Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller The woodstove is gone. A neighbor bought it. We moved it onto his trailer last Friday, and it was no easy task. I had grown attached to the woodstove. On the one hand, it was about as inanimate an object as you could find, steel and brick, and as solid as a tiny Gibraltar. There’s nothing colder than a cold stove. On the other hand, when that stove was full of oak on a winter night, it was as good a friend as you could ask for. It was the center of our household universe, and it didn’t have to beg for attention. Malika showing her great strength hauling  wood for the stove. Noah got  stuck  hauling far more wood than she did,   but that is the subject for a different column. Our first dog would lie with her head under the stove. She would get so hot that we thought she might burst into flames. We called her the heat sponge. My wife, Cindy, wasn’t quite that desperate for heat, but on cold days she would sit ...

David Heiller The woodstove is finally earning its keep at our house, and so are Noah and I. On Sunday, we stacked about four cords of wood. I did most of the work, but Noah kept a steady pace too for four hours. We stacked wood and listened to the Vikings beat Chicago 41-13, and even took a hot chocolate-peanut butter cookie break. Is there a better way to spend a sunny November afternoon? Afterward, Noah had to take off his shirt and make me feel his arm muscles. Yup, I said, they feel a little harder, and they did. The wood stove was, for much of the year,  central to our house and family. (Why  don't I have  any photos of it?)  Anyway, this  is more  or less how we  heated our home for many, many years. (I must confess that he was also motivated by the dollar I promised if he helped stack the whole pile, and he got his buck.) We’ve had fires in our Fisher wood stove since September, mostly burning up old elm that feels and heats l...

David Heiller The time bomb is set to explode at our house. It’s doesn’t look like a time bomb. It looks like a woodpile. But because the woodpile will fall down, I think of it as a time bomb. David and his maul: the never ending  battle to keep the wood box full. Hopefully no one will get hurt. My woodpile fell last spring while I was on a canoe trip. It covered three bicycles, a garden tractor, and a compost shredder. I had to buy a new front rim for Noah’s bike. But it didn’t crush my children or wife, thankfully. It took a year for that woodpile to fall down. That was a long stretch. I remember once when my brother-in-law and I spent the day stacking wood. He had to go back to college that afternoon, so I drove him to Moose Lake to catch a bus. I drove home thinking how great it was to have a brother-in-law like Randy, what a great job we had done stacking wood together. When I drove into the driveway, the woodpile looked like someone had shot a cannon throug...

David Heiller We’ve had a lot of wet weather lately, which has me worried about our Firewood Supply. Firewood Supply is capitalized because it is a serious subject when you heat with wood. Most people have their Firewood Supply under control at this point in the year. In fact the true old timer is working on his Firewood Supply for next year, or even 1997, right about now. Maybe someday I’ll be at that point. But things always seem to get in the way, like football games and gardening and an emergency or two. "Argg"! So I’m crossing my fingers that we’ll get a cold snap and the rain will cease and the ground will harden and everything will work out fine, like it always does. In preparation for those perfect conditions, I spent part of Saturday and Sunday in the woods wearing knee-high rubber boots, cutting and splitting several cords of basswood, maple, and red oak. Two companions helped the time go faster. On Saturday I worked with the company of our Austra...

David Heiller “Would you mind helping me in the woods?” I asked my son on Sunday morning. “Yeah, I suppose,” he answered enthusiastically. He knew it was a rhetorical question. He sat in the back of the trailer as Ι drove the Oliver 66 to the firewood that I had piled along the trail. The first pile was some big chunks of ash. “Let’s split them first,” I said. “They’ll dry bett er. We tackled that job with a double-bitted ax and a Monster Maul that I bought about 20 years ago. The Monster Maul came with a lifetime guarantee, which impressed me at the time. I remember telling Cindy, after seeing the ad in the Mother Earth News , “Hey, how can we go wrong? If it ever breaks, we can get a new one for free.” And it is indestructible. That was the good news. The bad news is that you have to be a pro football player on steroids to swing it for more than two minutes at a time. It is heavy. Noah and I discovered that as we tried to split the ash. We did it, but our arms f...