Twelve years ago I bought a small piece of ruined pastureland on the north bank of the Middle Loup River, just southeast of the town of Dannebrog, Nebraska. Then, with the help of many friends, I took apart a log house near Pleasant Dale and moved it, log by log, one hundred miles to the Dannebrog place. We rebuilt the cabin pretty much as it had been first constructed in 1872 by a Civil War veteran named Tom Bishop.
Small towns on the Plains are not generous with their hospitality when a stranger moves in. They like to have you visit but they really don't want you to live there. To the local people I suppose that I was also a stranger stranger than most. I had a ponytail, often with a feather in it, and drove a battered Chevy van wearing bumper stickers from every lost liberal cause of the sixties. The people who came with me to Dannebrog from Lincoln only reinforced the derelict image. The townspeople were polite but remote and to this day, even though I consider myself a resident, when I walk into Dannebrog's Sliver Dollar Bar, someone will inevitably declare in loud and dramatic tones, "Ah, the tourists are in town!"
Moreover, I am not a conventional farmer. In the middle of the Plains, America's great grasslands, I have a tree farm. While there are tree farms in Nebraska, they are mostly Christmas tree farms, while mine is a fuel farm. I burn wood to heat my house, and it seems only sensible to me to grow more fuel to replace what I burn.
I was raised in the small city of Lincoln, Nebraska, and am gradually feeling my way through the hazards of tree farming. For that matter I grew up during a period of ample energy, so I am only slowly learning my way around a wood-burning stove too.
A good part of my education came quite unexpectedly. One bitter cold, blizzardy day I was sitting in front of my wood stove, reading, when I heard a knock at my cabin door. It was "Moose" Osterman, the reclusive barber from town. He explained that he had heard all the comments about what a strange fellow I was but, since everyone seemed to have comments about him too, he just thought he'd come down and see for himself what I was all about.
We drank peppermint schnapps and hot chocolate and exchanged opinions about everything from politics to catfish bait. He recited some popular poetry and we talked about heating with wood.
There was the usual observation that there is just something different about wood heat, although that obviously doesn't make much sense (heat ought to be heat). Maybe wood heat is just drier. He discussed wood as a renewable resource, although in homier terms, and he told me about some of the favorite stoves that he had enjoyed in his long life. He looked over my Buck's Hot Blast heating stove and pronounced it suitable to the task.
"Don't clean out the ashes too often. At night, open up those little holes at the top so the draft travels over the top of the fire rather than under it. Caulk up holes with a mixture of ashes, salt, and enough water to make a paste." Then he asked, "What do you burn?" "Wood," I said. "What kind of wood?" "Whatever I can find."
He shook his head with the kind of look I have learned to
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