By Brett Laidlaw
The freak May storm started as snow, then turned to a depressing rain. The freezing rain that followed was worse, but then it turned back to snow, then a spell of sleet, before it settled on snow, which then fell for two days in a manner almost Biblical. We watched our hillsides, only recently greening after numerous April snows, disappear again under featureless white.
On the second morning of the storm, as I went to fill the kettle for tea, the clock display on the kitchen range began to flicker ominously. Odd beeps and buzzes issued from smoke detectors. Then there was silence, and on the clock face, darkness. The snow was bending over trees and snapping off branches all over western Wisconsin and the power lines went with them as they fell.
Briefly I pondered the paradox of an endless winter in an age of global warming. Then I turned my mind back to tea, and carried the kettle into the living room and set it on the woodstove. No power? No problem. In the stove there were still embers from last night’s fire, and with a careful arrangement of kindling, and some strategic puffing, soon I had a good flame going. If we had had to rely on the LP furnace, we’d have been without heat, never mind tea; but with our new woodstove and dry wood in the box, we’d be fine until the thaw.
We had only had the stove for a few months, and already it was hard to imagine life without it. It had become like a member of the family—the good sort, the honor student offspring, not the slacker son squatting in the basement. It’s hard to overstate the impact that becoming “woodstove people” has had on our lives. What did we do in the evening before we discovered the world’s greatest entertainment center, flames dancing behind glass? How had we deprived our taste buds of the splendor that is a venison goulash simmered at ideal braising temperature for hours on a January afternoon? And though our house before the woodstove was more than livable, how had we done without the unifying function that is the hearth? Hearth and heart may not share an etymological root, but they ought to.
There are trade-offs. You don’t hit a button and receive instant heat, nor can you program the woodstove to magically spring to life and warm the house before you venture out from under the comforter. But in many ways, I’ve come to appreciate the slower pace of life with a woodstove. While I wait for the red kettle to whistle, I can do some stretching on the rug in front of the stove (first claiming a little space from the dogs, who since day one had assumed a very proprietary attitude about their spots in front of the fire). And once the tea has steeped, it stays nice and warm on the shelf at the back of the stove.
We didn’t buy the woodstove for any principled reasons; frankly we just thought it would be cool to have one—and, with 20 wooded acres on our property, we had the means to fuel it. It simply made sense to use this energy resource, which is, literally, right outside our back door. But the May storm and loss of electricity, which lasted more than 24 hours, showed us how important a degree of energy independence can be, especially for rural folk. I like that this form of energy is renewable and sustainable. As we harvest mostly small dead oaks, it’s a fairly carbon-neutral way to heat. I also like the simplicity of it, the direct connection to our land that it provides.
While heating with wood may be simple and direct, it is by no means easy. There’s that old saying that heating with wood warms you twice, but whoever came up with it apparently could not count past two. How does wood heat warm you? Let me count the ways: trudging up the hill with the chainsaw, and then the actual cutting, which will work up a sweat. Loading the rounds to haul them to the house, then unloading, splitting, and stacking; filling the woodbox by the house, and stocking the wood basket by the stove. Phew. Only then do we get to appreciate the actual warmth of the fire, and then finally, one’s cockles are warmed by the comforting view of the entrancing flames.
Heating with wood is definitely a lifestyle choice, one that many people we know in this rural part of our state have made. When we were trying to decide what kind of stove to buy, we put out a query on the email share list that folks use to look for feeder pigs, offer eggs for sale, that sort of thing. We heard from a lot of people, and many different stove brands were mentioned—Jotul, Vermont Castings, Pacific Energy, Hearthstone. A clear consensus emerged: they loved them. Their own stoves, whatever the make and model, they loved them. Sure, they had some quibbles—the cooking surface on this one could be better, would be nice if that one accommodated a bigger log. But it was clear that in the woodstove and the rural mindset, here was a perfect meeting of sensibility and technology.
I couldn’t end this ode to the stove without a few words about how beautiful it is to cook on a woodstove, since not one hour of the day passes when I don’t give some thought to what we’re having for dinner. Here again, much of the appeal is in the simple, rustic nature of this age-old device. It’s very much a slow-food way of cooking, ideal for the kinds of long-simmered dishes that we tend to crave after brisk activity in the cold (like, say, chopping firewood). It excels at cast iron cookery, producing superb pancakes and frittatas. Meats and hearty vegetables, slowly pan-roasted, develop deep, savory flavors, and cheap, flavorful cuts like beef short ribs, oxtails, or pork shoulder braise to succulence while the cooking aromas fill the house. And while we have scrupulously heeded the manufacturer’s admonition that “Under no circumstances should you attempt to barbecue in this heater,” we have found that root vegetables wrapped in foil, set in the stove away from the hottest flame, cook to a beautifully caramelized turn in just around 30 minutes.
There’s really no off-season when you heat your home with wood. By the time the heating season ends, it’s time to make wood for next winter. Some might find it oppressive to be reminded of winter in the shank of summer, but I actually appreciate the way it brings the seasons together. It’s a satisfying feeling to watch the woodpile grow, to know that there will be plenty of dry fuel when the cold weather returns. As a born-and-bred Son of the North, I look forward to those late summer and early autumn nights, when you pull out the sweaters and wool socks again, and a fire in the hearth makes everything seem just right. Likewise, winter days and deep snow are nothing to dread when you can step into the skis for a glide through the woods, ending in a swift flight down the hayfield hill, and come inside to that enveloping warmth, and the aromas of something good simmering on the woodstove.
Still, to everything its season—if we have more blossoms than snowflakes next May, I’ll be okay with that.
Although having a huge stockpile of firewood gives a person a great sense of fuel security, modern woodstoves are incredibly fuel efficient. Depending on the size of the home, some woodstoves only need a few chunks of wood to get the entire house warmed up. The end result is that your wood supply lasts longer.