I’ve read there’s an inverse relationship between years on the planet and the hours of sleep your body allows you to enjoy, an evolutionary holdover from more precarious times buried deep in our DNA. Something about as heads gray they’re also rewired to tend the midnight embers and keep a third-shift watch for fanged fearsomes as the youngsters sleep. As an old head now, I shoulder these instinctual responsibilities set upon me by biology and cultivated by my culture with a quiet resolve. I haven’t figured out how to wriggle free from the clutches of either nature or nurture.
That means most winter mornings find me waking the woodstove in our living room long before sunup. Thankfully, the only toothy carnivores I’ll likely encounter in the wee hours are typically still snuggled in bed with Christine. My biggest worry is that they’ll want to go outside before I’ve had the first cup of coffee.
After a night of being snugged down to near strangulation, the stove is still warm. The sleepy glow of fiery life peers at me through soot-coated glass. I open the dampers and then the stove’s door in that order because there might still be some smoke in there (nothing shatters the languid molasses magic of predawn meditations like a shrieking smoke alarm) and spread last night’s coals with the poker. I carefully place dry twigs on the pulsing, gasping embers. Little spirals of vapor waft into the flue. Orange sparks flick from the coals. I gently blow on them and the first flame comes forth. It flares, nipping at the twigs quickly, hungrily. The stove groans softly and rouses, taking shallow sips of air as the elemental in its belly nibbles on kindling. With each second the tiny flicker and its appetite grow.
But the little fire is timid this morning and it soon hides back under the coals. The problem is that I’ve shut and levered the stove door too quickly, before the fire had a chance to fully catch its breath. So I crack the door a bit, just a bit, and the coals respond with crackling excitement.
In V.K Arseniev’s Dersu the Trapper, (a splendid and highly recommended winter read, by the way) the half-wild taiga hunter Dersu Uzala speaks to his chattering leaping campfire as if it were a person, chastising it for being loud and boisterous. I don’t think a stern voice will help matters here. Instead, I open the door wide and offer coaxing whispers of encouragement and breezy resuscitation—one, two, three puffs. To my delight but not surprise, a small flame springs upward. It bites into a dry hickory branch about as big around as my pinky sinking hot yellow teeth into the bark, blackening the twig as I watch before moving on to a more substantial hunk of oak.
Resurrection complete. It’s all about care and feeding now. I stay squatted on the hearth, watching, waiting. Soon I’m offering quartered 18-inch logs to the flame, which it accepts with happy eagerness.
As the stove breathes deeper I feel a soft current of cool air moving with purpose just above our floor. It flows from the cold backrooms to the stove’s open airways as radiant heat rises from the cast iron and eddies on the ceiling before cooling, tumbling, pushed down the walls by even warmer currents. A sampling of natural law playing out in our home. It’s a system seeking equilibrium as all systems seem to do on their own—food webs, economies, waterways, the air in your home. The natural order of things is dynamic flow and continuous turnover marked by peaks and crashes, expansion and depression, pools and riffles, warm spots and cool streams. Everything an imperfect circle. Everything striving for that impossible perfection. Everything happening within flux.
The fire is fiercer now and the green kettle that serves as our humidifier starts to sputter and spit on the woodstove’s flat top. I ponder briefly on the ways of water and how, paradoxical as it may seem on the surface, my fire could not exist without it. The oak and hickory that serve as fuel came from this watershed—my home watershed—where rain quickly soaks into thin soil; percolates through limestone, sandstone, and shale; and courses through countless rivulets and streams before forming Big Piney and Little Piney Creeks. These trees burning in our stove fell not far from Big Piney. Rain is why I have a fire.
The dogs are up now. Heidi whimpers with urgency. I pull on the hoodie and rubber slippers and snap the leash on her collar. Rudy joins us for his morning tinkle, too, as we step into the frosty black where only a silver sliver of crescent moon hangs in starry heavens. The inkiness of this still night makes the soft white billows of smoke undulating from our chimney easier to see.
While our firewood is seasoned, trace amounts of moisture sucked up by the trees and stored in their fibrous cells as savings for the rainless days is still in there. It’s part of the tree. And now, set free in the blazing of those cells, it floats back into the atmosphere along with various other molecules and chemicals. I recently learned that some of those particulates found in wood smoke attract vaporized water molecules and work as condensers. They’re rain seeds, in a way. It’s not like our little stove could sow a storm, but I take supreme delight in this poetic notion. Forty years of winter mizzle, thundering spring deluges, sweet summer showers, and pattering autumn sprinkles falling on the hills watered the tree that’s now warming our home. Remnants of that rain now rise back to the clouds.
The deciduous forests these trees inhabited, that they created, are built on the fallen forms of the trees themselves. Leaf upon leaf, windfallen new branch and storm-flattened ancient trunk alike all laid low on the woodland floor. Most of their energy returns to the forest through the secret subterranean toiling of mycelium and bacteria. But if you can get the wood before it’s broken down by those unrelenting forces and turned over into new trees, you can unleash its energy to warm your bones.
The process starts with pyrolysis, the thermal decomposition of cellulose happening without much oxygen. Pyrolysis creates fuel for flame with the freeing of so many volatile gases setting the stage for combustion. When the potent cocktail of released gases mixes with more oxygen and hits the right temperature (about 450 Fahrenheit, and another great book) it ignites. After combustion the wood chars and becomes coal, the third phase of a fire, and then eventually turns to ash. Back to dust.
While the chemical reactions in our stove deconstruct the tree to base components, heat and light are its byproducts. It’s as if those photons born in the most volatile chambers of our sun’s heart more than 30,000 years ago, that light zipping through the solar system at the fastest speed possible toward the hungry green things on Earth, that precious energy converted to life through photosynthesis and stored in the tree for decades has now been summoned forth from the dead.
Another resurrection? More like another transformation. But aren’t those the same thing?
Back inside after the dogs and I have relieved our aching bladders, we have full combustion in the stove. The firebox is an incinerator. Everything inside it is flaming with vigor and the house has warmed noticeably (up to 70 degrees from a low of 64) from when I first woke. I choose a girthy length of post oak from the rack and ease it into the stove, shut the door, and tighten the dampers. The oak log pops and sighs as flames lick at the bark. Moss and lichen ignite and then the fire settles into a slow plasmic dance across the length of the wood. No feeding frenzy now, the contained primary only gnaws at the new offering in contentment.
I pour another cup of coffee and settle back on the sofa. It’s still two hours until even the malleable gray of predawn eases the gloom. I sip. The dogs snore. The kettle bubbles. The stove groans a murmuring story of earth, wind, water, and fire with warm breaths.
