Cold, Treacherous Death (Okay, I’m Being Dramatic)

I wake up in the morning chill and decide to click the snooze button. I should get up, I remind myself, and drive to the garage for my truck’s check-up…but I’m not keen to get out of bed this morning. Another hour of sleep, I think wistfully, a doze already opening its arms to me, and I’ll have met my sleep goal for the night. Having thus decided, I reach out and change the alarm to a new wake-up time. I can drive there tomorrow morning instead. Ah, the benefits of spring break…

A tintinnabulation weaves into my sleep. I hear the sound for a while before my mind consciously recognizes it as music from the generally silent chimes hanging by my front door, just below my bedroom window. Will the wind blow in more snow?

Once out of bed, I cannot seem to warm up. Shiver, it is chilly this morning. It must be the wind licking heat off of the house. At the back of my mind I know this cannot be true. That is not how modern homes work.

I putter around the house, making breakfast, putting away the clean dishes from last night’s dinner, boiling water for tea. I start feeling my toes. I never notice they are there unless they are cold. I put on a different pair of slippers. The foot-digits’ iciness continues to spread. I add a sock to each slipper, and, suspicion tightening my throat, start wondering…

The living room thermostat says sixty degrees. The boiler should have gone on long before now. I push a couple of buttons to encourage heating. Nothing, so I walk to the utility room and peek at the little box where I can sometimes see the hot-blue flames of ignition. A little green light diagonally above the dark window always comes on at the same time.

Now, the green light blinks. It never blinks. My breath becomes a little more shallow. The light is either on or off, never blinking. Isn’t a blinking light always a warning?

I press the reset button, and the green light goes off; the boiler clicks on like it always does just before ignition — and the resulting heat. There is no ignition this time. Thank goodness an expert is coming tomorrow afternoon to do a boiler maintenance check, I think in my firmly-not-panicking mind.

The house temperature drops another degree. Upstairs the thermostat reads 58ºF. I pull on boots and a warm coat, and retrieve my leather gloves from the porch on my way to the fuel tank pipe next to the house. The dipstick goes in, down and down, and I do not feel the wood entering the liquid. When the stick touches the bottom of the tank I draw it upwards and there is way too much dry wood. My pulse beats once, twice, hotly loud in my ears.

This is the afeared problem. I stare at the moisture that coats only the bottom two inches of the dipstick. 

I wipe the stick clean with the palm of a glove, letting the residual drop fall back into the opening even though I know that saving this drop is not going to help me now.

The former house owners had not installed gutters, so the roof’s runoff each spring caused erosion next to the house, and the fuel tank tilted. Two inches of fuel would not last me long as it is, but perhaps these last two inches never will be able to flow from tank to house anyway if the tilt has caused the remaining fuel to collect away from the tank’s exit valve.

I deliberately close the hinged fill pipe cap — and not put the lock back on. Then I ring up the fuel delivery company, but they are closed!

Oh. It’s only 7:30 a.m. They don’t open for another half hour. I make myself breathe.

During my first winter in the house, when an unforeseen plumbing issue caused the main drain line under my house to freeze, and therefore prevented me from using the system at all, I absently wondered what it would be like to also lose heating. At every stretch of low temperatures and during every ice storm and power outage, I have wondered, ‘How quickly will the house freeze up without heat…?’

I have not ever really wanted to know this firsthand — and especially not from something as preventable as running out of fuel. Grrr. I have to remind myself that this is the first time I’ve owned a house, the first one I’ve lived in, since I stopped having roommates, even, that had real plumbing. So what if it’s normally twenty-somethings who have this cringeworthy experience. Sigh…

I always strive to be prepared — if only to make a what-if plan when my sometimes overactive imagination keeps me from a good night’s sleep —, so I do have a couple of hopeful (and hopefully pulse-steadying) actions to take. I close all upstairs doors and shut off the water pump in the utility room. I don’t know if closing off rooms will help trap heat in, but I do know that if the temperature drops too much, I will let as much of the water in the house’s holding tank out through the drains, then cross my fingers that this will prevent the pipes from freezing.

On the phone, I have to swallow my pride to admit that I am out of fuel. I’ll even pay an emergency call-out fee, but surprisingly there is none. I wish there were because that might ensure a fill-up today. The receptionist calls the dispatcher, who cannot contact my area’s delivery truck. Maybe the driver will get to me today, maybe tomorrow, she says. I thank her and wish her a good day, because doing otherwise would not change the fact of my own foolishness.

