The secret history of spruce

It's amazing to look inside a tree. Of course you can only do it afterwards, if you know what I mean. 

Here you can watch a tree grow from a scrawny sapling, year by year, into the substantial tree it became before Greg cut it down. This tree was a seedling in 1960, more or less.  

Some kind of insect made its home deep inside this tree. A happy insect, I imagine.

And here is the story of how, long ago, two young trees met and fell in love. They probably had a lot in common. Eventually they grew together until it was hard to tell one from the other. But later they split up.

How to keep warm

It has been cold here -- way, way below freezing -- for the past couple of days. This season, which for purposes of accuracy we will not actually call Spring, swings back and forth between extremes. One day last week I was outside raking up dead ferns in a short-sleeved tee shirt. Today that wouldn't work out so well.

There are two basic ways for us to keep warm when it's this cold. There's the day-time way: plenty of logs in the wood stove that sits in the middle of the living room and heats this one room pretty nicely, as long as there's no cold wind blowing in from the west, through all the tiny cracks in the house.

Then there's the night-time way: piling on the blankets in our unheated bedroom over the living room. We use a combination of an old wool blanket that came with the house, two quilts, ditto, one on top of the other, and then, on top of everything else, a fat layer of cotton comforter we brought with us when we moved here. I think the layering itself has some effect, since with each successive layer you are trapping pockets of air that effectively create more insulation. Of course one decent goose-down comforter would do the trick. But we don't own one, and we do own this other assemblage, and it works.

The first summer we lived here, Anne Barclay Priest emailed us to say that she wanted to come and visit. She would come over in her outboard motor boat, she told us. Anne is the author of Trafficking in Sheep, her memoir of buying a summer place at Green Harbour in the early 1970s, and later buying Blue Island and becoming an owner of sheep. During that time she became a good friend of Elizabeth Hyde, who owned our place for over thirty years, and died in 1993.

Anne laid out her route for us: she would cross the mouth of Jordan Bay, then round Cape Roseway, at the southern end of McNutt's Island, enter the Western Passage, pass along The Point, and come into Hagar's Cove. It's the way she used to come when she visited Elizabeth, she told us.

On the day of our meeting we watched from the shore as Anne steered her skiff along the Western Passage and headed into the cove. She moored in the cove, untied the dinghy that trailed behind her skiff, and rowed ashore, up to the remnants of the haul-up Elizabeth had built and used long before. After she tied up, she clambered over the old haul-up and we forged our way along the over-grown path from the cove to the house. Anne was already in her eighties that summer and still a force of nature.

Before she arrived, I worried that Anne might not approve of the changes we had made. But she enjoyed the wind turbine and the solar tracker and the idea of having electricity in the old house. She admired the washing machine and the indoor plumbing and told us Elizabeth would have loved it.

In the bedroom she spied one of the quilts and burst into laughter. "These two quilts!" she said. "Elizabeth and I had quite a spat over them. I had found this wonderful quilt maker in Jordan Bay. And I had ordered two quilts for myself. Then I made the mistake of telling Elizabeth about my find. When I went to ask about the progress of my quilts several months later, the quilt maker told me that Elizabeth had already come and bought them, out from under my nose. I was mad at the quilt-maker for selling them to Elizabeth and I was mad at Elizabeth for buying them. But I got over it, and Elizabeth just thought it was funny."

I think of the three women whose stories intertwine like a design in a quilt: the quilt-maker herself, and the two friends, each with such an adventurous life. We have the quilts by the quirk of a trick, and then later by the kindness of Elizabeth's daughter who left them here for us to keep. They remind me every day of how all the various bits and pieces of our lives are somehow patched together.

And of how, the more you look at anything, the more beautiful and intricate and surprising, really, you see that it is.

On these cold nights they keep us warm.






Yesterday I had a lovely back and forth with Janet Gordon, a quilt-maker who lives in Hall's Harbour, over on the Bay of Fundy. It's cold over there, too. Janet got me thinking about these quilts we inherited. She has a blog about the quilts she makes and sells, and about life in Hall's Harbour. If you want to learn how to quilt, she has a teaching blog, too.

March work

Around here, March and April are for getting your wood pile into shape for next winter. All across the harbour we hear the chainsaws buzzing away.I can hear Greg's chainsaw, too, down near the fish house, where most days now he is out felling spruce. He cuts the trunks into logs and loads them onto his cart and pulls them up to the wood pile, where he splits them and stacks them.
So far he has stacked between one and two cords. Only eight or so cords to go. Not bad, really, since he is providing all the heat for the house.

