Chapter 1

Discovering Tranquility

We are all tree-huggers. The reasons are not just sentimental or even environmental in the modern sense. We have relied on trees for food and shelter since way before we decided, without much evidence, that we were “Homo sapiens.” Our primate predecessors took to the trees for safe haven, and so do we, even today. Russ, a friend who farms not far from me, likes to tell how he escaped an angry bull by climbing a tree in his pasture. Ever since then he has referred to that arboreal refuge as the Tree of Life.

The most endearing example of our love of trees is Central Park in New York City. Over the years all sorts of schemes by what I call privateers have been brought to bear to “develop” parts of Central Park. Rarely has that ever succeeded, even when huge amounts of money and power were brought into play. The public will not be swayed, will not allow encroachments into its lovely forest in the city. Not even the sacred commandments of our mightiest religion, capitalism, have swayed the people. Central Park may not be the most “economic” use for that land. Too bad. Go practice your money religion somewhere else and leave the park alone.

When I was barely old enough to be called by that misnomer, Homo sapiens, we depended on trees even more than our primate ancestors did. Trees kept us from freezing to death. We cut firewood in the winter, and in other seasons, when the work of planting and harvesting slacked off, we split the log chunks into kindling and cut up waste wood—rotted-off fence posts, old boards, rafters and siding from deteriorating or torn-down barns and sheds, fallen tree branches—anything that would burn. We heated with wood because we were too poor to buy more extravagant fuels. We could have afforded lump coal, I suppose, but like wood, that would still have required manually feeding the fire day and night. If we had to do that anyway, might as well burn something that did not require out-of-pocket cash.

I was born into the wood culture and wood fuel economy at the tail end of it. Dad had worked out a deal with the neighbor who owned the woodlot adjacent to our land, allowing him to cut wood “on the half”; that is, half of what he cut went to the landowner. (Later on, Dad would buy the woodlot.) I had to go to school for the first time that year, so I know it was 1937, and I was irritated because I missed out on the tree felling. My sister, a year younger, gloated because, not yet in school, she could take my place as Dad’s right-hand helper in the woods. I suppose if either of us had been old enough to do much work, we would have preferred school, but I doubt it. So when Dad hauled a load of log chunks or split firewood to the cellar with the wagon and a team of horses, she got to ride along while I sat fidgeting in school. We had no idea that finer folks, who burned coal, gas, or oil, thought we were poor.

Burning wood because we were poor meant that we were really rich in real values. We stayed just as warm as the wealthiest oil baron while the woodland provided many other things that barons can only pine for (damn those puns). The woodlot gave us morel mushrooms that we loved to hunt; maple sugar and syrup; ginseng (the poor man’s Viagra?); fried squirrel and stewed rabbit (hasenpfeffer); sassafras tea and sassafras root beer; pawpaw custard, if you could stand it; persimmon cider; hickory nut cookies and black walnut cake; raspberry shortcake, blackberry cobbler, and elderberry pie. I could go on and on.

The woodland also provided all kinds of opportunity for play: hunting and trapping sports, hockey sticks, homemade bows and arrows, baseball bats (my cousin Virgil turned one on his lathe for his son), gunstocks (my brother would later make excellent ones), walking sticks, and wild grapevine swing sets. One of my very earliest memories of happiness in the woods was a day when I was recuperating from a mild concussion; I’d fallen off the sliding board at school. I had been in bed for about a week, reading adventure stories of Indians, pioneers, and Robin Hood. I really adored Robin Hood (still do) and his proficiency with bow and arrow. It was one of those rare warm days that can come in late February, and I was headed for Snider’s Woods to make a homemade bow and arrows for hunting rabbits. The reality of this adventure was not nearly as glorious as my imagination depicted it, but I did find an ash sprout for a bow growing off a tree trunk where Dad had previously cut wood for the furnace, and several other sprouts that were straight enough for arrows. I did not flush any rabbits out of the brush piles to practice my aim on that day, and when I shot my arrows at trees instead, I usually missed. I was only a little disappointed to learn that using a bow and arrow requires consummate skill, first in the making, and then in the shooting. Just the idea that a potent weapon could be made directly from the woods, a weapon the poor could use to get food and to stop the rich from oppressing them, struck me as most appealing. I was already a revolutionary, based purely on instinct plus the influence of Robin Hood. The woodland was my salvation: it could provide hideouts and the means to defend myself.

