which sounds simple but isn’t. There’s an art to it, and she’s a woodpile artist.

 

Proof of Concept III

We celebrated by going out to dinner and had a nice conversation about anything but firewood. We were both tired, but it had all gone well. We didn’t need to talk about it. We had demonstrated, at least once, that we could get through the winter without freezing, and a contented discussion about more mundane matters seemed to be an appropriate way to celebrate.

The crucial test results will be in by May, when we’ll still be alive or not. That’s the real proof-of-concept we’re working on, and like the good empiricists we are, we don’t make any assumptions about the results until we get them.