West wind

A few times each winter low temperatures and westerly winds converge upon this house. Then we remember that for all its bright paint and fresh shingles the house is a leaky old thing, and that there are gaps around the doors and odd corners where a cold imp lurks, and huffs and puffs at our ankles as we walk past. We wear eccentric get-ups, including clothes more likely to be worn outdoors. I have discovered the charming wool cap an old friend knitted for our daughter twenty five years ago: it covers my ears and ties beneath my chin and I have taken to wearing it night and day.

But Greg got us a pile of good books at the library last week, just in time for this. Best of all was Sarah Water's fantastically creepy The Little Stranger (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2009). I pulled my chair close to the wood stove and covered myself with a quilt and read about down-on-their-fortunes English gentry huddled around a fireplace in their ancient dilapidated mansion.

It is the west wind that makes the difference for us between comfort and discomfort. No matter how cold it is outside, the wood stove keeps the living room perfectly warm unless that particular wind is blowing. But the west wind also sets the turbine spinning, so that adage about an ill wind that blows nobody any good comes to life. Anyway, today the wind has finally stopped, and we will go on about our business, both indoors and out.

It's all about wood, continued ...*

Our relationship to firewood has continued to evolve since we first arrived in Nova Scotia. Back then, our most recent experience with actual fire -- as opposed to heat coming out of radiators --was a gas log fireplace. Which was pretty nice, really, with its remote control and all. Quite cozy. And nothing but icing on the cake, since back then the real heat was supplied by some mysterious furnace in the basement that we hardly ever even gave a thought to, even when we probably should have.

Here, we saw right away that by the end of April most people already had huge wide orderly walls of next winter's wood sitting in their yards, cords and cords of it, split and stacked and drying. It was a little intimidating to imagine the amount of labour involved in this one housekeeping item. But it was exciting, too. We had wanted to deal with life on a more elementary level. What could be more elementary than providing our own heat from start to finish instead of writing a monthly cheque to the anonymous purveyors of oil or gas or electricity?

As we observed our new environment more closely, we saw that many people kept their wood in an actual extra old house or shed. This is not the sort of thing you notice right away, stacked firewood peering out of the windows of old buildings. Instead it's a telling detail that reveals itself in due time.

The back room of this very house was an attached wood shed before it became a guest room in the 1960s. Keeping the firewood dry and getting to it easily was not a problem for the families that lived in this house before us. But it was for us, at least until now.

Now Greg has finished building our covered wood shed. He used spruce poles for the uprights and recycled local lumber for the rest.

He planned it with a big overhang in front to cut down on the effect of weather that blows in from the southwest, as it mostly does. And also so I will have cover while I'm getting wood off the pile.
This is a huge improvement over our first and second winters, when I tried to keep the woodpile dry with big pieces of heavy plastic sheeting, secured against the wind by random logs and stones. It worked okay, most of the time. But I have a feeling that this is going to be lots better.

Some firewood connoisseurs say it's best to allow the wind to blow through your wood stack so that drying continues all the time. That's the theory we have embraced for now. If it doesn't work we can always restore the guest room to its original purpose.

*I realized that firewood has been a recurring theme, so I made a new label -- firewood -- in case you'd like to read earlier posts on the subject.

Unwinding the spruce

But what does Greg do all day? That lazy fellow. You mean aside from the baking and cooking, the trips to town, the hard cider making, the propane tank replacing, the snow shovelling, the pumping out of Chopper's innards after a big storm, that sort of thing? It's an easy answer. He cuts wood.

Early in the morning he leaves the house, whistling, with his axe upon his shoulder. He goes to the woods where he begins to cut. And there he remains until lunch time -- dinner, they call it around here. And there he remains until supper. And now that the light is longer, there he remains again in the evening. Now and then, I imagine, he rests with his back against a tree and talks to the friendly forest creatures who gather around him, their shyness overcome by his growing familiarity.

In between felling trees and carrying off tree rubbish to an undisclosed place where it becomes a valuable ecological habitat for small mammals, he splits logs. So you see Greg's life is truly simple. He might sometimes wish that it were more varied, but for now it is not.

He has carved out his wood cutter's role entirely by himself. And by adhering faithfully to his vision and purpose he has accomplished great things. When we first saw this property -- uninhabited for more than decade -- it was overrun with spruce. A few spruce -- even a spruce forest in its proper place -- can be a beautiful thing. Spruce growing up randomly and impulsively and even you could say compulsively out of every nook and cranny is not. We did not know, for example, that there were two unbroken parallel boundaries of old stone walls along the outer edges of the property. Nor that apple trees hid near those walls. We did not know about the old farm's springs and wells and bogs. They were all obscured by spruce, standing, or lying, where they ought not.

Michaelangelo was said to have viewed his sculpting as a process of revealing the essence of the raw stone he carved. Greg is a forest Michaelangelo. As he topples the spruce trees he reveals the essence of the place. His most recent project has been to disentangle a crowded patch of trees and so make space for a grove of hackmatack, a noble tree.

