February 12, 2008

• Two Harsh Weeks

  The big cold snap has apparently broken.  It began warming up yesterday.  Before that, it had been getting colder by the day.  On the coldest night, just before temps began to ease upward, I watched the thermometer.  The reading went down from minus 22 around sunset to minus 37 (F) before I crawled between the covers around midnight in my polar fleece pajamas over a t-shirt and two pairs of socks, with two hats on my head and my hot water bottle (affectionately named Piggy) snuggled against the base of my spine.

  During the coldest days, I endured by sitting in bed with Piggy under the covers on my lap, and the book I was reading propped on top of Piggy.  It was cold enough that I decided keyboarding on my laptop was out of the question.  Using rubber bands and a plastic clothespin to keep books open, I was able to keep my hands under the covers most of the time.  Doug didn’t even try to sleep in his room, but has been sacking out on the couch by the wood stove.  In the best of times, he sleeps while I’m awake to tend the fire, and vice versa.  Lately, both our sleep cycles have been all screwed up and when we have slept at the same time we have resorted to using the kitchen timer to make sure that one of us wakes up in time to keep the fire from going out.

  That became harder several days ago, when the average burn time in our stove went from four or five hours down to about two hours.  All was going as usual, as usual as it can be when the temp is deeply subzero, when I woke Doug to tell him I was going to sleep and it was his turn to tend the fire.   He knelt in front of the stove, opened the door, did a double take, and said to me, “You didn’t tell me about that piece.”  Not knowing what he meant, I was about to ask when he picked up the old blackened rock hammer and poked at the fire.

  Then he said, “That’s not a piece of wood.  It’s metal!”  That impelled me out of bed, and I saw the baffle that had previously hung at the top of the firebox, to keep rain, snow and falling creosote out of the fire and to keep flames from licking up into the stovepipe and igniting any creosote encrusted there, lying aslant on top of the fire.  It had been welded in, and presumably the heat of the fire combined with the cold ambient temperature had warped it sufficiently to break the welds.

  One thing we knew was that we didn’t want to just remove it and leave the fire open to the sky, especially since the stovepipe hasn’t been cleaned for a while.  Creosote fires in stovepipes burn down about as many houses and cabins around here in winter as are burned down by people (those prosperous enough to afford running water) trying to thaw frozen water pipes.  We have had a few, and while it can be exciting to see the flames shooting out above the roof from the top of the stovepipe, it’s a pain having to monitor the glowing indoor portions of the pipe, spritzing them with a plant mister to keep them from melting, and misting the ceiling around the pipe to prevent its igniting.

  We collectively dithered and fussed for a while, expressing our mutual thoughts that this just had to happen when we needed the fire most.  Then I said we’d work out a solution and get by, and Doug said, “That’s what we do best.”  A little experimenting showed us we didn’t want to just lift the heavy iron baffle and stuff wood in under it.  As the wood burnt away, there was a risk that the baffle would shift the wrong way and break out the glass in the stove’s door.  Finally, I hit upon the temporary solution we’ve been using since the past weekend.  The baffle is in there on a diagonal, with its front right and left rear corners resting on a pair of flanges to either side of the firebox, about halfway up.  That limits the amount of wood it will hold to slightly less than it could contain just before I did the burn-down-and-clean-out procedure described in the previous entry.

  Temps are in the teens above zero now, and this would probably have been the day we cleaned the stovepipe, if I hadn’t gotten much sicker a few days ago.  My shortness of breath is not quite as severe as it was just before Doug phoned 911 two months ago, but worse than it has been since I got home from the hospital.  In addition to my long acting pills and inhaler, I’m using bronchodilators in the nebulizer every couple of hours when I’m inactive and more frequently if I need to get up to use the pot or whatever.  Doug has been doing almost all the fire tending, letting the dog and cats in and out, etc., for several days.

  During the coldest days, the cats didn’t want to go out at all, and Koji only went out when not doing so would have broken his house training.  He never wasted a moment out there.  One night, he was whimpering even before he started back across the yard to the door to be let in.  Cats accustomed to outdoor activity go squirrely when confined for days at a time.  Occasionally one of us will yelp or go, “Ooof!” as cats charge across the bed or chase each other over the back of the couch on their way… wherever.  They seem always to be on an urgent mission.  Four of them were wrestling on the top shelf of a book case and knocked down the stereo speaker up there, which in turn knocked down two hanging plants.  Cleaning up after them has made Doug’s and my efforts to keep their water dish thawed, with frequent additions of warm water, somewhat grudging.

  A couple of days ago, we were startled by a loud explosion.  It was a can of pop that I’d previously moved up off the floor when I’d noticed that one can in that six pack had quietly popped its top and spilled a little.  Apparently, moving it up to a warmer level hadn’t been enough to prevent the blowup.  Our usual tactic of placing water jugs on upturned milk crates to prevent freezing has been only partially successful.  We have a bunch of partially frozen water buckets and jugs.  The exploding pop can spewed a mass of ice fragments that could be swept up, but the pan that had been placed on my work table under a roof drip, when the cats pulled it off, and later, the water jug they knocked off a milk crate, left a sheet of ice that has only just begun to thaw and soak into the newspaper Doug laid over it at the time of the spills.

  Today, cats are going in and out frequently.  Doug has just moved from the couch into my bed, all grumpy and only half awake after days of interrupted sleep.  I took some notes during the cold snap and intend to blog out a few of my frustrations and fears sometime in the next few days.  Even though I have to get up occasionally and shut that door the cats can open but not quite close, and have to nebulize whenever I need to do that or anything else, I’m looking on the bright side.  We had it relatively easy here.  In some villages in the Alaskan Interior, that stubbornly stable high pressure system brought temperatures more than seventy degrees below zero.  At best, we were able to maintain an eighty degree differential between indoors and out, and usually it was only about a sixty-five degree difference.  Most of my houseplants have survived the cold snap.  I continue to survive.  Greyfox has begun shopping around, comparing prices and collecting wood stove brochures.

  The Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Challenge started in Fairbanks on Saturday.  Lance Mackey, who won it and the Iditarod in 2007, started in eleventh position and at latest report was leading the pack.   I just heard a little sound bite from him on public radio, talking about the “incredible” sixty below temperatures.  The race was shortened and dog teams trucked fifty miles or so because of exposed rocks where high winds had blown snow off the trail.  An early report, before the start of the race, said that on one mountainous stretch of trail, three hundred trail markers had to be replaced after the original ones had been eaten by caribou.

  I’ll be back… maybe it won’t be such a long hiatus next time.

  • 2:00 pm
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