Cordially yours

Fuel for the fire

By Max Alexander

My uncle, an aircraft historian, was involved a few years ago in the search for a French plane that may have crashed near Calais, Maine, in 1927, several weeks before Lindbergh’s historic flight across the Atlantic. The biplane and its two pilots left Paris hoping to beat Lindy as the first across the pond (going the other way), but their plane disappeared, presumably into the ocean. Yet accounts by old-timers in the woods around Calais suggested the French might have made land, albeit at terminal velocity; a hermit named Anson Berry heard a plane pass low through dense fog over his cabin that night — at a time when air travel was rare indeed. Because the wooden craft was largely biodegradable (alas, ahead of its time in more ways than one), the searchers’ main hope was to locate its massive engine.

“They’ll never find it,” announced my Maine father-in-law when he heard about the plan over dinner one night. “Some woodsman dragged that thing out of the forest a long time ago. It’s probably rigged up to a saw in his barn right now, bucking up firewood — and he’s sure as shit not gonna talk about it to some history buffs in Gore-Tex boots.”

Well, that tells you about my father-in-law, not to mention volumes about backwoods Maine — the hermit named Anson, the windfall in the woods, a crafty old Yankee with a monkey wrench and a fear of Flatlanders — enough Puritan themes to constitute a Maine literary movement, all from of a plane out of Paris. It also says a lot about the rural Mainer’s obsession with firewood (what else would you do with a French airplane engine?) — which is what reminded me of the story at the end of this cold, wet summer (heretofore known as the Summer of Green Tomatoes), while stacking wood against another impending winter.

I came late to the firewood aesthetic, having grown up in a suburban house with no fireplace at all. In fact, the heat of my boyhood was seemingly involuntary; I recall a furnace but don’t know what fueled it, nor do I ever recall a single discussion about it. The first time I ever thought much about heat was in 1983, when Sarah and I rented our first apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Heat there became a constant concern from November to March because there was none, and because the ancient radiators clanged and banged all night — waking you up to remind you that there was none.

Since then I have taken control of my life in many ways, the procurement of heat being one. Last year at a cost of $7000 I installed a new furnace and radiant-floor heat in my farmhouse. The system requires copious amounts of fossil fuel, of course, for which OPEC and its local distributors may decide to charge me another $7000 this winter. But I also have three woodstoves (one of which doubles as a kitchen cookstove) and several cords of seasoned firewood. So there.

Except it isn’t that simple. Like most things today, wood has gotten more complicated. Start with chimneys; my house has two very old brick ones. When my contractor first saw them he said, “You’re not planning to use those, are you?”

“Well, actually...”

“Don’t burn wood in unlined chimneys. You’ll burn your house down,” he said.

“Unlined?”

“Those old chimneys were held together with lime mortar, which degrades over time. Probably all sorts of holes up in there. One spark gets through and it’s all over. You need to have them relined with new flues.”

He was right, of course, so out went $5000 for new chimney flues. And if you care about not spewing tons of particulate pollution into the air, you’ll want one of the latest woodstoves with catalytic converters that re-burn smoke. I felt guilty spending $2000 for one of those until I met a woman in Bangor who spent $20,000 on a custom-made, 10,000-pound masonry woodstove for her kitchen. (You can spend more, she assured me.)

Then comes the wood — and it comes unstacked, by the way, a mountain of timber, dust, bugs, fungus, and snakes dumped in the middle of your driveway. Need to get your car out? Get stacking. Wood heats you twice, goes the old saw, once when you chop it and once when you burn it. But you can get your blood downright boiling just stacking wood that somebody else chopped and split, believe me. A cord of seasoned hardwood weighs two tons; each stick weighs about five pounds. Two cords, five into 8000, carry over the three. . . (these are the things you think about while stacking wood) makes 1600 pieces of wood. Bend, grab, straighten, stack (“chink”) bend, grab, straighten, stack (“chink”) . . . I ask my 8-year-old to help; he refuses. Should I take him out to the woodshed? By the end of the day you feel like you’ve stacked a woods, not some wood.

And written another check for the privilege. My firewood this year cost a pricey $175 per cord, and the delivery guy said I should get it while I could at that level. Demand is high thanks in part to heating oil prices, he said — but more to the point is the high cost of diesel fuel, which of course runs the trucks that bring the wood from upcountry. So that’s the bottom line: there’s no escaping OPEC, unless you chop your own wood in your own woods.

Which is what the previous owners of my property did. But from the neatly stacked piles of cut firewood I still see on walks through my woods, I suspect they got tired of all the bother, and turned up the furnace. Now their abandoned woodpiles, like that French biplane, lie rotting into the forest floor.

My uncle died this summer at age 80; nothing of the airplane has been found. Maybe my father-in-law is right — but with oil prices hitting the ceiling, a 73-year-old airplane engine has to be an expensive way to buck up firewood — even at $175 a cord.

Max Alexander lives in Washington, Maine. He can be reached at malex@midcoast.com.