Still convalescing from the concussion, I grew a little dizzy, so I sat down on the south side of the woods, closed my eyes, and soaked up the sun. Something about the unnatural warmth of that late winter day made me think that I was about to burst into bloom. I can feel that sun to this day, and the surge of radiant joy that I felt. That was the first time I knew my place in life was in the embrace of nature and the tranquility of the woods. That kind of tranquility, rendering me utterly serene, was what I needed in life more than anything else except food. It was a kind of food. Time after time in later days, I would choose this tranquility over money, glory, or office, but it would take me thirty years to claw my way back permanently to my own sanctuary in the woods.

Rather than going to the lumberyard we went to the woods for fence posts, pen and yard gates, hayricks, barn siding, structural lumber, ladders, milking stools, feed troughs, roof shingles, tomato and bean stakes, furniture, shelves, wooden tableware, wagon beds, wagon tongues, truck racks, shop benches, tool handles, cow stanchions, doghouses, corncribs, chicken coops, smokehouses, outhouses, woodsheds, and ready-made hooks to hang everything from hats to horse thieves. If you managed the woods correctly there was, in addition to firewood and lumber, an occasional high-value log good enough to sell for veneer.

Then there were the intangibles, like that sun on the south side of the woods in February, or the song of a wood thrush at twilight in the spring. In summer, the trees provided a shady respite; in winter, a break against the wind. And in all seasons the woods became a sanctuary for meditation as awe-inspiring as any rose-windowed cathedral.

Show me a coal mine that can do all that.

Nor did our wood economy end there. For one thing, while it may not be provable by science, a BTU from a wood-burning stove feels warmer than two BTUs from any other kind of heat this side of hellfire. We also made secondary use of these BTUs to heat water by running the water pipes around inside the furnace firebox. There was always a big kettle of hot water on the kitchen woodstove too. Mom would leaven the cistern water in the tub with a steamy addition from the kettle to take the edge off the cold water. She cooked with wood heat, and, wonder of wonders, the food was just as tasty as any from an electric or gas range.

It was my job, before electricity, to keep the woodbox full of kindling—pieces of dry split wood, no more than two inches thick, that would catch fire quickly in the stove. Mom could feed kindling into the stove very cleverly, controlling the temperature under cooking pots and frying pans almost as accurately as an electric or gas stove would do later. She would refer to a three-stick fire for oatmeal in the morning or a six-stick fire under a slab of beef for supper.

Dad would make kindling with a hatchet, chopping through splits of oak or ash that he set on a tree stump, striking down with the hatchet in his right hand, a thin piece of wood falling off with every stroke, till he had reduced the chunk all to kindling. We had lots of tree stumps around to use for benches and chairs. There was even one on the floor of the barn, which got covered with hay every summer and uncovered every winter. That’s how close our farm was to the primeval forest that went before it. When Grandpa Rall built the barn, he just built it over the big stump, knowing it would rot away in time. No use doing work nature would do for you.

