SOUTH SHORE, N.S. — Never in this lifetime, if asked how I spent the weekend, did I ever expect to respond, “I stacked a couple of cords of firewood, how about you?”
This week, I uttered those unexpected words.
The wood, mostly maple, arrived a little after 8:30 a.m., Sunday morning on a flatbed truck owned by a man named Mike.
A city boy, I had absolutely no idea what two cords of wood looked like.
I know that I did not expect a pile the size of the one dumped in front of our shed, down on the South Shore.
Just as, eight hours later, I did not expect to be as bent as Quasimodo as I laid the last log on the woodpile meant to get us through the coming winter.
Ignoring the pain for a minute, it did feel good to stand there and look at the four rows of maple, running wall to wall, each of them as high as I am tall.
At that moment Henry David Thoreau’s observation, “Every man looks at his woodpile with a kind of affection” made perfect sense.
The words of SaltWire’s Aaron Beswick, that “you can tell a lot about a man by the way he stacks his firewood,” seemed sage, indeed.
Alas, if Beswick speaks the truth, I am man with no eye for detail, and no grasp of the beauty that comes from order.
My woodpile is just that, a disorganized pile. The rows aren’t plumb. The log ends stick out higgledy piggledy.
This is not how things should be, according to Marcel Ouellette, who describes himself as a master chimney-sweep and mason, but more than anything a “wooder,” which means that he is obsessed with everything about firewood, from growing, cutting, and stacking it, to burning it.
When we spoke Wednesday, Ouellette, the owner of Black Magik Chimney Sweeps in Halifax, told me that wood should never be piled on the ground, which I knew, and that when logs are stacked, there should be enough room between them that a squirrel can run in and out, which was news to me.
“If outside, put the logs bark-side up, so it will act as a roof when rain falls,” he told me.
On the other hand, he advised not to worry too much about covering a pile to protect it from the elements; in the warmer months, sunlight will evaporate the moisture.
Ouellette is in full agreement with Thoreau and Beswick: how you stack wood matters, and not just because the drier it is the more heat it produces.
Art can be coaxed from those piles of logs. Just look around.
Look on the internet, where mosaics worthy of a Byzantine church have been fashioned from firewood, but also look closer to home.
Look up in Advocate Harbour, where, the last time I visited The Wild Caraway Restaurant and Cafe, I parked beside a one-storey building made from firewood.
Or look in Wentworth from where, on Wednesday, a friend sent me a picture of a firewood sailing ship, complete with a bowsprit.
In Blandford, down on the Aspotogan Peninsula, a passerby that same day would see Lisa Cochrane’s winter wood supply formed into round conical piles.
“I used to just cover it with a tarp and kick it loose when I needed some,” she told me. “I hated stacking wood.”
Then she heard of the sculptural stacks of firewood – something, I believe, known as the Holz Hausen method – which appealed to the artist. The act of making them, furthermore, was “like an unpaid gym membership,” she said.
Let us not forget about Ouellette, the wooder. Last year, he won an international woodpile art contest sponsored by the Outdoors with the Morgans YouTube channel with the version of a reclining tree pictured with this column.
By now, that work has gone up in smoke, as all woodpiles do sooner or later.
Ouellette’s property in Mill Village, however, has six Holz Hausen firewood stacks. There is also a perfectly straight 60.96-m long wall of wood.
“Some people just like the look of a stack of firewood,” he said.
I couldn’t agree more. In fact, a stack of firewood, in my view, doesn’t even have to qualify as art to be beautiful.
I would settle for straight rows, and log ends that won’t take out an eye.
