Word: woods
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
ESSAY: Burning wood still has its virtues
...Wood stoves, once trendy devices beloved by suburban bores, are out of fashion. But the subtle mysteries of the split log endure...
There was a time in the mid-'70s when wood-stove bores were a serious environmental hazard at parties, the way bullfight bores had been three decades before, sports-car bores were a bit after that and college-tuition bores are now. Some self-pleased gasbag was always bombinating lengthily about his new airtight Jotul 118 or Vermont Castings Defiant or Fisher Papa Bear. (Yes, suburban trendies, from South Carolina to north of Boston, would actually buy, and get all gooey over, a 200-lb. hunk of welded steel that some marketing genius had called a Papa Bear.) This ecological...
That, as seems to be said more and more these days, was then. I believe that I am now the only wood-stove bore still active on my mile of dirt road. My neighbors have concluded that full-time wood heating is dirty, dangerous (chain saws are worse tempered than alligators), economically foolish, a champion time waster and brutishly hard work. In this they are correct...
...longer true, alas, that the wood-stove bore can warm himself twice, once by bragging about the money he is saving and again by preening at the perfection of his environmental posture. Heating oil, for the moment, costs less per gallon than bottled no-lead spring water. Never mind economy, however. There are congested localities such as Aspen, Colo., and Missoula, Mont., where wood burning is immoral, toxically wasteful and severely curtailed. The sweet-smelling, picturesque blue-gray smoke rising from Grandma's condo on a crisp December morning simply loads the air with too much additional junk...