Learning from Mistakes

After being in Chicago for three days over Thanksgiving, and lazing around in the house for two more, I returned to the shack Monday morning and built a fire in the stove.  I do that nearly every winter morning when I’m home and in my routine.

It’s a tiny stove, made in the San Juan Islands at a place called Navigator Stove Works.  I bought their “Sardine” model, smallest in a line that includes “Cod” and “Halibut” stoves as well.  The stoves were designed and marketed to heat small spaces below deck on sailboats.  Turns out they also work great in a small space like the shack.
    
Half a brown paper  grocery bag, pinecones, thin pine sticks, a single heavy chunk of wood and my little stove is full.   It’s a formula for fire.  I leave a piece of bag sticking up near the top.  Before I light a wooden match, I check the air intake on the side of the stove, open it wide if its throttled back, strike the match, let the flame grow a moment or two outside the stove, then reach in and light the paper.  I put the lid back on the stove, turn to the computer, and go on with my day.

When I hear the pine crackling inside the stove beside me, or feel warmth on my shoulder, I know it is burning as it should and I add wood.  Monday, I heard or felt nothing.  I pulled off the lid to reveal unburnt fuel and wisps of smoke.  That rarely happens.  When it does the paper burns and my kindling doesn’t catch.  When I lit a second match and applied it directly to a pinecone, I realized the paper was still there.  What the heck?

I relit the paper, making sure this time it caught and was burning well, and replaced the lid.  My computer was booted up to Outlook and I began to check e mail.  After a time, I realized I still had no heat.

I removed the stove lid to the same scenario.  Smoke and unused fuel.  How could that be?  I sat back in my chair.  My formula for fire had failed me.  I had good dry fuel, the fuel had access to air, and I started it with a strong flame.  It had to burn.  It always did.

And then I remembered.

Before I left for the holiday, we had high winds.  Leaves were racing past the shack and piling up on the saplings at the edge of the ravine.  Trees were swaying side to side outside the shack and wind whistled across the top of the stovepipe that carries smoke up from the stove and lets it pass through the roof.

I closed the flue.  Something I rarely if ever do.  Somehow, I thought it wise to keep that air from blowing down into a cold stove and the shack while I was gone.  I’m not sure why.

The damper that closes the flue is just a circle of tin inside the round 4” stove pipe.  It is fastened to a rod that extends outside the pipe on both sides above the stove.  On the rod is a handle.  Turn the handle horizontally and the tin circle inside the stovepipe is flat, shutting off air from entering or escaping the stove.  Turn it vertically and the tin circle is straight up and down presenting no obstacle to escaping air and smoke.  Simple little deal.

I thought I knew exactly what the fire in my stove required, but I left out a critical fact.  Fire requires air to burn, but not simply an air supply.  Fire can’t exist without air flow. Intake means nothing without exhaust.   While I checked the air intake on the side of the stove, I ignored the other side of the equation, a way for that air and smoke to escape and allow more air in.

I opened the flue, applied a third match inside my stove, and in less than a minute a fire was roaring, and smoke was floating away through the trees outside the shack.  I smiled.  

Forgetting the flue and not recognizing the need for air flow in my stove was a small thing, but it reminded me how I can and do at times ignore facts.  In this case it was a law of physics, a basic component needed for combustion.  In other situations, or at other times, we may overlook or fail to acknowledge basic needs.  Perhaps our own.  More likely those of others.

I was reminded to think clearly, and not ignore what I know as fact.