On a chilly morning in Woodstock, New York, frozen dew turns lawns a glistening white as puffs of smoke from chimneys float across the road.
“Winter is here,” declares the woodsman, a broad-shouldered man in a black-and-gray checked wool shirt and navy denim Carhartt overalls as he sharpens his orange chainsaw. Hanging from his neck is a medallion that reads “St Christopher protect us”– a gift from a red-carpet-level comedian who once collaborated with him on a theater project.
The woodsman, who requested anonymity, is an accomplished director, writer and producer with several popular film and TV credits on his IMDb page. But he now devotes much of his time to supplying his struggling – and sometimes freezing – neighbors with free firewood.
Think of him as a cross between Paul Bunyan and Banksy. He delivers seasoned hardwoods like birch, oak and his favorite, maple (“burns hot, burns clean”) often to elderly people, the ill, or both. Though he is quick with a quip, his soft voice hardens when discussing America’s insufficient safety net: “Heat in the winter,” he said. “It’s a human right.”
The Woodstock area is known for its thriving art scene as well as its famous former and current residents, including Bob Dylan, Levon Helm, Uma Thurman and David Bowie. But poverty festers amid the wealth.
“Many people are suffering,” said the woodsman. “So many more than I imagined. Quietly, just secretly, really suffering.”
The numbers back him up. Almost half of the children in the local public school district are economically disadvantaged, meaning that they or their families receive government anti-poverty aid such as supplemental nutrition assistance program (Snap) or disability funds. Affordable housing is in short supply: there are only a handful of long-term rentals on Zillow in the 12498 zip code with an average price of nearly $4,000 per month.
A cord (128 cubic feet) of firewood, about enough fuel for a month or two, costs between $250 and $350 in Ulster county – up from about $200 before Covid. According to the low income home energy assistance program (Liheap), which distributes block grants to the states for heating and cooling subsidies, 18.6% of US households “kept their home at a temperature that felt unsafe or unhealthy for at least one month in the past year”.
And in the world’s wealthiest nation, some people freeze to death inside their homes.
This year, Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Edward Markey and Representative Jamaal Bowman introduced ambitious (some might say doomed) legislation to bolster federal heating programs. The proposal would cap expenditures on energy at 3% of a household’s income, allow applicants for energy aid to “self-attest to eligibility criteria” and ban utilities from shutting off power or charging late fees.
For many Americans, warmth is just another unattainable luxury.
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The woodsman has been an active activist for several years, helping refugees in Mexico stay in safe houses, distributing free masks during Covid and organizing voter registration drives with the Comedy Resistance, a non-profit organization.
He moved to upstate New York from Los Angeles a few years ago to look after his mother, who had cancer and then Covid. He stocked a paying stand, which operated on the honor system, outside his mother’s house with bundles of wood; she donated the proceeds to local charities. But some of the bundles of wood vanished. The thefts distressed the woodsman, who recalled that a friend “suggested that I put a sign out on the stand that says if you if you need wood to heat your home, but you don’t have the resources, just ask me and I will deliver”.
That conversation sparked the free firewood program.
Two local librarians, Hollie Ferrara of the Woodstock Library and Elizabeth Potter of the Phoenicia Library, voluntarily spread the word about the grassroots initiative. “Most people who work here can’t afford to live here,” said Ferrara. “But there are still outlying folks who have been in their homes for a long time who basically have just about just enough money to live on and that’s about it.” She acknowledged that librarians like her routinely act as unofficial social workers. “We wear many hats,” she said, quoting the official job description from her library’s HR department: “‘Other duties as assigned’; it’s a library joke.”
Residuals from the woodsman’s entertainment career defray some of his expenses. But Potter solicits donations for the charity from the community. Some benefactors leave gift cards for gasoline and stash them under a rock on her porch, or drop off oil for chainsaws.
She first called on the woodsman during a power outage, a regular occurrence in upstate New York, two winters ago. An older couple had burned through their “last stick of wood”. Within hours, the woodsman came to the rescue. “They said they and their spouse were huddled under the blankets upstairs, the fire long gone out, freezing cold, when they saw headlights in their drive and the soul-warming sound of wood being thrown on to the gravel. He got them through until the power was restored.”
The woodsman considers his volunteerism a cheap form of therapy. “I’m sort of a quiet guy,” he said. Giving away wood “does draw me out, pushes me out. When you interact with people, and I listen a lot, you do you learn their stories. And I’m moved by every one of them.”
