Professor Yeti

There’s a new woman in my life. Her name is Ashley. She’s finicky and demanding, needs to be fed often, and I have to treat her right if I want to stay warm all night long. I moved in with her a month ago, and haven’t really thought about anyone else since. Sometimes I get burned, but I couldn’t live without her — because she’s my wood stove, an Ashley Automatic, and she’s the only way my roommate and I are heating our house this winter. Lame metaphors aside, Ashley is more than just a stove. Sometimes she’s a third roommate, sometimes she’s a time consuming piece of shit, and almost always she’s an efficient, inexpensive, and environmentally-friendly heat source. Made of dark intimidating cast iron, with a round belly and ornate feet, she dominates one corner of our living room, a not-entirely-benevolent empress looking down condescendingly on the piles of wood offerings we lay at her feet. Never in my life have I invested so much time and energy in staying warm before, and the experience has been a memorable one.

It’s important to note before we go any further that when I was little I thought my house would burn down. Someone, probably a mean older kid on the playground, gave me the impression that everyone’s house caught fire eventually, and thus it was only a matter of time before mine burned as well. I made careful escape plans for every room, listed which possessions and pets I would take with me when I evacuated and placed them in convenient spots by the exits, practiced climbing out of second floor windows, and otherwise remained paranoid for most of my young life. Despite all this careful preparation for the “inevitable,” I still had nightmares regularly about being caught in house fires and not being able to escape. “Dad,” I once asked, “can we just set our house on fire now so that it doesn’t happen later, when we don’t expect it?” When I reached middle school, however, and we hadn’t had a single fire, not even in the kitchen, I began to realize I’d been suckered into undue anxiety for no reason. Eventually my fear of fire subsided and was replaced by other, more normal fears like heart attacks and boys and speaking in public. I thought I’d moved on.

When I was suddenly confronted with the idea of having open flame burning continuously in my place of residence, however, some of my old worries resurfaced. They were stoked (ahem) by my father, who found out where I was moving and began to warn me almost constantly about the dangers of chimney fires and errant hot coals and carbon monoxide, beyond what was probably necessary. He insisted on dismantling the chimney and peering inside to check for blockage while I climbed up on the roof and shined a flashlight where he requested. Only after he gave me the official “all-clear” and I installed myriad smoke and CO detectors was I allowed to truly move into the house. And all this while I was running the backup propane heater instead of burning wood. The seeds of paranoia had been replanted, and the worrying began!

When I spent my first real night in the house, a cute little cabin with excellent views of the nearby bay, my roommate was gone on vacation. I came home from work after dark, hungry and tired and cold, and decided that it was the night to make a fire for the first time. Thus began a drama that has been oft-repeated ever since. I was determined to do it right and prove that I was suitably “outdoorsy” and “practical” by getting a roaring fire going right away, so I opened the door of the stove wide, and set about crumpling newspapers into a nice little tower. Once I deemed the newspaper pile high enough, I added several sticks of kindling in a teepee-like shape all around the newspaper. Looked good so far, so I struck a match and held it near the paper. It seemed to work well — the paper burned fast and hot, so I shut the door to let it catch. I waited patiently . . . and waited some more . . . and finally opened the door to add the larger pieces of wood I’d carefully chosen from the woodshed out back. But, to my surprise, the stove was dark. The paper had burned so quickly that none of the wood had caught fire, and I was back to square one. OK, I said to myself, more paper this time, and no more messing around. Another, larger tower was created, with more kindling as well. The contraption was lit, and the kindling started to burn. Excited about my success I tossed in a large piece of wood on top of the whole shebang — only for it to put out every single flame in the stove in one large, depressing puff of smoke. I was getting annoyed at this point. I had other stuff to do besides build a fire, and I didn’t want to go to bed in a cold house. I could have just turned on the propane and given up, but that would have been letting Ashley win. If I wanted respect from this stove I’d have to earn it. So I tried again . . . and again . . . and again. Finally, half an hour later, on the sixth try, using most of the newspaper and most of the kindling, I got a respectable fire burning.

