First someone tells you about it, then you hear it on the radio, then you tune in on the evening late news, then a second person tells you about it, earnestly, and then, ok, finally, you tell someone too.
That’s usually how it works when a storm is coming. And this particular storm we have right here, we have been hearing about for like a week, ever since some moisture came ashore in Seattle 2,851 miles away. Then this front, that front, Pensacola moisture, Carolina ice, Appalachian Ridge trap, and, OK, a nice seven-inch snowstorm. Big deal. I dug out my bird feeders and everything is fine.

But the days leading up to the storm, they were special.

Temperatures dropped into the single digits and daytime temps were mostly in the teens and with that, the scientifically challenged said “Hey! What about your global warming now, huh?” Some of us remember when temperatures were, religiously common, 5 to 15 below zero during the third and fourth week of January. So, there is that. Plus, Australia set a record of 123F this week. And Buenos Aires, Argentina just hit 106F.

But those cold clear days came with ample sunshine, and sunshine and low wind are the keys to a fine winter day working in the woodlot or along the fence line. Many trees came down this last summer, downed by the fierce winds of several storms. They crashed out into the hay field and near the garlic patch. With my rudimentary road nearly complete and the ground frozen, it is now easy to get access to these fallen giants. I hooked up my dump trailer and got up there by late morning. On the north side of the hayfield, between the beehives and the garlic, is an area along the wooded fence which is like a bedroom for white-tailed deer. You can see their droppings and their beds lined with uncut high grass which could not be mowed due to the trees down on the field’s edge. A little sanctuary, protected from the north and west winds, exposed to the eastern and southern sunshine, I’d camp here too, and chose this spot to begin my cleanup.

I like to begin my work on a downed tree from the top, looping off the small top branches and working down the tree, cutting anything that will burn into 16- to 18-inch-long pieces. First tree was a wild black cherry. Cherry burns just fine, but an experienced cutter judges the lumber as he cuts it and looks for workable logs that might make good boards, or oversized stumps which might make for exceptional carving, or he looks for burls and other abnormalities.

The last tree I had to drop, as it was dead but still standing, and I notched the base nice and it crashed down where I wanted it, where I could easily load the pieces, once sectioned, into the dump trailer. It was an ash, a big ash. That’s just about the end of ash around these parts. All the ash on the hill are dead and on the other southern fencerow too and that is the end of ash as a species, at least in this locale. Ash were beautiful trees, full canopied and distinctly tree-shaped, the wood made excellent baseball bats and fine firewood and good handles for tools. They were an American staple in the wood department. A nice light-colored, straight-grained hardwood, I have a stack of ash boards in my cellar with “staircase project, do not touch” labeled promiscuously.

During my father’s generation, America lost the American chestnut trees and the American elm. During our time, we have seen the last of the ash. The next generation may be witness to the decimation of the maples and hemlocks and then, later, the oak will disappear. Each has its own pathogen.

With the tops, I invited a few friends over and we got a fire going, a new year’s celebratory fire, as I believe, in my tortured religion, each season deserves its own celebration, and I am not about to surrender burning wood to the climate action debate. It has long been known that burning wood is carbon neutral and not the cause of global warming. This is not the same argument as saying it is ok to burn down the Amazon to make room for McDonald burger meat farms. Not at all. The earth needs it forests. They are a carbon sink and an exporter of oxygen.

But burning wood in celebration, or burning wood to heat your home, is not the problem. There is talk on-line that New York State is in the process of outlawing the use of wood to heat homes. There is a committee somewhere claiming all sorts of things and advocating the end of wood. Does the state have any idea how many country people depend on wood as a primary, or back-up source of heat? And for most of them wood is a source of free, or low-cost, heat. Trees take carbon from the air and build themselves with carbon as a building block. When a tree dies the carbon is released back into the soil, or into the air, or into the air a lot faster if burned, but burning a tree is NOT adding to the net carbon level of the atmosphere. Burning coal and oil and natural gas, which has been sequestered for hundreds of millions of years below ground and out of the atmospheric cycle, is adding hitherto unavailable carbon and methane to the atmosphere and oceans. Therein lies the problem, not a campfire.

It’s not the individual who should feel guilty for heating their home with wood, especially if they burn well cured wood in an efficient double-burning chambered stove. The great hydrocarbon industry is always attempting to shift blame to the less well lobbied members of society, to divert people from the real causes of global warming. The wood is here, is part of the byproduct of a working system of air and elements. Coal and oil and gas are not a natural part of this atmosphere and, guess what? 2022 will see a record year for the production of hydrocarbons in the USA and worldwide.

Let’s not punish the backyard poor and the Druids for the sins of an industrial complex that will never let up, never surrender their profits and their hold on how they think life should be. Keep the wood, dump the coal.
I had three great days bringing in wood. Now snow. I better plow it too, this time, as it’s going to freeze and that doesn’t mean the earth isn’t warming.