the Walnut Diary

I’ve made many mistakes in conversations over a long career of heating with wood, but none matched my goof last week.

The Dutch elm blight in the seventies made it fashionable to heat with wood, or at least to talk about it endlessly in one’s workplace. Status went to the biggest, the fastest, the hottest.

We borrowed my dad’s old box stove for the house we had built the previous summer. Large basement windows meant that I could back a trailer up and drop the firewood to the floor below. Burning wood promised to be quick and easy.

My new pickup truck soon discovered the hazards of broken branches in the woods, so I pressed Dad’s old Massey into service with a disused manure spreader as my trailer. Aware of the huge elms on Young’s Hill, Bud Merriman sold me the largest chain saw he had ever stocked, a McCullough ProMac 850. With its 30” bar I was able to power through some massive tree trunks, though I recall two which were too big for the saw.

The remainder fell quickly to my frenetic actions with saw and spreader, and the pile of green blocks accumulated in the basement.

The odd night spent pouring buckets of water over the coals of an overheated box stove convinced me that a more controllable heating unit was in order, so I replaced it with an new airtight stove. It offered the additional benefit of a huge top opening, greatly reducing splitting chores.

Somewhere in my young mind was the idea that the green blocks would dry from proximity to the fire over the course of the winter, and that the lost moisture would provide needed humidity in the house.

My system did not take into account what happens in an elm block as it thaws. There are forty species of elm in this area, and at least one of those strains smells really, really bad as it dries in a basement.

But the weird smell could be explained away or cleared with open windows when guests arrived. The ants were another matter entirely. Apparently every elm block has a population of large black ants living just under the bark. When their nest warms up, the ants think it’s spring and emerge, all energetic, to hunt down whatever it is they eat. Most of them found their way to our kitchen.

Bet waged war at first but as the influx continued she gradually gave up on the ants, accepting them as part of the rural experience.

But the cost of wood heat kept going up. The unfinished basement needed a concrete floor. The woodpile was taking up a lot of space. It was impossible to keep the house clean. I had learned to sleep scared, automatically waking up a few times per night to check and replenish the fire.

A few minor blazes in the chimney shocked us with their violence. When our son arrived, I announced to the world: “Electricity is cheap!” and that was the end of the indoor woodpile.

Our house in town had a fine Edwardian fireplace. When lit, it proved an extraordinarily effective air conditioner. If a smoker came to the house, all we had to do was light the fireplace and a strong stream of air flowed quickly up the chimney. It was great for parties, but hardly a viable heat source. As smoking fell from favour and heating costs rose, I eventually blocked off the chimney to save fuel.

But this all leads up to our current situation: a huge old house heated by two oil furnaces, with no way to burn wood. Notwithstanding Bet’s objections, the time has come once again to look to the woodlot as an energy source.

The new system has to be efficient in both labour and energy. That means a boiler, and heat pumped to the basement. It must burn clean. That disqualifies the outdoor furnace. The search has narrowed down, then, to a boiler inside a purpose-built building with a serious chimney. The only question is where to locate it.

Mom had been after me all fall to replace her burn barrel, so I brought her one this week, and then I discovered the thing a man should never, absolutely never, say to his mother. After some discussion we placed the barrel to the north-east of the house with a view to observing smoke currents and examining the feasibility of locating the boiler at that location.

All went well until, half in jest, I suggested she drop a couple of chicken bones into the fire to create the worst-case scenario for smoke. I was pretty sure she didn’t have any chicken bones at her disposal.

Turns out she did have a number of old feather pillows.

The wind was steady from the east and blew the smoke right at the garage which was my work site of the day. For much of the afternoon I alternated between retching and running for cover.

I learned my lesson. You never dare your mother to make a bad smell with an incinerator. Mothers have way too much experience and imagination for that.