We did not know the potential hackmatack grove was there, in a bog near the lower road, until Greg began to cut down the spruce that crowded that corner. We didn't know the bog was there either, beneath criss-crossed logs and fallen branches. Bogs have a wonderfully mysterious quality, with their hidden watery places and their soft mossy ground which you must tred upon with care. Hackmatack have an affinity for bogs and so do we.

Greg labouriously cut the spruce and pulled out the litter. One dead spruce had fallen so that it was caught in the high branches of a gigantic hackmatack. He hoisted it on his shoulders and walked around and around the hackmatack, unwinding the spruce until he could pull it away. His life is simple, but not without its challenges.

Early every morning the wood cutter leaves the house, whistling, his axe upon his shoulder. And now we can see the hackmatack, and the stone wall that runs all the way down to the shore.

Lull between two woodpiles

Our wood pile is in a lull. At the beginning of winter we revelled in how much wood we had, a wall of wood, split and stacked, long, high and wide, of spruce and apple and birch. We were rich in wood. But by the other day it was almost gone. I don't know how this happened so quickly. It reminded me of when you think you have plenty of money and then all of a sudden you see you don't. How did that happen, exactly, you wonder.

It's not that we don't have wood. We have a huge pile Greg has made since December, a wall of wood, split and stacked, long, high and wide. But it is the wood for next winter's heat, not for now. It must dry and age until then, when it will be ready. It will be of great use next winter. But it is of no use at all right now.

We can scrounge our way through this lull. There are plenty of standing dead trees around. Come to think of it, we are rich in standing dead trees. Greg can cut one down and chop it up and we can burn it right away, since it's pre-aged. And down by the sheep corral there's a huge pile of well-seasoned slab wood -- the remnants of Skipper's lumber milling over a year ago.

It's another lesson in living hand-to-mouth, an aspect of late winter when the wealth of harvest is running out faster and faster. Still, the temperatures are rising. Soon we'll be in and out of the house all day, too busy with spring projects to pay attention to the fire in the woodstove, which is how winter finally ends.

A little bit more about our house

I cleaned up the breezeway so today was a good time to take a picture of it. This picture shows the entire building -- somebody's house or shed -- that was brought here from somewhere else on the island sometime in the early twentieth century and attached to the original house. For the Gouldens, who lived here from 1907 to 1951, and the DeMings, who lived here from 1951 to 1960, this part of the house was divided into two rooms: the wood shed and the cool room for keeping milk, cream and butter. There was a pass-through structure that connected the original house and the wood shed/dairy room.

The breezeway is new. We tore down the old connecting room, which wasn't hard. We pushed one wall and it fell over. We dug beneath the space and laid the plumbing there, and this section has a new concrete foundation. Greg tiled the floor. Those are new windows and a new door. There's a lot that goes on in this breezeway. It is our basic mud entrance, where we put on and take off our boots and jackets and gloves and hats. The upright freezer is in this room, and the washing machine. It is where we keep our jars of applesauce and chutneys and jellies and jams, what's left of them. For a while this fall it was Greg's hard cider making place. Sometimes we keep wood in here just to make sure we'll have some back-up dry wood if the weather looks iffy. And we have a retractable clothesline so we can dry clothes in here. It's also where we have dances.

Looking through the breezeway you can see a hallway with a door opening into the bathroom. Then you can see into the back room which is our guest room. Originally that back room was the wood shed, and the far window was a door. We keep the door to the back room closed in winter so the rest of the house can stay warmer. It's lovely in summer, though: the window opens onto the back orchard.

The bathroom was the very first indoor bathroom on McNutt's Island. Greg cut a hole in an old cabinet to make the sink, and he tiled the floor with tiles left over from an earlier renovation back in the US. There's also a bathtub and shower, which you can't see in this picture.

Elizabeth Hyde had the most ingenious shower rigged up in this part of the house. She drew water from the well, heated it on her wood stove, then poured the warm water into a bucket hung from a hook, and pulled a cord that opened the perforated bottom of the bucket. When you release the cord the water stops. Elizabeth brought this bucket back from her year in Africa, in 1960. The water drained through a wooden grid into a substratum of stones and then into the earth. An indoor shower in a house without running water or electricity. Pretty cool.

We still have the bucket and used it outside the first summer, before we got running water. It was heavenly to take a shower under the oak tree with hot water running all over you after you'd spent the day insulating the attic crawl space or mucking out the cellar. Of course it's pretty nice to take a hot shower indoors in February, too.

