029 - Stacking Firewood, and Other Numbers
what began as an exercise in stacking firewood, led me to wonder, how big is a billion
Before tossing the firewood in 029 - Stacking Firewood, and Other Numbers, two things:
➡️Listen to my most recent accepted submission in this 600’ish word Field Note shared on Montana Public Radio - The Cynicism of Marriage and A Story of Inosculation.
➡️Check out Threading Waters, the first group of essays from the Lay it on the Line cohort of seven amazing women. This collaboration is the exchange of wisdom and perspectives that allow for conversation. Each month one of us is the curator and offers a letter. Each member of the cohort responds in a manner that is not prescribed, but creative.
stacking firewood
Fully into double stack mode, I think how a craftsman, an honest Craftsman, would find stacking split logs an unrewarding task. Unfinished logs hauled out of the forest allocated for the winter stove. A yawning mouth that requires regular tending and feeding. I was pondering the concept of shim, or shimming. To shim is to use thin tapered scraps to fill a gap. In the matter of wood stacking, between pieces of various sizes and probably unequal edges. Craftsmen are a practiced and skilled lot of measure twice, cut once, design and nail, no prefab factory pressboard. Talented purveyors of a woodpile are similarly artisans and tradesmen and with that same pride don’t just pile logs on top one another. To be sure, that can get the job done but a well-constructed stack needs to be stable with maximized airflow to assist with drying. Stacking wood is a skill—physical and mental. One that begins as an apprenticeship and transitions to journeyman and eventually a master trade.
Placing each stick of wood, the repetitive action, I am reminded that stacking wood is not about the shim because it is in fact a more considered effort. Shims seek to level a crooked, unbalanced creation. But the craftsman’s effort is to find the perfect fit with strategic placement as the row grows higher, and the wood stack stands solid as a whole with no chance of tippage. From a distance, a wood stack looks beautiful. Up close the stack shows off more intricate details. The stacker is persistent, efficient even, but rarely lingers in the process, taking only the necessary time to fit each piece into one another.
I began building horizonal rows in my twenties. My first home in a suburbia neighborhood had a wood stove in the greenroom I would use in the winter. A few logs lit to warm my house as I sat on the couch to read or watch the desperate cold of outside. Half a cord each year delivered by a guy selectively harvesting trees on his farm.
Long past is the time of half a cord. No longer do I live in a place with central air or heat. Lifestyle preferences change and mine requires the scent of wood smoke. For twenty years Boone and I heat almost exclusively by firewood. It is an unspoken agreement of a must have.
Stacking for me is a mediative blend of exertions. My practice is to work in piles of 100. Throw 100. Stack 100. Unlike some households bent on hurry and stack, I tend to draw out the process for weeks, maybe even months - ☺️. The effort dedicated between the other menial homestead tasks. Is there a word to replace the joy I find in picking up a piece in a mound of pieces and allow it to roll, change position in my hand because I know exactly where that piece is going to go before I even turn to face the stack? The repetitive action, each piece landing like the workings of a jigsaw puzzle only in various types of wood—maple, birch, beech, ash. Size equally variable resulting from splitting with a maul or the assistance of a mechanical splitter. Rare is a square edge. Instead, an assortment of triangle points, blunts, or round outer trunk shells cut flat on one side.
Once I finish moving the old cord (it does not make a lot of sense to move stacked wood but sometimes it has to be done) and dig into the new pile, the meditation stops. I grow agitated which morphs to pissed off. Shit wood. Gnarls and knots. Misshaped cuts. Shredded edges. Wood for a pile, not for a stack. Fanned ends, bumps, hollows. Is my stack leaning backwards or is it leaning forward. Pieces moved, realigned, turned, moved two, three, four, even to five different spots before I my irritation renews. The back row grows taller … a safe haven for misfits and once that reaches a certain height a new pile of nonconformists’ forms to the side of the larger pile I pull from, away from the rows I am building.
At some point a self-preserving internal mandate, I begin to pick over the wood. I seek and toss specifically sought straight lengths and return to the mediative action, a stretched row of ten feet, solidly embraced with the row behind, waiting to hold the row soon to be stacked in front. There is plenty of straight wood, I’d overthought the process. Did not engage in just being. Found myself overwhelmed. I had declared that wood could be shitty. I dug too deeply into the concept of shim. Stacking wood, by definition is filling the spaces to promote levelness and function. There exists no shimming, just good execution to find the right fit. Craftsmen do the right thing. The superior instead of the inferior. Without shims, instead right angles and precision.
how many is a billion
My neck hurts. During my morning walks I spend much of my time peering at the ground. This happens frequently enough lately that I have to make a considered effort to look directly ahead, eyes forward and level. Around my feet are millions of living parts. A million blades of grass. Millions of fern pinnules. Millions of little ray flowers and then a million dandelion seeds that disperse with a gust of wind to float on currents I cannot see. Millions of brown leaves breaking into millions of pieces to become part of the soil to support millions of earthworms and spring tales that churn the dirt. The millions began as a single seeing. The one trillium, morphs into seeing a couple of trilliums, then a handful, then a presence. What I notice is that a million is burgeoning into billions. Billions of accumulating little spikey green pokes from moss or the booming growth of tamarack needles from their cup saucer holds on the forest edge.
