5 Things Old Loggers Would Never Burn Indoors. Number 3 Is in Half of America's Woodpiles

Free and dry is only half the test. The other half is what comes back out of the stove and into the room you sleep in. Five things that went in American woodsheds this fall and should not have. Painted and varnished trim out of an old house. Plywood, particleboard and the free pallet, and the two letters stamped on the side of that pallet that decide whether it is clean wood or a fumigant. The punky piece off the bottom row, which is the one that gets you before the stove ever sees it. Cardboard, wrapping paper and the Christmas tree, eight weeks out. And the last one, the only one on the list that is still working against you next July, out in the garden. In the winter of 1974 nine of us in a bunkhouse above the Cranberry burned a stack of free bridge timber for two nights. Six could not open their eyes in the light by Thursday. Two could not open them at all. I tell you at the end what it actually was, and why not one man in that bunkhouse was dumb for doing it. Harlan Sawyer. Sawyer Ridge, Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Forty-two years cutting timber, 1969 to 2011, and forty-five winters heating this house with what I cut. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. A note on safety: I am not a fire marshal and I am not a doctor. If your appliance came with a manual, that manual outranks anything I say here. If your chimney has no liner, if you rent, or if your stove has no name on it, get a certified sweep in the house before you take my word for any of it.