Two Is One And One Is None

Winter is never easy but some are worse than others. Sometimes it’s a mere inconvenience. Sometimes it fights dirty. This winter is a groin kicker.

Take firewood. Firewood is a gamble where you pit your own brawn and brain against the mountain of BTUs needed to heat a house. Do it well and you’ll get summertime exercise, a cheery fire, and a significant amount of savings. Plan badly and you’ll be Jack Londoning your ass into icy misery.

[RANT] Don’t let hippies give you shit about wood smoke either. Wood is among the most ecologically sound of many options. The material is relatively cheap too. Wood is so commonly that it… well… grows on trees. Also for the Tesla fanboys out there, electric heat is a joke. If you heat with electric you’re not too far north of the Mason-Dixon line. Besides, most electricity is just remotely burned coal. [/RANT]

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, the trick with firewood is to use your big monkey brain to avoid overusing your weak monkey muscles. I use all sorts of mechanized force multipliers. Unfortunately, a hearty winter and decrepit machinery are slowly closing out options.

My main system is a nice little wood carrying wagon towed behind my ATV. Love that little wagon! Holds about a half a face cord. A few trips with it each week and all is well. The labor saving is huge! I move wood from a pile to a wagon that’s a few feet away. Then from the wagon to the house that’s a few feet away. It’s the most efficient way to do an incredibly hard job.

Alas, the wagon just plain wore out. You can buy all sorts of ATV trailers and a replacement is on my “to do” list but I’m currently light on funds. (Good ATV trailers are worth the price but they’re not cheap).

Earlier this winter I fell back to plan B. Plan B is a “real” trailer; I use it for on the road towing behind my truck. It’s a smallish trailer (I think it’s 5’x 8′) but it’s bigger than the ATV wagon and that’s a drawback. It takes a much wider track so I need to plow a much bigger path. That’s precisely what I’ve been doing. I have to invest more labor keeping the path open but wasted labor is the nature of sub-optimal solutions. I also have to be careful to only half load the trailer. Otherwise I’ll overwhelm my 20 year old ATV. That said… it works.

Until it doesn’t.

The ATV died. Or rather it keeps failing to engage 4×4. It’s intermittently useless for plowing. Plowing is how I keep the firewood hauling lane open. Plus the ATV is how I tow the wood. The ATV is mission critical and it’s unreliable. This too shall pass but not before spring. Getting an ATV repairman to look at my ATV is a multi-month affair. He’s busy making bank off the snowmobile owners right now. I don’t blame him for his priorities. (As with buying a new trailer, a new ATV would be nice but it’s cost prohibitive.)

I muddled through for a while but finally the wood hauling lane was snowed in. In current conditions no ATV in creation has enough oomph to plow it. That’s how homesteading works. An ATV is not a truck. An old ATV is not a new ATV. Do not dwell on what you wish, accept what is.

Plan Z is to man up and just haul wood by hand. I hate Plan Z! Pick up a great armload of wood, hike it across the driveway, through the house door, through the living room, step on the dog, track snow everywhere, stumble down the stairs, drop the pile in our rack… lather rinse repeat. You can work to exhaustion and it gets nowhere. Compared to a trailer it’s a tiny amount. I did it for a few weeks but I hate it. Nobody wants to get beaten that hard!

A man’s got to know his limitations. In order to haul all the wood I’d need using that level of crude brawn I’d need to the physique (and possibly the dumb brute patience) of a draft horse.

So I created Plan C. I got myself a nice but smallish ice fishing sled and planned a narrow hauling lane.

Ice fishing sleds are plastic but pretty cool. They’re a million times stronger (and somewhat heavier) than a kid’s sled. Ice fishing folks use them to haul 200+ pound loads of ice auger and beer behind a snowmobile or ATV. Some of the more dedicated fishermen just pull the sled on foot or with snowshoes. They do this in blizzards. They do it to kill fish. Think about that when someone in the media is all fluttery about politics from the DC point of view. Politicians who can’t change a car tire are meddling in the lives of people who haul great loads of fish killing shit onto frozen lakes in blizzards for fun.

I carefully chose a smallish sled. The large one would probably weigh too much when fully loaded.

Then I geared up to bust out the snowbound trail. I have a snowblower but I very much prefer to not use it. Plowing with ATV is strenuous but the snowblower is a wrestling match. Also it’s very loud and sometimes sucks up rocks that bind its impeller.

My kid came out to see me futzing with our snowblower in the freezing cold. I’d stored it with an empty tank (on purpose!) so there was the search for a gas can. Then the obligatory flat tires (when it gets real cold unused tires will go flat). This led to wrestling the compressor out of a different building. Then stretching the air hose, which was as flexible as lead pipe.

I clicked on the compressor and promptly tripped the circuit breaker. Sheesh!

The kid assessed the situation and, teenager that he is, decided I was a moron.

“This is a lot of steps.”

“Yes it is. I’m having cascading failures at the moment.” I said this while rummaging in the cold dark barn for a flashlight.

“We should just use the sled without all this stuff.”

OK folks, you’re adults. You can maybe see all sorts of logic to my more sophisticated approach? Should I explain it? Nah, it’s a teenager I’m talking about. Plus, why not let him try?

“Knock yourself out. I’ll keep at this and you haul with the sled.”

Ten minutes later I’d reset the breaker, wrestled an extension cable to a different outlet, fired the compressor up, and was topping off the snowblower’s fuel tank. Another five minutes and the tires were inflated.

Now I had the blower running and it was game on! I roared into the gloom with the great beast hurling snow like a gas powered tornado. I marched slow and steady through waist deep snow while wondering how the kid was doing. He’s a precocious lad. Competitive too. Given the slightest chance, he’ll show you up and make you look like an incompetent dumbass. (I wonder where he got that from?) I half expected him to be standing there with a grin of smug superiority. Ready to report he’d moved six face cords to the house while I was banging my knuckles on the air compressor.

He was nowhere to be found. He couldn’t have muscled hundreds of pounds through deep snow that fast could he? I had a moment of doubt.

Finally, I found him a couple hundred feet away; collapsed in the snow and exhausted; halfway from the woodshed to the house. The loaded sled buried in a 3′ snowdrift near his feet.

I roared up to the prone teenager and very carefully said nothing mean. I’m awesome like that.

“Snow… Deep. This isn’t going to work!” He panted.

I’d known that all along. The sled had at least 60 pounds of payload and he’d wallowed that pig though drifts to almost literal collapse. Brave but stupid. I didn’t say anything discouraging.

“Nice try. You rest and I’ll see how it goes when the snow’s cleared.”

I wrapped the rope around my waste and pulled it through the cleared path. I’d made sure to clear a level path. The sled rode on a half inch of snow over the frozen soil like it was on greased skids.

I trudged around the house and unloaded it. I gave the kid many compliments when he got to his feet and helped again. We did just a few loads with the sled. Each one was many multiples faster and easier than carrying the wood by hand. Not as easy as the wagon… but not too bad either. We moved perhaps half a face cord. A few day’s worth depending on the weather.

Word to the wise, friction is a thing to be managed, not ignored. Pulling a hefty sled in an inch of snow is at least 90% less effort than churning the same load on top of deep drifts. The kid has learned and will remember. Or not.

Thanks to the wood, the house is nice and warm. We’re fine… until, I suppose, the sled breaks.