Wood stove blues

As far as I can tell, the ability of a group to keep their own cabin warm is just a test of how good each group is at scavenging. Someone left the toilet paper roll in the stall? Snag it quick!! Did we just use scratch paper for a group activity? Hurry and collect it and stash it in your pockets for emergency late-night fire starting! Going for a walk? Get all the birch bark you can and don’t leave it lying around! And whatever you do, don’t tell any more people about the dryer lint trick. Or just be really good about taking it before people think to check the dryer trap.

Our cabin is still puzzling though the ins and outs of our very tiny wood stove. I’m on the top bunk, so if we crank up the stove I feel like a boiling potato up there and can’t sleep. But if it’s too cold, the fire will maybe go out twice in the night instead of just once and that’s pretty rough for whoever notices they are cold first. You lie there thinking about how maybe it will be fine to wake up in a frigid cabin in the morning, because you’re just leaving to go to breakfast anyways and you don’t have the change your clothes because who does that anyway so is it really that necessary to have a warm cabin? But then you also consider how very nice it was that your roommate got up last night to stoke the fire, and how probably you should just do it, and probably you’d sleep better if you got up to pee anyways, and it will be a million times easier to light if the stove is still slightly warm…..

You hop down from bed and start finding logs that have strips of wood coming off already so you peel all the strips and make a little shavings pile and then you scrounge for paper or magazines or something and then think about how you wish you had chopped some wood while it was still light out or not the middle of the night because it would be quite nice to have some logs that are not the size of your entire stove. But alas, there is just not enough time in the day, especially if you go for an xc ski before dinner.

So anyways you light the fire and because there are still coals it goes great but then the smoke alarm goes off because it’s so dang smoky in there and then everyone wakes up anyways and then you get it so hot that you can’t sleep again. But hey, at least the cabin will be warm in the morning. Maybe. Unless it’s in the single digits outside. Then you’re shit out of luck.**

**This is all to say that things are going well here at Bear Brook, and I’m learning me some woodsy living skills/ refreshing what I learned in Alaska.