Chopping kindling was easy work, Dad pointed out, if the wood was very straight-grained oak, especially red oak, which split so easily he liked to joke that he could do it with the edge of his hand. He could split off pieces almost as straight and even as sawn wood. He showed me how the “old-timers,” as he called them, could rive shingles off squared chunks of oak wood using the same technique. He did it with his hatchet, setting it on the top end of the wood about an inch in from the edge and driving it down into the wood with the butt of an axe. He could rive off clapboards an inch in thickness from a six-inch-squared chunk that were almost as even and uniform as sawn shingles. “Old-timers had a special tool, a froe, to make shingles,” he told me. “You shingled the roof just the way you do now with bought shingles. You laid them on the roof, row by row going up from the bottom edge of the roof to the peak, lapping the second row over the first and the third over the second and so on to cover the cracks.” Then he stared at me and added: “Good to know this. Might have to do it again some day.” Another pause. “Oak is best, but it has to be free of knots. Shingle oak is the best of all.”

I tried my hand at the job. Splitting kindling was easy. Actually sort of fun. Splitting out six-inch-wide shingles was harder. “It’s easier with a froe,” Dad said. “If I had one I’d show you. The froe is L-shaped, the handle at right angles to the blade. When you drive the blade down into the wood and it doesn’t go through easily, you can twist down on the handle like a lever to pop the shingle loose.” And so I learned some of the art and skill of the old wood culture we were still living in then. I carried the phrase “shingle oak” around in my head for the rest of my life because for reasons I can’t explain, odd notes about trees have always stuck with me.

We were energy-independent but at the time didn’t realize there was value in that fact. The second that Mr. Edison’s disciples raised the cross of electric salvation before our eyes, we left the sawdust trail and embraced it. First came stoker coal, which made possible an automated way to feed the furnace. Actually, first came electricity to run the motor on the stoker. I still wonder if many of us would not have kept on heating with wood if someone had found a way to feed cordwood into a furnace automatically. Then came oil. Then natural gas. Then propane. Electric heat got into the act too. Anything that relieved us of the job of feeding the fire manually was heavenly. Then everyone could go forth and get jobs to pay for the privilege of push-button heat.

Not everyone was happy even then. Rather than pay a lot of money for automatic warmth, some people started going to Florida in winter to escape the cold, which of course cost more than paying for fuel to stay warm at home. An elderly neighbor and friend now passed away, Jerome Frey, used to love to point out to me the weakness in that kind of thinking: “I was never so cold as when I went to Florida one winter and the temperature went below 50 degrees,” he would often say to me. “They aren’t equipped to handle anything under 70 degrees down there.” He never went again.

But that’s not the greatest irony of almighty progress. With all the modern, advanced, high-tech, expensive, automatic, luxurious, gleaming, push-button heat, I was never really warm in winter again until I went back to heating with wood.

I would like to leave it go at that and simply write the rest of this book about the tranquility that I’ve found living in a grove of trees, but there are grimmer reasons why some of us should be thinking about wood these days. There may be no true tranquility without it. When the electric current goes off in the middle of winter, our comfortable, carefree lives turn off with it. We may have to turn to wood for the same reason my father did long ago. In terms of energy today, everyone is poor. No matter how much money we think we have, or rather how much the Federal Reserve prints for every occasion, we are entering an era when there’s simply not going to be enough push-button heat to go around.

Lest that sounds paranoid, consider this. The big power companies, like American Electric Power that serves our area, let it be known recently that they have been looking into burning wood to generate electricity. Some of these power companies own thousands of acres of woodland and, if shortages of other fuels did occur, well, why not consider wood? I doubt that they could do that with enough efficiency to make it pay, and evidently they must have reached that conclusion too, because in most cases they have shelved the idea, for now. But if giant utility companies even considered the possibility of generating electricity with renewable wood, it certainly makes sense for individual homeowners, at least those of us in rural areas, to be thinking about wood for home heating because we can do it quite efficiently if we have a grove of trees, or have friends who do.

I keep thinking about the forest devastation going on in third world countries where the land looks empty and barren because the trees around villages are being stripped away for home fuel. Efforts are only beginning there to bring in high-efficiency stoves that increase tremendously the BTU output per acre of forest. Nor, as far as I can find out, are there ongoing studies, experiments, or actual forest studies in these countries to grow plantations of high BTU fuelwood trees like black locust that can be coppiced every ten years. (More on coppicing in chapter 11.) The people too often are too busy killing each other. Of one thing I am sure, as I will try to demonstrate in a later chapter: the cost of energy from such forests would be far less than producing ethanol from corn.

