Fire Back

 I am a cheapskate.  Just ask Jane.

My bath towel sports a hole big enough to admit my hand up to the wrist.  But, hey, it dries me perfectly well and I can hang it so nobody sees the aperture.  When my whole arm goes through the thing maybe I’ll promote it to the rag bin.  I drive a ten-year-old Ford Escape which no one washes but me because I can’t bear paying what the Extortionate Carwash Brothers demand.  But, hey, it’s grey, nearly exactly the color of road dust in Sonoma County, California.  Just think of all the money I have saved by hosing it off myself from time to time.

I also mow my own lawn, prune my own orchard, and pull my own damn weeds.  Keeps me young.  Here’s what really smokes me:  heating a whole house and all of its cabinetry and furniture and walls just to warm a few cubic feet of meat — me and Jane.  What are sweaters for?  And long johns?  And down?  

So here is our winter strategy in the Wine Country where no snow has fallen on the valley floor in decades.  Jane just loves this part of our still-young relationship.  Yes, yes, Jack Frost sometimes rimes our rooftop and lawn at night, so, Number One, sleep under a down comforter with the loft of a yak’s pelt.  After the initial bracing slide between the sheets it’s toasty snuggling til dawn.  Then comes morning and Step Number Two:  charge from bed straight into the shower and spin both faucet handles to scald.  By the time Jane stumbles in under her shower head it’s a Turkish steam bath.  And here’s the secret trick to Step Number Two:  stay in there until your entire torso glows like the door of a furnace.  That way you maintain body heat until you layer on your woolies and down for the day.

Step Number Three.  Daytime.  Dress like Nanook.  By lunchtime you will be shucking layers.  Which brings us right up til evening, the best part.  Step Number Four.  Draw the curtains and the blinds in the front part of the house, close the hallway door leading to the sleeping quarters where you will not stray until bedtime, apart from a pit stop or two, and build a cheery fire in the hearth with the wood you have scavenged around the neighborhood throughout the year.

Now.  We all know that some small fraction of those cheery BTU’s shoot straight up the chimney.  Solution: a fire back.  You’ve never heard of a fire back?  Well I confess I hadn’t either until blundering into a roadside forge in rural Vermont some decades ago where the smithy produced and sold them . . . inch thick slabs of cast iron which you insert against the back wall of your fireplace.  When the time comes to lay your kindling and logs, you lean them up against the fire back.  Then, about thirty minutes after ignition, that huge slab of iron starts to radiate heat out into your living room.  Sit in front of it as you watch back episodes of The Crown and you will soon shuck another layer or two.

Our fire back was forged with the face of a fox peering out from it, and the long-ago blacksmith promised that a well-made fire would make the fox’s nose glow like Rudolf’s.  Ain’t never yet happened despite many scores of perfectly laid racks of cured oak and olive and walnut wood.  So . . . we consulted Google the other night to identify the firewood that burns the hottest.  Apple wood is near the top of the chart and smells so delicious as it burns that you want to eat the smoke.   Ditto the wood of other fruit trees.  Ash?  Blackthorn?  Hawthorn?  Maple?  Oak?  Nope, nope, nope, and nope.  It turns out that Osage Orange burns hottest of all, and . . . there happens to be an Osage Orange tree just around the corner on Watmaugh Road, right next to Bobby’s pasture, and I happen to have a chain saw.

I confess I snuck down there the other day to, ah, scout out the possibilities.  And there, right there, I spotted two large branches, as long as my wingspan and as thick as my thighs, just laying there in the weeds.  Somehow those two lengths of Grade-A-Number-One firewood found their way into the back of the Escape and then laid themselves down, back at the woodpile, for chainsaw reduction into fireplace lengths.   OK Mr. Fireback Fox your number is up!!

Here is how you lay a fire which is certain to make a fox’s nose glow.  First: balled-up newspaper.  Second: fatwood.  Third:  a combination of Valley Oak and cured olive wood to get things stoked.  Fourth:  a half tepee of Osage Orange logs artfully arranged to finger the hottest part of their flames right onto the proboscis.  Fifth:  blow on the doggone thing with all your lung’s capacity.  Sixth:  bad words.

By way of this modest blog we are soliciting nose-glowing suggestions from all of you.  Maybe you know of some other way to get a really torrid flame in your hearth, apart from pouring on Boy Scout water.  If you do, well, you know, kindly share it.