Burning Questions

We bought a wood-burning stove recently, to help keep us warm here at Sunnyside through the winter months. Four or five days still have to go by before we can light it; the insulating mortar in the chimney has to cure all the way and harden up. But the stove itself stands in the dining room, like a cadet at attention, ready to be commanded, and our stack of wood outdoors beside the hedge looks forward to shrinking. All that's left is to fire the thing up. Put it through its paces. And then of course sit back and enjoy the warmth and the beauty of the fire. 

Now, I don't want to make 9-volt Nomad into a venue of praise for home improvement. I love our home, but in general when it comes to home improvement—well, let's just say that almost nothing depresses me more effectively than even just five minutes of one of those TV shows in which the home-owners gravely consider whether it'll be granite or stainless steel for their kitchen counters, or whether a ten-foot ceiling is of sufficient height for the upstairs bathroom. These programs seem like prime instances of our culture's obsession with surfaces, and remind me that whole industries thrive on creating human dissatisfaction with life as it is, though life as it is would be beautiful and interesting enough if we bothered to look deeper than the all-consuming skin.

So. This post is not meant as encouragement to buy a stove. Really it's not. I intend it as a sort of balanced recollection. An attempt to trace a line of reasoning. I want to ask “why did we at Sunnyside get a wood-burning stove, and why might it be more than an extra, a vanity, a thing owned essentially for the sake of show?” 

Here are few reasons that I would put forward:

First, Northwest Indiana is prime ice storm territory, and in the aftermath of a really bad storm, it's possible for the power (and therefore the forced-air furnace) to be off for weeks. Now, my wife and I prefer it at least tolerably warm in the home in winter, and by that I mean oh sixty degrees (15 C) and a sweater. Our houseplants, which are largely tropical, would of course not take kindly to an indoor freeze; and many of these are heirlooms from my mother and grandmother, which I would never want to lose. Then too there are all our vegetable seedlings, which we start indoors in flats many weeks ahead of spring planting. Their loss would be a tremendous waste of labor, and would substantially reduce our harvest.

Second, we're trying to reduce our carbon footprint, and within certain parameters, heating with wood can be considered carbon neutral and sustainable. New trees can be grown to replace those that have been burned, and what carbon is released in their burning gets stored in their growing.

Third, it's a do-it-yourself kind of thing—heating with wood—and I like that. I like the idea of just saying no to the utility's gas, lugging in the splintery wood, and getting down to the business of keeping soulfully warm. I especially like the idea of getting up early on a cold morning and making a fire for my wife, whose need for warmth is tied up in the meaning of my existence. Then affection makes the labor light. Then, in the streets of the City of What's Difficult, I walk uphill, humming a tune of love.

Fourth, our wood-stove will serve as a means of travel! To the past! To the ends of the earth! You see, I have such fond memories of stoves and fires. When I was a boy living up in the high hills of Southern India, at about seven thousand feet, it would get plenty cold believe me, and we heated with wood sometimes, and had a wood-burning stove in our kitchen. I can remember so many rainy afternoons sitting in the kitchen on a yellow bench just letting the stove transmit its warmth to me—me like a grateful planet, and the stove, my sun. I remember one particular day, me coming home from school in the rain, and our housekeeper Pushpam toweling me down. She let me squat right in front of the stove to dry. I shivered extra-dramatically and she laughed. On another occasion, I got too close to the stove and branded a little length of my thigh on it. I still have that scar. 

Years later, when I was living in the highlands of New Guinea, and going to boarding school, I stayed in a boarding house that came equipped with a ginormous fireplace. There were coils above the fireplace to harvest the heat to heat our water. And every morning, as an agreeable daily chore, I would get up early in the quietness and light a fire in the hearth, so we all could have hot showers. Then I would go out walking on the red dirt roads of the base, and my hands would smell like ashes and embers half the morning. On Friday nights too sometimes, when everyone else in the boarding house was out doing something social, I would stay home and make a fire and sit and watch its lovely life cycle from fuel to flame to ash. This was oh-so-therapeutic for me. Sometimes the fire was my only company. 

Fifth, the stove can be considered a gift to others and to the future: when it's cold and we have guests for dinner. Or when there's that big emergency, which we hope doesn't come, but might. Then too, given the future that I see in store for us, which is a very uncertain one, I doubt if the stove will ever be replaced or torn out on a whim. I think people will see its value. 

So do these reasons convince you? I myself admit that I can't know for sure. Maybe it makes perfect sense to have it. Maybe a future of difficult circumstances will prove its purchase to have been a choice fortunate beyond belief. But maybe too, vanity is always mixed up in decisions like this, and you can't get away from that, no matter how hard you soup it up with poetic appreciations and semi-green homesteading/emergency-preparedness justifications.

Ah, what a bitter paradox it is—this conflict between two domesticities—between the comforts of our individual homes, and the health of our home-at-large the Earth, from whom so much is taken to provide those comforts! Sometimes I wonder whether we can do anything these days without tromping hard on the life of the planet. Humanity has heavy feet these days, there's no denying it. There are so many of us. And all of us want more than what we truly need. 

I like thinking about this stove's long ride into the future though, because I do anticipate that it'll have a longer life here at Sunnyside than I do. And what I hope more than anything else for the stove, is that whoever owns it after us, will use and love it too, and find meaning and poetry in the making of a fire. Of course, even with me, as time goes on, a good number of the initial pleasures of the brotherhood of the flame will doubtless wear thin, and the whole business of tending the stove will grow to be more of a chore. But then I'm not afraid of chores either. Chores are what makes the world go round. Chores are universal. Even Adam and Eve in the fabulous biblical garden seem to have had chores, and that was paradise.

HB

(Next Post Friday, November 28th)