Essay: Time To Split

There was a time in the mid-'70s when wood-stove bores were a serious environmental hazard at parties, the way bullfight bores had been three decades before, sports-car bores were a bit after that and college-tuition bores are now. Some self-pleased gasbag was always bombinating lengthily about his new airtight Jotul 118 or Vermont Castings Defiant or Fisher Papa Bear. (Yes, suburban trendies, from South Carolina to north of Boston, would actually buy, and get all gooey over, a 200-lb. hunk of welded steel that some marketing genius had called a Papa Bear.) This ecological wonder, the braggart would assure other wood...

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