We are all painfully aware that fuel prices are rising. Electricity, oil, gas, and even coal prices are climbing. What are you paying today to stay warm? What were you paying ten years ago? Twenty? When we moved to our own woodland retreat some forty years ago, our electricity cost us 3.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. Now it has gone as high as 11 cents and everyone knows that’s not the end of it. Oil and gas have risen similarly. If this occurs while our economic wizards assure us that inflation is under control, whatever will happen when it is obvious to everyone that it is not under control and never was? Wood for home heating may not be practical for cities, but out in the countryside it can save money and save oil and gas for areas with more concentrated populations.

Trying to figure precisely how much your own firewood and labor are worth as substitutes for fossil fuels is difficult because, as we shall see, there are so many variables. From my experience, an able-bodied person should be able to turn logs and tree branches into cordwood with a chainsaw and a maul at the rate of one cord in five hours after the log is on the ground. I see figures that say it takes longer than that. At age seventy-nine, I work up a cord’s worth in about eight hours, taking frequent rests. I have a hard time figuring out if my labor is a cost or a profit. Working up firewood is my afternoon recreation on warmish days in late fall, early spring, and winter. I enjoy being out in the woods. I think that these interludes are more effective in gaining peace of mind than $100-an-hour sessions with a psychiatrist and more healthful physically than $50-an-hour sessions at an exercise center. I enjoy even more those occasions when neighbors come by and talk awhile, giving me an excuse to rest even longer.

But I shall pretend to be very correct in the accounting and bookkeeping department. Let us say it takes six cords of wood to heat a moderately sized, well-insulated, three-bedroom house through a northern Ohio winter. Masonry heaters along with sufficient insulation and perhaps a bit of passive solar heat can reduce that amount significantly, as we shall see, but let’s be conservative and say six cords. If you know what your fuel bill is now when you are heating with oil, gas, or electricity, you can easily figure the value of wood heat to replace fossil fuels.

I daresay we are talking about an average home heating cost today of somewhere around $2,500 a winter, to use figures as loosely as the feds do when talking about deficits. If it takes six hours to work up a cord of wood, or thirty-six hours for six cords of wood, your labor is worth $70 an hour. Kind of a nice wage for spending a few peaceful hours in the woods trying to figure out why your friends think you are crazy. If you are old and crusty like me and need a part-time job, you can hardly find a retirement position, except maybe lolling around as a retired general in the Pentagon, that will pay better.

Your chainsaw will cost you about $50 a year over its lifetime if you take care of it. Chainsaw blades will cost maybe another $30 a year unless you are good at sharpening them yourself, in which case about half that. You’ll need a pickup truck, but if you are living in a sanctuary of trees, or contemplating doing so, you surely have one already. Yes, there’s a little gas and oil involved. So okay, you only make $40 an hour. Of course, using horses to haul the wood to the house might lower the costs more. And with horses, you could drag logs out of the woods without cutting truck lanes through the trees.

Another way to compute value is to compare your wood’s BTU output directly with the alternate fuel you now use. A cord of air-dried white oak firewood is equal in heat output to somewhere around 300 gallons of No. 2 fuel oil.

How big a grove of trees do you need to provide this kind of lucrative part-time work indefinitely? That question will be exhaustively addressed later on, but just to get your brain in forward gear, I can assure you from experience that five acres of more or less mature woodland can in some cases supply you with three winter months of heat every year without depleting the annual supply of wood. With ten acres, you will not only get all the firewood you need until death do us part, but logs or lumber to sell or use yourself. So what are you waiting for?

