On day 5, Linden Gray and Young Mi Kim got cone 9 in the second stack to fall, using an ingenious method of building up the coal piles in front and in the side stokes and closing down the damper to keep all the heat in the kiln. But the front remained stubbornly stuck at cone 7 throughout the sixth day, and nothing we did, stoking with dry pine, burning down the coal piles, would move it.
Young Mi at the controls
On day 7, Sunday morning, Mark woke me with a phone call at quarter to eight to say “all hands on deck.” I came out and found all the dry hardwood in the sheds, and split it all for side stoke wood. It produced an incredibly hot flame. We were stoking the front with giant clunkers of pine which produced a flamethrower effect if you didn’t get the door shut fast enough. At one point, I got a kiln burn on my arms right through my cotton sweater.
It was incredibly hot in there, a yellow-white heat, and the pots were glazed all over with runny ash, and finally cone 9 fell in front. The cones were about six feet away, on the first stack, and it was hard to tell what they were doing. Was cone 10 softening? I couldn’t look in there long enough to tell, without burning my beard off my face. (We concluded later that the cones were lying to us – perhaps they got covered in ash and frozen, or were in a cold spot behind other pots, who knows?)
Mark went and cut some green ash and maple logs and brought them up the hill in the truck, but when I went to start the splitter again, it sputtered and died. So there we were with a hungry fire and no way to feed it. We had a big pile of pine, but it needed to get cut and split. And the splitter was dead.
Mark, stoking into the night, Day 6
It was at this admittedly rather depressing moment that Paul Chaleff arrived. We were all sitting around trying to figure out what to do. He looked in the firebox when we stoked, and then at the back of the kiln, and he said “you’re doing fine. You’ve got wood. Just keep going.”
Then he had to go, but he had done his work. We all jumped up and grabbed our axes. And Ben Case called up his friend Kai, who is the man-mountain with the blond hair in the foreground of this picture, who split those big, green rounds like they were nothing. It was a John Henry moment: he actually worked faster than the splitter, and the rest of us cut those big pieces into progressively smaller pieces, while Linden and I fed them into the kiln.
By 9 p.m., everyone was exhausted. Brendan, who had stayed up way too late talking about the nature of existence with Jon Rosen two nights before, said we should continue, but then he practically fell asleep in his chair. We had come almost to the end of the wood, and we were at the end of our strength. It was time to shut it down.
We’ll be opening the kiln a week from Thanksgiving, and then Brendan and I have the Crispina and Friends holiday show in Pittsfield Dec. 5 and 6, a warm up for our big show at the Train Station Dec. 19-24. Stay tuned.