IIT Winter Newsletter: Thoughts About from "Stump to Stove."

By Susan West - IIT Trust Topic Winter 2024

Necessity drives us, like it does all other living things, but those of us with the luxury of having a choice about it, go for what we desire to satisfy those needs. A long burning desire of mine was to heat with a wood stove, and now I’ve got one, in an old house, built when cutting, hauling, and burning wood was necessary to live through the winter, unlike just turning up a dial.

I was a city girl who later chose to live year-round closer to the land, but being from away, what do I know about cutting and hauling wood, when all I do is stack what gets delivered by the good wood fellow, haul it in a cart to the door, drag it in, and burn it? Not much at all, except that it brings a great deal of animal pleasure to this body, and much human meaning to this soul. So, I asked Sue Hatch, who learned from in fancy that a home’s heat comes from wood, and still harvests trees through good land stewardship, and sometimes luck, in partnership with her husband Tom.

When 18, living alone in an old uninsulated log cabin, and her wood pile got low as the weather got colder, she’d burn the small spruce out back to get by, and was much assisted by those who out of friendship left piles of logs outside her cabin after doing their work clearing trees downed in a storm. When still young, in Alaska, Sue learned to wield an axe more precisely, cutting a “bird’s mouth” in a substantial tree to get it to fall in the right direction, then felling it with a friend using a double crosscut saw. She and Tom use a chain saw now, but she said that it “bamboozles you” some, requiring you to look up for the visible signs that a tree is close to falling, as opposed to with the crosscut, where you listen to the tree’s creaking and groaning that tell you when it is ready to go.

Sue and Tom have a sugar bush on their land, from which they tap sap, clearing more room for the young sugar maple trees by cutting down the non-maple trees for firewood. Elsewhere on their land she watches the crowns of trees, to find when they’re coming to the end of their lives and ready for harvest. When they come across a tree already down, they’ll check if it’s gone “punky,” knocking it with a good log of hardwood, listening for the sound, hollow or dense.

In the process of harvesting firewood, Sue said there’s at least seven times one’s hands touch that wood, from stump to stove: as it is felled, after it is felled and each trunk section cut, with each section split, with each cut piece tossed, into truck or wheelbarrow, then each piece stacked, that piece later carried into the house, and last, when that piece is put into the woodstove.

If I’d lived as Sue has, I would know, from the inside out, something of what she knows about land stewardship and have a far closer connection to the wood I burn. But I only touch a piece of firewood four times, which at this point in life is likely all I am up to (unless you count the bumbling times I have to take hold of a log again after it falls off a rack, much less when a full half cord rack falls over, as it did the first time I ever stacked wood, landing perfectly composed flat on the ground, because I hadn’t thought to check if the ground was level enough under it).

Foolish or not, when I lift a piece of firewood, especially when fierce winter winds knock out the power, I think of those who lived here before there was any electricity or gas, and think of those who still live like this, around the world, with only wood for heating and cooking. I think of the tree from which each piece of firewood came; wonder how old that tree was, where it was, and who cut it down; wonder if any pieces of that tree ever end up getting stacked next to one other, and wonder how many hand shave touched that tree.

Most of all, in each morning’s ritual—get the kettle on, feed the cats inside and the birds outside, clean out the ashes, light the fire, pour the coffee, then sit by the stove as the wind blows and snow falls—I think of those who needed to live this way here, years ago, and am very grateful indeed to be able to live now, by choice, such a good life in this place of great natural beauty, getting warm by the fire.