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.
Indian nations east of the Mississippi carefully managed their forests. Oaks, hickories, and chestnuts were selected to form a broad canopy of trees that rained down food every year without any tillage or irrigation. The brush in the understory was regularly cleared by fire to allow grasses to provide pasture to deer, bears, and turkeys and allow an easier path for their arrows. The first descriptions of Europeans described a vast park, not a wilderness. I doubt the Indians called this system, “agroforestry.” For them, it was simply life.
Europeans have a long history of coppicing – meaning cutting certain species of trees at their base and letting them regrow in several year cycles. The multiple smaller trunks meant less sawing and splitting. Much of this coppiced wood came from hedge rows that separated fields, sheltered crops, providing habitat, fencing and fuel. In Britain alone, over half of all hedge rows have been lost since WWII, mostly to bend the landscape to fit the ever-larger tractors that have replaced the farmers and herdsman of old.
I cut the dropped trees into five-foot lengths with a chainsaw and Marek’s dad and I ferry them out of the forest to the truck. Marek’s dad is here, apparently, just for fun. He’s already cut and stacked his wood – in fact, he thinks he’s set for the rest of his life. He tells me he met some Germans not long ago who were complaining about their neighbors burning wood to stay warm in their mountain town. They said it stinks up the whole valley at night when it’s cold. He asked the Germans how they heat their apartment. They didn’t know. Some kind of oil truck shows up and refills a tank.
Pavel often joins me splitting logs on Saturday mornings – Sundays he’s ringing church bells. He likes to go for a swim in the Vlatava river, even when the pond’s frozen. He then rides his bike over and splits a few months’ worth of logs all while sipping his lager. Pavel likes to remind me that if you heat with wood, you get warm six times - sawing the tree down, hauling it out of the forest, cutting trunks into pieces, splitting the logs, stacking the split wood, and finally, burning it. I’ll add one more to the list, eating food cooked with it.
A few days of work and less than a gallon of gas between the truck and chainsaw and we have a winter’s worth of heat stacked and covered along our fence line.
If you spend the time and energy to get warm six times in heating your house, you’d better be sure that your house is buttoned up properly. There’s a lot more sweat invested than turning a knob to the right and auto-paying a few more increasingly imaginary digits each month. What heat is produced, must be captured, and held onto as long as possible. When we reconstructed our home last season, we added three layers of sheep wool like a giant sweater around the ceiling and walls.
Heat can be stored in batteries of mass - clay, stone, bricks, and cob. This mass warms up while the wood burns, then radiates heat long after the fire dies. We keep a stack of bricks behind our stove for now, and next year we will encase it in cob – a mixture of clay, sand, and straw.
My Grandma was a child during the great depression. She used to tell us a story of how her father would throw a few bricks into their fireplace in the evening. When grandma and her five brothers and sisters would go to their cold beds for the night, he’d pull the bricks out of the fire, wrap them in a towel, and place them under the covers by their feet to keep them warm.
Lucie’s grandfather has what Czech’s call a pec, a large oven he made himself from bricks. It’s the focal point of his house – which is appropriate, “focus” in Latin means hearth. The fire burns in a stove and the heat and smoke wind through a canal of bricks, which absorb the heat before leaving through the chimney. On top of the stove in the corning of the dining room, there is a small platform with pillows and a blanket. A little staircase takes you to a warm loft – perfect for naps after grandma’s duck and dumplings. The stored heat from a day’s fire keeps the center of the home warm all night and into the following day.
A tightly insulated house and a pile of stacked and covered wood allows good sleep. Firstly, from the physical work involved, but more importantly, the peace of mind. We don’t need to watch the news or pay any bills - we can look out our window each day and know we’ll be warm.
Open fireplaces are romantic, sure, but convey only 10% of heat into the house, the rest goes up in smoke, and smoke is waste. Good stoves can convert 50-70% of the heat energy contained in the wood into the house. Some newer models even have a secondary chamber where the smoke and gases are consumed. Burning dry wood, hot, makes for clean combustion. Wet wood gives off less heat because more energy is used to burn out the water vapor than to radiate heat. To gain the most heat from the wood, it should be split and stacked for at least half a year, with dense wood like oak, a year is better.
All the ashes collected from our stove are sprinkled around the fruit trees of our orchard to give them essential nutrients and minerals, or added to the chickens’ dust baths where it acts as a natural disinfectant and anti-parasitic. Ash contains lye. Boil it out, mix it with fat, and you have soap.
A few years ago we took the subway to the last stop in Naples and wandered into a town festival, the celebration of one saint or another where we were invited to stay a few nights with Clementina and her dog, Alma. She had a small olive orchard above the city. She sprinkled the ashes from her fireplace around her garlic. I asked her why she did this, and she said that her mother and grandmother did, so she does too. I read later that the allium family (garlic, chives, onions, leeks) prefer alkaline soil and ash lowers the acidity. Clementina’s grandmother didn’t know what pH was, or understand this from a scientific perspective, yet she understood what the plants needed.
Our warmth depends on relationships with our neighbors. I can go knock on their door. Energy from the grid relies on a vast network of cables that can be damaged during storms or cyber-attacks and are subject to the whims of geo-political games. There’s about as much hope of getting your power up by calling the utility company as there is in fixing the political system by mailing your congressman.
None of this is to say that I don’t like or want energy from the grid. We applied to the city half a year ago and are still waiting on someone to stamp some paper. When we finally do get the permission, it will take about a day to connect our home.
Resiliency means being able to spring back - back to the basics, with built in redundancies and fail safes. If the grid goes down, how can you heat your home? How much food do you have? Is all the food spoiled in the fridge? How will you have light, charge phones, and use the internet? There’s a reason it’s called a blackout.
