Free Wood Beat My $240 Cord of Oak by an Hour a Night. I Weighed Every Load for 30 Nights to Be Sure

There is a cord of oak behind your house you paid two hundred and forty dollars for, and a dead tree on the edge of your lot you have driven past a thousand times. I burned both this winter, one against the other, twenty-two pounds a night on a kitchen scale for thirty nights. The dead tree beat the oak I paid for by an hour a night. Every night it was in the stove. What is in here: what the receipt said and what the meter said on delivery day. What the free wood was and why it read twenty percent before I spent a dollar or a summer on it. The first fifteen minutes, where the hour went. The thirty nights, fifteen pairs, with the thermometer in the back bedroom at six in the morning. What it cost, and the three hundred dollars the receipt never mentions. And the sixth thing, which is why there is more of this free wood standing dead in this country right now than at any time since 1947, how to read one with three looks and a knock, and the one rule that keeps a dead tree from being the thing that puts a man in the ground instead of the stove. Harlan Sawyer. Sawyer Ridge, Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Forty-two years in the timber, 1969 to 2011, and forty-five winters on this stove. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. A note before anybody writes in: I am not telling you to cut down a standing dead tree. It is the most dangerous tree in the woods. The one the wind put on the ground is yours; the one still standing is a job for someone with insurance. A pin meter on a fresh split face, never the end, twenty percent or under, is the EPA Burn Wise number. By the pound, dry species are within a whisker of each other (extension service tables); oak wins by the cord because a cord of oak weighs more. Burning borer-killed ash is the one thing every agency agrees is safe to do with it.