Ammi Midstokke: Fetching firewood and other life lessons

I didn’t know it growing up, but some of the most valuable wisdom I would learn would come from chopping wood.

Or rather, from having a wood-heated home that requires the acquisition of trees, appropriate sawing, hauling, piling, chopping, stacking, and so on. It is a process that requires both brawn and brains. And while no one has accused me of the latter, I have been mistaken for a rugby player or Latvian bear wrestler on more than one occasion.

As a child, firewood season was abhorred. This could have something to do with the fact that firewood hauling was also a form of Machiavellian punishment instilled by my parents – who are arguable geniuses. If my brother or I were the cause some sort of behavioral infraction – such as trying to find out if chickens could swim, hiding and drinking all the JOLT! cola, or talking back – we would be ordered to “fifty logs.”

Our firewood supply was a quarter-mile away up a road that curved around our property, over the creek, and dove into the steep side of the mountain where tamarack and pine had been fell and stacked earlier in the season. We would take our red, plastic toboggans strung with bailing cord, sling the rope around our waist, and trudge up the hill where we did our darnedest to find the smallest rounds of firewood possible.

By July, we’d caused enough trouble that most of the small logs were gone. Earning fifty logs in late summer meant one could only get maybe six logs in a single, heavy load. Into the woods we’d go to load our sleds and drag them home. The tiny cord was drawn taut against our hips or shoulders, we leaned forward like toe-head Clydesdales and stomped one foot in front of the other, the sound of rock and dirt scraping under the plastic as we inched our way toward the house.

Sadly, we knew no chain gang songs at the time, though we may have sung a bible camp song or two.

There was a time when my mother was building rock walls around everything and we had to fetch rocks instead of wood. Although optimistic to begin with, I soon discovered that rocks are no lighter than firewood. Surprisingly, while I was learning a lot about weight distribution, torque versus speed, and geology, I never learned how to stop getting in trouble.

Some decades later, I find myself smiling at a pile of log rounds on a Saturday morning. The Captain has fetched several trees and delivered them, like a sweet gift to his lover, to our back door. Many advancements have been made in the technology of firewood acquisition since my childhood: He used an ATV and trailer and there was no punishment involved, just a desire to not freeze this winter.

I set to the work of setting up the rounds, lining up a selection of chopping tools (axes, mauls of different weights, a cup of coffee, and soundtrack). My palm wrapped around the wooden handle of the maul – we are becoming old friends – and I rolled my shoulders a few times. It was a big pile of wood. Rain was coming. I wanted it all split and stacked before the weekend was over.

Each piece of wood that splits has a different story, whether it is one of how frustrated I was with the many knots or how hot I think it may burn on a cold, winter day. For hours and hours I swung, grunted, thudded, split, tossed and stacked the wood. Tired and sore, I woke up the next day to do the same. Strangely, I was elated as I saw my wood shed fill one foot, one row at a time.

It smelled like soil and splinters and hard work in there. I stood before the stacks and I could already feel the heat of the flame through the stove, hear the gentle clacking of my knitting needles, see my children huddled around the flickering light as the snow falls outside.

“Why do we even have to heat our house with wood?” asked my daughter as she complained bitterly at the prospect of manual labor – apparently an antiquated practice amongst the younger generations. She declared me a mad woman, much as I accused my own my parents of breaking a number of internationally recognized child labor laws.

Yet somehow what was once a form of discipline has become one of my most rewarding experiences. My guess is, my parents knew exactly what they were doing.