Skipper and Radar framed, insulated and gyp-rocked this part of the house, and Greg built the shelves and did all the trim work, the finishing and painting. For the framing, they cut the trees right here on the island and and milled all the lumber themselves. Skipper has a wood mill, which Greg deeply covets. Their 2"x4"s were truly 2"x4"s. They also roofed and shingled the breezeway exterior, and installed the breezeway windows and door. We loved having them both around for that first summer we were here. We learned so much from them and never laughed more.

It's all about wood

It was about this time last year that we read the journal kept by Elizabeth Hyde, who lived here before we did. Mostly she lived here in the summers, but in the winter of 1984/1985 she stayed over, and wrote about her experience. Elizabeth was here by herself for most of the winter, and the house had no electricity or running water then. Many of her journal entries were focused on the basic tasks of survival. A friend of hers, Anne Priest, read Elizabeth's journal at about the same time we did. Her comment to us was: "It's all about wood!"

It's true for us too, even though we have it plenty easier than Elizabeth did. The house is still heated with wood, though our Pacific Energy stove is much more efficient than the old cast iron number Elizabeth used. Greg spends most of his outdoors time felling trees, cutting logs, carting them to the wood pile and splitting them. He's working on next winter's wood, a good sign of our progress. This time last winter we were using it as fast as it could get thrown on the wood pile. I call him The Woodcutter, as it has a nice Brothers Grimm ring to it.

My task is to resupply the log holders next to the wood stove. I do this every day. I have built up an extra supply in the breezeway in case we get a patch of wet weather. Our wood pile is protected, but not very well, with plastic sheeting that blows off in spite of the many many logs and rocks I have piled on top.

Before Elizabeth bought the house, the back wing (an old building that had been attached to the house at some point) was a woodshed. In those days you could walk from the kitchen into the woodshed without going outside, and your wood was always dry. The old fellers had their priorities straight. Elizabeth turned the shed into what she laughingly called the guest wing, and we followed her direction. We put the plumbing over there, and made a laundry/mud room/breezeway, bathroom, closet and bedroom in that space. Some days I think we ought to turn it back into a woodshed.

The forest

Except for the harbour that lies below our house to the west, the forest surrounds us. It does not crowd against us anymore, though it did when we first came here. Now you can see east -- past the back orchard and the vegetable garden -- to the empty lower road. You can see the far stone wall to the south, where Greg cleared the trees last summer. But beyond these boundaries the island is a pointed vertical dark forest of spruce, and the ground beneath the forest is moss-covered bog and boulders, cross-hatched with fallen trees and branches and scrubby undergrowth.

The forest is the island's default position, and everywhere it is not something else -- our newly cleared places, an old field, a ruin, a summer camp, a road, a rocky shoreline -- it is forest.

Ten feet inside, you are clambering over dead logs that give to the touch, or treacherously collapse when you are half way over. Your feet get caught in mucky bog that emerges and disappears without warning, layered with twists of wicked dead branches, ingenious traps for trespassers.

The only paths are those made by the sheep and the deer and the ATVs. The paths of sheep and deer are narrow, and you must rely on what they had in mind when you travel there. They may not go where you think. The ATV paths are easier to follow, with their secret signals of a hanging buoy or a beer bottle stuck over the end of a branch. They lead to deer blinds deep within the forest: gnomish huts and treehouses, empty eleven and a half months each year. You stare, then retrace your steps.

Twenty feet inside, and when you look back you don't know where you are anymore. There are no landmarks to give you a sense of orientation or direction. Look back toward the main road you so foolishly left. It has disappeared. On its other side, the same forest blends into the one you are standing in, so there's no perspective, really, to grab hold of. Still, there are wonders to behold: silently trickling streams that eddy into tiny rock-edged pools, deep and mysterious, where nobody ever goes. The gothic verticality of thousands of narrow spruce spires, delicately draped with an airy gray-green lichen called Old Man's Beard. The weak winter light filtering through the forest. The silence.

Once, last summer, Greg and I unaccountably wandered apart, each going in slightly different directions a few yards off the main road. I felt an alluring pull that drew me deeper and deeper into the forest. It was irresistible, an ancient druidical enchantment. I walked further and further, until suddenly my boot sank down a good foot into a bog, followed by my other boot. I was being sucked into the bog, forcefully. I was only able to fall forward flat on my face and from that position slowly extricate my feet, then reach in to pull out my boots, then crawl backward until I returned to solid ground.

I laughed while I was lying there spread out flat against the bog, deep in the forest, beyond hearing or seeing. I laughed at first with surprise, but then with an inexplicable joy. I could have lain there, filled with such gladness, forever. I think the forest is somehow dangerous that way.

The forest is the stuff of fairy tales, of being lost and finding your way again. Strange things can happen there, just beyond the known world of stone walls and vegetable gardens and apple trees, and beyond the great wood pile that Greg has made by going into the forest day after day and felling the trees, and cutting them into logs, and splitting them, so that we can be cozy and warm all winter.