REMEMBERING WHEN: The Woodcutter’s Philosophy
By Keith Schell
When we were young, our late father, early one Saturday afternoon on our bush property as our family culled and cut down dead and decaying trees in the spring snow to harvest as firewood for our home, shared this profound piece of manly philosophy over lunch with his three growing boys:
“A man who cuts his own firewood is twice warmed.”
And that’s very true. For those of you who may not know what he meant, he meant that you are firstly warmed by the physical effort of cutting the wood yourself, and then later on you are secondly warmed by the heat from the burning of that same wood as you burned it in your wood stove or in your fireplace at home.
Our father was an ardent and robust outdoorsman who loved and respected the bush. Dad loved everything about wood. He loved to cut down trees, he loved to cut the downed trees up into splittable sections, he loved to split the wood sections into usable firewood, and he loved the heat and roaring glow of a fire in a wood stove. Firewood was an essential part of our father’s life growing up.
Dad grew up on a country farm where wood was the sole source of heat for their home. Not only was his country home heated solely by wood as a boy, but he was also appointed by his teacher as the boy who had to get to school a bit earlier than everyone else in the winter to get the wood stove going to heat up their one-room schoolhouse so that everyone else would be comfortable when they came to school to begin their studies for the day.
Because the burning of wood held a special place in our father’s family life growing up, it also held a special place in our memories of growing up in the country. I distinctly remember our grandparents having a big black cast iron wood-burning cook stove in their kitchen that they used to cook meals every time we visited. They also had an electric stove as a backup, but it was only used as a last resort if the wood stove was going to take too long to cook the meal. The wood stove was big and black with white enamel oven doors, and you had to lift the cooking surface stove lids with handheld lid lifters to feed wood into the stove to maintain the fire for cooking. Many a happy Sunday dinner we enjoyed at Grandma and Grandpa’s was cooked on their wood-burning cast iron cook stove.
Eventually, after Mom and Dad married, started our family, and built our house in the country, Dad decided it was finally time to invest in a wood-burning stove for our family home. He originally purchased a Franklin stove and set it up in the living room. We enjoyed the warmth and crackle of a wood fire on many cold and snowy winter nights and occasionally saw the natural phenomenon of the ‘migrating geese’ radiating from the fire on the inner walls of our Franklin stove.
Taking his love of firewood to the next level, our entrepreneurial father decided to turn woodcutting into a profitable side business. While we usually just cut wood for ourselves, Dad knew the local cottagers enjoyed the pleasure of a glowing fire as much as he did. We boys would go with Dad to a local sawmill to buy truckloads of slabwood to cut to size and sell to the local cottagers for firewood. For those who may not know, slabwood is the outside part of the tree, including the bark, that is left over when the sawmill cuts the harvested tree logs into usable building materials. Slabwood was considered scrap at the time, so the mill was happy to sell it by the truckload to anyone who wanted to take it away.
We would pile the wood as high as we safely could in the back of our truck, using extra-long pieces of sturdy slabwood as side slats to secure the load and make the pile even higher. Once our truck was stacked to the sky with slabwood, we would tie the load down securely and take it home to pile close to our own little personal sawmill, ready to be cut to size and parceled out to any cottager who wanted to order a cord of wood from Dad. As word about his business spread, many local cottagers experienced a warm and soothing evening fire in their fireplaces thanks to the efforts of our family.
Double entendres aside, men and wood will always have a special relationship with each other. Lynn Johnston, the Canadian creator of the ‘For Better or for Worse’ cartoon strip, understood this, once writing in her autobiography, as she lived with her dentist husband in a rural community in the wilds of Northern Ontario, “You can mess with a man’s wife, but not his woodpile.”
Like in the story of the grasshopper and the ant, our family spent many weekends in our bush lot in the early spring before the bugs came out, harvesting decaying trees for firewood in preparation for the winter to come. And I smile about those times spent in our youth, working in the early spring snow and bonding with family, all the while being ‘twice warmed’ by the cutting of our own firewood.