by Noel Perrin
April 23. I’m past the eight-cord mark, and still cutting. My wife has started coming out with me, to help with the splitting. She learns fast.
May 2. We’ve decided to cheat a little on the wood. Counting last fall’s, we have nearly ten cords of long wood for the Defiant cut, split, and stacked. That was fun.
But I’m getting tired of cutting very short pieces for the two little stoves: the Ulefos in the kitchen and the Jøtul in the upstairs wing. So we have ordered a truckload of scrap from Malmquist’s mill, four miles away. It’s what is left over after they make blanks for chair legs, and it’s mostly pieces of rock maple and yellow birch six to twelve inches long. You get about a cord and a third for forty dollars.
May 28. We’ve had a dry spell, when I could get my truck into the woods. Most of next winter’s firewood is now stored in the barn, ready for use.
It’s been a problem spreading all that weight around. Our barn is built right onto the house, and it has a cellar, just like the house. Earlier owners kept their cattle down there. I don’t want to keep our wood down there, because it would mean lugging every armload up the stone cattle ramp next winter. But I’m scared to keep too much in any one place on the main barn floor, for fear of breaking the beams. Result: I have five different piles of about half a cord each, plus two cords stacked on the ramp itself. Another cord and a half is outside, stacked against the west wall of the barn.
There’s a connecting shed between the house and the barn (the cellar goes under that, too), and that’s where we used to keep practically all of our wood. This year it just has the short wood for the two little stoves. About three cords of it, counting the load we bought. The maple from Malmquist’s is awfully heavy. I worry a little about having stacked it six feet high.
May 31. We haven’t lit a fire even once this week. Heating season is over. I cleaned the stoves, and spread the ashes in the back pasture. Lilacs are at their height, and apple blossoms almost over. We’ve got peas up six inches.
September 12. I haven’t thought much about heating systems for the last three and a half months. Been too busy gardening and raising sheep. Last night’s frost and this morning’s kitchen fire reminded me, though. It’s time for the next project, which is to insulate the cellar. People have warned me that if we don’t run the furnace regularly, our cellar will freeze. But I have a solution. Most of the cold gets in where the house cellar meets the barn cellar. I am going to build an extra wall eighteen inches outside the existing wall, and fill the space with sawdust. The old-timers used to keep ice all through the summer by burying it in sawdust; I reckon I can keep icy air out the same way.
September 17. The wall is built. It took a full pickup-load of sawdust to fill the space – and it must be one of the least expensive insulating jobs on record. A hundred and twenty cubic feet of good hardwood sawdust cost me six dollars.
I may be imagining it, but the shed floor seems to have developed a slight slant.
October 1. Cold, steady rain for the last two days. We’ve had two stoves going, and the house is beautifully warm. Who needs a furnace?
October 4. The rain has continued, and we are using wood at a good clip. It is already clear I don’t have enough stored. No problem. I’ve got plenty more cut and stacked in the woods. All I need is a few dry days to take my truck out and get it.
October 5. Perfect sunny day after a sharp frost. I went out at dawn, while the ground was still hard, and brought in two more cords. It’s stacked on the front porch, leaving just enough space for the door to open freely.
I am not imagining the slant in the shed floor.
October 6. After work, I went down to the barn cellar with a flashlight. All three beams under the shed are badly bent. The central one has cracked, and is on the verge of breaking. I borrowed two jack posts from my neighbor Barbara Duncan, and spent the evening trying to jack the center beam back up. No luck. The woodpile up above is just too heavy. But at least I don’t think the floor will sag any more. I’ll worry in the spring about how to straighten the beams.
November 24. Snow today. We just smile and stoke our stoves. We have yet to use the furnace this winter.
December 8. I didn’t use screws when I mounted the Defiant’s stovepipe, and a couple of sections are beginning to come apart. We are not eager to have the house burn down. Annemarie let the fire go out this morning, so that this evening I could take the pipe down and reassemble it with screws.
