By Robert Rutherford
The only firewood we had when we moved to West Petpeswick were the tops of red spruce the lumber barons didn't want. They left them where they lay among the younger trees that were too thin.
All I needed was a chainsaw, a woods truck, and my Ashley Automatic from Alabama. After that heating the house was free. The saw, the stove, and a 1952 Dodge army truck cost about $3,000 in those days.
That's about three months of groceries now. The two- or three-year old chunks of wood burnt pretty well. That's a good thing because we didn't want to crank up the big electric baseboard heater. We had a tight budget like any young couple—you might say it was the Eastern Shore on $10 a day.
The 50-centimeter cement chimney had a 20-centimeter-wide clay liner and was almost 9 meters from the cellar up to the sky. Softwood packs more British Thermal Units for its weight, but it's a bit sappy. Old timers say, “Where there's smoke there's fire” but that smoke coats the chimney with the hard tar of creosote.
One old timer who didn't care about creosote was our neighbor to the south, Lewis Greenough. One windy winter day across the field, I saw thick black smoke with bits of flame coming out of his chimney. I ran over to tell him he was having a chimney fire, but he didn't even care to come outside. By the time I was back home, it had stopped. Later in the afternoon of that windy day, I saw it was happening again. Burning bits spewed like a volcano. This time I didn't bother him.
Next day I saw young Andy up on Lewis’ roof pushing a tall thin young spruce tree down the chimney, but the horse was out of the barn by then.
One year Louis said come on over, he had a present for me. It was half an 80-year-old red spruce that had been about 25 meters tall when the loggers left it on the property line. That's where it should have stayed, but there it was, cut and split. I thanked him but didn't say anything about saving what was left of the old growth.
Another year with a snowstorm roaring outside one Sunday morning, the Chronicle Herald's funny papers lighting the kindling went flaming up the chimney. When it sounded like the Blueberry Express was roaring up country, I stepped outside to see our own chimney fire. I shut down the stove draft, and it was soon out.
The liner on my chimney must have gotten cracked around our son’s bedroom ceiling because some black creosote was oozing out of a seam of the cement structure. It wasn't long before Robert Monroe (everybody calls him Mooney) with one of the Stevens, was pushing new stainless steel chimney liner sections down as far as the living room stove pipe On the eastern shore, that was called the modern age.
Round about then Bruce Conrad dropped by with about 20 white pine saplings left over from his lands. They were soon part of the long windbreak protecting the house and garden from the eastern and southern storms for decades.
As for too old softwood, it will warm you twice. Once when you cut and split it. And again when you drag it away like a damp squid.
