A Cord Of Wood

…is a maddening unit of measure. Technically it’s the volume of wood one can stack in a 4′ x 4′ x 8′ pile.  This is bullshit because a buyer patiently stacking uniform, small diameter, gently tapered, logs can cram a shitton of wood into the same space a busy (and mechanized) seller will occupy with a smaller amount of lightly tossed, poorly stacked, scraggly, tapered and forked, large diameter, junk… in a pyramidal heap. Not to mention that no sane human will stack 8′ bolts of anything. An 8′ bolt is just too unwieldy. Thus, cords ostensibly made of 8′ bolts manifest as 128 cubic feet of dead tree in 24 linear feet of 16″ stovebolts stacked 4′ high; if the work is done by a man’s own labors. (Not withstanding my neighbor who likes to burn 20″ bolts in his external wood boiler.)

The whole 8′ thing is nutty. It’s a tradition springing from industrial processes that came sometime after Paul Bunyan was sledging shit around Maine with a blue ox and and slightly before this morning when someone in British Columbia fired up a whole tree chipper with self leveling cab. It’s enough to make a man go metric!

But I digress.

A cord of wood is so much more that a vague way to specify 128 cubic feet that’s (to a lesser or greater extent) occupied by chopped up tree. It’s more dammit! Especially firewood. Here’s a Curmudgeonly rant:

Firewood isn’t money in the bank, it’s gold in your pocket! It’s a solid fuck you to big oil AND a simultaneous kiss my ass to dweebs with subsidized solar panels. It’s the manliest way to heat your house and the easiest way to work a man to death. It’s the ability to live off grid in ball freezing climates that no rational person would expect of homo sapiens. It’s the brutally hard construction of a personal biomass mountain that you’ll happily torch to ash in your living room: because that’s how you roll! Firewood is about the freest damn thing you can do. If you can harness it, firewood is an endless fountain of tax free, unregulated, privately owned, hand hewn, BTUs of freedom!

It’s also hard fucking work!

Firewood is proof that shit that’s so cheap it literally grows on trees can also be priceless and sometimes unobtainable. It’s pretty damn hard to amass “so cheap it grows on trees” shit when you progress from theory to reality. Life is hard but vivid when you start wandering around the woods armed with nothing but a chainsaw and great clanging balls.

So yeah, I stacked firewood this week. And I’m pretty damn happy about it.

Why am I happy? Because I’ve been taken out of the game for a while. Injury, then illness, then time constraints, then a thousand other little deaths. Lather, rinse, repeat. The world conspires to make us weak.

Also caution held me back. Which is a good thing. A chainsaw will kill you dead. You shouldn’t mess with one unless you feel like you’re firing on all cylinders. Lately, I haven’t often felt healthy enough to mess with beastly forces like a chainsaw.

Until a few days ago. I was leaving the firewood game to studlier people than me. Instead, I had a camp out planned. I was going to deploy my supertent and sail my microboat (pretty good plan eh?). Alas, the weather sucked. Not quite rain but definitely cloudy, neither warm nor cold, winds ranging from mild to none. I paced the house like a caged animal, getting increasingly frustrated, until I set out to see if my body was ready to mess with raw tonnage. My Stihl started readily. My rebuilt and over-engineered wood splitter coughed to life. The only thing that could fail was… me.

Working in cautious 2-3 hour chunks (with ample rest and lots of hydration) I managed to lay up a 16′ long stack of 16″ stovebolts that’s 6′ high. Do the math and that’s one cord.

Then I dropped an old dead tree that’s been trying to fall and block my driveway. Not a big tree but a good chance to see if my directional felling skills had atrophied. They haven’t; that bitch landed on target like I’d typed the coordinates into a GPS. Nice!

Accepting that age implies both limits AND privileges, I didn’t do the tree entirely on my own. Eventually, I pressed a teenager into service to help with splitting and swamping. He did his duty with the minimum required eye rolling and only minor complaints… which is pretty good nowadays. Millennials have potential… or at least this one does. The hard target was to get the shit cleared off the driveway before Mrs. Curmudgeon came home to find her dipshit husband had gone into some sort of logger flashback and blocked the driveway. We made the deadline!

Sadly, I ran out of steam for stacking. Muscles don’t come back in a day (or a weekend). I estimate I’ve got 2/3 cord sitting on the utility trailer I’ve been using to haul my little sailboat. I guess I’ll have to unload and stack it before I can sail again. I can live with that, though I’ll probably let my back rest a day or two before I’m back at it. By the time the next cord is stacked and ready for winter I’ll have earned my sail/camp trip. Earnin’ shit feels good!

Here’s how I felt after doing a little chainsaw therapy: