Beechwood fires are bright and clear
If the logs are kept a year.
Chestnut’s only good, they say,
If for long ’tis laid away.
Wood as fuel has been so important for so long that it’s understandable that some long-gone poet would have fashioned these lines extolling the virtues or warning of the deficiencies of our various species. There are a number of versions of this poem from both sides of the Atlantic, but invariably the last couplet is as follows:
Ash wood wet or ash wood dry,
A king will warm his slippers by.
White ash does make great firewood. Dense enough to have serious heat to release, it also has the peculiar property of being ready to burn with less drying time than other hardwoods. Thus, the “ash wood wet” part of the ditty.
Anyone who has spent time hefting a splitting maul knows what a good thing they have in a pile of ash. Because it tends to grow relatively straight and without a lot of limbs, it is a treat to split. Down comes the maul and apart goes the wood. It’s as if it wants to split, and it does so with the most satisfying sound. No dull thud from burying the maul head in a grabby, twisted block of elm, or even beech for that matter. Instead, ash comes apart so willingly, and it does so with a sharp, quick thwack. Nothing like a good thwack to instill confidence in a tentative wood splitter.
Noting that a tree makes good firewood could, I suppose, be seen as damning with faint praise. So let my praise increase in volume. Trade the splitting maul for a hand plane, start shaving wood from a nondescript rough-sawn board, and witness its transformation. Emerging in the plane’s wake is a creamy white surface decorated with golden lines. White ash’s gorgeous grain shows up so well because it’s a ring-porous wood: each year the early growth of the tree produces wood with visible pores followed by the later wood that’s more dense. This alternating pattern of early and latewood is displayed in any lumber or finished product that comes from white ash.
Whenever I see the grain, I am reminded that it was the first wood grain I ever recognized. If you played baseball, as I did, before the insipid ping of aluminum bats replaced the splendid crack of wooden bats, you too will recognize the distinctive grain. While maple has been edging its way into the act of late, ash remains the choice of purists.
I love the wood. I love the tree. In the forest, ash stands tall above its companions, which in my woods are most often sugar maples. In winter, with tree silhouettes and branch structure so starkly visible, ash stands out prominently with its branches ending in the shape of a three-prong pitchfork or Neptune’s trident. That stark silhouette is etched in memory because it will still be there after the maples have all gone green in the spring. I used to worry every year that the ash were failing to leaf out. And then, when I’d just about given up, they would finally explode in fans of compound leaves, each bursting from a single fat bud. Later in the summer, when it’s fully leafed out, there’s something peculiar about its crown. Compared to its prototypically northern neighbors – maple, beech, and birch – whose crowns seem uniformly thick with leaves, the ash is so greedy for sun it concentrates its leaves at the ends of its branches. To me, its crown makes the ash seem downright tropical.
Given my obvious love for white ash, you wouldn’t think I would do anything to compromise its future. Still, back in November, I did just that. In preparing for our annual pilgrimage up north to deer camp, and knowing that the woodshed at camp had been pretty well depleted the last time we were there, I loaded up my pickup with firewood and transported it 70 miles north.
What was so bad about that? By doing so, I risked facilitating the movement of a voracious beetle that has been mowing down ash trees. West of here, ash trees have been dying by the millions, the victims of the emerald ash borer (EAB). This insect, native to eastern Asia, was first noticed in North America in 2002, when it was discovered in Detroit and across the river in Windsor, Ontario.
Since then, the EAB has killed untold millions of trees in southwestern Ontario, Michigan, and adjacent states in the upper Midwest. It has reached Maryland, the Virginias, and western counties in Pennsylvania. It attacks and kills all species of ash and is remarkably swift in its destruction. Beetle larvae feed just under the tree’s bark, hollowing out S-shaped tunnels that disturb the transport of water and nutrients within the tree. A healthy tree can be dead within two years.
