Passionate about Firewood
20/02/13 05:29
My friends know that I have been known to utter a joke about those of Norwegian ancestry from time to time. It is all in good spirits, but I also know that ethnic jokes all contain an element of untruth. No group of people all fall into the same category and jokes can quickly become slurs and disparaging statements. For the most part I try to avoid ethnic jokes these days, or try to at least tell jokes in which I am the person in the joke. It’s not always easy.
So I need to say up front that this is no joke. Today’s blog is based on information from the New York Times and the Oslo Journal. Mind you I don’t speak or read Norwegian, so some translation by others was involved. The story starts with Lars Mytting from Elverum, Norway. He wrote a book called “Solid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood.” I know that it sounds so exciting that you’re ready to quit reading the blog and head to Amazon.com to order your own copy. That might be a good idea if you read Norwegian. No matter, plenty of people do. The book became a best seller. People in Norway are passionate about their firewood.
A best selling book should lead to a television program, right? Of course, right. So last Friday, during prime time, the special program was aired. It originally was shot to be a series, but was finally edited down to a mere four hours of produced discussion of chopping, drying and stacking wood followed by eight more hours showing the wood being burned in a fireplace. That’s right eight hours of the camera trained on a fire with the occasional excitement of someone adding a bit of wood to the fire.
The show was a hit! Nearly a million viewers, or about 20% of the population watched the program, called “National Firewood Night.”
Remember, this wasn’t the old “Yule log” shot that you sometimes see in the middle of the winter in the middle of the night on American television. That is a bit of video of a log burning that is looped so that you watch the same thing over and over again. The Norwegian program featured a live shot of the fire in a fireplace for eight solid hours with an occasional view of a hand adding a piece of split wood to the fire.
That caused real excitement in Norway. The twitter feeds lit up. People started to text complaints to the television station. “We received about 60 text messages from people complaining about the stacking in the program,” said Lars Mytting. “Fifty percent complained that the bark was facing up, and the rest complained that the bark was facing down.” He went on to say, “One thing that really divides Norway is bark.”
Wow! Excitement and controversy in the same show! And that all happened before they got to the eight solid hours of the fire burning. “I couldn’t go to bed because I was so excited,” a viewer e-mailed to a newspaper web site. “When will they add new logs?” At one point they must have opened the flue a little, “Oh! Just then the flames shot a little higher.”
I knew that Norwegians are a patient people. I had forgotten how passionate they can be when the topic roles around to something that is really important to them.
Petter Nissen-Lie, a 44-year-old lawyer from Oslo tells the story about when one of this three axes broke at his vacation home in the mountains. He took the broken axe to the store where he had bought it a decade ago. When he tried to pay for repairs, he reported, the storekeeper declared, “this sort of thing should not happen to our ax,” and insisted on repairing it for free.” Quality is important to these people. And they stand behind their way of doing business.
I’ve hung out with people with Norwegian heritage a lot. A lot of my friends claim Norwegian ancestry. But I’m not Norwegian. So it isn’t fair for me to criticize. What I do understand is that there is something very important about creating warmth. When our neighbors struggle to find enough money to purchase propane to heat their homes on cold Dakota winter nights, we deliver firewood to help them stay warm. A warm home is a place to share conversation and food and to get the rest that is necessary to go on with life. Without the heat – without a warm place, there is no rest, only misery. Our church takes firewood seriously. We deliver a lot of it. And we stack firewood over and over again. We haul it in from our donors’ property, unload and stack it. Then we split and stack it. Then we stack it into trucks and trailers. Then we unload and stack it again.
In all of that, I don’t remember once having a serious discussion with other members of our group about the proper way to stack firewood. I guess if you stack 50 cords of wood a year, you quit caring about whether or not the stack is pretty. If it stands up in the winds we get around here, the stack is good enough for us. And if it falls over, as sometimes is the case, we pick up the wood and stack it again.
I’m thinking that the 12-hour special on firewood probably won’t catch on here in the United States, however. Something tells me that there are plenty of US viewers who are short on patience for watching the fire. Something tells me that there are plenty of US viewers who are more passionate about car chases and solving imaginary crimes and singing competitions and so-called reality shows about things that don’t seem at all real than they are about how to stack firewood.
But maybe there is just a little bit of Norwegian in me. I think I’d like to watch the program. After all I know the proper way to stack firewood. The bark goes down, always down. Bark is designed to hold moisture in the tree. You need to stack it down for the firewood to dry properly. If you disagree, I’d be glad to debate you. It might even make a good program for Norwegian television. Then, of course, I don’t speak Norwegian.