Since it was five below zero when she got up, this naturally meant starting the furnace. I wasn’t altogether sorry – even though I had hoped to go until Christmas. Our water pipes run under the kitchen, just inside the new sawdust wall. Somehow the cold is getting through. Last week I took a thermometer down there. This morning it registered thirty-six degrees. A little hot air in the furnace pipes will be a good thing.
December 10. We’ve been back on stoves for two days, and it is now thirty-three degrees inside the sawdust wall. I consulted my friend Tom Pinder, who is clever about such things. With his help, I’ve vented the clothes drier directly into the cellar. (More accurately, he did it, while I passed him tools.) Come spring, we’ll shift the vent back outside.
December 11. The coldest day so far this winter. Minus twelve. The pipes to one bathroom were frozen. The water pump, miraculously, was not, though the cellar thermometer read twenty-eight degrees this morning. I took down a bucket of coals from the stove.
December 12. Twenty-four hours of running all three stoves at top heat have failed to melt the frozen pipes. The problem is that the warm air from the stoves can’t get at the pipes. They’re in the walls – right next to the air ducts from the furnace. No one was thinking about heating with wood when this house was plumbed.
December 13. Shut down the Defiant again, and let the furnace run all day. Even though the temperature never rose above six degrees, we succeeded in thawing the pipes out. Starting today, I am leaving the furnace turned on. The plan is to keep the thermostat set low (the markings only go down to fifty-two degrees, but you can actually set the dial at about fifty) – and then count on the furnace to come on for a couple of hours late each night, just enough to keep the cellar warm and the pipes unfrozen.
January 25, 1978. The system is working perfectly. It doesn’t even take much oil. We had our second delivery of the winter today. The tank got topped off in September with 28 gallons, and today it took 140 gallons. And we are halfway through the winter! Other winters, we have used five or six hundred gallons by now, even with the old parlor stove going most of the time. (And if we had ever tried a completely stoveless winter, this big brick house would have drunk 900 gallons by now. I know, because once we rented the house for a year and our tenants never lit a match. They got through almost 1,800 gallons in what was a fairly mild winter.)
February 4. The system was working perfectly. Yesterday the temperature dropped to fourteen below. Today it’s twenty below, and windy. Even though I left the thermostat at fifty-eight instead of the usual fifty last night, we have no water this morning. Two buckets of coals in the cellar before I went to work brought the water back by noon – but I don’t want to spend my life providing hibachi service for water pipes. Before next winter I shall either put a little stove down cellar or figure out a way to insulate the rest of the cellar walls, or maybe both. This morning it was twenty-six degrees next to the sawdust wall. And thirty-seven at the other end of the cellar, where I keep the wine. California and France make poor training for a Vermont winter. I hope the wine wasn’t too upset.
February 16. Another bitter day. We have now used all the wood on the front porch, all the wood on the stone ramp, and three of the other five piles. There’s still some stacked outside along the barn wall, which I never had room to bring in last fall – but it is currently buried under six feet of snow, piled up when the barnyard was plowed.
I see two choices. I can dig it out, or I can go to the woods and cut dead elms. Otherwise, we seem certain to run out of wood before spring.
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February 25. I chose to cut dead elms. This was a sunny Saturday, delightful to be out, and I spent nearly all day cutting on a low hillside, and then riding the wood out on a toboggan. Got a two-week supply (at February-March burning rates).
March 15. Today we had our third and final oil delivery: 169.6 gallons. Then we turned the furnace off until next winter. I’m no longer worried about pipes – we’re already into mud season, and there wasn’t even a frost last night. And I’m not worried about wood, either. The dead elm didn’t quite last two weeks – but the powerful March sun has already melted the snow away from the barn wall where I had wood stored outside, and I can get at the top rows easily.
We used 337.6 gallons of oil, at a total cost of 178 dollars, 13 cents. This is lower than our oil bill ten years ago. In the winter of 1967-68, despite help from two stoves, we used 1,317 gallons of oil at 16.6 cents a gallon, and it cost us 218 dollars, 34 cents. Who says there’s inflation? The country may have inflation, but this farm is enjoying deflation.