He often monitors his client’s firewood reserves and notices that he is receiving requests for help earlier this winter than last, a sign, he believes, of increasing economic struggle.
When I visited him, he decided to check in with repeat customers who live about 20 minutes away from his wood lot. When driving on country roads, he eyed passing wood piles and offered reviews at 40 miles per hour. Commentary included “that shit is nowhere near seasoned” and “great logs”.
After arriving at the two-story house with a view of the mountains, he inspected a pile of logs strewn on the land to ensure they were not rotted. We then chatted in the house with Tom and Malley Heinlein, who had asked him to cut and split their wood.
Tom, 74, always handled that chore until he nearly died in November 2022. “He’s from a family that did everything; I’ve never had to hire a plumber,” noted Malley as their dog, Nate, greeted visitors with cheerful barks. “I know pretty much all the building trades,” added Tom, a stonemason who became a registered nurse.
Tom, the family’s main breadwinner, is gaunt and slowly recovering from Mycobacterium chelonae, a severe bacterial infection, that sapped his strength and swelled his body. “We’ve been happily living our independent little quirky life for all this time,” Malley said wistfully. “And then all of a sudden, something trips you up.”
Tom’s bed now dominates the living room, since he struggles to make it upstairs, let alone lift logs. “His whole body was inflated like a tick,” said Malley, a singer and former DJ who said Tom’s bloated condition had even shocked doctors.
The couple quickly drained their modest savings and were resigned to toughing it out in the cold when a friend introduced them to the woodsman. A slight woman who also struggles with her health, Malley, 67, found applying for a heating subsidy daunting. “I’m taking care of [Tom]. And taking care of the dogs and taking care of the house ... He went from being my partner to being my patient.”
Stigma also fueled her reluctance to seek government heating aid. She recounted a “humiliating” episode when she once applied for financial assistance and her town assigned her a workfare job shoveling gravel, which she viewed as punitive. “I could have done filing,” she said.
After a cup of coffee –“it’s important to accept hospitality,” the woodsman explained quietly – he methodically cut the long logs into manageable chunks. For another 15 minutes, he fiddled with the Heinleins’ malfunctioning electric splitter, before giving up and tossing 58 logs into his pickup bed. He owns a new and reliable hydraulic splitter, so he planned to return later in the afternoon with ready-to-burn wood. He hopes to one day boost his output by buying a dump truck and additional wood from other suppliers. There was plenty of demand, he fretted.
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The woodsman grew up in a liberal home in the rust belt. When he was a kid, his mom boycotted grapes to support Cesar Chavez and the strike by the United Farm Workers. “Why can’t we eat grapes, Mom?” he remembered asking. “No more grapes,” she shot back. But he credits a chance encounter with Rosa Parks in 1994 as inspiring his frontline activism. He had been directing a show on the road in Detroit, when his theater company booked him into a large corporate apartment complex.
A mugger had recently attacked Parks, then 81, in her home and she had moved into the same complex. The woodsman yearned to meet her, but he doubted that possibility: “She’s rehabilitating. I’m not gonna see her at the laundry.” One day, he noticed a package on his doorstep addressed to Parks. “I could see that [the package] had just spilled over from her door to my door. And I realized at that moment I’m living right nextdoor to Rosa Parks.”
The next day, he knocked on the civil rights icon’s door to make sure that she had received the package. Her caretaker answered and asked, “Do you live nextdoor?’”
“And I said, ‘Well, I’m here just for another week or so.’” The caretaker then explained that she was considering moving in full-time or expanding the apartment Parks lived in. “Do you think it would be OK,” the caretaker wondered, “if [Parks] came over for tea and looked at [your] place?”
At the appointed time, Parks and her caregiver stopped by. “She looked diminutive, elderly,” he said, “with a nice sweater set.” She seemed a bit uncomfortable, though, and asked whether the air conditioning was on. He quickly offered to shut it off, which palpably pleased her. Her fragility touched him.
“This is someone I read about in school and textbooks. But when you see someone like that, and the observation is trite, but she’s a real person and she looks like my grandmother or someone’s grandmother, it just inspired me to think that I can’t do what she did.”
He chewed on that for a moment. “But anyone can do something, right?”
David Wallis is the co-editor of Going for Broke: Living on the Edge in the World’s Richest Nation (Haymarket)
