Life in Alaska means lots of cutting wood

Perhaps part of what binds our almost 40-year marriage together is the work of cutting and stacking firewood and burning brush.

Today, after waiting out four days of rain and another four days of wind, we are burning a brush pile. Between clearing some land last spring to build a garage and a recent right of way clearing by a borough road maintenance contractor, we have quite an accumulation.

My husband Gary and I take turns feeding the fire from the piles of spruce and birch branches and alder and willow bushes. As I sit here resting, my mind returns to the memories of the many times we have done this before — when we were first married and childless, when we had children living at home to help, and now years after the kids have moved away.

We have moved several times over the years and in each new place we either heated with wood or had raw land to clear — sometimes both. I my mental pictures of the various locations I can hear the chainsaw cutting the logs into firewood and smell the smoke from the brush fires.

For almost 15 of those nearly 40 years we heated totally with wood. That’s a lot of cords of wood, especially during the winters we lived in Fairbanks and Slana. Cooper Landing and Palmer had milder temperatures, of course, but even in Palmer in the mid-1980s, we would usually go through eight cords of spruce and birch combined each winter.

Now, here we are back in Palmer in a new location (our fourth in the Valley) and we don’t even have a wood-burning stove installed in this house yet. But with the help of his tractor, Gary has stacked several 4-foot lengths of round logs into a pile for future stove-length cutting and splitting.

Gary has always done most of the firewood work — hauling wood to the house, cutting it to stove-length with a chainsaw and then splitting. Usually while he split, I stacked. Besides the good old splitting maul and wedge, he’s used machinery to make the work easier. In Cooper Landing, he would drive his 1960 Willys Jeep across frozen Kenai Lake and then drag home many standing dead trees from around the shoreline. At home he would take one of the back wheels off and attach a threaded tapered metal cone. With the Jeep in low gear and the cone spinning, he would hold a stove length chunk of log up to the point and it would screw itself into the side and split the log apart. More recently, in Slana we used a gas-powered hydraulic splitter.

When the kids got old enough, they helped, too. Our son reminds us that one year back in the early 1980s we paid him a penny for each piece of wood he stacked in the woodshed. He was only 6 years old, but he did his part. I’m not sure if he was proud of that fact or if he was complaining about the wages.

Sometimes we filled the various woodsheds on bright, sunny summer days and others times in autumn when it was overcast and rainy. Frequently, there were either mosquitoes or whitesocks buzzing and biting around us. The most enjoyable times were in mid-winter when we bundled up and the air was cold and crisp.

Over the years we have also gathered brush and burned it for a variety of reasons — when we needed space cleared for drilling a well or putting in a septic system or power poles or a garden plot. Other times it was just to clean up the downed dead trees or branches from trees blown over by the wind. My favorite way to gather brush was using a four-wheeler towing a small trailer, but other methods were used as well. This summer we took advantage of the borough’s Fire Wise program. When the crew came to remove our fire hazards, I saw a chipping machine up close in action for the first time.

I can’t help but think that if we hadn’t moved so often, we wouldn’t have needed so many brush pile fires. Our son has a theory about that, too. He once said, “I’ve figured you guys out. You buy a place, work hard for as many years as it takes to make all the improvements you feel necessary. Then, when there are no more projects, it’s time to move on.” Well, he was too young when we moved to realize that we left several residences in various stages of completion, but there might be some truth to his observation.

As we sit here now tending the fire, I think about other changes, too. In the early years, we seldom needed to rest and when we did, we just sat on a stump or a fallen log or anything else handy. These days we rest more than work, sitting in carefully placed lawn chairs. With the pop, hiss and crackle of the fire in the background, we talk about important things or about nothing. Through the years living in all the various places, we may not spend time together sharing sports or hobbies or watching TV, but together we fill the woodshed and burn brush.

Maraley McMichael is a longtime Mat-Su Valley writer and resident.