It’s true that I’ve got to fix the shed floor, insulate the cellar, think about getting another stove, worry about the piano room, plan better storage facilities in the barn, and fetch home ten cords of wood – but, then, I enjoy doing most of these things. Keeps my weight down, and it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than jogging.
As for the wood itself, it was cut and split last fall and winter. In fact, while I was at it, I cut twenty cords instead of ten. What we don’t use, I shall sell. After deducting expenses in woodcutting, and the cost of whatever oil we buy, next winter I expect the process of heating our house to produce a cash profit. We may just blow it on a trip to Saudi Arabia.
[1978]
Postscript, 1980. We have now been through three winters on System B. Only it’s not System B anymore, it’s System B-plus. Practice does help.
Oil consumption has continued to decline. The second winter it dropped more than a hundred gallons, down to 204. Last winter, with heroic effort, we pushed it on down to 137. This, I suspect, is about as low as it’s going to get – at lease if we want to continue using the plumbing.
As to cost, our private deflation continued for a second year. In 1978-79 our total oil bill was 120 dollars, 49 cents. That is surely the lowest oil bill the house has ever had, even though it got its oil furnace back in the bargain days of 1950. It may even be lower than the coal bills the previous owners were paying in the 1940s. And since I sold 600 dollars’ worth of wood, we did get our cash profit.
But last winter our slowly descending use curve met OPEC in round three, and was soundly defeated. For that one solitary delivery of 137 gallons, an unfeeling oil company charged us 139 dollars, 74 cents. One more rise of that magnitude and we will probably shift to System C, a wood furnace. (If we do, we’ll put hot-water pipes through it, and so get free hot water six months a year.)
Meanwhile, we have been busy learning new tricks about managing with wood stoves. Most important, we have learned how to keep a fire going pretty well continuously. Back in the old days, I would have to split ten or fifteen boxes of kindling every fall – and the first person up every morning normally had to build a fresh fire in both stoves. Now we use maybe two boxes a winter. Every member of the family knows how to cram the Defiant so full at bedtime that there will still be plenty of coals in the morning. And we all know what proportion of the ashes to take out and just how to rake the coals so that starting the day’s fire amounts to no more than putting in fresh wood. (You have to put it in right, of course – and not all at once. They don’t call it building a fire for nothing.)
Furthermore, we run only one stove now, except on the very coldest days. The little kitchen wood stove is still there, and it’s very handy for burning milk cartons and the boxes pizza comes in. Between that stove and the pigs, we don’t have much garbage in the winter. But as for keeping the kitchen warm, we do that primarily with a tiny fan. It’s four inches square, and it’s mounted in the top of the doorway leading into the kitchen. Except when the temperature is ten or twenty below zero, it blows in enough heat from the Defiant to keep the kitchen comfortable. I no longer cut much short wood.
At the cost of shutting off one bathroom from mid-December to early March, we have completely avoided frozen pipes upstairs. The cellar is a little harder; and in really cold weather I am still running the hibachi service. That’s another inducement to move to a wood furnace.
But even the cellar doesn’t cool off as readily as it used to, because we did indeed do more insulating. In the fall of 1978 I repointed the cellar walls, caulked around the windows, and stuffed fiberglass in wherever any would fit. Then, since there was nothing left to do inside, we started on the outside. Late that fall, copying something we’d heard people used to do a hundred years ago, we banked the house with spruce branches. You make a sort of festoon of them, all around the foundation. It looks pretty, like a giant Christmas wreath laid clear around the house.
But spruce branches turn out to be only so-so insulation. So last winter we tried a different system, employing slightly more modem rural technology. I had a bunch of hay bales that had got rained on (which makes them unappetizing to cows – and less nutritious as well), and I gave the house a necklace of hay. Hay bales do a superior job. Cellar temperatures averaged a couple of degrees higher.
