The past week has been a cold one here at Sunnyside, and I've had to keep the stove continually stoked to keep up with it. I've been chopping wood too with my Finnish-made ax, which cuts like the prose of Oscar Wilde, being finely balanced, elegantly constructed, and devastatingly effective. The firewood we buy comes already seasoned and roughly split, but if you want to keep the fire hot and also burning clean, it's best to have a healthy mix of smaller wood pieces in with the larger ones, hence the need to split at least some of the wood. As a rule I work about forty-five minutes a day, chopping and tending to all the needs of the stove.
In any case, as I was splitting wood this week, I was reminded of a moment, oh a month or so ago, when I mentioned to a coffee shop acquaintance that I chopped wood daily to fuel up my stove. This was someone with whom I've occasionally discussed books and a little politics. I think she is only vaguely aware of my homesteading aspirations.
“Well,” she said, turning the thought over in her mind a moment, “at least that's good exercise.” I agreed that it was, and that was that; the conversation moved on. Nevertheless, I stored the moment up, especially the rather awkward pause after her “well.”
My impression of my coffee shop friend, is that, like many well-educated left-leaning Americans, she lives an environmentally concerned sort of life, so long as it doesn't cost her any appreciable sacrifice or comfort, which probably in her mind shouldn't be necessary, since eventually science will come up with the necessary improvements in renewables. Furthermore, her ideals are scholarly and cultural. She assumes that the life of the mind can be lived without much reference to the life of the body. That, if there's learning to do, or an enlightening interview on the radio, the chores can wait. That the reason we have snow blowers, automatic washing machines, central air, and food from the deli, is to free ourselves from drudgery, and commit ourselves to the pursuit of more worthy tasks.
So what she was struggling with in that little awkward pause, I think, was just how to justify in her own mind, my spending precious personal time on the task of chopping wood. Chopping wood, is, after all, not what most people would classify as mentally enriching, say like a book or a good jazz concert in Chicago. It's not self-improving like meditation. It's also what Reagan did to pass the time on his ranch, which doesn't endear the activity to the Left. So, some part of her was probably asking me: “If you're looking for a little heat in the house, why not just locate the thermostat on the wall and press the up-arrow where it says "temperature"? Or, if you really MUST own a wood stove, why not purchase wood for it that's been chopped to an accurate choppiness in the first place? Why waste time chopping it yourself? Just think what you could be doing with that time!"
Which is why apparently the only real justification she could come up with that fit with her sense of my basic sanity was, well, exercise and all the good things that come with it: a life free of heart disease and maybe cancer too, which, in turn would ensure a decent life span and thus more time for concerts and books and meditation. So, good. Exercise. That must be why he's chopping wood.
Now, I am aware that I'm being a little satirical here. And the satire is of course intentional. Satire has real uses. Satire clears the mind of cant. Still, my point is not to make fun of a human being for having a certain outlook, especially when such views on living (if I've described them accurately) are not far from the views I myself held say, five years ago. I am a Johnny-come-lately to the peak oil, de-growth, and homesteading camps, and I certainly have no corner on carbon-free lifestyle purity. No one does really, except perhaps the poorest of the poor in places far away from me, and they, to be frank about it, generally not by choice.
But. It was certainly not for exercise that I bought the ax. Nor for longer life and all that. I bought the ax because I wanted to chop wood, and I wanted to chop wood because that's part of the art of keeping a wood stove hot. And we bought the wood stove because we wanted to heat our home as minimally as possible and as renewably as possible, and a wood stove does that pretty well—not perfectly, but pretty well.
So it's a pretty big thing—the ax. It's a kind of creed in the person of a tool. It chops about what I believe. About how much I want to give to the world, and how much (or how little) I want to take from it. It's an image of my resolve to give every hour of every day something of a physical tang.
So, in harmony with my ax, while the year is still new; while it still feels like a propitious time to reassert and recommit myself, I want to articulate once again, for myself and for my readers, the two major reasons I do the homesteading work I do, chopping wood inclusive—work which is, by and large yes, physical work. Work that's sometimes, yes, boring and repetitive. Work that yes, also takes a good deal of time.
- I believe that for the earth's sake, and also for the sake of humanity's future, it's time to wean ourselves from the daily use of so many machines, which pollute the planet in their manufacture and their use. Carbon pollution is maybe the biggest and most weightily worrisome of these forms of pollution, but it is by no means the only one. There is for instance, sonic pollution. Distraction pollution. Narcissism pollution. Sex pollution. Information pollution. Speed pollution...etc.
- I believe that physical work, done for a purpose directly connected with my own body's keeping, deeply enriches my mental and spiritual life. It's as simple as that. The sense of competence gained. The sense of closeness to the elements. The sense of immediate access to beauty, in flowers and the living earth. The depth of what you might call “the reality factor” in my life. Also the way my relationships with my family and community have been strengthened by means of this work: All of this has combined to make the considerable time I put into homesteading seem much more like an investment than a thing consumed away. Of course, I can't be certain that the householding experience for others would be as positive as it has been here for us here at Sunnyside. Still, plenty of other venues on the internet and plenty of books these days, resonate with the same theme: “Don't be afraid to change. The rewards are real.”
All of which makes the thought of chopping wood merely for exercise seem pretty small in comparison. Or maybe you could say that the goodness of exercise is just an extra that comes with the complete homesteading kit, that when certain of your ducks are in a row, the others waddle their way into the line as well. Because of course, hefting the ax, washing the clothes with a board and plunger, kneading bread, lugging rainwater around the house-corner in a pail, hoeing weeds, chopping leaves to enable their efficient assimilation into the protozoic nation of the compost pile: sure, all of it's great exercise. I can't think of any better exercise. I can't think of any better kind of life.
More on the question of time though soon! There's so much more to grapple with. So much more to say.
HB
(Next Post January 18th)
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)
