Have you ever had a chimney fire or nearly had one? The latest free chapter from BUFFALO LIGHTS, “Wood Heat,” tells all about what might have been.
These are chapters from a published book. To access preceding chapters and the introduction, please visit the Buffalo Lights category page. (The official synopsis is here.) Why not order a copy while you’re at it?
Part III: San Cristobal
Chapter 2: Wood Heat
“Pay attention!” said the voice between my ears.
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 altogether 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 Lord, 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 piñon logs I’d chosen burned insanely, 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. The 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 enough air 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 had 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: I could simply fill a shot glass with water and cleverly toss it directly onto the “gasoline wood” logs!
At first I appeared to succeed, with no damage to the stove or me. The log, however, shrugged off the jigger of water and promptly flared right back up again. I repeated the routine several times with similar results and then decided I needed a more accurate method of water delivery. That blue squeeze-bulb syringe we never used should work nicely, I thought hopefully.
My first surprise was discovering that we had two of the 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, the sight of a dirty gray-white plume rewarded me. “We have a pope!” I shouted. At least it wasn’t black. My wife and I pulled on our coats and took an abbreviated hike. 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 a nearby mountain resort 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.
Heck, I only had one job, and it wasn’t even dangerous — but I did heat
with wood.
Related posts:
- BUFFALO LIGHTS: Maryland to New Mexico – Part I, Chapter 1, “Imprinting”
- BUFFALO LIGHTS: Maryland to New Mexico – Part I, Chapter 3, “Missing Links”
- BUFFALO LIGHTS: Maryland to New Mexico – Part II, Chapter 4, “Light in My Eyes”
- BUFFALO LIGHTS: Maryland to New Mexico – Part II, Chapter 3, “A Little Farther Out of Town”
- BUFFALO LIGHTS: Maryland to New Mexico – Part I, Chapter 5, “Dreamwatch”
