Heat constantly abandons my house. It leaves out every available passage; regardless of the fact that I've paid for it, regardless of the fact that it's my own personal heat, from my breath, my body. Heat must fall from full to empty, high to low, so it spills through every crevice, wasted, into the cold winter air outside. Gravity and other laws of physics dictate this, unfair as they may seem. They have no eye for commerce or conservation. These are the cruel laws that govern my days now, loyal to the currency of supply and demand. Outside, there are pressure systems that have interfered with our lives, taken my family from my home and left me here in a cold and empty house. Off in the continental distance, surging waves of air had flown across the land. A warm, moist low pressure valley from the Gulf of Mexico had flown north across the axis of the Appalachian Mountains then east across the St. Lawrence Valley to the Bay of Fundy. There, it met with a cold high pressure crest off the coast of Labrador. The result was rain, which passed from the upper echelon of cloud miles above our heads to crystalize into what would have been a sweet post-Christmas snow, but instead melted in the layer of warmer air to freeze again only when it hit the cold ground where we live, our frozen habitat. Rain then varnished our world in ice and added on. Normally, a system like this would be a miserable visitor for a night, a day, but a third factor; a high pressure system out in the Atlantic Ocean stalled everything. All came to sit still, frozen. And the ice added on.
The house is cold. It's outer extremities; the bedroom, the bathroom, they hover at a decent 34 degrees fahrenheit. I've brought the thermometer indoors and now I monitor the temperature indoors, scrutinizing nature's intrusion, the flow of heat to cold. The natural disaster outside takes solace from my house's warmth, ignorant of the fact that it had already stolen power from us. Nature is a greedy bastard. Our cities lay under its cold, oppressive weight, crushing great aged trees and causing power pylons to buckle, folding the creatures of the earth down to the earth. Gravity is lord again and we are prostrate in obeisance, sodden then set in place. A frozen system. The very mechanics of the Earth threaten us.
The power went out while we'd been sleeping. We awoke to a cold house, to appliances that would not awaken when prodded, lights that could not break the twilight and a twilight that would not lift. The periphery of life had dissipated in our sleep and left us with the coarser strata of its provisions. The kids, my teenage sons were ecstatic at seeing this. It had only been one day after Christmas holidays and already they were home again and playing pioneer. "Roughing it." my oldest called it. The novelty wore off quickly however, with the realization that pioneers had no internet nor game systems, nor hot showers and microwaves. Many of their freshly opened Christmas presents were useless without power. They are kids on the cusp of the new millenium and the pioneer blood they'd been born with had evolved and left that past behind them. Their complaints quickly became loud and consistent, prompting the exodus to Mamere's where the power was still on and the comforts of home still operated. This is all why I am here alone with the dog, dressed in my layers and a parka, insulated yet brave. The dark solstice had set in and the pagan rites of Christmas had been obliterated by a cruel turn of nature. This is the dark solstice, when night o'ertakes the day and finds me here alone.
The recroom downstairs is now the only room with heat in the house. A few feet away in a walled off corner of the basement, the furnace stands ineffectual, betraying the weaknesses of technology. The fire burns from the stove and its warmth sails up through the open concept of the stairs, creeps where it can through the house. Doors are shut to the bedrooms and bathrooms to deny it, keep it more central and efficient. You are better served where you are, they say. I live these days close to the warmth of the hearth, where the heat originates, from whence it radiates. I'm an inner planet, more alive near the source of my comfort and energy. The dog too, spends his days within its warmth. He lays sprawled on the carpet in total surrender to the floor, sleeping. I have an army of candles here too, to give me reading light, travelling light. I carry a lamp with me through the hallway at night while I check the rooms, use the facilities of plumbing which thankfully have not frozen.
