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WOOD
HEAT
"Pay
attention!" said the voice between my ears, and
so I did.
As we
left the adobe cottage and headed off for a sunset
walk, I glanced back at the smoke coming out the
metal chimney: there was only a little, but it was
distinctly dark, almost black, with a rather
unpleasant industrial smell. I stopped and
considered the situation. "What's wrong?" she
asked, coming back towards me, boots squeaking on
the icy snow.
"I
don't like the way that looks," I said, pointing
toward the chimney. "I think we'd better postpone
our hike so I can keep an eye on the stove. We may
be on the verge of a little chimney fire." The
choice of the word "little" was both intentionally
reassuring and aptly descriptive, but I was fairly
sure something unpleasant was happening in the
flue. We crunched back to the house, not
althogether unhappily. In the rapidly chilling air,
the exercise was more discipline than fun, and both
of us were glad to stamp the snow off our boots and
go back inside. But whoa, was it ever
hot!
As
usual, I'd done a fabulous job stoking the stove
before we left, and it was putting out a lot
of heat! Too much for comfort, in fact. The logs
I'd chosen were a variety of piñon I call
"gasoline wood" because of the way it burns, and
the firebox was a blazing supernova of orange-white
flame. Similar fires had driven us out of the
kitchen before, but right now I was more concerned
with damping it down and stifling what I knew was
surely the beginning of a creosote fire. If I could
just get the stack temperature down far enough, the
embryonic horror in the chimney might go away
quietly and I could pretend I hadn't nearly burned
down the house.
Naturally,
there was no way to simply shut everything down.
This particular stove had a solid airtight door
with a large glass window and a lever to control
the draft, but I had never been able to shut off
the air enough to extinguish a fire. What to do?
The obvious way to cool things off was to douse it
with water, an insane tactic, of course: if cold
water came in contact with the interior firebricks
or the metal of the stove itself, things could get
ugly in a hurry. People have literally blown up
their stoves doing just that, I knew. On the other
hand, rules are made to be broken. I was clever,
wasn't I? What if I used just a little bit
of water and managed to put it where it would do
the most good? Besides, this could be fun, trying
to effect spontaneous steam generation without an
explosion, heh-heh: I would simply fill a shot
glass with water and cleverly toss it directly
onto the "gasoline wood" logs!
My
first try succeeded, with no damage to me or the
stove, except that the log shrugged off the jigger
of water and promptly flared right back up again. I
repeated this routine several times with similar
results and then decided I needed a more accurate
delivery method. That silly blue squeeze-bulb
syringe we never used, that should work nicely, I
thought hopefully.
My
first surprise was finding out we had two of
the stupid ear-cleaning gizmos gathering dust on an
out-of-the-way shelf in the bathroom. My second
surprise was that the damn thing worked!
By
carefully opening the door to the firebox and
squeezing a narrow stream of water along the length
of the logs, I was able to all but extinguish the
fire and send great dousing clouds of steam up the
flue. Miraculously, I avoided hitting either the
firebricks or the extremely hot glass and suffered
no injury myself. When I walked outside to gauge
the color of the smoke, I was rewarded by the sight
of a dirty gray-white plume ("We have a pope, or a
bear!"). At least it wasn't black. My wife and I
pulled on our coats, took an abbreviated hike, and
when we came back, the house was still there.
The
very next day a chimney sweep summoned by
the landlady pronounced our flue to be "completely
clogged." He regaled us with stories of
panic-stricken Texans in Angel Fire blowing
themselves up by tossing water into their stoves,
but I confessed anyway. "Oh sure," he said, when I
told him how I had doused my supernova. And he
confirmed that the black smoke I had seen was the
beginning of a chimney fire. "White is right," he
exhorted. I also discovered that in the grand
working tradition of Taos, the chimney sweep was
also a professional jazz drummer and taught G.E.D.
classes to juvenile probationers. Our landlady
later revealed he'd kept eight kids from going to
jail so far. Hell, I only have one job, and it
isn't even dangerous.
(But
I do heat with wood!)
John
H. Farr also edits the news for Applelinks.com and
invites your comments
(especially compliments). The Farr Site
Archives
will take you to the past three years of
columns. (2001 archive not yet posted) John also
writes a monthly op-ed page column called
"El
Emigrante"
for Horse
Fly
in Taos, NM [but not this month!] and has
reworked the minimalist Zoozone
to include a daily image feature called
FotoFeed.
To be
notified whenever the column is updated, just send
a message titled "Subscribe FSN" to
this
address.
The
FARR SITE is © copyright 2001, John H. Farr,
all rights reserved.
|
January 29, 2001 "Moving Right Along"
January 22, 2001
"Digital Deathstyle"
January 15, 2001 "Gibble Gobble, One of Us"
January 8, 2001 "High Desert Satori"
January 1, 2001 "Psychic Cats Predict Wild Year Ahead"
December 25, 2000 "Christmas in Dubuque..."
December 18, 2000 "Merry Christmas, I Think!"
December 11, 2000 "Easy Does It, Someday"
Farr Site Archives
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