Firewood, Stoves, and Heating

-->

I’ve sort of digressed from our trip to Eureka but I’ll digress a little more. The couple who took us looking for huckleberries we seldom see anymore. They were quite active in the local Methodist church when we first arrived in Ashland and we got to know them rather well. The husband worked in the local post office. He had at the time an old pickup and a chainsaw and a couple of times we went up in the mountains to get firewood from a logging slush. Even at this date (10–15 years later) I have a couple of remaining log chunks that I use for setting potted plants on, on the patio, during summer months.

He was really a congenial person, his wife somewhat less so, and I regret that our paths diverged. The wife tended to be more conservative in religious matters than he, and eventually they drifted off to a local Lutheran church, I think Missouri Synod. This may have occurred because the younger of their two daughters married a man from that church and she joined there. I thought to myself what a way to regress theologically — Methodism is bad enough but Missouri Lutheran is outright awful. Perhaps not as bad as the Catholic church but almost.

I encountered my erstwhile wood gatherer at the local grocery store not long ago. It was after my heart attack and surgery and I mentioned I’d had [double bypass] surgery. He said he’d had the same operation about two years ago and he had seven bypasses. I hadn’t even been aware that he’d been ill.

During our early time in Ashland we had other sources of firewood which we used. One was the discard pile at what was then the McGrew mill about a mile from us. Anyone was free to go there and take away whatever was wanted. Since then McGrew went through bankruptcy and the mill was purchased by Croman; their operation us more sophisticated and I think they convert any scrap logs to chips for sale. This practice is actually one that developed after we arrived in Oregon, at least to the extent that it is now used.

Then there were some small manufacturing companies on “A” Street that made such things as surveying stakes and these would periodically put up a sign saying free firewood. Another source was buildings which were being razed; some of the wood pieces recovered from an old barn near Highway 66 and Tolman Creek Road I still have and I use them for various purposes.

The wood which we recovered (Jean helped me) was also the source of the wood I used in constructing my woodshed. I say woodshed since, although it was made originally for this purpose, it has been used instead for storing various miscellaneous stuff. A good part of the wood from the barn was used for firewood however.

When the old Ford garage downtown was torn down, all the building was simply hauled off as debris; I looked on with envy at all the firewood going to waste. I suspect that the construction company didn't want the bother or the potential liability. The garage was on the site of the motel that replaced it; the company that built the motel was very well organized. The motel went up faster than any other building project I have ever watched.

Shortly after we arrived in Ashland I bought some old mill ends that lay on a property that belonged to some official in the local Mormon church. These had been collected for use by indigent Mormon families but had never been needed. Then someone else bought the property and decided to dispose ot eh wood and clean up the property. Then I later bought some wood from Parson Pine products, a local wood products manufacturing concern; I got a large pickup load for $10 and have used it for kindling etc.

The wood which I scrounged I transported partly in the trunk and partly on top of our ’69 Plymouth. We had a car-top carrier that fit this car so that transporting wood on top of the car was feasible. Since disposing of that car in 1984 when we traded it in on the Mercury I haven’t collected any free firewood though I still see signs for it occasionally. One of these is the Shakespeare Festival when they dispose of scenery from their productions when the season closes in late October or early November. I have rooted around in the large dumpster to which they consign this material but the discarded material was never very good for firewood etc.

Our home here has a fireplace both upstairs and downstairs. Early in our stay here we bought a stove and had it installed downstairs on the fireplace hearth. When we bought it there were only a couple of places selling such stoves in the valley; now there are quite a few and the requirements for new stoves, and for the use of them (to avoid air pollution from particulates) have been enacted, and stiffened.

One reason for putting the stove downstairs was heat for Laurel who spent most of her time downstairs. I wonder sometimes if we were remiss in not sensing that it tended to be cool down there to be sitting around. Another instance of not being perceptive about the needs and wants of out offspring.

In recent years I have purchased firewood for the fireplace, and this plus what I have recovered from various pruning jobs around the yard has kept the fireplace supplied. Jean likes to have a fire in the evenings so she can sit and read and keep warm in front of it. Over the time we’ve used it here in Ashland I’ve developed a way of laying the fire so that it will burn rather slowly for the three hours or so when we want it going. The way I do it isn’t perfect as sometimes it burns too slowly, but almost never too fast.

In developing means to dispose of garden debris (during the time we didn’t have garbage service) I even went as far as devising a way of wrapping up small twigs in several sheets of newspaper and tying it in sort of a roll, like a log piece. These I burned in the stove downstairs, not in the fireplace. I’ve sort of discontinued this now that I’m gardening in a somewhat more lackadaisical manner.

Mostly what I’ve used to stoke the stove downstairs (when I’m downstairs at my desk in the colder months) is old newspapers. In recent years we have subscribed to three newspapers — the Wall Street Journal, the Medford Mail Tribune and the Daily Tidings — and the discarded newspapers accumulated rapidly and of course during much of the year they aren’t used up at all so they accumulate even faster. We could dispose of these to recycling except that often there seems to be a glut in the old newspaper market; I sort of feel that using them for fuel for warmth isn’t such a bad way of getting rid of them.

Our supply of old newspapers was enhanced when I was collecting the old San Francisco Chronicles and Los Angeles Times from the college library. This would practically double the supply we had from subscriptions. I’d leaf through the two newspapers for the crossword puzzles, pictures and any articles that might catch my eye. This source of old newspapers stopped when I had my heart attack and subsequent surgery, I couldn’t collect them as I did before and now that I am recovering I don’t seem to have the time to go through them. The last stack that I picked up is actually still lying on the garage floor. The day of my heart attack I had picked up a rather large accumulation at the library — in fact it was when I was carrying a bunch of the papers from the library to the car that I had the sensation of distress that was a forerunner to the attack itself.

We actually don’t burn a lot of wood in the fireplace. In recent years I’ve bought a cord of wood about every other year. For awhile I bought the firewood from a retired logger down at the end of Faith Street near Highway 66. Then he died and I’ve just called up someone advertising in the paper.