Wood Stove

Living in Fairbanks, Alaska, it had to reach twenty below before I fired up the woodstove; the woodstove was for back-up, anyway, for power outages and to augment the boiler when it really got cold.  Besides, I could never control that sucker.  If I cranked it up much warmer than that, I’d run us out of the house.  Mostly, I burned birch.  Spruce worked, as well, but popped like crazy and the smoking sap made a mess, blackening the woodstove’s glass.  I’ve burned cottonwood, but it burns cold and leaves too much ash. Firing up the stove at thirty below or colder was tricky.  The chimney was cold soaked and cold air pushed down the stack and out into the room.  I had to start with a propane torch and let it shoot up the chimney for five or ten minutes to get a draw going; otherwise, if you just put a match to the paper and kindling and closed the door, the fire would jump to life, but smoke like crazy until it ate up all the oxygen and killed the fire, although it continued to smolder and puke smoke out into the room, setting off every smoke detector in the house, frightening my dogs and irritating my wife, so that, at thirty below (or colder), I’d have to open the front door to chase out the smoke and let in fresh air.  That being said, we did enjoy a fire.  Oh, and the dogs—Alaska, Dingo, Pinky and Gertie—really did.  They couldn’t get close enough.  They’d lie in front of the woodstove and stare into the flames with their paws crossed—I swear to God.  Who knows what they were thinking.  At those temperatures, I did a better job of controlling the heat, but it still got away from me from time to time.  Once, it was fifty-five below outside (by the thermometer; in Alaska, you don’t talk about wind-chill), and I had it ninety degrees inside.   +90F(three inch door)-55F: it was fun going from one side to the other wearing nothing more than shorts, T-shirt and flip-flops and letting the cold just kiss you all over, and then back into the sauna with the smell of red beans and rice simmering in the kitchen; but, had I locked myself out, it could have turned bad.  Even with it that hot inside—at least at eye level, where the thermometer hung—the cold outside was so extreme that it radiated through the door and created thick frost at the bottom on the inside, a frost that refused to melt.  Chimney fires claimed a few houses in Fairbanks every year, but I never had one—I kept my chimney clean—and I don’t need to knock on wood, as we moved to Florida last summer.  Yeah, Florida, where our dogs pant even while at rest, and we have a house with a fireplace—I don’t know what the hell for.