Cutting through the cold

We were standing along the wall-side aisles of the supply store, staring at the racks of hand tools—shovels, post-hole diggers, pick axes, mauls. My 14-year-old son picked up an axe, hefted it in a small semi-circle that only slightly imitated a genuine wood-splitting stroke, and pronounced it acceptable: “This one will work.”

Back at our hillside home, we immediately headed to the woodpile behind the house, where the yard (green weeds with a little grass mixed in for good measure) meets the rising, forested mountain. Over the years, the woodpile has grown to include a place for stacked wood, a pile for downed limbs and branches, another pile for tree sections not yet cut to log size, a few logs ready to split, and a fire pit. It is now a 20-by-15-foot semi-circle. Needless to say, we had plenty to work with.

A few trees near the house had crawled over our roof and had been raining limbs and leaves during every weather event. I had those unruly branches cut this past spring. Several other trees—mainly locust—had fallen naturally during a horrific windstorm about a year ago. My 16-year-old daughter, my son and one of his friends, and I had already moved the sawed lengths of tree to the appropriate pile, a job that had left us with bloody wrists, sore backs, and tired legs. That pile will take me and my son all winter and spring to get split and stacked. 

For years I’ve purchased firewood, and every time I handed over the money my own guilt poisoned the transaction. My thoughts would go to our small piece of land on the mountain, the downed wood all around, and wonder when I would make the time and effort to cut my own. Oh, I’d done it in fits and starts, taking pride in occasionally turning a felled tree into wood to burn in the fireplace. But then I would pass a pickup truck of seasoned, stacked wood with a “for sale” sign taped to the bed, an old guy just as seasoned as the wood sitting in the cab or on the tailgate in his coveralls. I’d stop and make the deal.

Now, though, with my son changing from boy to man before my eyes, the many hours of hard work it takes to turn trees into firewood has taken on a new value. Liam wants to get stronger, I want to spend as much time as possible with him, and the family can always make use of a regular source of heat. 

Heat. At 3,500 feet, we are at that elevation in the Smokies where we get “the weather.” Those few extra degrees of coolness make our mountain a heavenly haven and let us do without air conditioning in the summer, but we pay for it when the days get short. We often wake up to snow or ice that is non-existent once we make it down the mountain and into town for school and work. Or, a downtown dusting could mean several inches at our place. There’s joy in those storms, the sledding and playing, the unearthly silence of walking through the woods during a snowfall. There’s also the treachery in maneuvering down the mountain in the Subaru—numb, cold fingers fumbling with tire chains, second-guessing myself as to whether that tortuous process is necessary, the slippery close calls going up and down the road. There is also dealing with the very real possibility that we will lose heat.

We went a decade or more at this house without losing power to snowstorms. Slowly, though, as the forest around us has grown taller and with more understory dying off and wreaking havoc on power lines, we’ve become susceptible to occasional outages. Just last winter, we were down to the fireplace as our only source of heat on a couple of occasions. Two years ago it was a five-day span without power after a rare two-footer blanketed the Smokies. A few years back the furnace belched its last dying breath a day before relatives arrived for a holiday visit. 

Truth be known, I love the mountains but detest the cold. Most of my youth was spent in warmer climes, and my body is attuned to it. My wife and two children who still live at home could as well have come from some Artic tundra tribe. All winter they leave windows open in the bedrooms and run fans and are perfectly fine burrowing beneath a pile of blankets and comforters every night, just their faces exposed to the elements to keep them from suffocating. I literally have been snowed on while sleeping in my own bed.

Close calls with the cold seem to happen often to me, and they are frozen in my memory. Lori and I were sailing with her father one winter along the coast of North Carolina when a line got caught in the prop and left us without power. We had to dive beneath the boat, taking turns in the frigid water trying to get the line untangled. We didn’t have wetsuits or a mask, but we somehow got the prop back in working order without catching hypothermia. Brrrr. During the great Blizzard of 1993, we were stuck under four feet of snow on a mountain in Boone, N.C., at the home of our friends, the Enterlines. They live at close to 4,000 feet. Police had declared the county a disaster area and told people they would be arrested for going out on the roads, but we needed supplies. Tom and I had to crosscountry ski out with empty backpacks to rendezvous with friends who had gotten as close to the house as they could with the two essentials we had run out of —diapers and beer. Our infant children—and the parents—were saved, as it was three or four more days before we could get a vehicle out.

Needless to say, living on a mountainside in the Smokies has taught me several lessons in survival. Always having a source of heat is chief among them, so Liam and I have been working on that woodpile since we got home with his new axe. We’ve had four or five good sessions, probably six hours of back-and-forth banter, friendly joking, wood-cutting challenges, and the stack of firewood is slowly growing to a respectable size. It should provide all the warmth we need should an emergency occur.

He will split as many logs as possible, perhaps wearing out the new axe and possibly a couple of others before he graduates from high school. My job is to make sure that pile of ready-to-split logs is never-ending, promising hours and hours of time together. I’m already feeling warmer.