Adaptive Curmudgeon

My time for amassing firewood ran out long before my enthusiasm for cutting it. Autumn became a flurry of activities and cutting firewood gave way to more urgent winterization tasks.

Then it snowed. Summer was over. The first snowfall is one of my favorite days. I dedicated a long afternoon to watching the chickadees. Call it reverence or call it an old coot staring out the window. I’m happy with either definition.

This little bird is the soul of winter. When showoff bald eagles turn tail and head south, a chickadee just keeps keepin' on. You'll find chickadees flitting around the branches in a blizzard...which is why I like them so much.

The first days of winter are delicious and bittersweet; the harvest is done and the fevered rush to store acorns becomes an instant moot point. The beauty and grandeur of snow brings a stark brilliant clarity to the forests. Deer hunting improves with visible tracks.  Bass boats are stowed and ignored and snowmobiles are readied and coveted (I own neither). Those who can afford it shift to preserving their better cars and drafting “winter beaters” into service. Tourists are long gone and the hectic hours of the summer give way to a well earned period of hibernation. Yet the hard part of the year is coming. If I ever go bankrupt it won’t be on a sunny August afternoon. Folks in the milder climes will never know this seasonal cycle. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

My favorite fall ritual is to read aloud To Build A Fire. This bores my wife and creeps out my kid. So be it. It’s short and they humor me, then we light the fire. Jack London knows the score. For those of you who aren’t familiar with his none too subtle story I’ll provide a synopsis:

“When it’s extremely cold, you should be smart. Old people know not to mess with the elements. Dogs know it too. Young men don’t. Blow it and you die. ”  Adaptive Curmudgeon’s Review of To Build A Fire

You're gonna' die. I hope you learned your lesson.

After Mr. London’s cheery send off we kept the fire going and it wasn’t a big deal. The shocking thing about winter is that we can survive and even thrive in it. I dragged my feet and we went a few more months without a furnace.

Eventually, because I could avoid it no longer, I had a furnace installed. This was a very good thing but I felt oddly let down. I’d always intended to replace the dead one but I wanted something more awesome than a duplicate of what broke; a soulless box that emits tepid heat and fuel bills. You don’t always get what you want. (Even if you blow a 50 amp fuse.) Our new generic off the shelf moderately efficient appliance performs with all the excitement of a toaster.

On the other hand I can now let the fire go out without worrying; which is nice.  Plus two sources of heat are always better than one.  Also the new furnace set on low (keeping it’s use to a minimum) coupled with wood heat evens out the comfort in the house better than either alone.  To my eternal delight Visa didn’t get a red cent out of me.

I expected a new furnace to heat better than our decrepit one but it is neither better nor worse. It’s a little quieter but the old one wasn’t noticeably loud. The biggest improvement was the $20 programmable thermostat I installed. I was disappointed but maybe I’d been letting “excellent and theoretical” be the enemy of the “good enough and done”? Intellectually I know it was stupid to have gone so long into a second winter without a backup heat source but I’d enjoyed the challenge.

With a stroke of symmetry the new furnace went “on-line” almost one year to the day after the old one died. I never even bought more fuel, I just hooked it up to the tank and started consuming unused fuel left from last year. Of course, the wood stove is still providing 90% of our heat. Time to reflect on lessons learned:

1. I’ve proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that we could go without fossil fuel heat. (We do use some electric but it’s minimal.) We can be and have been self reliant. It is a fact.
2. I learned that #1 isn’t the endless slog of misery that folks tend to imagine.
3. I learned that nobody but my wife (who is a saint) believes me. Folks weaned on modern technology just can’t get their heads around a redneck with a chainsaw supplanting all powerful Exxon. They have a little voice in the back of their head that tells them that morons like me cannot be right and earnest looking strangers with lab coats and salesmen with good hair know better. How many marketers have worked for how long to create this flaccid compliance?
4. I learned that the lack of a heat bill makes a difference to the household bottom line. A big one. I’d gone one full year without paying a single penny for fuel of any type. I’d spent a little on bar oil, saw gas, gloves, and minor tools but that’s peanuts. How many of us are stumbling though life without realizing how much we’re spending on necessities that aren’t strictly necessary?
5. I learned that huge savings could be diffuse and subtle. If you weren’t paying attention you’d scarcely notice it. I can’t point to a big ticket result. I just have a few extra bucks in my pocket for life’s other priorities. This brightened my outlook more than I’d expected.

The most important note is #5. It boils down to two Curmudgeonly Gems of Insight that you can count on:

“Savings, even very significant savings, spread over time will melt into the background. You’ll still get the benefit but you don’t find a pile of cash on the kitchen table.”