But since I hope not to get any hay rained on this year, and I’m certainly not going to use good cattle hay, worth a dollar-fifty a bale, I have an even more advanced plan for next winter. All the leaves from the ten or so maples in the yard I intend to put into those big green plastic bags you see being carted away in suburbs where it’s no longer legal to burn leaves. Only instead of carting mine away, I shall stack them like pillows all around the foundations. A big maple drops a lot of leaves. On the back side of the house, which is also the north, I may have leaf pillows three deep and three high. Right up to the windows, in fact.
People who notice the rapid rate at which our Defiant burns wood sometimes wonder if we won’t burn ourselves right out of trees in a few years. The answer is no. Unless I get tired of cutting, we can go on this way forever. Our farm includes just about a hundred acres of woodlot. In a cold climate like Vermont’s, an acre of trees will add about half a cord of new growth per year. So our annual production is 50 cords – 900 cords of new wood in the eighteen years we have owned the place.
Some of that growth, of course, is in pines and hemlocks, which we would not use for firewood. Quite a lot is in good, straight yellow birch and ash and sugar maple, trees that it would be criminal to buck up for firewood. But at least a third of it is in trees that ought to come down anyway – red maples that are busy rotting at the core, crooked oaks, black cherry that’s getting shaded out and dying. I could cut fifteen or twenty cords a year indefinitely, and just be improving a still-increasing timber stand.
In actual fact, I cut twenty-six cords last year – sold seventeen and kept nine. (Grossed 1,124 dollars, 75 cents; netted plane fare for one to Saudi Arabia.) This year I may cut thirty cords. That still won’t be borrowing on the future. It will merely be catching up with the past. Of the 900 cords that have grown while we’ve been here, about 650 are still out there on the stump. A couple of hundred, at least, are in the form of trees that ought to be thinned out. Even though I never want to have a forest that is wholly practical – with no hollow trees for the raccoons and no three-hundred-year-old low-branched maple stubbornly clinging to life and not growing an inch – I still have a mighty backlog to draw on. In fact, from the point of view of getting this farm in shape, fuel oil at one dollar, two cents a gallon is about the best thing that could have happened.
Third Person Rural
Birth in the Pasture
MY FARM (the house excepted) used to be exclusively male. It was sort of like those Greek monasteries on Mount Athos where even the cat is a tom and the chickens are roosters. Only with me it wasn’t ideological, and it didn’t last as long.
Female animals were exclud
ed from the twenty monasteries on Mount Athos under a constitution promulgated in the year 1045, and still in effect now. The idea was, I think, to be even holier than other monasteries. Female animals tended not to appear on my farm between 1963 and 1974, and there was no idea at all. There was simply a timid owner who didn’t want to winter livestock. It was fun to raise lambs and calves, and to see them grazing in the fields all summer. No fun (so I thought) to have to feed and water the creatures all winter. So I bought young stock every spring, and either sold or butchered in the fall.
This naturally meant that I bought males. Females are the important sex biologically – Mount Athos wouldn’t last very long without the rest of Greece to supply it with monks, cats, etc. – and farmers like to keep their ewe lambs and heifer calves to raise themselves. They are delighted to sell the surplus nine-tenths of their ram lambs and bull calves.
So always excepting the house, it was just us boys on the place. And an ever-changing group of us, too, all but me.
Then one year I realized I didn’t want to keep farming in this stop-and-start fashion. I wanted continuity, familiar faces in the barn, some sense of growth. In short, I wanted a year-round farm, and I wanted it badly enough to be a winter servant to livestock. Rather soon thereafter I owned my first heifer calf. Life has been getting steadily richer ever since.
That calf grew up to be a mostly Hereford cow named Michelle. (The females in the house named her.) When she was one and a half, she met her first bull, an older part-Hereford with no name and no manners. He had a long orange penis, though, and knew just how to use it. There in her own pasture Michelle became pregnant.