Pieces of the Frame by John McPhee

Author:John McPhee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

Firewood

FIREWOOD HAS BEEN SELLING, OF LATE IN NEW YORK CITY, for one dollar a stick. Piles of it. Right off the sidewalk. Split from small logs of oak or ash or maple. Split. Split again. Four pieces, four dollars. The bulk rate is around a hundred dollars a cord in the suburbs and a hundred and fifty dollars a cord in the city. From such prices, understandably, the less fortunate have turned aside. The Harvard Club is burning artificial logs made of wax and compressed sawdust. There are people enough, however, who seem prepared to pay for real wood—people, in fact, who are removing the boards and bricks from fireplaces long in disuse. With the destruction of old buildings and the erection of new ones, which tend to have fireplaces only in penthouses, fireplaces had steadily been disappearing from the city, an atrophy that has now abruptly ceased. As petroleum reserves ran low early this winter, a row of apartment buildings on Park Avenue exhausted its allocation of heating oil and the buildings went cold, bringing on a micro-crisis that was overcome by heavy deliveries of firewood handsomely packaged in burlap.

At roughly the same time, a memorandum went out from Albany, from the director of the Division of Lands and Forests to all regional foresters in the state, instructing them that it was now “the policy of this Department, as an energy conservation measure, to encourage the cutting of firewood for fuel on state land.” For five dollars a cord, plus a dollar seventy-two for liability insurance, plus twenty cents tax, a private woodcutter could be assigned to a segment of the state’s forests and permitted to remove sugar maple, red maple, ash, birch, hickory—the cutter’s choice. “The major value of this new effort,” the memorandum went on to say, “may be to help alleviate the energy shortage.”

Interested citizens in the southeastern part of the state were to call 914-677-8268, where foresters were waiting to answer questions and to explain the terms of the state’s printed contracts. The phone was in Millbrook, northeast of Poughkeepsie, but there was designated forest land near Carmel, closer to the centers of population, and foresters would meet people at the site in order to complete contracts and consummate sales. After the phone number appeared in newspapers, customers began to fan in to the Carmel woods from all over the metropolitan area. Ralph Fisher, for example, a retired I.B.M. branch manager, drove up from Larchmont with his son in his son’s Toyota. They took an axe and wedges, a large mallet, and a manual saw. They cut wood from trees that were down and dead, because “due to this energy problem” they wanted “a lot of heat” on short notice from wood that was ready to burn. They went home with a modest load of maple, oak, and ash. The state would allow them two months to make return trips, whenever they liked, to cut the rest of their purchased cord. William Nalepa, a Nassau County detective, drove up to Carmel just to study the situation.

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