Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  Bagged wood is piled high in a storeroom at Clark & Wilkins over wood-splitting machines that approach a century in age. The company has been selling wood since 1870, and once had lots in various parts of town where stacked firewood filled as much as two entire blocks to a height of thirty fee—tmany hundreds of thousands of pieces of wood. It came down the Hudson in barges, and it came up from Virginia in the holds of merchant schooners. It was delivered by men in topcoats and bowler hats. Many pictures hang in the company office. One or two show the men in the bowler hats, but mainly the pictures are of stacked wood—of hills and mountains of stacked wood. Even the corporate records smell of smoke. An accidental fire some twenty years ago lasted more than a week and went through the total inventory of firewood. The flames got to the company’s old ledger books and charred their corners.

  Most of the Clark & Wilkins facility is unheated, and the office, a brick-walled room, twenty by twenty, is heated only by wood fires. The coals of hardwood ends (the bits left over when logs are trimmed to exact lengths) give off red heat from an open fireplace. Oak smoke mixes with smoke from the cigars of the boss (the semi-wild acridity of blended wood smoke and tobacco smoke is one of the great moments in the history of the nose). The manager’s name is Jack Roth, and he is trim, friendly, about forty. He says Clark & Wilkins has to keep up very high standards, because of the firewood sophistication of its clientele. “It’s a question of education,” he explains. “There is a difference between the New York market and the suburban market. The New York market is knowledgeable. The suburban market is the uneducated firewood market. People in the suburbs know nothing. They’ll burn anything. A suburb is a green-wood market. Do you know what green wood is? Green wood is wood that is not cut in the winter. There is green wood and winter-cut wood. If you cut in winter, the sap is out of the tree, and you get real seasoned wood. If wood is not cut in the winter, no matter how long it seasons it will never be anything but green wood. People who buy from us want wood that doesn’t make much noise. It bums quietly. It throws few sparks out. It mustn’t ooze. It has to be clean. It has to be free of bugs. In a New York penthouse, you can’t have little things running out from under the bark. So far as I know, no one else in the country goes to the trouble to turn out a bag of wood like this.”

  The country seems to agree. Clark & Wilkins recently shipped a bag of firewood to a customer in Maine. Florida, too. Michigan. Indiana. Massachusetts. Brooklyn. Clark & Wilkins sells a considerable amount of what it calls “rabbi wood” to the Chassidic bakeries of Brooklyn, some of which prefer to bake matzos on wood fires.

  Wherever the wood goes, it all comes from Ulster County. The company has a man there who goes around making deals with farmers. He is what is left of the barges and the schooners.

  The manager taps the ash from a cigar. “This is an expensive hobby, you know—to burn firewood. Most people in New York have been using it for effect. We haven’t been getting the cordage in recent years. Now, though, they’re beginning to buy it again for heat.”

  There was a time when New England farmers preferred to cut firewood under the influence of a waning moon. Something to do with the tides. Firewood, in essence, is mysterious. For example, when it is kindled and burned it almost completely disappears. The nature of firewood seems to be in the mind of the believer. Some people believe that black cherry, burning, sends out clouds of befouling soot. It no doubt does, in their houses. Others smell cherries when black cherry burns, smell apples in smoldering apple. Some people say that wood splits more easily when it is freshly cut; others say to wait until it has seasoned and checked. Still others say that it depends on the wood: you can’t split fresh apple with a pile driver, but at the tap of an axe fresh oak will fall apart in boards. Most people have thought that green wood is wood that has been recently cut from a living tree, no matter at what time of year, and that seasoned wood is wood that has been drying for at least six months. This has been the impression of silviculturists, dendrologists, and foresters, for example, who go to universities and are taught that trees are full of water in the winter as in summer.

  Science was once certain that firewood was full of something called phlogiston, a mysterious inhabitant that emerged after kindling and danced around in the form of light and heat and crackling sound—phlogiston, the substance of fire. Science, toward the end of the eighteenth century, erased that beautiful theory, replacing it with certain still current beliefs, which are related to the evident fact that green wood is half water. Seasoning, it dries down until, typically, the water content is twenty per cent. Most hardwoods—oak, maple, cherry, hickory—will season in six months. Ash, the firewood of kings, will season in half the time. When firewood burns, it makes vapor of the water. The rest of the log is (almost wholly) carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen—the three components of cellulose, also of starch and sugar. When a log is thrown on the fire, the molecules on the surface become agitated and begin to move vigorously. Some vibrate. Some rotate. Some travel swiftly from one place to another. The cellulose molecule is long, complicated, convoluted—thousands of atoms like many balls on a few long strings. The strings have a breaking point. The molecule, tumbling, whipping, vibrating, breaks apart. Hydrogen atoms, stripping away, snap onto oxygen atoms that are passing by in the uprushing stream of air, forming even more water, which goes up the chimney as vapor. Incandescent carbon particles, by the tens of millions, leap free of the log and wave like banners, as flame. Several hundred significantly different chemical reactions are now going on. For example, a carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms, coming out of the breaking cellulose, may lock together and form methane, natural gas. The methane, burning (combining with oxygen), turns into carbon dioxide and water, which also go up the flue. If two carbon atoms happen to come out of the wood with six hydrogen atoms, they are, agglomerately, ethane, which bums to become, also, carbon dioxide and water. Three carbons and eight hydrogens form propane, and propane is there, too, in the fire. Four carbons and ten hydrogens—butane. Five carbons … pentane. Six … hexane. Seven … heptane. Eight carbons and eighteen hydrogens—octane. All these compounds come away in the breaking of the cellulose molecule, and burn, and go up the chimney as carbon dioxide and water. Pentane, hexane, heptane, and octane have a collective name. Logs burning in a fireplace are making and burning gasoline.

