sabbatical reflections: wood stoves
13 Jan 2024a very significant part of being on sabbatical up at dickinson’s reach (DR) was staying warm. the heat sources inside the yurt were wood stoves. and it was fucking rad.
now, of course, i know it’s different to use a wood stove while on vacation versus to heat your home like… for your actual daily life. so i’m not trying to glorify it as an overall thing. but for, while on sabbatical, using the wood stoves was epic.
since moving to new england, i have been getting more and more practice with fire. having grown up in florida, i think the only actual fires i was ever around were beach or backyard bonfires. they were huge, unruly, and often started with gasoline. so learning how to start a fire in different contexts (firepit, living room fireplace, while camping in the woods, in wood stoves) has been a fun journey since like 2010ish.
being at DR with the wood stoves was a whole different level.
until i borrowed peter’s camping stove, the only heat i had to cook with were the wood stoves. and that is my first big insight about them. cooking on wood stoves is amazing and challenging.
one of the wood stoves was a tiny one (with one cooking eye) and the other was huge (with six cooking eyes). it was a cool journey to learn how they worked similarly and differently.
by the time i left, i learned some other things like:
- how to get a small hot fire going quick (to cook oatmeal boil water for tea) and then turning it down or off so as to not overheat the yurt (like if it was not actually that cold outside)
- how to keep a fire going for multiple days
- how to keep a fire hot overnight
- how to keep a fire going, low and steady, for a long time
- how to use wood with differing levels of dryness to get the heat level for a fire right
- how to let a fire get cool overnight but not so cold as to lose embers (which makes it much easier to get going again in the morning)
and i guess by learned i really mean “started to learn” because it’s definitely not something i’ve gotten mastery at. but i’m way further along than i was in august 2023, ha.
the most significant thing about cooking and heating with the wood stoves was a surprising ancestral connection.
one time in an early week of the trip, i was having a check-in chat with my dad about my sabbatical. i was telling him about the yurts and the wood stoves and he told me that his mom used to cook exclusively on a wood stove when he was growing up. that she essentially cooked for 9 kids for 30 years on a wood stove (note: i need to fact check these numbers but this is definitely the general range).
so me using these wood stoves on sabbatical, and definitely the larger one, became this ancestral practice. i started thinking of my grandma whenever i used the big one. there was a lot of internal shifting that happened that i can’t really explain in words but needless to say, it was pretty magical.
ok as often, there’s more to say but i’m gonna wrap this post here.
grandma ruth
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