Reverence for wood.

#051

It’s 20° this morning and I have the downstairs wood stove roaring. Before bed last night, we had a fire in the one upstairs. Neither stove had seen much use before we moved here in the spring of 2020, but now we use them every year.

Shortly after we moved in, I bought my first chainsaw. I’d never even used one before, but I knew that life in the woods would be easier with a tool that could clear brush, fell trees, and cut them into manageable blocks for splitting - at 9,500 revolutions per minute.

Somewhere along the line, I got interested in the Holzhausen method of stacking firewood. The internet offers no shortage of videos, articles, and tutorials (as well as spellings of “Holzhausen”), but I learned by trial and error.

Some folks say this method provides better airflow for drying wood as opposed to traditional stacking, but I simply liked the aesthetic. It seems to be the perfect connecting point in my brain between being an outdoorsman and an artist.

(Note: a “true” Holzhausen stack is filled in the middle and begins to taper more toward the center as it gets taller. Again, I just loved the way these looked.)

I’m blessed to have a great neighbor who has been more than willing to pass along his knowledge of not just tree cutting, but of mushroom collecting, deer processing, and a host of other things I’ve tried to soak up like a sponge. He’s helped me fell a number of trees over the years.

I’m not a fan of cutting living trees, but prefer instead to work with standing dead trees and ones that have fallen in storms. There is no shortage of downed trees on our property. As I write this, I can think of at least half a dozen that need to be cut, bucked, and split that would keep us in firewood for the next three years.

One of my favorite things to do on a crisp day is cut kindling, although I never seem to accumulate enough. I’m a big fan of the Fiskars line of hatchets, axes and mauls.

The process of constructing the Holzhausen stacks was meditative. There is something about working with your hands, being able to measure progress over time, and when finished, to stand back and appreciate your labor. I need to get back to making some of these stacks.

I split a lot of wood by hand, but a few years ago, I bought a gas-powered splitter that makes much quicker work when there’s a lot of wood to split.

One day, I’d like to get a portable sawmill and make my own lumber. It’s really incredible what you can do with those things. I’ve looked into chainsaw mills, but for the size saw required to handle the kind of timbers I’d be working with, I’d rather invest money in a portable mill.

About a year and a half ago, I picked up four 275-gallon IBC totes for free from a local road paving company. The only catch with them was I had to dispose of the plastic bladders that still had some paint inside. I used a sawzall to cut them down to manageable pieces and let the paint air dry before disposing of them.

Each tote holds between a third and a half cord of wood (a face cord is 4 feet high by 4 feet deep by 8 feet long). Once filled with stacked firewood, I can easily move the totes with the tractor from the wood yard to the basement door to hand load and stack inside.

Do you burn wood? Do you have a favorite way to stack it?

(Note: the title is borrowed from Eric Sloane’s A Reverence for Wood.)

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While I’m grateful for warmth and quiet on a morning like this, it’s hard to find peace when our nation is filled with so much division and strife. I think it’s the abject cruelty we’re seeing on a daily basis that I can’t reckon with.

If you’re reading this, I implore you to be kind and do good unto all.

Stay warm,

- Roger