To Start a Fire(place)

With full apologies to Jack London. If you haven’t already, or don’t remember, you can read the original here. It’s short, and sad, and a classic. Mine is shorter, not sad, and neo-classico.

Day dawned warm and sunny as the man stood reviewing his balcony. It was the usual: always warm and sunny, almost monotonously so. The man liked to joke about the sameness of the weather. It was after all all of twenty-five degrees outside . . . Celsius. The joke ran cold with friends up north, but never failed to elicit a smile on the man and his dog. Or at least he thought his dog was smiling. It could have been his canine sense of humor, or it might have been the bacon which the man regularly fumbled off the table at breakfast. Either way, the dog was definitely smiling.

In a land where the weather never changes, and rarely threatens, the man knew the importance of routine. You arise with the dawn, because the blackout curtains always leave a small crack which the sun penetrates and demands your attention. Or the dog does. You eat breakfast which is always huevos mexicanos, bacon, avocado and tomato, which will tide over a hearty man until a real meal in the afternoon. Not that life is so strenuous it needs fuel; no, it just tastes good. You rest in the afternoon, not because you need sleep, but because it’s hot, and wise not to tempt nature’s fury in the tropical noontime.

The seasons change little, so the man clung to small reminders of times past in order to mark their passing. One was building a fire in the hearth for Christmas. Not that he needed a fire; he didn’t need heating, or air conditioning, or even a blanket at night most of the year. But winter–and the man smiled when he said it, noting he used the term loosely–required something to mark its arrival, and the man chose a fire.

The man knew how to start a fire. He had lit small brush fires as a child, burning his fingers on the matchbook before hastily stamping them out in panic. He had started charcoal grill fires, usually after a heavy dose of lighter fluid and the ensuing rush of ignition. He even lit gas grills, and mostly remembered to open the top BEFORE hitting the starter. He was a man.

But the man’s problem was he was not mechanically inclined. He could tell you the theory of a thing’s design, or describe the components of a chemical process like combustion, but he did not intuit the “how” as someone so-inclined does. And now he faced a challenge: a gas fireplace. Not that that was totally new. He had faced one before, and it nearly defeated him. In the end, he eschewed the fake logs, added a large dog iron full of kindling and fresh firewood, then ignited the gas nozzle directly with a quick-n-flame: dangerous but effective.

Now he would need to engage with the real thing: a fully enclosed, completely installed gas fireplace. There could be no compromise here, and maybe only a second chance to succeed. It was early afternoon, shortly before his routine siesta, so he had little time. He had instructions; Good Lord, did he have instructions. There were instructions for installation, for warranty, for safety, for lighting or extinguishing the fire, for cleaning. He even had three (three!) sets of hand-written notes from the original owner, scribbled and identical and now faded to illegibility.

He had only one or two tries, less he miss his siesta. He was already growing tired, anticipating a good nap on a hammock in the shade, but near the sun. Yet he persisted. He removed the grill cover and discovered the controls. They were all there, just as the many instructions foretold, but never exactly where they foretold. There was a knob, clearly meant to be turned. A spigot which should control the gas flow just before the igniter. Another knob with “pilot” on it, and a button which had to be the ignition system. But there was also a rocker switch on the wall, and a master handle to control gas flow to the entire system.

His mathematical brain told him 5! (factorial) meant 120 possible combinations for these five knobs/switches. He had no time to start trying them in order, which was the rational thing to do. He made some simple assumptions–always dangerous when one’s siesta is at stake, but still necessary. He reasoned that the fireplace was off, and had been for some time, so he assumed every switch was in the negative. He started to switch them, slowly, to the positive. The dog, which had been following the action closely to this point, backed away, tale between his legs. The man wondered: did the dog smell gas leaking or sense an explosion in the making? It was too late for such introspection: he knew that if gas was flowing, he needed to ignite it now, or risk something much worse than a blown grill lid. The man pushed the igniter, and the dog left the room.

Nothing happened. The igniter snapped, but no gas, no flame. He stopped. Now he remembered the gas tech who years ago told him “if you ever try and fail to start a gas system, you should always, (–and here the grizzled old gasbag paused and repeated for effect–) ALWAYS turn everything off and wait for any gas to dissipate.” Yet it was siesta time, and he realized his assumptions about what-was-on and what-was-off were incorrect: so how to ensure they were “off?”

The man paused. The dog was nowhere to be seen. Maybe the gas had dissipated already. The man lit a match and mover it toward the ignition system, slowly, and nothing happened. It was a rash move, like tasting milk in the fridge to see if it had gone bad, but it worked. As in, nothing exploded. The man decided to press ahead, buoyed by this small success. He was heedless of the small significance of the explosion-that-didn’t-happen, and instead decided to use it as the basis for renewed confidence.

He knew what to do now. He tried each knob or dial in turn, lit match in hand, to determine if any were contributing gas to the igniter. The first knob started a tiny circulating fan, which fascinated the man. Who needs a circulating fan on a fireplace in a place where no fire is needed for warmth? But he had no time to linger on the thought. Probably a Canadian design, he mused before moving on. One switch produced only the slightest, tell-tale smell of gas, so he eliminated that variable. Obviously, the knob-so-named needed to be set to “pilot.” Which left only the wall switch.

He flipped its position and tried the igniter. Nothing. He knew the gas might be flowing, so he tried it again, quickly, realizing time (and his luck) was running out. Still nothing.

At this point he should have backed away, ventilated the area, and reviewed the instructions. But he was tired, so tired. He had been awake for hours, and the hammock sat there, swaying in the wind. Yet the fireplace was between him and his goal, and he was a man. It would light. The man flipped the rocker switch, whispered a small prayer (for success? for safety? we’ll never know) and pushed the ignition button. Still nothing happened. He was just short of delirious now, and resigned to his fate: he pushed it again, and again, willing the spark which would breathe life into the device.

Suddenly, there was a small “whooshing” sound, not the giant bang of a gas grill, but clearly and unmistakably the sound of ignition. There between the fake kindling and ceramic logs was a little blue flame. It spread around the edges of the fireplace, real (if gas-fed) and sustained. The man was pleased. The dog returned, since the fireplace provided a chance to warm one side in the tropical sun while the other toasted near natural gas. The dog had no idea how dangerous it had all been, but then again, the dog had instinctively left the area. The man felt only a sense of peaceful calm. He was already in the hammock, leaving the gas fire to tend itself. He had lit the fire. “Who needs snow?” he thought.

Merry Christmas!