Fighting fire with fire
You live in the 19th century the way we pretty much do, you heat your place with wood. We heat the entire house, the woodshop, our old shack (now a glass studio) and the sauna. We keep 5 woodsheds. Six if you count the house we bought next door and yeah, it has a woodstove too. Probably got about 30 cords of wood stored right now, maybe more. When the carbon footprint police come for us — and they will — we’ll be the folks in the ten league boots. We’ll plead guilty, no question about it, but maybe the judge and jury will be merciful considering how hard, how incredibly hard, it is to heat with wood. Probably they’ll throw the book at us, if we still print books anymore, or just beat us with a Kindle.
I’m not even going to try to soften your hearts with tales of chainsaw mishaps, massive peavey lifts, endless days of log splitting with an 8 pound maul, wheelbarrow haulings, wood stacking, the endless work of bringing in cordwood. Instead I’ll tell you a tale of the dangers of burning the stuff.
Our first sauna was a chicken coop. The mizzus came out from the tundra of Minnysota in the winter of ’77. By spring we decided we needed an addition. But first! she wanted a sauna. A sauna? I asked, bewildered, not really sure what a sauna was having never been in one. But she was of Finnish heritage and by god, by jiminy, she would have a sauna, yah shure, u-betcha. Being a dutiful husband, I tried arguing, explained we could better use the resources for an addition, but no, a sauna she wanted. And a sauna she would get, I assured her. Just tell me how the damn thing worked so I could build a South End version.
You need a building and you need a stove. If you can, you pile some rocks on the stove for pouring water to make steam. You can go out and roll in the snow when you’re hot enough or you can jump in the lake or stream. All we had was a hose for a cold water shower. It’s simple really. I cleaned out the chickenless chicken coop and added benches up high, plumbed in our old shack heater, built a change room outside with the hose from the well and voila, we had a sauna. I admit, I was skeptical, but maybe my Scottish ancestors had vacationed in Helsinki back when, because I liked it a lot. We started taking sauna once a week. We sweated mightily and we were purified. It was almost, but not quite, a religion. At the least, an island sweat lodge.
I liked it so much that after a few years I remodeled it, paneled the coop, put in nice flooring, added a covered change room with a big stained glass window in it. Put another cedar shake roof on both and added insulated stovepipe for the new stove. My mistake was figuring the insulated stovepipe could have cedar shakes right up to the pipe. So about the first big firing, the roof caught on fire when the pipe was blisteringly hot and right up to the very flammable cedar shakes. I came out to put another load of wood in only to find flames had engulfed the roof and the entire sauna was ablaze.
The mizzus wanted to call the VFD, the volunteer fire department, but I said why bother, they don’t call em ‘basement savers’ for laughs. So instead I went out and took photos of the conflagration lighting up the night sky. The fact no neighbors called 9-1-1 tells you how many neighbors or passing cars we had back then. While I was doing my photojournalism I noticed the adjacent wellhouse was smoking, its paint blistering off, and I thought, geez, maybe we should’ve called the VFD. If the wellhouse caught fire, then our water supply was gone too and the shack was about as close to the wellhouse as the wellhouse was to the sauna. I grabbed a hose, the one with the end burnt off and smoking from the changeroom now engulfed, and for an hour I watered down the wellhouse. In the end nothing was left but the blackened body of the cast iron stove and a few odds and ends.
The mizzus could only shake her head sadly. Probably for the loss of the sauna, not for my idiocy. I figured she was getting used to the idocy by then. Course … later I’ll have to tell you the tale of the chimney fire.
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Great story. How do you make all this stuff up? You must have quite an imagination.
I take great umbrage, sir, that these tales are manufactured. As proof of authenticity, I offer my imagination, puny as it is, as proof they must be true.