We took down two trees. Thus began a year-long saga.

They were destined for firewood, which elicits thoughts of New England winters and our connection with fire that dates to the dawn of humanity.

Some of the logs left for firewood when we cut down two trees last October.

We had to take a couple trees down on our property last fall. One was a maple that was on its last legs, the other a black cherry precariously close to a studio we were building. The tree company also trimmed limbs off a few other trees that run along our property.

The tree guys shredded and chipped most of the smaller branches, leaving us a massive pile of hardwood chips that we’ve spent much of the past year using as mulch for garden beds and pathways. In addition to the wood chips, I also asked them to leave the trunks and larger branches of the trees, which they cut into eight-foot lengths and stacked in a pile. 

Thus began my adventure with hundreds of pounds of hardwood logs. My plan: Cut and chop them into firewood.

I love wood fires and I love heating with wood. Wood is one of New England’s cheapest and most plentiful resources. Many friends here in western Massachusetts heat their homes primarily with wood stoves or high efficiency fireplace inserts. There’s something about entering a home heated with wood on a cold afternoon or evening. It’s a pure, dry heat the color of amber. It takes the chill off your bones and it smells to me of a New England winter.

We have two fireplaces in our 1785 home. One is in the living room that burns beautifully and gives off an impressive amount of heat. We light a fire in it most colder evenings in the winter and it really shines during the holidays when the family is here with us. On those days, when we’re usually sticking around the house, the fire burns from morning till night.

The other fireplace is in our first-floor bedroom. We haven’t used it yet, though not because it doesn’t work. We like sleeping in a cooler room and the size of our bedroom, even with a newly built adjoining sunroom that connects the bedroom to the studio, is only about 300-350 square feet. We’ve looked into enclosed fireplace inserts, woodstoves and gas log inserts but they would all give off too much heat for a space that small. We’d be roasting. The fireplace is good to have, though, as a potential heat source if we lose power.

Back to the logs from our downed trees. 

We have a pretty good battery powered chainsaw, which I dusted off last October to attack the 8-foot logs. There were about eight logs in all, most of them about 20-24 inches in diameter. When I tried to move them, it was as if I was trying to lift a small car. I managed to slide and roll them into position for cutting with the help of a steel tamping and digging bar that gave me some leverage.

When I cut into the first log it was slow going. I pushed down harder on the saw, taking care to hold the saw properly and safely position my body a bit to the side. I wore earplugs and goggles. Despite my efforts, all I could see coming from the saw was a little sawdust and a lot of blue smoke. It turns out the chain was dull. Thankfully I didn’t burn out the saw. After a quick lesson in how to sharpen the chain from a local hardware store and the purchase of a sharpening file, I was back in business. 

In a few hours I cut all the logs into 16-18 inch round sections, a size that would be great positioned as seats around a campfire. There were about 35 of them, each weighing upwards of 40 pounds. I left them strewn in the bushes right where I had cut them. 

And there they stayed, through the cold of winter and the heat of summer. They were impossible to miss, icons of my procrastination, the butt of jokes from local contractors and the object of gentle queries from my wife Katie that went along the lines of:

What are we planning to do about those logs?

Hand splitting was an option. I have a couple rusted awls and a sledge hammer but truth be told my Paul Bunyan days may be over, though I probably could have given it a shot. Then a neighbor came to the rescue. He’s a German-born chef who’s lived and worked in the area for decades. He’s also a master mushroom forager and owns a gas-powered log splitter. He offered to bring it over for me, along with a rugby-ball sized mass of hen-of-the-woods mushrooms.

So last weekend, Erhard drove the splitter attached to the back of his John Deere lawn mower down the road and up our driveway. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect because our son Gus and his wife Kelly were visiting from California. Gus is strong and a great worker. I suddenly had a powerful machine and a willing partner who could help ferry the logs across the lawn to the driveway where we could split them into pieces of firewood.

Hydraulic log splitters are pretty easy to use. It was a marvel watching the mechanically driven awl move slowly into these large pieces of hardwood. The wood would resist for a second or two, and then succumb with a crack that sounded more like an implosion. And then two pieces of wood would tumble off the machine where there had once been one. The black cherry smelled sweet like an earthy piece of fruit once their orange-red interiors burst open, a hint of what’s in store when we toss a piece onto a burning fire.

It took us several hours and a lot of lifting, but we got through all of the logs. When we were done stacking we had what appeared to be close to half a cord of wood.

Living on the edge of a forest, which we do, can expand your appreciation of trees – the miraculous giants that grace our landscape. We can take them for granted, oblivious to the kaleidoscopic array of their leaves this time of year or their glorious shade on a summer’s afternoon. “Shade is our Elysium, our abode, our state of ideal happiness, our paradise,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1806 of trees’ effect in a hot Virginia summer.

So I didn’t take cutting down a couple of them lightly. And yet, the act of cutting wood and using it to heat our homes or cook our food is timeless and elemental. When we light a fire in a fire pit in the backyard or in the fireplace in our living room, we naturally congregate around it, drawn to its flickering light and glowing heat. Our dogs always lay themselves in front of the hearth for warmth, unknowingly maintaining a significant link in the human-canine connection that goes back to the campfires of the earliest days of mankind. European settlers cleared New England’s forests to build and heat their homes. Those forests are now back, and saplings emerge in our woods every year. We’ve actually planted more trees on our 3 ½ acres than we’ve taken down, and this includes an American chestnut sapling that is still thriving five months after I put it in the ground. More trees have fallen of their own accord on our land this year than succumbed to the tree company’s saws last year.

Heating a home with oil, propane, electricity or wood may be a wash environmentally, though the edge is trending in the direction of electricity with the expansion of zero-carbon renewable energy sources and the increasing efficiency of heat pump technology. We installed heat pumps this summer to reduce the amount of oil we burn to heat our home this winter. And we’ll supplement both with wood, unless, that is, we decide to install a high efficiency wood burning insert in our living room fireplace. If we do that, watch out!