Haines was a great place to live. Beautiful scenery, great fishing, bears and moose in our backyard and now and then a coyote trotting down the runway to exercise my dogs. It seems now Haines is getting to be a harder and harder place to live. Donnie Turner gets chewed out for wearing a “humorous” T-shirt, can’t play music on the dock, the infrastructure is falling apart, and the town is desperate for money and nobody can agree on anything. The latest hit is the loss of the best source of firewood Haines could have. When the cost of diesel went out of sight I put in a wood boiler to heat our house and shop. I bought a lot of hemlock from the local dealer and was totally satisfied with the service. Hemlock is heavy and full of water. I needed a machine to move it even after cutting it into rounds and, of course, a splitter. A fire can be made with wet hemlock but it takes a lot of kindling and splitting the first go-round into small pieces. After it finally was burning, stalactites of creosote would drip out of the door of the boiler to the deck floor. I tried splitting a bunch and ricking it for a couple years under a tarp. Even after that long it still had about 20 percent water in it. When I heard about Dimok selling bug-killed spruce, I jumped on it. A 22-cord load I could cut and burn the first day. No machine or splitter needed. Just a wheelbarrow and a power saw. Much greater BTU output, almost no smoke even at startup and only had to haul ashes once every two weeks. Now that is gone. Too bad, Haines.
Bud Stewart