Bohemian Wood

On heating our home with wood, and the necessity of fires, forests, and fairytales.

“The fire was a success. He was safe.”

-Jack London, To Build a Fire

“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace…. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the weekend in town astride a radiator.”

–Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

The fire cracks like an old man’s joints. Its flames, the only light at night, project orange shadows that dance on the walls of our little home. I open the glass door of the wood stove and place a split log angled towards the corner, sit back on my heels, and watch it catch. I nudge the damper closed and go back to bed.

Awake in the morning, my bare feet rest on the cool wooden floor. I knock the ash through the grill to the tray below, place a log on the left side of the cavity, crumble a scrap of paper next to it, and lean several small pieces of tinder against the log. Drag a match, flash of light, fumes of phosphorous - like fourth of July.

Fire is stored sunlight. This is true of wood, coal, gas, and oil. In each case, what is burning were once living beings that grew from the energy of the sun. There’s been much debate of late about energy sources. At the core of this debate is how old and what kind of dead creatures we’re burning to heat our homes, cook our food, drive our cars, and run the whole global Machine.  In every case, something is being burned somewhere.  Make no mistake about it, all this so called “green, renewable energy” is burning a lot of those dead creatures to be mined, made, moved, mounted, and after two decades, mashed, and put back in the ground somewhere.

I close the glass door and open the latch to the ash tray below to create a draft. There are a few precarious moments when the paper can burn to ash without catching the tinder, leaving a smokey mess. The smaller the tinder, the less paper needed and the greater the chance of success.

Fire requires fuel, heat, and oxygen. The art of making a fire is finding the right balance of the three. In a wood fire, the wood itself doesn’t burn. The gases and charcoal burn, but the wood does not. The process is similar to how a candle’s wick doesn’t burn, except slowly on its tip. The heat from the flame creates a draft of vapor wind that prevents the in-rushing air from consuming the wick. Try to light any stick thicker than your thumb, and the surface area of the kindling won’t produce enough heat to burn the gasses in the wood and create the rising vapors needed to maintain the flame. I learned this from Neil Soderstrom’s, Heating Your Home with Wood, a guide to everything you could ever need to know on the subject.

I hear the fire catch. The flames begin a soft roar, gasping in oxygen like a drowning man. And then the old man’s creaky joints go snapping away. Fire tells stories and we tell stories around it. Here’s one.

The only source of heat we have in our home is a wood stove. The wood we burn to keep ourselves warm in the winter grew right out of the ground of our quarter acre property and a small forest the size of a football field next to a tram stop up the hill. Almost all the wood is from pine trees about the thickness of a telephone pole that are dead, but still standing.

A family who’s lived in Klukovice, our valley village surrounded by Prague, for over three hundred years owns the little forest near the tram stop. One of the owners met us there in the morning the other week to show us which trees to cut - those that pose a danger of falling on someone as they wind through the forest to catch the tram.

The owner ended up joining us - me, Pavel, Marek, and Marek’s Dad, who’s almost eighty. We’d gather around a dead pine, Pavel grinning, chainsaw in hand, head turned towards the sky, sizing up the tree, determining its lean and guiding its return to the earth by cutting a notch on the side he wants it to fall. Sometimes the other’s put in their two cents, “Bring him this way. It’d be a shame to damage that young cherry.”

I strike up a conversation with the owner while hauling the logs to the truck parked nearby. He tells me that his grandfather used to grow wheat on this land and that this forest was planted when he was a child. I’d guess he’s in his early fifties. The rings of the pines confirm his story.

So does having a look around. Forests follow a succession, a cycle of birth, maturity, death, and rebirth. Disturbance - either from fire, humans or animals, or the uprooting of a tree when it falls, is needed to restart this cycle. Nature abhors a vacuum. Disturbed ground invites pioneering plants, i.e. “weeds.” They are the wound healers, sending long tap roots into the ground, mining nutrients from below, and holding the topsoil in place. Organic matter accumulates, shrubby plants begin to grow offering more niches for life, increasing the flow of nutrients.

By thinning the dead pines, more light comes through the canopy. Shade tolerant grasses and forest flowers find their way, pollinating insects arrive, followed by birds to eat the insects.  Small oaks, cherries, and iron wood see their chance and reach for the sun – in time becoming the overstory.

Healthy forests, like healthy communities, are multi-generational. Different stages of succession foster a greater diversity of species. Death brings life. Old forests grow on dead forests. Not all dead wood and stumps should be removed, for these provide homes for creatures and feed the spiderwebs of mycelium that are the greatest of recyclers. Most of the coal we’re now blowing the tops of mountains off to get, that powers much of our industry, comes from ancient peat bogs that existed during a geological epoch before mycelium developed a taste for lignin.