The Curious Nature Of Alder

It is Sunday as I write this story, the smoke in the air is very thick. We can no longer see any of the fields from the house. Instead of a half-mile visibility that we thought was bad a couple of days ago has now been reduced to yards of visibility. The few cars on the county road are moving slow with their lights on day and night so they can be seen by oncoming traffic.

Cooler weather with less east wind has given the firefighters a chance to keep the local fires from jumping some of the fire lines. To the south and east, the fires are making their own wind and are still out of control. Forecast is still calling for moisture this next week. There is still a precarious danger throughout the western states.

Most of my days are spent trying to figure out fact from fiction. Mike is full of old-wives-tales, rumors, childhood remembrances, wisdom passed from older generations, folklore, superstition and outright nonsense. He spouts off a blurb of an old story and I go about trying to disprove the theory.

One of the things he told me many years ago was that one cannot stack alder without other stacks around it because the stack would fall over. To me that statement sounded silly. Why would one particular type of wood (one that we would use for firewood) not stay stacked in the woodshed? Year after year, the stack of alder would fall over. Sometimes I could blame it on the cats playing on the stack and making it fall, or the dirt floor becoming unstable when the winter rains started with the ground softening up. But every year, my lone stack of alder wood would fall over. By my trial and error, I figured that this bit of folklore was correct.

I’m sure I noticed the unusual patterns in the wood before but this year as I was working through a pile of alder for my firewood project, I noticed the freshly split 16 inch pieces and their typical stripes. When the wood is very wet and fresh, a cut piece looks orange on the end. However, the orange does not show when the piece is split. When split the fresh wood is a bright white and fades to a light brown when exposed to sunlight and drying temperatures. The pieces that I was splitting were not bright white all the way through but had streaks of tan and brown that ran along the length of the wood and got me to thinking about the reason for the stacks falling over.

Most wood varieties tend to dry in a uniform pattern from the outer edge into the wood while alder tends to dry/cure in stripes that expand in different directions. The drying and curing would lead to unstable expansion and contraction areas (think of ice cubes expanding and drying dirt contracting). The expanding and contracting of various areas of each piece could lead to a stack being unbalanced and cause it to fall.

I’m not sure if this discovery is correct in scientific reality, but trying to disprove Mike’s words of wisdom gives me the chance to prove him right time and time again, even when it takes me decades to do it.

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