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The woodcutter’s philosophy

March 23, 2023   ·   0 Comments

When we were young, our late Father, during an early spring moment one Saturday afternoon on our bush property as our family culled and cut down dead trees in the slowly melting snow to harvest as firewood for our home, once espoused this profound little piece of manly philosophy over lunch to his three growing boys:

“A man who cuts his own firewood is twice warmed”.

And that’s very true. For those of you who may not know what he meant by that, he meant that you are firstly warmed by the physical effort of cutting the wood yourself, and then later on you yourself are secondly warmed by the heat from the burning of that same wood as you burn it in your wood stove or fireplace at home.

Our Father was an ardent and robust outdoorsman who loved and respected the bush. Dad loved everything about wood. He loved to cut down trees, he loved to cut the downed trees up into splittable sections, he loved to split the wood sections into usable firewood, and he loved the heat and roaring glow of a fire in a wood stove.

Firewood was an essential part of our Father’s life growing up.  

Dad grew up on a country farm where wood was the sole source of heat for their home. Not only was his country home heated solely by wood as a boy, but he was appointed by his teacher as the boy who had to get to school a bit earlier than everyone else in the winter to get the wood stove going to heat up their one-room schoolhouse so that everyone else would be comfortable when they came to school to begin their studies for the day.

And because the burning of wood had a special place in our Father’s family life growing up, a wood fire held a special place in our memories of growing up in the country as well. I distinctly remember our Grandparents having a big black cast iron wood burning cook stove in the kitchen of their home that they used to cook the meals on every time we came to visit. (They also had an electric stove for backup, but I remember that the electric stove was only used as a last resort if the wood stove was going to take too long to cook the meal.) The wood stove was big and black with white enamel oven doors and you had to lift the cooking surface stove lids with hand held lid lifters in order to feed wood into the stove to maintain the fire for cooking. Many a happy Sunday dinner we enjoyed at Grandma and Grandpa’s back in the day was cooked on their wood burning cast iron cook stove.     

Dad loved everything about the burning of wood. To him, the roar and warmth of a hearty wood fire were synonymous with the happiness and security of family and home.

And eventually after Dad got married, started a family of his own and built our house in the country, he decided it was finally time to invest in a wood burning stove for our own family home.

Originally purchasing a franklin stove and setting it up in the living room, we enjoyed the warmth and crackle of a wood fire on many cold and snowy winter nights and occasionally saw the natural phenomenon of the ‘migrating geese’ radiating from the fire on the inner walls of our franklin stove.     

And taking his love of firewood to the next level, our entrepreneurial Father decided to turn the act of woodcutting into a profitable side business.

While we usually just cut wood for ourselves, Dad knew the local cottagers enjoyed the pleasure of a glowing fire as much as he did. So we used to go with Dad to a local sawmill to buy truckloads of slabwood to cut to size and sell to the local cottagers for firewood. (For those who may not know what slabs are, slabwood is the outside part of the tree, including the bark, that is left over when the sawmill cuts the harvested tree logs into useable building materials, be they 2 x 4’s, fence posts, or other essential framing and construction components.) Slabwood was unusable to the mill at the time and considered scrap so the mill was quite happy to sell the slabwood by the truckload to anyone who wanted to take it away. We would pile the wood as high as we safely could in the back of our truck, using extra-long pieces of sturdy slabwood to serve as side slats to secure the load and make the pile even higher. Our truck finally stacked to the sky with slabwood, we would tie the load down securely and take it home and pile it close to our own little personal sawmill, ready to be cut to size and parceled out to any cottager who wanted to order a cord of wood from Dad. And as word about his business spread, many a local cottager experienced a warm and soothing evening fire in their fireplace thanks to the efforts of our family.

Double entendres aside, men and wood will always have a special relationship to each other. Lynn Johnston, the Canadian creator of the ‘For Better or for Worse’ cartoon strip understands this, once writing in her autobiography, as she lived with her Dentist Husband in a rural community in the wilds of Northern Ontario, “You can mess with a man’s wife, but not his woodpile”.

Like in the story of the grasshopper and the ant, our family spent many weekends in our bush lot in the early spring before the bugs came out harvesting trees for firewood in preparation for the winter to come. And I smile about the times in our youth spent working in the spring snow and bonding with family, all the while being ‘twice warmed’ by the cutting of our own firewood.

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