Firewood+G.D.

Firewood – Garrett Derrah In this article McPhee describes an energy crisis that befalls New York City that forces some urban citizens to go outside of their comfort zone. In McPhee’s article he describes the efforts of several citizens in their adventures; harvesting their own wood in order to keep them selves warm. Initially this article starts out with this sarcastic tone of McPhee poking fun at the population of New York City for being so absent-minded when it comes to cutting and burning wood. As the piece progresses we get these journeys of some, and the stress and hilarity the Woodsmen experience during their instruction. Among all of this is a mysterious underlying tone that McPhee seems to be keeping from us. This becomes more apparent when McPhee expresses at length the different characteristics of wood, the different species of trees, and these almost metaphysical properties of the wood, we must assume that he is trying to instill in the reader a supernatural quality in wood. This becomes more apparent in the article near the end when McPhee begins to compare the heat output of wood to oil fuel, “Logs burning in a fireplace are making and burning gasoline”. McPhee pushes this point even further here, ”Wood was the main source of energy in the world until the eighteen-fifties, and it still could be. Roughly a thirteenth of the annual growth of all the trees on earth could yield alcohol enough to run everything that now uses coal and petroleum - every airplane, every industry, every automobile”. So although McPhee takes the reader on a bit of a journey to get his point across, his point is made very dellicately with great detail and love for the subject, just looking at the information and mythology he brings the reader regarding trees and burning wood shows this.