Jeff Davis | Vent Section Manager

I grew up with no air conditioning and baseboard heating in my older home. We couldn't afford anything else. When summer came, I roasted, but when winter came, I was warm. Why? I had a woodstove, and I had a fireplace. They were wood-fired, romantic, sturdy, and stunk a lot less than the gas models our contractor tried to imperialize on us with our new home.

Okay, okay. Now, I'll allow gas log fireplaces this: they do the basic job. They make fire, and fire heats up any house. Ooh! Aah! If you don't have access to firewood, gas is the way to go if you have a fireplace. They're all over the market too, so it's not like they're the most expensive thing. But my family, like some people, have a choice. I'm going to be the "mahnly mahn" and opt for wood.

Gathering firewood and transporting it to my house has become a ritual. Dad and I put on layers of our trashiest clothes, hop into the squeaky, rusty, green 1970 Chevrolet pick-up he's had since before I was born loaded with a maul, a sledgehammer, an axe, his frightening Stihl chainsaw and hobble down the gulley behind our house and harvest the dead sycamore and pine trees that topple over each season.

Garrison Keillor argues on his radio show, "Prairie Home Companion," that men hunt and do work outside just so they can pee outside, but there's a lot more to it than that. Dad works often-insane hours in a high-profile advertising position and when I get home from school, I'm recovering from all-nighters, stowed away in my room with only the company of Earl Grey to keep my pansy butt awake. Being outside feels right. I don't know what it's like to buy gas logs at Wal-Mart, but it doesn't feel like this, I can assure you. No salespeople, no stupid smiley face flying around with his sword, swatting at prices. The air is so cold it gets inside your clothes with you and the only way you can get warm is to heave the two-foot by eight-inch wedges of wood into the bed of the Chevy as vigorously as you can.

You might think of this as punishment, and I can understand that viewpoint, but look at it this way as well: the only thing we have to worry about is getting the wood into the truck, and getting it to the house. My family has ample wood on our land, and there's enough there to last years. If we need to, we can buy years and years worth of firewood for chump change. Generally that allows us to enjoy other kinds of wood, like red oak or if we're lucky, cherry, which burns so sweet it's like incense. Yellow pine is another great firewood. If you have a fireplace or woodstove that can be powered by wood, nature has everything you need.

In addition to giving the man that brawny surge of chest hair, wood fireplaces have an aesthetic magic about them. The colors of the flames stretch out in tertiary rainbows, something gas logs can't do. Fireplaces snap and pop. Gas logs go whiiiiiiiih. Which one will you curl up with your lover in front of? And tell me this: in that seminal, old-time Hollywood melodramatic scene involving the man standing over the hearth, was he standing over a gas fireplace? Nope.

I suppose there are environmental advantages to having a gas fireplace. Surely cutting down trees so you can have a romantic fire seems trite and perhaps selfish, but the trees that are cut are often in the way of other trees. When too many trees grow in one spot, their roots compete for the resources and they all die. Some trees are cut away to let other trees have a promising life of giving humans the oxygen we need and providing low-cost housing for owls, snakes and squirrels.

When the contractor put that gas valve near our mantle, Dad protested with him, but he let the contractor indulge himself and install it. Needless to say, the unattractive fixture has been collecting dust ever since we moved in.