I really enjoy wood fires

Sunday was Earth Day. I hadn’t paid much attention to the day until I watched the news on CBC on Sunday and saw the parades and people working to cleaning up waterways and parks across Canada People planted trees along road ways and replaced fallen trees in parks.
In my lifetime, I have planted lots of trees in my yard and now over 30 years later, I am blessed with shade in the summer and huge drifts of leaves in the fall. The leaves go into bags or onto my compost pile.
At the cottage, we harvest our dead birch, cedar, and ash for firewood. We barely keep up with those three species of wood. We also use the white and red pine, but they take a lot of splitting effort.
In Fort Frances we are now burning wood to create steam and power to run the Kraft mill and paper machines. It is green energy because trees will grow back and the supply will not end.
In the past year in cities and towns across Canada and the United States, a movement has grown up to ban the burning of wood in neighborhoods. Wood smoke is a pollutant.
A letter to the editor at the Welland Tribune states “Fire pits, fire rings, bon fires, beach burns, chimaeras, outdoor wood-fuelled barbecues and all wood burning devices must be prohibited/ended/banned in all residential communities in our nation.
I was taken aback. Even more so, when I read that some counties in Wisconsin even outdoor wood burning furnaces are now being banned. Fairbanks, Juneau Alaska have banned wood burning boilers and stoves. In the fall, winter and spring as I walk through the neighborhoods, I enjoy the smell of wood smoke in the air. I can even tell you what type of wood is burning.
I have two wood burning fireplaces in my home and in the cooler months of the year, the smell of wood burning in our home gives me a certain feel of comfort. At the cottage, a fire along the shore was a time to roast hotdogs and make “S’mores”. It was a good family time with cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents all joining in around the fire.
As a cub scout leader, the best time of the day when camping, was the campfire with all those young boys in a circle. The sun had set. The sky was filled with stars that shone like diamonds. And the anticipation of what might happen had every young boy excited. Fire was magic. Around the fire, we sang campfire songs, and told the boys of legends.
After the campfire, the boys would return to the main camp and they would make bannock on a stick, and bake it over the coals and then fill the inside with raspberry or strawberry jam.
Fire through the ages has brought comfort and warmth. Even in the earliest times of man, the ability to make fire was an important craft. Not everyone could spin a pointed stick on another piece of wood to induce fire, or spark a flint on to the down of a cattail to begin a fire.
The fire brought light to darkness.
This past weekend at the cottage, my brother in law, in the rain on Saturday, dragged huge amounts of spruce, balsam deadfall to our burning rock and cleaned up years of downed wood. The bonfire warmed the cold, wet area around where the burn was being supervised. Around the cabins everything looked better. The coals at the end of the day would have been perfect for cooking.
And back to the cabin. I fired the wood stove up shortly after eight in the morning when the temperature inside the cabin registered 1 and by eleven in the cabin was 22 degrees. The bluish grey smoke drifted out of the chimney. It was great to come inside from the cold wet outdoors.
We filled the hot tub around noon on Saturday with lake water that was 4 degrees and heated the water all afternoon and through to 8 at night when the tub had reached 33 degrees when we submerged our bodies into the warmth of the water, with snow and drizzle falling.
Wood was our companion all weekend, heating the cabin, heating the hot tub and the smoke drifting across the island would let anyone know that there was safe refuge and warmth close by.
I understand why people with breathing problems, and allergies would want to ban fires. But I really enjoy the wood fires in my home fireplaces and wood stove at the cabin.

–Jim Cumming,
Publisher