We find ourselves in the grips of a cult-like faith in what George Orwell, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Kingsnorth, among others, simply called - The Machine. We are told we must have faith in The Machine to continue to meet all our basic needs any time, day or night.
To point to the fragility of globalized supply chains and centralized (i.e., controlled) - food and energy distribution, can get you labeled a “prepper,” which is becoming synonymous with “domestic extremist.” A term that’s been babbled to nonsense to mean - anyone that protests The Machine.
Case in point – under the FBI’s behest, Facebook is now attaching warnings to groups sharing information on canning and jarring food as being “too prepared.” It would be laughable if the implications weren’t so terrifying. If jarring food raises alarms, anyone who has a wood stove and stockpiles firewood must be Ted Kaczynski.
No doubt, as I write this, some bureaucrats in Brussels are getting off to writing new legislation restricting or outright banning wood stoves, while simultaneously gathering funding for new satellite technology to closely surveil any extremists who dare let a whiff of smoke out of our chimneys.
All this will no doubt be lauded as “combating extremism” and “fighting climate change. Never mind corporations’ industrial-scale pollution, private jets to Davos, massive servers for crypto mining and cloud computing, or the enormous coal burning ships that bring electronics produced by slaves across the ocean.
It’s no surprise that heating with wood has come under attack in the last several years – it is one of the last vestiges of autonomy. We’ve outsourced our food, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, child and elder care, education, entertainment, and general ability to think deeply about complex topics, to “experts” who “know” more and more about less and less. This is the nature of hyper energized societies – they become hyper specialized. Until no one knows how the whole thing works or where stuff comes from. And that’s acceptable, I guess, for luxuries like phones, ice machines, and fine wines. But to paraphrase Wendell Berry, societies that outsources necessities are not only foolish – they are inviting ruin.
At this moment, forests are being clearcut in the Southeast of the United States, hauled by diesel powered trucks to processing facilities, shredded, and compacted into pellets, put on massive coal burning ships, brought to Europe, and then burned by energy companies that call it – “biofuel”, and perhaps even more grotesquely, “carbon neutral.” Around 40% of Europe’s “renewable” energy currently comes from wood burning and a good chunk of the wood is shipped from the United States. Utility companies burning pelleted wood for energy leads to the same pitfalls as coal, gas, solar, or wind power stations.
Scale matters. When these technologies are used on a household or neighborhood scale, they are used more efficiently. I am constantly reminded of the limits of our available energy each time I go to the woodshed and observe the slowly shrinking pile of logs throughout the winter, or the draining batteries of our small solar array, or the rainwater in our tank. That’s the added benefit of what we can call democratic technologies – technologies that are in the hands of each of us, given that we are healthy and have a few basic tools.
The same cannot be said of grid systems of heating and electricity, or even some components of off-grid systems. They are black boxes. The battery in our home that powers our lights, phones, computers, and internet that make it possible to share this here is a black plastic box that arrived in a black cardboard box from China. I have no idea how it works, only that I can connect it to our solar panels or plug it in a socket and have days of lights and screens.
For most of us, flipping switches and having light and turning faucets that cause hot water to flow is nothing short of magic. We have virtually no understanding of the complex systems needed to make those things happen. We assume they’ll just keep on working forever.
For now, even our forests are black boxes. If more of us heated with wood, we would begin to see the value of our forests beyond BTUs of energy and the dollars they can be sold for. We’d get to know them once again, to understand their cycles and how to care for them. Trees wouldn’t be nameless trunks in a crowd, but familiar, friendly faces. We’d recognizing their bark, leaves, and buds – we’d understand and appreciate the food, medicine, heat, shelter, habitat, and timber they provide. And maybe if we start spending more time in the forest, we’ll begin to understand that forests are alive, and energy is life.
There is something that runs deep within us about gathering in a home around a hearth, listening to and telling stories. Why else would so many televisions now be mounted above or next to fireplaces? Manufactured screens tell us manufactured stories. Around Christmas time, a video of burning yew-log plays in loops, never needing tending, nor skill, nor knowledge, or care. No story.
The Greeks had Hestia – the origin of the word hearth. She was the goddess of the fireplace, and alter. Albanian folk stories state that each home’s hearth is the connection between the living and the dead. For the Roman’s, their “focus” meant hearth and home. You could say that for many of us, we’ve lost our focus. We’ve hidden our furnaces, now controlled by dials, remotes, or apps, and powered by distant fires. Just another black box, like our phones, cars, and toilets – another basic need we don’t understand or appreciate.
I took my daughter, Marie, in my arms the other day. She was crying. I knelt with her on my knee in front of the stove. She felt the warmth of the fire on her face, opened her eyes, and stopped crying. We gazed together at the pulsing embers. I opened the damper and watched the flames shoot up through the reflections of her mesmerized eyes. And I told her a story of the old man with creaky joints who lives in our stove.
The post presents an interesting perspective on the importance of self-sufficiency and resilience in the face of potential power outages and supply chain disruptions. The author emphasizes the value of traditional methods for heating and cooking, such as using a wood stove and stacking bricks for heat retention. The post also highlights the importance of community and local relationships for building resilience. The author challenges the societal belief in the infallibility of the "Machine," or globalized supply chains and centralized distribution systems, and encourages a return to the basics for self-reliance. The post offers valuable insights and raises important questions about sustainability and resilience in modern society.
Brett! This is Matthew (Mario) from College. It is an absolute joy and treasure to find your writing. Reading your stories felt strangely familiar but also uniquely foreign after so many years gone. I admire your courage and steadfastness in your beliefs and life. I will always cherish our conversations together. Till we see each other again, keep going and keep writing!
-Matthew Modesitt