On my spring break to-do list I had written “check fuel”. I generally don’t have to purchase any heating oil so early in the calendar year, but Fairbanks did have 30º below temperatures this winter, as well as several additional days of -20ºF. I thought checking might be sensible. I should have listened to myself on Monday.

The outside temperature is -5ºF. Sun on the siding might help warm up the house, yet the sky is overcast like the firmament has been wrapped in layers of tulle and gauze, and the sunlight does not look like it will be able to break through. I have a propane heater, and I think a bottle of propane, too, in the shed. If the indoor temperature drops to 50ºF, I’ll dig them out and heat up the bathroom that separates the kitchen and the utility room, the two places which hold most of the pipes. At night I can move the first chair I bought for my new place, a lovely, comfortable cushioned seat, to the kitchen as my “bed” up off the cold floor. Although…Could the camping air mattress and my sleeping bag (supposedly rated to -40ºC/F) be a cozier place to sleep? It would be a good test for the bag. This is optimism poking through more than the sunlight.

My poor little toes! Yesterday, while re-organizing my camping equipment, I pulled out all of the expired hand and toe warmers left from my days of regular winter biking. (The thought of that at the moment makes me shudder even more.) I can use those warmers now, and some of them do work just enough for a chilly house.

It’s only 9 o’clock, and the inside temperature has dropped a full degree in the last hour. Where is that sun? Will the fuel truck come today? Would the sun help at all anyway? 

My bedroom is noticeably cooler than the kitchen. I try not to think about the sinking temperature. My sister once told me she had turned on her stove when her heating had been shut off. I never asked why her cooker still worked if her heat was off, but her resourcefulness comes to mind now. I bake a batch of “Jiffy” corn muffins and leave the oven door open when I turn off the dial. Moving keeps my blood warm, and the temperature on the thermostat is now up one degree. Yay! I don’t check the ones upstairs because the last time I checked, the bedroom panel read 55ºF, and I’m not brave enough right now to see whether it has dropped.

A couple of warm muffins raise my body temperature and my hopes.

I have a plan. I might not enjoy the next, possibly twenty-four, hours, but I have a plan that makes sense, and I know that if I need to get warm today, I can go in to work for a few hours, and if the house is still too cold this evening to be bearable, despite my Pollyannaish camping plan, I could beg a night’s stay at a friend’s house — even though I don’t want to have to admit the reason.

Beep, beep, beep!

I gasp and stand stock yearning still. Is it..?

I dash to the window and peer out. Yes! The fuel truck is here! I love those guys.

The truck finishes backing up into my driveway and I hear the clunk of the hose being drawn out. After a few minutes, I press the reset button under that annoyingly blinking green light, the boiler clicks on, and then… ignition!

I don’t know how much fuel a working furnace uses but if I can get a few more drops of the powerful liquid out of the truck, I am all for them.

490.4 gallons and $1,452 (yikes!) later, the fuel truck driver hangs a receipt on my door and heads to his next gig. I wave thank-you from the doorway. I don’t know if he sees me in his mirror, but I want to show my gratitude in some non-contact way.

It’s 10:21 a.m. The heating registers click once, twice— cautiously, as if they are afraid to pour all of their effort into the work in case there is not enough oomph behind them to allow them to finish.

The boiler runs for 16 minutes non-stop, a light whiff of exhaust hanging like invisible ice fog in the house. I don’t mind it. The heating system is working to catch up from what I’ve put it through! Two minutes later the ignition kicks back on because the thermostat’s temperature still reads 59ºF. Six more degrees to go! I wonder if keeping my house at a more tropical warmth would have prevented me from knowing as soon as I did that potential death was on its way. (Too dramatic, I know.) Certainly I would have used up fuel faster, and perhaps I would not have known the bitter danger until I had returned from a long day of work to a cold, deadened home.

Good thing for spring break!

The boiler clicks on and off about ten more times before each room is back up to its set temperature. When I turn on the hot water faucet, warm water actually comes out. I take a long deep breath.

I am glad I had a reasonable plan that I did not have to follow in the end. Now I know what it is like to run out of fuel. Been there, done that, won’t do it again!