The beetle has been moving eastward in Canada as well, and it was recently found in the town of Carignan, 30 miles east of Montreal. That means that this destructive beetle is only 110 miles away from my woods as the crow flies. But crows don’t have anything to do with it. Nor do any other birds. This insect, left on its own, would spread relatively slowly from tree to neighboring tree. But with people in on the act, they’ve helped the insect to leapfrog from Toronto to Montreal, from Detroit to Pittsburgh. I name cities because so far, the infestations have largely been an urban and suburban phenomenon. Ash trees (particularly green ash) are favorites in yards and along streets because they are hardy and capable of growing well under the relatively difficult conditions of roadside life. But just as the Asian longhorned beetle – another terrifyingly destructive insect – has made the move from suburbia into surrounding forest (in Worcester, Massachusetts), it’s only a matter of time before the EAB finds its way into the forest. I don’t want to be the one to make that happen.
But if it’s not here in my hometown, why am I worried about moving firewood?
Perhaps the best way to understand the risk is to play a firewood version of the game Six Degrees of Separation.
A few years back, the house next door to the Northern Woodlands office was rented by a Canadian who had taken a job in the village. On weekends, he traveled to visit his girlfriend outside of Montreal, and she just as regularly visited him here. The happy couple, like all happy couples, enjoyed having a fire in the fireplace. Where did their firewood come from? Let’s just speculate that the girlfriend was from Carignan, and it came from a tree in her yard that died abruptly of mysterious causes and had been cut down by the electric utility because it posed a danger to the power line.
That firewood, riddled with the larvae of emerald ash borer, could be sitting stacked under cover within sight of my office, which happens to be less than 30 feet from the edge of a hardwood forest that stretches for miles. And if the beetle was burrowed into the firewood, you or I wouldn’t know it. It could indeed be a challenge for a highly trained inspector to find it beneath the bark of a stick of firewood. The larvae could, as they do, emerge in May, and go looking for the nearest live ash tree, which in this case would be less than 100 feet away. This is all fictitious, mind you, but how many degrees of separation is that? Not many.
Here’s another scenario, this one for the Asian longhorned beetle (ALB), which has been infesting trees by the thousands in and around Worcester. Our closest neighbors have a camp a quarter-mile away, which they visit only a few times a year, because they and their two daughters live very busy lives. Like everyone else in the world, they love to have campfires. But because they’re here rarely, the firewood sits stacked for a year or two. What if the source of their firewood was their neighborhood in Massachusetts? What if they were from Worcester? What if they had been bringing firewood for years from the newly discovered Ground Zero of the Asian longhorned beetle?
It would be foolish to think that the experts have found every infestation of either of these insects. Who knows where they are burrowing into trees at this very moment? The pathologists believe the ALB was in Worcester for as long as 8 years before anyone noticed it. I shudder to think how much firewood could have gone off on camping trips from the danger zone during all that time.
There is no known way to eradicate either of these insects except by removing and destroying infested trees. They have no natural enemies, and there are no effective treatments to prevent their spread.
Commercial traffic in logs, lumber, and nursery stock is being regulated, and quarantines are in place in all of the areas where EABs and ALBs are known to be present. Firewood, however, has been frequently implicated in the spread of these insects, yet transport of firewood in car trunks and pickup beds is below anyone’s radar.
Don’t think for a moment that I’m cautioning you against burning firewood. Far from it. I believe that burning wood instead of oil or coal is the environmentally responsible as well as the patriotic thing to do. Indeed, let’s rely more heavily on our local fuel for heat and electricity.
Instead, I’m cautioning against moving firewood. Don’t take firewood with you when you leave town. When you go camping, buy your camp wood from the local guy selling it roadside by the armful. Presumably, he cuts it nearby, and he could use the business. We are up against some devastating insects, with these two Asian beetles only the worst of them. Let’s not help them expand their range.
We no longer have as many kings as we did in the old days, but if we’re vigilant, we’ll always have ashwood to warm our own slippers.
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