On a slushy February afternoon in 1991, I walked into the Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan and bought a one-way Greyhound ticket to Flagstaff. Three days later, I pried myself out of a window seat and stepped into a brittle northern Arizona night. My new home smelled like wood smoke.

I rented a room at a cheap motel, dropped my bags, and took a walk. Every third house in town seemed to have a wood stove. Trains I didn't yet know the names of - the Southwest Chief, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe - rumbled through the darkened town. The Milky Way and the Pleides shimmered over my enormous good luck. I had come to the West for a magical life - spending weeks and months at a stretch in mountains and deserts, and precious little time indoors making money. That dream materialized the juniper-scented moment that I climbed off the bus.

So for me, wood smoke smells like freedom.

I followed my nose around the West for 15 years, spending days in the open and nights on the ground. As a seasonal Forest Service ranger (basically a paid hobo) I went camping for a living. When the annual layoff came (and it always came, praise Allah) I would turn in the pickle suit but keep the backpack loaded. At the end of each day's walk in the backcountry, there was likely to be a campfire. Even my preferred backpacking stove - a charred and battered metal cylinder with a tiny electric fan - burns wood. That smell is a tonic for many ills, and adds a ritual grace to meals in the backcountry

Of course, my shacks in Flagstaff, with a few exceptions, have always been equipped with wood stoves. Since that long-ago February night, most of my winter mornings have begun with the lighting of a fire. This act is reassuring, sensuous, and purposeful - like kneading bread or chopping vegetables. And if you suffer from seasonal depression, lighting the morning fire in winter is good medicine. It's simple, it needs doing, and it provides immediate, tangible gratification. A cold house made warm is like hunger satisfied or thirst quenched.

So, for me, the scent of burning wood also smells like freedom's alter-ego, security.

But all life is change, and mine no exception. Seasonal wilderness work is behind me now, replaced with new dreams centered much closer to town. And my newest winter camp - a nice three-bedroom place near the hospital - has no woodstove. The convenience of a thermostat has replaced the hard-won satisfactions of heating with wood.

For me, this is not an improvement. While the apartment offers many advantages over my last place, central heating is a loser, in my book. You see, I like to cut wood.

If you heat with wood and live on the cheap you already know this: a big wood is like a bank account, the only insurance that some of us have. The annual ritual of getting the wood in creates a bond between you and the place.

It also feeds the body, mind, and spirit. Sadly, most 21st century Americans do very little physical work that actually sustains us. We may earn paychecks, but how many of us grow our own veggies? Make our own clothes? Kill our meat? In the desperate digital age, getting your winter wood is an attitude-adjuster par excellence, a vitamin for the soul.

This is especially true for the stubborn Luddite (is there any other kind?) who gets his firewood with hand tools. Most reasonable people, of course, use chain saws. But with a sharp axe and bow saw (and, yes, a gas-burning pickup truck) wood-gathering is elevated to a kind of hippy sacrament.

Getting your own wood feels good for plenty of reasons. It's a local, renewable fuel source. The supply does not depend on pipelines, military might, or the depletion and poisoning of water sources (as the current coal bed methane boom does in Wyoming and Montana).

On the down side, too many wood stoves in one place will make the air brown, as it does in Denver. There are no truly free lunches. But the health hazards of particulates are a valid choice for the thinking, feeling human critter.

Many of us want a big wood pile in the yard and the scent of juniper smoke on our clothes because, in the cold half of the year, the flaming heart of a wood stove is the soul of home.

Michael Wolcott is a Flagstaff writer who has the c.v. you would expect of a nature mystic with poetical leanings and an old Toyota truck. His e-mail address is angelpass12455@hotmail.com.