Of wood - the art of stacking wood - column

National Review, Jan 27, 1984 by William F. Rickenbacker

IT IS SEVEN steps from tree to hearth: select, fell, trim, cut, split, stack, build. Each step invites what Hugh Kenner once called "the full critical act"--knowledge, comparison, love. There will be room for only the first few words on only one of these steps. Today it is Stacking. I may get around to the others, later; or I may not.

The way a man stacks wood tells you a lot about him. Some men just dump the logs on the ground every which way and burn them when they need them. Some make a stab at a proper stack but use an ignoble stratagem: They find a couple of trees 15 or twenty feet apart and use them as you'd use bookends for a bunch of books that want to come tumbling down. It works, but I think it scars the living tree, and it certainly advertises the woodman's satisfaction with a half-measure. Your hard-core wood stacker creates his stack. I'm hardcore.

Probably born that way, but family and schooling took the bent twig and petrified it. My parents had no patience with a job ill done; and Captain Eddie, the child of German-speaking immigrants, had the classic German pride in craftsmanship. Faced with a job half botched, a tool not stored in its place, a shop floor not swept, he would almost week with rage: "Dammit, do it right! Dammit, do it right!" Later, a son of his might find the Biblical equivalent: Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might. There is a point you reach when a simple chore done with loving thoroughness becomes an act of beauty. Thoreau at Walden stacked his wood before his window that he might gaze upon it: "Every man," he said, "looks at his wood pile with a kind of affection."

You don't just stack wood to raise it off the ground, so you can have more lawn to mow. You have some serious business in mind. The first goal is to air the wood, to let it dry for a year or two. So you get down some long saplings along the ground like railroad tracks, far enough apart to give a wide stance to your average log; the saplings are expendable and will rot in a year or two, but meanwhile will keep your firewood off the damp earth. You set the saplings east-west so the stack gets maximum sunlight in the winter. You keep your eye peeled for good half-moon and quarter-moon split logs; these you will use for the structure at the ends of the stack, to keep the stack from tumbling down. You lay one big piece across the ends of the saplings and lay two good flat quarter-moons athwart it, with their other ends (the ends buried in the stack) angled sharply down. The spaces in between these structural members you can fill with smaller pieces, kindling, work gloves, old issues of the Sunday Times, whatever. Two years later you will find that the Times doesn't last but has been replaced by the sloughed skins of garden snakes. There is a lesson here for all of us, which each of us may determine for himself. Or, as Brigid says, "Let every man's pig root."

You now have a stack that won't fall, and your next consideration is to look to the proper airing of the wood. So don't put all the pieces of the same size together in one part of the stack. Mix 'em up for better air flow. And remember to lay them on the stack bark side up; bark side down, they catch water and hold it between bark and alburnum, and there's hell to pay for that kind of bungling, I tell you. Remember, too, how the wood came to be cut and split: tree by tree. So you're probably working off a pile of jackstraws with all maple here, all pine there, all oak beyond. That makes for bad fires in the hearth, for the best fires are like the best salads, a bouquet of the different offerings of the garden. Here in New England, too, we have to watch the pine. We have a lot of it, and we shouldn't have more than one-third of our fire made of pine at any one time, for if you exceed that mark you'll build up a bodacious load of creosote in your chimbley, and if you don't mend your ways your chimbley will sooner or later catch fire, usually on New Year's Eve, whereupon your house looks like an exploding cannon, and can be heard for miles.

SO YOU PICK and choose from the jackstraws--hoping to have a woodstack so homogenized that you can send even someone so stupid as a college senior out there and ask him to bring in a load of wood in the dead of night and he'll come back with just the right assortment so the house don't burn down. That's a subjunctive, not a colloquialism. I toss in a subjunctive here and there. Sorta makes the stacking go swifter. And that ain't a subjunctive.

Not in the stack, but in some special hiding place, you save the glittering and aromatic miracles, your apple, your cherry, your Roman-candle birch, your splendid cedar. Exactly how to place them on the fire, and when, is properly the discourse of Step Seven; suffice to say, here, that you must treasure them up, and know how to get at them when you want them.

We burn about four cords a year, much of it in the cast-iron stove that provides the only heat in my office, the rest for pleasure and coziness in the den, or for major celebrations in the salon and dining room, or sometimes for comfort in the little fireplaces in the bedrooms when one or another must rest for a day. We have eight fireplaces to feed. In the early days your average farmer burned twenty cords to keep warm; and the minister, and other wealthy folk, burned forty. The first villages were set in Indian clearings and so were far from the woodlot; Plymouth men went an eighth of a mile to collect their cords of wood. It was a wintertime chore then as now; with oxcarts hauling inland, and small craft hauling wood along the shore. In 1726, year of great snow, hundreds of sledges daily slid into Boston loaded with cordwood; normally Boston warmed itself with wood shipped down the coast from New Hampshire.