What you are waiting for is the same thing I waited for until I was forty years old, I suppose. It took that long for me to arrange my life so that I could live the way I wanted to live it. (It took me until I was thirty to even understand how I wanted to live.) With a whole lot better planning and insight, I could have moved to the woods at age twenty-five or even sooner, but I was not smart enough to figure things out that early in life. Smart is probably the wrong word. It really doesn’t take a whole lot of brains to find a sanctuary of trees to live it, just awareness that you can do so if you want to badly enough.

I am not suggesting that deforestation is not a serious problem worldwide. Lester Brown, in his Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: Norton, 2008), describes the situation very well. Developing countries have been losing forests at the rate of 13 million hectares a year. But then he goes on to say something quite surprising to many people. “Meanwhile, the industrial world is actually gaining an estimated 5.6 million hectares of forestland each year, principally from abandoned cropland returning to forests on its own and from the spread of commercial forestry plantations” (p. 87). While the world is still losing forestland, it is true only in those parts where wood is the principal or only fuel, and efforts to make growing and burning it more efficiently are not yet in place.

The situation today is best described by that old saying about not being able to see the forest for the trees. There are woodland
possibilities at least in the United States waiting for you almost everywhere that rainfall is sufficient. But because we early on denuded so much of our land of its pristine stands of trees (and have been repenting that ever since), we tend to think that there is a shortage of woodland sites for tree sanctuaries. Not so. In most of the United States, you can’t take fifty steps with your eyes closed and not bump into a tree. We have culturally closed our eyes to that reality. We don’t see little nooks and crannies of one or two acres overgrown with second- or third-growth trees and brush as being excellent opportunities to develop little sanctuaries. (And of course these kinds of tree groves are almost totally overlooked by geographers trying to estimate the amount of forest in this country.) It is not difficult to find bigger groves too, and if you can’t, it is almost as satisfying to plant a grove and watch it grow to become your sanctuary.

We still have a lot of remnant woodland in the United States for at least three reasons. The first is that the forest is very resilient, much more so than human civilization. It is awesome to see those jungles of trees in South and Central America hiding the ruined buildings of resplendent but long-forgotten cities. Trees spread just like weeds, given any chance at all. Many of us think that trees have to be deliberately planted, when in reality we just have to let nature take its course. If you don’t think so, don’t mow under the trees in your yard. Most of our trees in their natural habitat will seed themselves thickly the very first or second year. If we parked the lawn mowers, every yard in the eastern United States would return to forest in twenty years. I’ve watched this happen on abandoned farmsteads (see figure 10 in the color insert). Given about thirty inches of annual rainfall or more, trees will come marching in. Parts of New England and the South are on their third or fourth regrowth of timber. Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire have been cut over at least twice, and today, eighty percent of the land there is still forested.

The second reason there are more trees, not less, than a century ago, is that even here in the Corn Belt, where level farmland is so much more productive than in hilly New England, we are just about at the end of the happy, sappy bulldozer era of turning everything a tractor won’t fall off into giant baseball diamonds for corn. There just isn’t any more land that can be profitably cleared for corn and soybeans. For whatever else that means, the forest remaining still amounts to thousands upon thousands of acres, in ravines, river- and creeksides, steep hillsides, floodplains, and even on the best ground where property owners hold tree groves more sacred than corn. Also trees are growing up between housing tracts on vacant land too difficult to develop, or on land waiting to be developed.