  From a small can Randy Phillips refuelled the chain saw while Eric Meola split with the axe the logs Phillips had already cut. Phillips moved on through the woods in search of a third dead tree. His second tree, like the first one, had made a hundred-and-eighty-degree error in its fall, and now Phillips seemed to be advancing somewhat stealthily through the glade, as if the next tree, even before it felt the saw, might come down and hit him. He chose one that was obviously leaning enough so that it could fall only in one direction. It had a seven-inch diameter. He did not notch it but cut it straight through. It fell uneventfully, and in a few minutes Phillips had it cut into fireplace lengths—about fifty dollars’ worth of wood, had it been bought from Clark & Wilkins.

  Jerry Gotsch, the forester, came into the woods and watched for a while. He said there was an ash or two nearby that would go nicely with the two elms and the maple that Phillips had already cut. He pointed out the trees he meant. “Ash is a good species,” he said, “and these are good specimens, but they are already overtopped by that big sugar maple, and so they will die. When that’s the case, you take them while you can.” Gotsch had spent his professional life in forests. As he looked through this one, he seemed to be reading it—its history, its characteristics. He explained why he had chosen the trees he had marked for destruction. Unmarked—and the tallest and heaviest by far—were the liriodendrons, the tulip trees. They could grow to be almost two hundred feet high and twelve feet d.b.h. (diameter breast high), and they could live for three hundred years. As a species, they were the biggest trees in eastern North America, and, after the white pine, the tallest. The tulip trees that were spaced through the woods here were not ev
en mature yet, but they so outreached and outgirthed everything else that they had clearly got here first, and by a considerable margin of years. They virtually dwarfed the sixty-foot maples and cherries and birches around them. The tulip trees appeared to have been open grown. Those old stone walls along the road, also running through the woods, implied open fields here, in the nineteenth and perhaps in the eighteenth century, and the big trees must have stood in the fields once, competing with nothing—not even each other. Look at the breadth of those crowns. Maybe they had been allowed to grow for shade, or possibly just because they would have been considered so beautiful—tall, straight as plumb lines, with a deeply cooling canopy of broad, orbicular leaves, and yellow-green flowers in May and June that very much resembled tulips. Liriodendron. People called them yellow poplars. They were not poplars. They were, familially, magnolias. Needless to say, none in these woods were going to be marked with orange paint. They were, anyway, poor for firewood and good for lumber.

  For the rest, it was a woods full of pioneer species and transition trees, evolving, across a century, maybe two centuries, toward the climax forest, which would be a grove of giant oak and hickory, with everything else pensioned off to other old fields and other new beginnings. The long-run product was timber, the forester said, and it was as timber that you judged a tree, but that did not necessarily mean that the trees would ever actually be used for lumber—just that the best timber tree is also the healthiest tree. Hence the orange mark on that nine-inch red maple. It had few knots and no cankers (lesions of the bark) and twice the d.b.h. of the sugar maple standing beside it, but the sugar maple would one day be the more valuable tree, so you fell the red maple and let the sugar maple have the light.

  He moved on, into a small grove of young sugar maples. Elms had stood there but had been killed by disease, opening this small area to pioneer growth. Sugar maples were ordinarily transition trees in the development of forest, but they could be pioneers, too, if there was a good seed source nearby—and those big sugar maples along the road, which must have been around as long as the tulip trees, would have helped fill in the field. These new ones now were saplings—less than four inches d.b.h. At four inches, a sapling became a “pole.” At one foot d.b.h. and less than two, a tree was a “standard.” When its d.b.h. reached two feet, it was called a “veteran.” Those tulip trees were veterans, but, for all their local seniority, they would not be “mature” until they were two hundred years old.

  Gotsch as a boy had lived in the country, he said, near Millbrook, grew up hunting, fishing, trapping. He had gone to the New York State Ranger School, at Wanakena, in the Adirondacks. “It seemed like a natural type thing to do.” His father was a prison guard, and his father had emphatically told him that being a prison guard was not a natural type thing to do. After ranger school, he went on to Syracuse and its renowned school of forestry. He had finished in 1960. The tulips, the sugar maples, and the white ash were the best trees here, he said. There was some hickory on the side of Ninham Mountain, but the ground was not dry enough for hickory down near the road. Why had he marked that twelve-inch black cherry? In part, because it was near the edge of its range. It was strong and healthy, but up north here it would never amount to much, as cherry goes, and six feet away from it was a big ash, prospering, fourteen inches in diameter. Confronted with such a choice, you just had to say to yourself, “Which is the better tree?” The decision had been easy, and the paint was on the cherry.