I recently learned that the median home price in the United States is $414K.1 Continuously I ruminate that there are 8 billion people on this planet of land, water, and air (this because I so often think about resources). The news is heavy—genocide framed as something other than an effort to cleanse dark skin from white, how the social stratum is becoming more striated, how war is an economic driver worth billions on a bulletin board of tit for tat, for control and power over human bodies.
I remember when a million was a very large number. A median home price now is almost half a million. Now, a billion is used almost as if the size is proof of value, a number to be proud of. Billion … how is one billion a term easily understood?
1,000 millions are required to equal 1 billion. According to Forbes Magazine, there are 902 billionaires in the United States.2 This led me into more math. One billion, if distributed equally among each person in the United States is a tad less than $3 per person.3 If I were use one billion, for each of the 902 billionaires, the per person distribution is roughly $2,625. Now, don’t take my math as my recommendation that billionaires begin distributing their wealth—this is simply an exercise in income distribution. I mean Elon Musk, the richest man in the world,4 at his worth could distribute each person of the United States roughly $1,137. If the top ten richest individuals in the United States were distributing their 1.9 trillion dollars that would equate to approximately $5,571 per person. Somewhere along the way I read that there are 3,000 billionaires and combined their wealth is a mass of 16.1 trillion dollars which would equal nearly $47,352 per person (granted these rich people are spread around the world and I’m highlighting this number for the distribution of just United States folks just for effect).5
My point is, I’d rather not do math skills. I’d rather be able to afford groceries not waiting for items to go on sale and buying in bulk or being required to add an app to my phone to get the digital coupon for a discount on strawberries or yogurt (I have a grievance that I have to look at my phone and click buttons to buy my groceries at a lower price). When I think about where to shop, I consider companies that pay their stockholders and management team but haggle over wages for their workers because management knows it doesn’t matter. When individuals get tired of being treated poorly, while paid a lowly wage, and quit, others desperate enough will fill the empty vest.
Billions fill the coffers of a capitalistic machine. Millions are part of profit and loss statement; billions are the purchase price of businesses consolidating. I think how companies and enterprises spend millions to lobby our Congressional men and women for economic advantage but to have that money, that access, they raise the rate of what I am purchasing. The companies make higher margins without the constraints of fairness or regulations that attempt to create a cleaner environment or reasonable standard of living for everyone.
Before I thought of any of those things I thought about how COVID killed approximately 7 million people worldwide, approximately 1.2 million in the United States.6 Adding those numbers and realizing that these numbers are less than one of the 1,000 million needed in order to make any revision to the billions on earth which is why bodies are expendable: in disease, in war, in poverty. I understand why there is inequity. How the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I return my thoughts to the median home price and realize I cannot afford to move despite decades of hard work and good choices. I understand fully my level of privilege and am not complaining, merely acknowledging that there are people barely scraping by through no fault of their own.
My first real employer paid me $5 per hour as a senior in high school. $2.25 less than today’s federal minimum wage. That was over 35 years ago. Not everyone is honest, but I would wager, given a chance to live purposefully, most are not seeking a handout but are in search of a degree of fairness, some leveling of the playing field.
the relevance of counting
I return to the firewood and toss 100 logs, then stack 100 logs. I repeat the process until my shoulders grow tired, and the wood does not travel as far. My head aches from math skills and I wonder how many pieces of wood I have thrown over the years. A million? More? Less? When I stop, I make my way to the porch and count mosquito bites. Then I count the leaves on the lilac just feet away. I wonder how many beans are in a half gallon mason jar, beans I dry from the harvested garden, can, and store in our pantry as a staple for eating throughout the year. I know I cannot count to one million. Let alone 1 million 1,000 times for 1 billion. To do so would require time away from the other things I need to do, like swipe my phone screen to save $3 on a whole watermelon until the plants in the yard grow big enough to produce fruit I can enjoy later in the summer season.
I'm riveted by this post, Stacy.
Since I've just acquired a wood-burning stove to heat my home, I'm fascinated by your log pile, and the work you do to keep it stacked. Here, I leave the task of gathering and splitting logs to my son-in-law, and just enjoy the warmth they deliver. Lucky me.
Thanks for giving our collaboration - Lay in on the Line - a mention. It's such a pleasure writing with you!
Love your account of stacking wood. I have room for 3 cords in the garage - no outside woodshed and I don’t keep the stove going nonstop - so I intersperse the shims deliberately to use as kindling for a new fire. Makes for a neat but not the aesthetically managed stack that I would try for if I had the space. Kudos to you, Stacy.