And:

“When savings, especially significant savings, melt into the background, your financial horizon gradually grows brighter. If the source doesn’t jump out at you (and it won’t) you might not notice it. It looks a lot like good fortune and happenstance. It isn’t. You earned it.”

That last concept is something I can’t quite communicate. It’s significant but hard to see. We all have a financial sword of Damocles over our head. Mine is a little less threatening after a year of savings. I feel like I stuck to a diet and came out healthier. It means more than you’d think. I didn’t do any extraordinary budgeting so it’s probably mostly a matter of not feeling so strapped when I spring for pizza or when the car needs a minor repair. It’s a measure of freedom. Freedom is good for you.

Epilogue:

It’s -8 degrees out. Only a desperate man or a fanatic would be cutting wood now and my tractor would wallow in the drifts anyway. But I recently managed to score four cords of raw logs at a discount and the pile is waiting for me. As soon as spring arrives I’ll start cutting it up…I’ve probably put on weight without my chainsaw based exercise regime and will be happy to get back to it. Good thing next winter is just around the corner.

Logs. There are many like them but these logs are mine.

In the summer you don’t need a furnace. So you’ve got time. What do you do with that time? First you fish, then you mow the lawn, then you prepare for winter. It is as it has been since the beginning of time. Also you should drink beer.

Our old farmhouse is insulated with old saltine boxes and hope. Every winter the seasonal reversal of global warming forces us to expend a lot of cash on heat. For some baffling reason my paycheck stays the same. I called Obama about that but he blamed George Bush and hung up.

Knowing that money would be tight once the snow flew (as it always is), I set to work. I’ve got an ace up my sleeve. Trees grow in my backyard, propane does not. My wood stove works. My furnace does not. Fate was giving me a hint with a sledge hammer. I started chopping firewood like a madman.

I should note that I know what I’m doing. I’m a forester and have plenty of experience with every aspect of timber harvesting. (Including planting truckloads of seedlings so shut up Sierra Clubbers!) If you don’t know what you’re doing, chainsaws are a great way to wind up dead. You’ve been warned. Don’t try this at home. Your mileage may vary. Warranty void in California and New Jersey. Etc…

For me it was therapeutic. Cutting your own firewood is a manly workout, but grit and Ibuprofen work wonders. I like doing it. Also I cleaned up a decrepit and messy forest. (Note: I can harvest trees and make the forest better. Don’t go all Al Gore and assume I created a barren wasteland.)

If you're picturing this you need to get off the tofu and go see what a forest looks like.

My wife and kid pitched in too. I believe they did about 8% of the work. I did the other 92% and a lot of the remaining 8% while my kid looked for his gloves. Sometimes it’s hard to work alone but the bitching is a lot quieter when there’s nobody there whining but me. Gem of Insight:

“Hard physical labor, unsurprisingly, is unpopular. Get used to being lonely.”

I didn’t cut as much as I wanted but I did amass a decent stockpile for most of the winter. Firewood around here sells at about $150 a cord for cut, split, and delivered. This isn’t labor free. After delivery you’ve got to stack it (or it won’t dry properly). Stacking it is also how you discover the extent to which you’ve been shortchanged by your supplier.

I cut about 4 – 5 cords. At $150 a cord that meant my pile of wood was worth $600 to $750. That’s money in the bank baby!

Everyone humored me while dismissing my mountain of wood as a clueless nincompoop’s hobby. Americans realize that you can buy stuff with money but they can’t quite see stuff as an asset. I think they’ve bought so much useless shit over the years that “stuff” means “shit” and asset means “expensive shit”. A pile of firewood seems valueless to people who didn’t cut the propane check last winter.

I was a happy little beaver cutting mostly dead and dying wood from my little forest. This improves the vigor and growth of the remaining trees. Most of the wood I cut was old, knotty, and bent. This, of course, is fine. Fire doesn’t care about the appearance of it’s fuel. Commercial loggers have to cut a lot more wood than a yokel like me so they tend to harvest live, straight trees in great mechanized swaths. Their product looks better than mine. Americans think pretty stuff is better than ugly stuff…even in the case of firewood where looks are irrelevant. This is why there are patterns drawn on your toilet paper.

By now it was mid summer and I was shifting from harvesting to storing. I did this all when it was 80 degrees out. Americans do not remember the story of the ant and the grasshopper.

In traditional children's stories the grasshopper, wastrel that he is, dies. Dies cold alone and starving. Just plain dead! And the **^%%%$ had it coming! (I love fairy tales!)

Hat tip to True Blue Sam for the excellent instructive tree felling safety video.

Even at my subarctic hovel, summer must come. By then I’d saved some scratch to install a furnace. At my leisure. No hurry at all.  Cash.  How cool is that?

I gots the benjamins!

