How Jefferson Kept Warm

By LANCE MORROW

Bow hunting season has started. The First Canadian cold comes down, air like wolves. Leaves descend today in a steady downpour. In a week the trees will be all but bare and will revert to dark wrought iron: November. Oil prices recently hit a 10-year high.

It may be a rough winter.

I locked in my heating oil at $1.38. We may buy a second wood stove. I have an Everest of logs to split and stack. I wonder if they will last until April.

How to keep warm? Jefferson burned 10 cords of wood a month to get Monticello through the (relatively mild) Virginia winter. But Jefferson had a fancy standard of living. Living much farther north, I use four or five cords in an entire winter, and 2,000 gallons of heating oil.

But as a pessimist, I'm getting ready for an atavistic, pre-petroleum winter. I stand in the yard, knee deep in bright orange maple leaves, and study the grain of the firewood, lazily choosing the straight grains first, the ones without knots or ropy torques that will clutch the blade and hold it, stuck like Excalibur. Splitting wood is a crude, rustic version of diamond cutting. Read the grain right, strike it there, and the wood bifurcates (chunk!) with algebraic cleanness.

Keeping warm can be a primitive but pleasing science. In a fireplace you organize the logs in harmonious balance between wood and air--fuel for the flames to lick and curl about and combust, encouraged by just the right oxygen and draw. A good fire is self-consuming architecture.

The trouble, of course, is that most of the heat flows up the chimney. Count Rumford's 18th century fireplace design (shallower, built to throw more heat back into the room) helps a bit, but the basic idea remains Paleolithic. There have been times during subzero winter power blackouts when we have pulled a futon next to the fire and slept there, curled up as close as we could get to the heat without igniting the blankets. On the other hand, the wood stove in the kitchen radiates efficient gemutlichkeit--a cloying heat, like the house on a Thanksgiving afternoon that has gone on too long.

Keeping warm, if you must work at it over a period of time, is an exhausting business. It's hard to stay clean. The effort (chopping wood, building fires, heating water) coats you with a fine sweat, like a delicate machine oil, which then acquires admixtures of woodsmoke and ash. If the hot-water heater is gone, you don't wash much, or thoroughly.

Then there's Fred, the heating unit of last resort. Fred is the dog. You pile Fred on for extra warmth in extremis. But you think about it first. To begin with, there is the possibility of fleas. The second problem is that Fred, in the past year or so, has begun to snore, loudly and almost humanly. The other downside is that Fred smells doggy--not flagrantly, but enough. He's a farm dog. He gets around.

All energy choices involve trade-offs, and that includes Fred.

Lance Morrow's column appears several times a week at time.com