Field Notes—

A Midwinter Night’s Scene

By Curtiss Clark

Midwinter is when I am most removed from the natural world. Darkness form-fits the work day so snugly that what little I see of the landscape is viewed through office windows. And of the weekend chores and errands that linger so persistently around the edges of my lassitude, the only one that gets me outside for any length of time at all is the need for cord wood split to woodstove size.

Splitting wood is still manual labor around our place. Swinging the ax and maul has not yet been replaced by a gas-powered hydraulic splitter. Working in proximity to an internal combustion engine is, for me, to be sealed off in a sarcophagus of sound; one might as well be working on the factory floor. Kate and I both still prefer to hear our own heavy breathing and the critical chortle of red squirrels overhead in the spruces as we work the woodpile.

I’ve wrestled with firewood every fall and winter for the past 35 years in an effort to trim heating oil bills while still staying warm in a succession of old houses. I’ve done it every which way, from cutting standing dead wood in the middle of a snow storm in a wood lot, to ordering eight- and ten-foot lengths from land-clearing contractors, to my current routine of ordering it cut to length and quarter-split. The last few splits required to fit it through the stove door are up to us. We enjoy the work.

Cord wood employs a remarkable energy storage system, invented by trees long before humans came along. Through their photosynthetic alchemy, trees, like all plants, knit together the energy of the sun, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and water from the ground into molecules of glucose, which ring by ring, year by year, trees turn into a firm clench of cellulose in their trunks and limbs. So tight are those molecular bonds that we must burn a fair amount of our own energy to break them apart sufficiently to fit the logs into the little stove in our dark and winter-chilled house. As they say, heating with wood warms you twice.

While we light fires in our fireplaces on special occasions, like Sunday mornings with The New York Times and tea, or when there is company in the house, the woodstove is our steadfast source of winter warmth. The tick-tick of its cast iron expansions and contractions settles into the general syncopation of our old Connecticut clocks and becomes the very sound of security. The cats and dog spread out before it to stretch, to bathe, and to doze through the evening. And when Kate and I arise from the tailings of our books, magazines, and crosswords, to turn off the radio or the TV and head to our own assignation with sleep, the stove continues its vigil into the night, flickering its dying light through its glass door across sinister cat mischief and the dream-twitching dog.

It is those last moments of my day, standing before the woodstove after one last tour of the house to pitch my socks in the laundry basket and to check the doors and lights, that I reap the greatest benefit of the longstanding sweetheart deal I have with New England’s hardwoods. On a midwinter’s night, watching the orange embers and the last dancing flames in the stove, I can see and feel the long-gone sun of a tree’s worth of summers.

(More than 80 other essays in Curtiss Clark’s Field Notes series can be found at www.field-notebook.com.)