The Good Life
As most indulge in dreams of the coming summer, others fret about next winter’s fires.
Spring certainly has her coat off down our way. But this hasn’t stopped my fretting. Like some sort of minor, soon-to-be-beheaded Game of Thrones character – a grim-faced Stark perhaps – I’ve been wandering about muttering, “Winter is coming, winter is coming.”
The worry is wood. Or rather how and where to get many cubic metres of the good quality stuff so that it is well stacked and properly seasoned before next winter comes.
Up north, in the traffic jam beside the shining Waitemata, wood is something you typically buy in small bags for hefty prices at service stations, mega stores or that unwelcoming central city place that will remain nameless. After all, most Aucklanders have little use for firewood unless they’ve had one of those outdoor pizza ovens built after seeing them employed by the rustics in rural Italy or possibly the peasants on The Block.
As far as I could tell, Michele and I were among the few in the Big Smoke who actually made smoke during winter, though during our last winter in Auckland we lit a fire on only a handful of occasions.
This first winter here in our rural paradise, with its proper frosts and southerlies that would scare a polar bear, the fire has burnt all day, almost every day for three months. And that, friends, equals a quantity of wood that I believe is loosely defined as a “shitload”. We have bought, at no small expense, 14 cubic metres of the stuff.
And it’s as well that we still have about three cubic metres of it left in our woodsheds because – and this will shock those in the city of the long whiny traffic queue – Wairarapa has run out of dry wood.
A month ago, in front page news, our excellent local paper reported that thanks to a long wet winter, there was barely a dry stick left; this in a region where nearly 75% of dwellings (compared with 35% nationally) are heated by wood burners.
One local wood seller was quoted as saying the ship had sailed for firewood this season, though he didn’t elaborate on whether the ship would return with more wood or a better metaphor.
Another seller, “also known as The Dag Man”, advised readers to get prepared for winter by ordering well in advance of the next one.
I’d already prepared for next winter by ordering Lars Mytting’s hugely entertaining book Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood The Scandinavian Way.
Our rural paradise is blessed with an orchard of roughly 350 ancient pear trees. So I confidently figured, with a little ancient wisdom, supplemented with buying the odd load of harder wood, we should get through a few winters to come once I’ve chopped, stacked and dried all that the Scandiwegian way.
However, lying on the couch by a fire lit from our ever-shrinking wood pile, it’s instead led to the fretting. Should I be “leaf-felling” the pear trees or “strip bark” them, or should I cut them down and split them immediately? Then there’s the business of seasoning: should I do this inside or out, and should it be in neat rows or one of those pleasing Norwegian round stacks? And how am I going to do it all by early summer?
As Donald Trump, who should be known as “The Dag Man”, might put it: who knew firewood could be so complicated?
I’d already prepared for next winter by ordering Lars Mytting’s hugely entertaining book Norwegian Wood. This will shock those in the city of the long whiny traffic queue: Wairarapa has run out of dry wood.