The Road Washes Out in Spring by Baron Wormser

Author:Baron Wormser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England

As much as anything that went with our living in the woods, we wanted a hearth—a fire that we could kindle each day and on which to cook our food. Since Janet and I both grew up in modernized households, I’m not sure where the idea came from. I have a feeling that it is a genetic idea, something encoded in our blood. I had never heard of a cast-iron cook stove before I came to Maine. A stove ran on gas or electricity. There was no making of fires involved. You turned a knob or pushed a button, and there was the heat to cook your food. Such cooking was relatively neat. Whenever there was smoke in my childhood kitchen, it meant my mom had burnt a piece of meat, not that the stovepipe wasn’t drawing well.

Before we moved into our house in the woods, we rented a small farmhouse from a school teacher I knew. She had retired and had gone with her husband to live in Vermont. She left behind a cook stove on which was stamped the manufacturer, the city and state in which it was made—Bangor, Maine—and the year—1924. The stove was squat and black with ample room on the top for pots and pans. It had an oven, water tank, firebox, various draft controls to manage the fire, and clean-out pan for the ashes. With a little refurbishing, such as getting the water tank re-soldered so that it wouldn’t leak, we had ourselves a real, cast-iron cook stove. It weighed what felt like a ton but came apart fairly easily. We paid fifty dollars for it.

That stove became the hearth of our imaginings. Most mornings of the year we started a fire in it to warm the house and heat up hot water. On top of the stove stood a canning kettle for that purpose. We dipped a pan into that kettle for hot water, which we then poured into a metal wash basin to wash hands and faces. I shaved each morning in that basin while using a small mirror that I propped against the rear of the kitchen sink. The water varied from cool to agreeably lukewarm to hot. For a habitual experience, it was far from routine. While shaving, I sometimes recalled how various nineteenth-century eminences (Emerson and Thoreau, for instance) told of waking on a winter morning and discovering that ice had formed in the wash water in the bedroom jug. Little wonder that Yankees tended to be brisk.

The cook stove took small pieces of wood—cut-up tree limbs were ideal. Some visitors wondered at the stack of long “sticks” that I kept near the woodsheds and sawed into ten-inch lengths. They didn’t look like wood that a serious woodcutter would bother with. They were right; a guy cutting pulpwood or logs for a lumber mill would not have cared less. After a few hours running the chainsaw, I felt serious enough, however. If there was a category for ethical woodcutters, those devoted to using fully what the earth gave forth, I would have checked that box.

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