The Library of Work and Play: Outdoor Work

by Mary Rogers Miller

KINDLING WOOD

Cutting kindling wood was ever a boy's job. Most set tasks have little to them but drudgery. But cutting kindling used to be interesting. What is there about it? The struggle to master a stubborn stick, the danger that a slip may bring the axe down elsewhere than on the stick, or that a careless blow may cause the stick to rebound, leap into the air, and give the chopper a whack on the head? Scarcely a boy but can show a hatchet's scar on the foot and I know a girl who will always carry one in the place where most people carry a corn.

The problem of a source of kindling supply on the farm is never one to be reckoned with. There are always old fences going to pieces, old buildings being torn down, and the problem is rather how to store the supply where it can be had when needed. In town things are different. The fences, if any, are iron, the buildings are few and kept in repair because they cost so much to build. There are practically no loose boards lying around and kindling has to be bought outright. The ex-farmer always resents this as an uncalled-for expense. But kindling is a necessity wherever fires are to be made. No patent article quite fills the bill.

Photograph by Helen W. Cooke

An Odd Job That is Never Out of Date

Why should grown men monopolize the kindling business? Because there is good money in it? But any boy can go into this business, if he has any spunk. The capital required is very small. If your credit is good you can borrow a hatchet. The chances are that spunk will supply the wood. It may be rotting in somebody's wood lot waiting till the right boy comes along.

Boys in the South are lucky. They can get fat pine which is in great demand both North and South. Some say the supply has given out, but who believes such tales? The demand for this will never be less than now and there is no substitute for fat pine.

Collecting driftwood is another occupation for boys, sea-coast boys, this time. A kind of substitute for this is being sold. It is a mixture of chemicals and does very well for toy fireplaces in city apartments. But the real thing will always bring a fancy price.

It is the common practice of American lumbermen to regard no part of the tree as valuable, but the trunk. All the rest is rubbish and the expense of trimming off the branches reduces the amount of profit on every log. Some day when our young foresters get enough experience to see all round the great subject they are working at, they will think out ways of disposing economically of the tops and branches of the cut trees. This is one of the big problems of forestry for these reasons: (1) The huge amount of this refuse wood chokes out the young growth and the forest cannot renew itself as it would naturally. (2) The brush dries quickly and whenever a small fire gets started there is fresh food for it everywhere. (3) The brush prevents the fighters from making their way to the threatened district. They have to fight the brush piles before they get to the fire.

This refuse wood might be put to a number of uses, e. g., for pulp wood, thus saving the trunks for lumber; for fuel, nothing makes better fires than the smaller limbs; for kindling, the branches which are too small to use for stove wood make splendid kindling, particularly for fireplaces.

Some of us think gathering faggots too slow and laborious. But we needn't make work of it. When I see men, women and children poking over the masses of evil-smelling rubbish on the mammoth dump-heaps that deface the landscape near some of our great cities, or going from house to house collecting old iron or rubber or newspapers, or picking over the slag along the railways for chance lumps of coal, I wish that there were some way of getting them away into the woods where firewood is rotting and doing harm besides, a waste that works both ways, you see.

There is no excuse for the poor people of a village near woods suffering for fuel. They needn't steal. Let them get permission from the owner to clean up his wood lot. It will be good for the wood lot and the owner knows it if he is an intelligent man. The boys and girls are much safer gathering faggots in the woods than coal along the tracks.

Faggots for kindlings bring a fair price, too, and I recommend it as a way of earning money out of your father's wood lot if he has one. In some villages in Germany the people have the right to break off in the forest all the branches that they can reach when standing on the ground. In those forests there is never any loss of life, nor lumber, by fires, no choking out of young growth by brush piles. You could walk through the forest there and see in every direction miles and miles of clean trunked trees of varying ages, but no underbrush, no rubbish, no decaying logs, no diseased wood.

Maybe those thrifty German people made mistakes when their country was as young as ours. But they found out the way to take care of their forests hundreds of years ago and we can learn how from them.