Making the fire was only the first hurdle, however. I definitely wasn’t prepared for how loud burning things are. A healthy fire makes intense wooshing noises, crackles, pops, thuds, thunks, knocks, and all sorts of other unidentifiable sounds. As I lay in bed that first night I couldn’t sleep, never knowing what new noise might emanate from the living room and whether that noise meant that things had gone awry. What if the fire had escaped its home in the stove, and I’d soon have to be spraying down the couch with an extinguisher? Eventually I fell into a restless sleep, however, and morning dawned bright and happy. The house, miraculously, was still intact! I’d successfully created cozy fireplace warmth, on my first night in the new house on the bay! Life was good again, and I thought that Ashley and I would get along just fine.

And we have gotten along just fine, for the most part. When my roommate and I are both around, often we’re home enough to keep coals burning for days at a time, which makes life much easier. Sometimes it still takes me an hour to really get a fire going, though, and often I end up setting off the smoke detector, waving burning sticks around the living room, or revealing in some other way that I’m not quite as good at this fire stuff as I’d like to be. And there are still all sorts of new and different things to worry about that people who are used to having their heat hidden in the walls don’t even think about. One is leaving the house. There’s nothing quite like looking in awe at the raging, savage flames in the wood stove, and then leaving those flames alone with all of your most valued possessions for several hours while you go to the store or the bar or the coffee shop. I can’t drive away from the house without first looking intently at the chimney and trying to judge the smoke coming out. Is that normal? Is it too hot? Is it too smoky? How would I know if something’s wrong? Often, embarrassing as it is, I go back into the house again before I leave just to make sure everything is OK. And of course it always is — not a single loose spark, escaped flame, or errant carbon monoxide molecule thus far. Ashley may be fickle, but she hasn’t done us wrong yet.

I have similar issues with going to bed at night. In order for the heat to last while we’re sleeping, we need to make sure that a) the fire has been burning long enough for coals to have formed, which usually means that the house has acquired a certain base layer of warmth that will stick around for a while (thank you, Mr. Insulation Inventor); b) we put enough fresh wood on the fire to burn for several hours; and c) we turn down the air-intake mechanism so that the wood burns as slow as possible and close the flue so that the heat stays in the house better (as opposed to vanishing up the chimney). This is quite an addition to the nighttime routine, which usually just involves brushing, flossing, and putting on pajamas. It also means that we usually have to suffer through an hour or two of intense heat (over 90 degrees, at times) so that the house isn’t freezing cold when we emerge from our bedsheets the next morning (shiver) — the rather undesirable alternative being getting up in the middle of the night to put more wood on, which isn’t very much fun. It’s a lot to think about.

But living with a wood stove isn’t all just extra work and being too hot or too cold all the time (although it is both of those things, for sure). There’s something about it that transcends all those annoyances and inconveniences. When a person has to think so intently about the most basic of necessities, keeping warm, the rest of life’s problems often seem trivial or fleeting in comparison. In that way, spending time with Ashley is just like having a talk with a good friend — it puts things in perspective and cheers you up. It also forces you to slow down. As I learned on that first night of fire building, you can’t hurry a fire. Creating a good one requires you to gather wood carefully, construct the fire skillfully, and wait for the conditions to be just right to add more wood. Even when I’m feeling panicked, like there’s not enough time in the day to get everything done, and negative thoughts are turning over and over in my head, the fire makes me stop, observe, and have patience. It doesn’t care how many schools I have to apply to or errands I have to run or people I have to e-mail — it just exists, or not, depending on your willingness to create it. You can’t ask for a better life lessons to be sitting in the corner of your living room every day.

And as I write these words, I’m sitting across the room from Ashley, hearing her whir and crackle. Those noises, which used to give me fear, are now more comforting than anything else — you’ve got a fire, they say, you’ll be warm tonight, and therefore everything will be okay. Thanks, Ashley, for teaching me that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go gather some more wood.

Erin Quigley (erin@professoryeti.com) and her roommate are having a potluck this weekend, if you’d like to attend.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.