Then the septic system went all third world on me. City dwellers might not realize this but people in the hinterlands have to pay to install their own personal septic system.  “This is my septic tank, there are many like it but this one is mine…”  It’s a lot like buying a good used car and then burying it.  On the other hand we don’t pay monthly water or sewer bills because that would be Communist.  We take a horrific financial body blow every few decades just to crap indoors.  No wonder we listen to country music.

I was faced with a choice; spend money on the furnace or spend money on the septic. Given the choice I’d rather shit in the cold. I chose to ignore the furnace and put in a massive septic system which can flush a Buick. It was completed on the Fourth of July and while the excavator was there I put in a cement base for my flag pole. God bless America! Every time I flush I think of Old Glory and am happy that I live in this great nation of freedom!

All over the world oppressed peasants are crapping in front of God and everything. Not me! God Bless America and God Bless Indoor Plumbing!

Since I blew my money on the septic tank, I backed off on buying a replacement furnace. That was the choice I had made. It met with disapproval from practically every person I know. Americans, like politicians, have lost the ability to make choices. When they can’t afford to buy both A and B simultaneously they consider their options carefully and then BUY BOTH RIGHT NOW.

So it's agreed; my side will spend money like monkeys on heroin and your side will bitch about any tax anywhere anytime. Win win baby!

Meanwhile I’d made a big discovery. If you do not have a furnace you don’t need to buy fuel. If you don’t buy fuel you have more money in your pocket. How much more? A whole lot! (Which helped pay for the septic.)

I was delighted. We may have saved as much as two grand or more. I tried to explain my good fortune and got nowhere. Which leads me to a Curmudgeonly Gem of Insight:

“If you don’t spend money. You still have it.”

If you spend less than you normally would, you’ve improved the household bottom line. This is true even if it’s savings over several months. I know this. Everyone else lacks that level of mathematical reasoning and is busy reading People Magazine. In fact, Americans only recognize savings if you amass all the money at once, put it in a steel box, and beat them to death with it.

I didn’t care. I was on a roll.

By now I was a man on a mission. I wanted to exploit my dead furnace “event” to:

1. Save some bucks by NOT financing a new furnace.
2. Live a year of flipping the bird at oil companies.

I was adamant about the financing.  Credit cards are radioactive. Visa once had a vice cranked firmly on my balls. I’m not going down that path again. A furnace costs $X. I had $0. $X>$0. So no purchase and Visa can go fuck itself. As for oil companies…I don’t really hate them but they’ll do fine without me.

Visa's corporate headquarters with newly upgraded communications center finally operational! (Big Oil corporate headquarters visible in background.)

My wife, who is saintly, said nothing. Sometimes the most wonderful thing your wife can do is to let you chase your dreams. My wife rocks because she let me chase my dream of being a cheap bastard. All the men who get browbeat until they wind up imprisoned in mini-vans have my sympathy.

Folks were incredulous that I didn’t buy a new furnace on day one. “I haven’t got the money” I’d say. They’d look at me like my head was growing antennae. Which leads me to a Curmudgeonly Gem of Insight:

“Americans have lost the ability to go without something merely for the quaint archaic reason that they cannot pay for it.”

For the rest of the winter I had to take wood from a pile, put it in the stove, and well…that’s it. I worked from home so it was uneventful. Every few hours I’d push back from my desk, toss a log on the fire, enjoy a brief moment of smug contentment because I hadn’t spent money, and then sit back down. I enjoyed it. It wasn’t as convenient as a thermostat but it wasn’t a big deal. Why the obsession with an appliance?  I’ve come to believe that most folks would buy an appliance to wipe their ass if Wal-Mart sold one.

There are appliances that'll wipe your ass for you! The only reason America hasn't collapsed is that they're not sold at Wal-Mart.

People carried on like I was living in a mud hut and wearing sackcloth. What is this? Especially from the men, I expected more…uh…machismo. Tossing an occasional log into a modern, non-catalytic reburn airtight wood burning stove is…misery? In a world that’s experienced war, famine, and pestilence…and that’s just in Detroit…I’m supposed to whine about using a wood stove? Since when did my nation, land of the free and the home of the brave, become a mass of limpwristed pantywaisted chickenshits?

Leading to my next Curmudgeonly Gem of Insight:

“Americans have come to believe that any inconvenience, no matter how small, is impossible to bear.”

The pressure was more or less constant. I expected people would think I’m odd. (Which is fair enough.) But beyond laughing at my kooky refusal to get with the program what of it? I was hounded relentlessly. I could have infiltrated a Buddhist temple and done lines of blow off Krishna’s ass with less social disapproval than I got for refusing to buy what I couldn’t afford. Apparently, Americans have (nearly) lost the ability to tolerate whack jobs who wont buy stuff on credit like God intended.  As always I relied on my super-Curmudgeonly powers of obstreperousness to see me through.