At that time when night starts tipping into morning, in the mostly quiet hours, I was awake and listening to our old gas furnace churn and blaze. That furnace lives deep in the cluttered basement, an aged beast. It’s as big as a rest stop stall, big as a walk-in freezer. It’s a massive metal box with an octopus of dirty arms housed in a dark corner, marked with orange stickers, like the travel stickers on an old-fashioned vaudeville trunk, only instead of Niagra Falls these stickers read “DANGER,” and “EXPLOSIVE HAZARD” and “ASPHYXIATION”. Why do we have such a dangerous mess below the house, keeping our rooms warm?
Portland has been trapped under an ice storm, weathering unusual weather, like other places each in their own way. If you’re in the area, you’ve been in this mess too, I know. It’s not a minor thing, this ice storm. It’s crowd control. Even Yak Trax find little traction against a sheet of solid ice.
“Purchase” is a strange word. In the ways of capitalism, we use it mostly in terms of buying power. A person makes a purchase. But it has more uses, pretty much one more linguistic Swiss army knife. To compress Merriam Webster, it also means, “an advantage (such as a firm hold or position) used in applying one's power; of exerting power; a mechanical hold or advantage applied to the raising or moving of heavy bodies; an apparatus or device by which advantage is gained…
Purchase was the word I held in mind as I went down into the basement to check on that monster furnace, blazing and roaring, nonstop. The thing was, I know the sounds of our furnace, and they had changed, not for the better. It wasn’t cycling. It wasn’t stopping, or resting, or toning down. It was blazing, roaring, burning, getting louder.
Outside, the ground was an ice rink. The cement stairs at both doors were a hazard. There was no way to gain purchase on that frozen ground.
There’s a box beside the furnace made to manage condensation. About once a year, if the furnace stops working, I can tap that external, corroded old box and jostle the flexible tubing that runs across the basement ceiling and out the side of the house, and that small jostle is usually enough to wake the mechanism, move the condensation forward and let the furnace start again. But this time, the furnace hadn’t stopped. The opposite—it had stopped stopping.
When I tapped that box, the whole beast roared louder. It went from loud to louder, at times clearing its throat then howling again. What do I know about a gas furnace? It pumped out a thin, airy heat. The pilot light was working. These things were reassuring. It was perhaps only trying to keep up with the cold? There was more. I knew the sounds. This furnace needed something from me.
But a gas furnace isn’t a thing to mess with.
I lay in bed awake, thinking about others who were asleep in the house—a house should be safe. It’s my house. People were sleeping. It was safe, it was the same, only more, with only the roar of the very same furnace I’d lived with for two decades. Still. The sounds were not the same sounds. The usual knock and kick had escalated; it was an angry racket.
I needed to check the outside of the house, where the hose vented into the air, but the front and back steps were encased in ice, and all over the city people had fallen, a city of head injuries and worse. That ice was something like a kind of CIA invention to curtail protests by knocking everyone on their collective ass at once. Elsewhere, there were power lines down and trees that had fallen right through houses.
I have never bought road salt, or any melting compound. It’s not in my repertoire, my kit. That shit kills salmon, destroys cars, ruins the planet.
I’m no prepper, but I have a gas mask. That’s how Portland was, in 2019 or so: a gas mask was part of the kit. I have sulfur pills. I have ways to filter swamp water, which I wouldn’t recommend. I’ve dug a person-sized sliced of snow drift away from a front door. I always keep the car working and the keys handy, and…there was nowhere to go, no way to go, no way to get out of the house. Our Yak Trax were useless.
I couldn’t find purchase, of any kind.
The furnace was howling louder still. Something was wrong,
I held the iron railing my gloved hands, and tried to hold my feet steady, skipping most of the stairs, landing on the iced, glassy surface of the frozen yard. It had melted just a little, that day. Now, I looked for the weak spots. I pushed one booted foot into the ice, three times, hard, until I could stand steadily on the broken ice shards. This small victory was better than I could’ve hoped for the day before. This was considered “melting,” on a relative scale.
Still, if I fell, if I couldn’t get up, I’d freeze. Nobody knew I was out there. Nobody was awake.
Is this the new Oregon climate? Is this the future?
All the mattered was the moment, and the scream of the furnace and loved ones sleeping, and under the light of the moon in the cold, I took another step, then took that single step with the same foot three times, hard. I was grateful for scattered furniture I’d left out back. I reached for the side of a chair. In that way, with each step pounding into the ground, I made slow progress, working hard on one step, then another. My Pj pants blew in a cold wind. I held my coat around myself more tightly. I walked like a monster, crushing what I could crush, until I found my way along the length of the back side of the house. I found brittle, frozen branches. I held on. I stomped another foot, trying to break through the surface.
The garden hose, which probably should’ve been put into storage, was now an ice sculpture. I heard it’s quiet, watery hiss. That was the temperature: a moment of sun in the late afternoon had warmed the air just above freezing, enough to let a stream of water find its way through the indoor pipes, but as that trickle of water left the plumbing, it froze again. Not to be too dramatic, but…that actively freezing water spoke to the blood in my veins, the hope in my plans.
My coat brushed against the broken-down fence that marks the neighbor’s duplex backyard, not far from the backdoor and window off their bedroom. For one moment I hoped nobody on the other side of that fence was scared enough to shoot without looking. What would they hear, if I woke them? Me, shuffling, stopping, struggling. My coat, whispering. Branches breaking. The weathered fence, bouncing and fragile. People are scared. I know most of my neighbors, but I no longer can keep track of who comes and goes in the rental units of an old duplex.
And in that icy, early dawn, I saw the small flex of venting tube. I messed with it, until it kicked out a spit of water. That was it. It was all I could do, so far as dark night, in a freezing ice, home repairs. My face was numb. I turned and retraced my steps, finding my way back, seeking purchase.
By the time I made it inside, the furnace was already lowering its yodel down to a purr. It burped and settled. My monster was tended, cared for. Mine. This was home. By the time I climbed into bed, the house was back to the normal collection of soft sounds. I’d won. I’d taken care of the furnace. I’d learned how little I know and how far a scrap of insight can carry an idea: the furnace was calm. The beast was resting, working, warming our rooms.
I’d survived.
How are you? How are you holding up?
xo
Painfully cold and snow on the ground for several days. Just enough snow that I cant get up my steep driveway. As of yesterday, we are back to cold, dark, grey rain. I ordered some long overdue goloshes. Walking down a snowy hill in dress boots is very much like skiing. At least Ill be able to navigate the mud better, and can bring proper attire to help my raw grass fed milk farmer friend next time.
Glad you solved the problem and didnt fall.
The upside of ice storms is that everything looks like its made of crystal. The world becomes very dream like. Its gorgeous.
Gosh that was a fun read. I'm glad you survived.
I can't wait for the essay class to start next month. I am really looking forward to it. While you were are snowed in down in Portland I was meeting writers in Seattle.
I also got invited to another workshop in February so that should be exciting. Maybe between all these classes and workshop I'll learn a few new things.