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It was a recent Saturday just after the bills from the local natural-gas monopoly had arrived. We were cleaning the old wood-burning range in the kitchen, which hadn't held a fire in years. Its warming compartments were crammed with odd items that might melt or ignite, the internal smokeways were laden with soot, and though I perked up when Martha said she wanted her ashes hauled, it turned out that she meant it literally.
I had to do some serious archeological probing in the subzero shed to find the ash rake, the lid lifter and the grate shaker, but we were just about done when a friend called. She asked what we were doing, and I told her.
We cleaned ours yesterday,
she said. There's
nothing like a triple-digit gas bill to get your
wood-burner up and running again, is there?
Further inquiry among my peculiar demographic subgroup -- self-employed Baby Boomers who live in 19th-century houses -- revealed that the return of a Bush to the White House coincided with the return of wood heat.
At Gambles downtown, they told me that flue brushes, stove pipe and furnace cement were selling at the briskest pace in a decade. The local chimney sweep said he was making a decent living for the first time in years, and a walk down the alleys was punctuated with the sounds of mauls splitting cordwood, accompanied by the inevitable curses when a chunk refused to fission.
Wood heat was rather fashionable into the 1980s --
What's your stove?
might have been a better pick-up
line than What's your sign?
then -- but it fell out
of favor.
Natural gas burns much more cleanly, and many mountain towns sit in valleys subject to atmospheric inversions, especially in the winter when the fires are going.
The wood smoke would rise from the stovepipes and chimneys, but only for a couple hundred feet, where it collected into a sooty cloud that loomed over the town for days. The resulting pall impaired the views that some people were willing to pay big money to enjoy, and in Colorado, anything that might impede the sale of trophy homes will be outlawed.
Thus in certain resort towns, the building codes were changed to forbid new chimneys unless they vented clean gas-log stoves and fireplaces, and at least one town, Telluride, started buying up old stoves with the understanding that there would be no future burning of solid fuels.
That never happened in Salida, though there was talk of it, and for good reason -- on gelid winter nights in the '80s, the town seemed hellish: murky yellow smoke swirling under the street lamps with a pervasive sulfurous aroma.
Meanwhile some environmentalists argued that wood-gathering was bad for the forests. Various critters needed downed trees for habitat, and the removal of timber that would otherwise rot also meant removing minerals that would eventually be needed in the soil.
The thought that our mountain soils might run short on minerals seemed beyond ludicrous, but I pretty much gave up on wood heat during the '90s for the same reason my friends did -- our kids grew up and left home, and thus we had no slave labor for hauling, cutting, stacking, splitting, cleaning, blacking, polishing and so forth.
Wood heat is labor-intensive, and I now console myself that the daily 20-minute workout with the maul builds upper-body strength without the expense of joining a health club, and there's plenty of other wholesome exercise in stacking and hauling the stuff.
Burning wood also keeps money in town because you send less to some conglomerate with a Texas address. Food tastes better when it's slow-cooked (there isn't any fast-cooking) on a kitchen range, and the pot of water that's always simmering atop the stove is an excellent humidifier.
The humidity is important because it reduces the static electricity that causes sheets of paper to clump together and jam the computer printers -- low-tech cast-iron and high-tech silicon have to work together these days.
It has taken a while to figure out which combination of transoms and ceiling fans best distributes heat through the house, but the uneven distribution also means there's a place to get thoroughly warm after you've been outdoors. And playing cribbage next to a warm stove with a pot of green chile is a fine way to spend a winter evening.
But wood heat does cause some environmental degradation, although I'm not too worried about the smoke -- as last summer demonstrated, our forests will burn anyway, and we might as well put the combustion where it will do us some good.
Besides that, the more natural gas we can save here, the more that is available for power generation in California. The more affordable and available their electricity, the more likely they are to stay in the Golden State, rather than move to Colorado and extend our suburban sprawl with all its loathsome environmental and political consequences.
So it's a trade-off, and at the moment, the benefits of heating with wood certainly appear to exceed the costs.
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