A quick way to grasp what is going on is to study land development in New England in the 1800s and 1900s. There is an excellent map drawing in Eric Sloane’s America (written and illustrated by Eric Sloane and published in 1954), showing a typical landscape in New England in 1800 and another a century later. The 1800 sketch shows a solid patchwork quilt of farms and farmhouses with only a few trees. Every acre at that time of small, horse-worked farms was utilized for farming because, with hand methods, every acre could be so utilized. But a hundred years later, only the more profitable, more easily farmed acres remained in cultivation. The rest of the land was in urban housing or had returned to woodland. This very same kind of development has now gone on in the Midwest. In 1900, all the rural land was committed to farming. Every bit of it. As my neighbor Albert Rall used to boast, the hunting on his farm was very poor because he used every acre for livestock or crops. Now, a hundred years later, significant parts of this landscape are returning to woodland because it is not profitable for today’s kind of farming with its large-scale machinery and very narrow ranges of profit. Small acreages of rougher land near creeks or in ravines was profitable pasture in 1900 but in 2000 is not enough to fence and graze profitably. It is going back to trees. It would go back faster except that many landowners can’t stand to see land go to “brush,” which is the beginning of a new forest, and so they mow and mow and mow these remnants at great expense of time and money. One of my friends was so obsessed with this kind of neatness that he tried to keep every foot of his creekside land in grass and lost his life when his tractor turned over into the creek. Had he left that “brush” alone, it would be woodland today and he would be here to enjoy it.

The land behind or between subdivisions that does not lend itself to more houses is often used by people living nearby as their own little parks. Such land, and there is quite a bit of it, is treasured mainly for the privacy and beauty it affords for the adjacent homes. Its potential for tree crops and food, if managed correctly, has not been realized yet. In many cases the amount and value of wood growing there could be doubled or tripled.

I know one person who did realize the potential. He grew up in a subdivision right next to land of this kind and, remarkably for this day and age, he built a neat log house for his family on some of that land, using the trees right there that had seemingly no commercial value. When I asked him which tree species made the best log cabin logs, he said: “The ones that are handiest to the cabin.” This is the kind of “suburban forest industry” just waiting for other enterprising people to take advantage of.

The third reason the trees are on the increase is what is being called urban farming and urban forestry. If you fly over a residential area of almost any city—and especially any village, even in the Plains, where trees are not particularly natural—you seem to be flying over woodland. There are trees everywhere because people plant them around their homes. We all love trees, even if sometimes they fall on our houses. We go right on planting more. That is good. There are all kinds of equipment and skilled tree cutters now who can handle big trees around houses just fine. The next move, and it is already happening in some progressive communities, is that the residents of a suburban area get organized and draw up a plan and program for forest improvement of their woodland sanctuary. They manage their trees not only as individual lawn ornaments, but as collective forest products.

There is a good reason, other than for home heating, that we should be thinking of bringing more wood back into our daily lives. Plastics have replaced wood for hundreds of uses where wood would be just as practical. We know now that many common plastics are releasing harmful chemicals into the air and into our foods and drinks. The culprit is BPA—bisphenol A. The Plastic Culture that has replaced the older Wood Culture is dangerous to our health, but if we would regain the knowledge about wood lost in that cultural shift, we could easily use wood as a replacement for many plastic products. There must now be a return to our primeval roots, and it is happening. There will come a time when every grade-school kid will again be able to tell a hickory tree from a walnut, a maple from an oak. We will master again the basic skills of making basketry from wood instead of those horrible plastic sacks, making table woodenware, wooden tool handles, wooden machinery parts, and wooden toys. It is not as though the knowledge has been forgotten. There is an army of woodworkers out there ready to respond to an army of consumers. The Longaberger Basket Company in Ohio is a classic example of just how successful using wood to replace plastic can be.

There is one more reason those of us who love tree sanctuaries should treasure our woodlands. Perhaps we don’t want to heat entirely with wood. Perhaps we don’t want to make beautiful turned bowls out of black cherry or baseball bats out of heartwood ash. But let us say it is January and the temperature is falling toward zero. An ice storm knocks out your power. Blizzard winds close the roads. Suddenly, the very essence of what “home” means has been taken from you. You are no longer secure. You are in fact facing dire insecurity, the danger of freezing not only your water pipes but your arteries. There is nowhere to turn for rescue. If you have some wood in the garage and a stove standing by, it can quickly be perking away contentedly, the teakettle singing and a pot of soup warming. Tell me: what is that kind of tranquility worth? It is not measurable in money. It is priceless.