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The Iran shortfall actually will not register until January, and while it may cause a gasoline shortage early next year, Washington describes heating-oil reserves as being above 1978 levels and higher than the "projected normal stock range." The fact is that less heating oil has been ordered by customers so far this year than during the same period in 1978. A relatively warm November has helped, but the Department of Energy gives much of the credit for the shrinkage in demand to high prices that in turn have led to greater conservation efforts. Citizens are discovering that plugging holes to keep cold air out and hot air in actually works—and saves money. This may not add up to Jimmy Carter's "moral equivalent of war," but the President's description of the energy crisis no longer seems absurd. Heat itself has regained its elemental magic, and keeping warm has become a tribal obsession. The season of Great Cold approaches. Scrape flesh from animal skins. Gather food. Drag tree limbs from the forest and pile them inside the mouth of the cave. Recite incantations. Make fire.
Wood stove manufacturers and importers have not yet been subjected to a windfall-profits tax, but envious oil refiners may begin to lobby for just that any day. At the All Nighter Stove Works, in Glastonbury, Conn., President James Morande says that his three-year-old firm is producing at capacity, 480 woodburners a day, at prices that run from $379 to $689, against a demand that exceeds 1,300 a day. Business is up 122% over last year. Morande talks bemusedly of visiting a retail stove store in Portland, Ore., where ten salesmen, gracing 1,000 sq. ft. of floor space, "actually were handing consumers numbers, just like in a delicatessen, to wait in line for a stove." Some economists dismiss such sales as "life-style purchases, made to express social attitudes." Believers go right on cutting, scrounging and burning wood.
The handsomest, and among the costliest (as high as $1,200) stoves are the cast-iron, enameled Lange and Mørso from Denmark and the Jøtul from Norway. One American manufacturer that assembles stoves of comparable quality is a down-home outfit called Vermont Castings, Inc. Two unfounded foundrymen started the firm four years ago in tiny Randolph, Vt. Duncan Syme, 42, was a sculptor with an M.F.A. degree from Yale, and Murray Howell, 34, was a bar owner and construction worker. Their meticulously crafted Defiant and Vigilant models, designed in elegant Federal period lines and selling for $575 and $470, are as prized by their owners as if they were antique automobiles. Business has doubled each year for Ver mont Castings, blazing along splendidly now at a production rate of 50,000 stoves a year. Deliveries are backed up eight to ten weeks.