  He came to a black birch and a sugar maple, side by side, each a terrific-looking tree, each straight and unblemished (no holes, few knots), each a mighty pole on the verge of standard. The bark of the birch in texture was much like the bark of a paper birch, but its color was dark, glossy pewter. The tree looked good now, but at fourteen to sixteen inches it would develop cankers—that sort of thing. It might have been spared had it not been growing so very close to that sugar maple, which was altogether the superior tree, for the sugar maple would live two or three centuries and be useful at any time for cabinets, chairs, bowling alleys, dance floors, shoe lasts, saddletrees, and boat keels, not to mention sugar. At breast height, the black birch bore an orange daub. To maple, birch was inferior even as firewood, but in someone’s living room this gray-metal form of it was going to look better, probably, than the pictures on the walls.

  Gotsch moved on into the area that had been worked over by Ed Talbert, of Patchogue. It was an example of what a stand of trees ought to look like when a cutter had worked with regard for the woods. He had worked in the one place. He had not run around like a child in a chocolate shop, grabbing what most caught his eye. It was odd what people grabbed for sometimes. They would charge into the woods like sooners into Oklahoma, heading for white birch because it was so pretty, although as fuel it would rank toward the bottom of the local list. People would run for an aspen and ignore an oak. Aspen has lovely bark. Aspen cuts easily, bums rapidly, gives little heat, rots quickly, and is hard to split. Somehow, you could see people’s characters in the trees they cut, in the height of the stumps they left, and in the disposition of the slash. The best of them would choose an area, and not a set of random individual stems. Then they would cut everything marked in the area. That was what Ed Talbert had done, taking five cords out of an acre or two and leaving behind him a well-thinned stand. He had taken out the defective trees and the poor species—all the marked trees. His stumps were as low as manhole covers, and his slash was neatly piled. A fair number of red maples had been there, marked, and a big, sprawling cherry, a mazzard. If cherry bark (on an old tree) is rough and scaly, the tree is black cherry and is thoroughly wild; but if the bark retains its lenticels, its young surface of broken horizontal rings, the tree is a sweet cherry, something ancestrally tame gone wild in the forest—a feral tree—and the name for it is mazzard. Talbert’s cherry had been a mazzard. Elms had been there as well, and had taken care of themselves by dying out. Talbert had cut some of the dead ones, and he had taken sugar maples that had been marked because they were competing with other sugar maples. His five cords were gone now, and what remained was a grove of sugar maples, spaced, selected, a really lyrical part of the forest. That was why Gotsch was showing it off. “People are doing the woods good. The one problem is haphazardness—high stumps, and so forth. If every area looked like this, I’d be happy.”

  Randy Phillips felled and segmented six trees that day, as much as the van could safely hold, and Eric Meola split all the larger pieces to appropriate size, while Myrna Wollitzer remained in the van, cold and patient. At one point while it was being loaded, she revealed that she was the president of Pure Planet, a conservation organization so much above the fruited plain that it did no conservation work on its own but existed solely to encourage other conservation organizations. Pure Planet was living up to its charter, for the president’s two friends had done all the cutting and all the splitting and were now doing all the stacking. They did so with the care they might have shown in preparing a studio still-life. Meola had won awards for his work—for example, for a picture of half a dozen hand calculators spread through a forest of standing yellow pencils. His work had appeared in Elle, Stern, Life. Phillips, who was also twenty-seven, was ready to follow in the same general pattern but had not yet caught hold of the trapeze. The six trees had become roughly three hundred and fifty pieces of firewood—about a third of a cord. Next time, they said, they would rent a pickup, or borrow an even bigger vehicle. They would bring a wheelbarrow. They would bring sleeping bags and stay two days. Moreover, they would come in May, when the weather was warm, and cut a load of green wood against the end of the autumn.

  The van had been backed a short distance into the woods, and when it tried to move out, its rear wheels spun through a frozen crust and sank down into cold mud. Gotsch, saying he thought it would make sense if the state were to push the program in May, put his shoulder behind the van. The wheels spun on—at eleven cents a mile. The forester then carried big rocks to the ruts and built a
two-track drive right under the vehicle, and it lurched back out to the road.

  An hour later, on the Saw Mill River Parkway, a police car overtook the van and Meola was nabbed. Although in size and shape the van was like a Volkswagen bus, it had commercial license plates. The officer listened with stoic grandeur to the tale of a day in the woods. “I believe what you’re saying. I believe your alibi,” he said. “But you can read the signs, and they say ‘Passenger Cars Only.’ Here is your ticket. If you wish to appear in court, you come back in two weeks. Court time is at 7:30 P.M. That’s in the evening.”