Gleaning, or How I Heat for Free

When my wife and I first moved into our house in July 1979, it was not finished. The electrical system consisted of one socket. One half of it was occupied by a string of Romex wire, into which was spliced, at intervals, several light bulbs which ran from the kitchen up the ladder where the stairs would eventually be to the bedroom. The other half powered an ancient refrigerator, a donation from a former selectman of the town. Plumbing was a few months away from complete, and where there is a flower garden today, stood a small, plain outhouse. It could be illuminated at night, if need be, by a kerosene lamp. Insulation and sheet rock was non-existent. With a six-week old daughter, we knew there would be a race to beat winter.
We had both quit our teaching jobs to make the move. I was going to be the oyster baron of Casco Bay with my brother-in-law and another partner, and as soon as Heather was old enough to be left with a sitter, Susan would resume nursing. The oyster farm could pay us in nothing but sweat, and the $260 per month I earned as a captain in the Army Reserve, commanding a combat support company in New Hampshire, didn’t stretch very far.
We were entering the time we now refer to as “The Winter of Ham Hocks and Beans.” Each week we would make up a new soup, first pinto beans, then yellow eyes, peas, and lentils, which would be enriched with a ham hock and rice. Our diet was rounded out with dairy products and cereals we bought with W.I.C (Women, Infants, Children) coupons and sometimes augmented with a huge brick of government issue cheese my father-in-law would score at the senior center he attended. Store bought beer, or anything like that was out of the question, and so I brewed, from a recipe in a prohibition era book, a beverage called “molasses beer.” That rates its own story later, but anyone who drank it felt pity on us, and would bring enough real beer to leave behind a bottle or two.
Heat was a wood stove. Fortunately, we had the foresight to purchase five cords of hardwood before we left our jobs, but being neophytes, we had no idea how long that would last or how warm it would keep us. It was then I started gleaning. At the end of each day, I would go down to the shore to pick up drift wood and lug it back up the steep bank to the house. Most of it was punky soft wood, but sometimes the sea gods would give me a break and cough up a nice piece of oak or better an oak plank that had been part of a commercial wharf. Soaked with years of fish and engine oil, they burned really well.
We don’t eat bean soup as much as we used to, and the smell of molasses beer will never permeate the house again, but I still glean. People call me crazy for spending the year, when the bay isn’t ice-bound, hauling pieces of wood much to heavy for me to be carrying, up a steep bank to cut up with an electric chain saw. Soft wood, they say, is lousy firewood. Well, I have to disagree; free wood makes great heat, no matter what it is, oak, birch, spruce or poplar. True, softwood doesn’t build up a bed of coals, but I use it when we don’t need a fire all night. I figure I can heat my house for free, right into December, although the free wood usually lasts until about the end of November. And no, I don’t burn pressure treated wood. I save that for projects, such as the platform my rain barrel sits on.
Most of the shore ice is gone, so I went down to glean today. I got a piece of oak, about 4’ long. I figure, cut, split and dried, will last me a cold January night. I retrieved some stray pine and poplar, which will probably keep me warm for two nights in the late fall.
Maybe I am crazy or cheap as many tell me, although I prefer to think of myself as parsimonious, but when those first sharp nights of October come in, I’ll go to my wood pile, bring in an armload of free wood, and sit back with a beer not made from molasses and stay warm.