Off we go on the wayback machine to the Anderson Valley of my youth, this time from the late 1950s into the 1980s. However, this one begins in the present day.
My recent visits to Anderson Valley show change is — if you will excuse a pun — in the wind. Although automobile traffic in and through the Valley is greater, especially in the summer, the air is as one would expect in a rural setting; fresh, clear and clean. It is possible my visits coincide with good air quality days, but I see — or rather smell — a marked contrast to the smoke in the air so common in my youth.
The late 1950s and 1960s marked the decline of lumber mills in Anderson Valley. When I first saw the Valley in the late 1950s, there were at least five mills in Philo (two near the Grange Hall, two just south of Philo and one near Jack’s Valley Store) alone, each with its own teepee burner to incinerate bark, cut-offs and sawdust. The mills ran from mid-spring to late autumn and the smell of burning wood in the air was a fairly regular occurrence.
The mills usually closed in the winter, but the smell of wood smoke — to a lesser degree — remained in the air. The reason was wood heaters, a common source of heat in Anderson Valley homes during those days before environmental awareness.
While wood heat was widespread in Anderson Valley in those days, modern heating technologies had arrived. When my parents built their house in 1959, it was equipped with a gas heating system. The system was used exactly one winter. The problem wasn’t the heater: it was the gas to fuel it. Because our property had no car access from November to May, we very nearly ran out of propane. My father assessed the situation, took note of the acres upon acres of forest on the property, and bought an Ashley wood heater. Essentially a cast iron-lined box with a manual thermostat, Ashley was perhaps the most popular wood heater of the era.
With the heater in place, it was time to cut firewood, and that task fell to my father, my brother and me. Fortunately, we had a decent 24-inch chainsaw, and a nifty circular saw and rocker table contraption that mounted on the back of our Ferguson 30 tractor (a machine of impressive durability — my brother still has it and it still runs, 50+ years later) and could cut through logs of up to about 10 inches in diameter. The rest of our equipment was purely old school; a couple of axes, a maul (a small sledgehammer with one side sharpened into a blade), a couple of sledgehammers, a wide wedge and a couple of long, narrow wedges, the latter made in the 1930s.
We also had lots — and I mean lots — of wood to cut, both leftovers from logging and downed trees. Within a couple of years, we had cut, split, hauled and stacked approximately 30 cords, enough wood to last a decade. We continued to cut wood — primarily blowdowns — every year to replenish the supply, but I don’t think our firewood supply ever dropped much below 30 cords.
One learns a lot about wood by cutting and burning it. Redwood was easy to split and it burned hot but very fast. Douglas fir also split easily, caught fire readily and burned with a medium heat for a moderate length of time. Oak was hard work to split, lit slowly, burned relatively hot and lasted well. Madrone was the champ; hell to split (dry rounds and setting the wedges to follow the natural cracks in the wood were musts), slow to light, but burning incredibly long and incredibly hot. In fact, madrone burned so hot, it eventually warped and cracked the cast iron plates in our heater.
Had we known the damage we were doing to the heater, we probably would have burned less madrone. However, there was method in our madness. To keep the heater going overnight, we’d put in a full load of wood, preferably madrone or oak, turn the thermostat up until it caught and then turn it all the way down. All the wood would burn away overnight, but the hot coals made lighting fresh wood in the morning a snap: certainly much easier than starting a cold heater.
As mentioned, we cut firewood the old fashioned way. During the heavy rains that caused the 1964 floods, we had a large bay tree fall across the road to our footbridge. For reasons that escape me to this day, my brother and I decided to cut the main trunk using an ancient two-man crosscut saw we owned, one six feet in length. The downed tree was three feet in diameter and we took slightly more than three hours to cut through it. Believe me, “misery whip,” the nickname for those long saws, is well-deserved.
In the mid-1980s, near the end of our time in Anderson Valley, we had a taste of wood splitting’s future. A big fir — perhaps 130 feet tall — came down near our house. A helpful friend brought up a wood splitter — not the hydraulic kind with a ram, but a machine with a sizeable gas engine, a couple of reduction gears and a cone shaped splitter with threads on the surface that screwed into a round and split it apart. After cutting the tree into rounds and splitting the rounds with this fancy — if noisy — machine, we decided to have a little fun. We fed it a round of oak and watched as the machine, though clearly struggling, split it. Then we threw on a round of madrone. It was no contest; the machine drilled itself to a dead stop without so much as opening a good crack in the round! We had a heck of a time getting it off.
As you probably know, times have changed. With a couple of exceptions, Anderson Valley’s lumber mills are gone. Ashley was purchased in the 1980s by a company that later went bankrupt and the brand now is just a memory (unless one needs parts for an old heater). EPA and California regulations now require catalytic converters on wood stoves, resulting in much cleaner air. Technology has advanced and clean burning heating systems — from pellet stoves to active solar heating systems — are available. In terms of air quality, it is change for the better. I remember the scent of wood smoke in Anderson Valley fondly, but I don’t really miss it.
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