Green wood does not want to burn. Chester Russell and the soldiers of the 35th found no shortage of firewood as they gouged Alaska Highway out of the woods and over the mountains of British Columbia. But their rush north left no time to cut and stack wood, let alone let it dry and season. Whatever makeshift barrel stove heated their tents at night had to do it with wet green wood.
Chester. “Have you ever tried to… you don’t know how to burn green, green wood.”
Interviewer Brown. “I choose not to…”
More on Chester Too Heavy for Muskeg—And the Statute of Limitations
But the soldiers, Chester pointed out, had no choice but to “Go out and cut a tree down, saw the damn thing up and try to burn it.”
Nothing if not creative, Chester devised a solution—using, of all things, a fire extinguisher.
The fire extinguishers on the Army trucks held pyrene. You used a hand pump attached to the tank to blanket a fire with the stuff, cut off the oxygen supply and smother it.
Chester found a different use. He emptied a tank and replaced its pyrene with gas. “…we’d be in bed, and all you had to do was just take your arms and stick them out and squirt a little gas in there and throw a match in there. And after a while, you’d get up and it’d be nice and cozy.”
Chester’s idea worked great until early one morning the tent next door caught fire, and the men in it grabbed Chester’s customized extinguisher to put it out.
Oops.
“They really had a bonfire.”
Thoroughly angry, Lt. Miletich ordered Chester to cease and desist, to give up his fire starter. And Chester followed the lieutenant’s order–more or less.
From then on after he customized an extinguisher, he hid it.