Dec 22, 2013 By Ben Moyer for The 4 min read

With the deer season closed and deer-hunting withdrawal setting in, any excuse to get outdoors is a good one.

Cross-country skiing is novel exercise, and ice fishing is sociable fun, but it can be tough to find folks sociable enough to sit with you on a frozen lake, staring into a hole. Weather conditions that promote those pursuits are unpredictable and, in recent years, are unfortunately rare.

Given all that, an acceptable stand-in activity during the winter outdoor slump is burning wood. Not the burning alone but the whole process of cutting, gathering, splitting, hauling and stacking that make capturing wood heat possible.

The ideal approach, of course, is to have all that wood gathered and stacked before the first November flurries. But autumn wood cutting competes with so many other important things — like hunting, scouting, fall fishing and, of course, work. My approach is to stock a moderate supply, say two or three months worth, then supplement the pile as winter wears on. This can be tricky, though. As snow piles deep enough to impede access to the woods, you are forced to kick the wood-cutting into high gear fast.

There is nothing like settling down in front of the woodstove on a night when sleet assaults the windows and wind moans around the eaves. Warmth from the stove is different from that pushed out of the furnace vents. Its limited reach in the house draws family members together instead of letting them drift off into fossil-fuel-heated rooms to discourse with computers. When the power goes out you feel a rush of self-reliant satisfaction, gladly inviting in friends and neighbors to share the warmth of seasoned oak.

If you’re lucky enough to have a source of wood nearby, the price of all that is nothing more than heavy work. But it’s outside work that loosens muscles and promotes deep sleep. I enjoy the splitting best. Turning a jumble of determined log-rounds into stove-size wedges of fuel is, to some, monotonous. But the work has its own calming rhythm, and as the stack of bright wedges grows, the satisfaction of providing something for yourself glows like the stove inside.

There are other sensory rewards to the work. As the maul drives apart the wood, each species sends its own scent out on the winter air. Hickory smells spicy. Cherry lends a rich, winey scent. Oak’s aroma is barely detectable — stolid and unpretentious, the meat-and-potatoes of hardwoods. Sassafras recalls the home-made root beer my dad made for us as kids.

Wood burning holds many of the same attractions as hunting and fishing. It is a way to participate directly in nature, to earn at least a token of sustenance without cash transactions. It offers a sense of what real independence and true security are about.

We are graced here in our region by the best wood in the world for heating — hardwoods that burn hot and clean, glowing there for hours with minimal smoke and ash. The quality of our hardwoods was brought home to me on my only western hunting trip. Years ago a friend and I went to Arizona on an archery hunt for elk. By happenstance we met and camped with some native Arizonans above the purple cliffs of the Mogollon Rim. As elk hunters tend to be, they were a cordial bunch, and the campfire talk went nightly into the wee hours. Eventually, though, the conversation evolved into a friendly comparison of the outdoor attributes of our respective states. My companion and I defended the woodsmanship of Pennsylvanians gone west to hunt, then fired back by demeaning the western tradition of counting antler points on only one side of a rack. Ridiculous, we said.

We sat there in a circle night after night, eyes watering, breath rasping, throats raw from the acrid clouds of oily smoke that rose from every knotty chunk of ponderosa pine heaved on the fire. As Arizona and Pennsylvania were compared and analyzed, we acknowledged that, yes, Arizona does hold more open space and wilder country. And, yes, its wilds are graced by a greater variety of big game. But it’s an ordeal to endure their resinous campfires. “Come back home with us to hardwood country,” we told our new friends. “We’ll host you to a real campfire.”