The wood stove has become my solace. I had always loved it, loved the culture of the wood stove, the labours of cutting the wood, the chopping and stacking. I love the trained violence of splitting a log, the capitulation of the its fibres to my strength, two halves sent into flight. This is my command of nature. It's my responsibility to keep the house warm and I'm serious in my commitment to it. The rec room is
where the boys play their video games, where my book collection is shelved, where the family congregates, and I keep it warm and habitable. It takes vigilance to keep the fire going, won't let me walk away for too long, especially now. I learned the art of lighting the fire from my father; the crumpled ball of newspaper, the tent of kindling that surrounds it. I coax air into the flame with the bellows, gently, watching the cinder glow, watching for the impetus of smoke. When the fire catches, I lay the log on the kindling, and close the door, though not completely, just to keep the smoke in the stove and the air coming in. You need to trust that the flame will survive when you put the first log on, my father used to say. Later, I rest another upon it, then another. Then, I close the door and limit the airflow using the bellow to politely negotiate the process. I step back and watch. Soon, the flue rumbles with the rage of the fire, a deephearted thrum, almost a growl full of bass and power. I nod at the fireplace. I nod at myself.
I follow my nightly ritual of feeding the fire to burn through the night with a surplus of logs. The fire burns ferociously, reassuringly, faithfully. I blow out the candles, one at a time, killing the flame with one sudden puff to make the wick smoulder and smoke. I love the smell of melted wax, a deep catholic sense; a factor of vigil. Everything set, I burrow into my sleeping bag on the mattress I'd pulled out from the guest room. On the first night, I'd slept on the couch, but found I needed to stretch out, elongate my legs, fan out my arms. Once I set the mattress on the floor, I found I could sleep. It didn't matter that the mattress didn't belong there. It was a matter of necessity and comfort. Later in the night, I would awaken to feel the dog pressed against me, the stove having exhausted, my body being the next available source of heat.
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In the morning, I venture outside the house to collect some wood from the garage and assess the situation. Even the silence is frozen, I find. The sky is a wintery gray and a fine rain still falls to the earth, almost hangs in the air like a mist to be breathed. This is stalled air, no sailing winds move it. The damage to the trees is the first thing you see. This system has sat down on us, pissing, cracking trees and pushing wires to the snow down below. Mature trees have drop limbs like ballast to lighten their loads. Those that had refused to drop have split in half, the fibres of their age showing, the cores of their birth made bare. The silence is absolute, the absence of technology bringing us a vacuum of sound. Now and again, we can hear the crackle of breaking branches like a staccato of gunfire followed by the glasslike tinkling of ice on ice, but the silence behind it is deep and profound. I look at the branches that have fallen from our maple tree out front; a Manitoba Maple, one of the messiest trees for dropping twigs. The smaller detritus had been shellacked into the snow with ice, but the larger pieces, as thick as my arm or more could be tugged out out of their icy cases and brought to a central spot where I could cut them up. My gas powered chainsaw, fueled from the pores of the earth, cuts, its teeth ripping through ice and wood, its sound roaring into the world. The wood is too fresh to use now. It would have to sit and dry a while, tucked away through the summer, which will have taken the moisture from it and made it thirst for its previous life. Now, there is no thirst for this satiated, saturated wood, so freshly torn from its source. This is just an exercise in maintenance, cleaning up the mess in my front yard.
Between cuts, my neighbour's voice startles me and I almost drop the saw. I'm annoyed. Rule Number One: Never startle a man holding a potential murder weapon.
"Army is out helping the crews!" he says a little too loudly, a little too joyously. He has a windup radio that brings him his news and this is what it's cranked out. I don't really want to stop working, but I indulge in chatting with him. He is an older man, in his 60's. He and his wife are surviving this together. They have a fireplace as well and this is reason enough for them to stay. He gives my house a proprietory glance. "How you holding up?" he says.
I explain how well I am, how the family is at Mamere's and all are safe. I'm good for wood, I'm good for
food, wanting for nothing. He tells me of the damage to his house, how the oak in their backyard crashed a limb through the glass of their sunroom, how they had to cover the hole with tarp.
"Let's hope that's the worst of it." he says wearily. I survey the street, the warzone attitude of it.
"I don't think it can get much worse." I say.
"The news says we're down to one power grid." he says. "If that one goes, it could take months to get power back." I balk at the thought, looking at him, then shutting up.
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The phone rings that night and it's my wife:
"How are you?" she says.
"I'm good." I say. "Cold."
"How is the food situation?"
"Good. Nothing gone bad yet. I might put things outside maybe if its too warm in here."
"Any more damage outside at all?"
"Nothing really to us. The neighbour had a branch through their sun room. We're lucky that maple is so far away from the house- it's in rough shape. I hate that tree. It's so messy."
"You'll really hate it now." she says and I chuckle, hearing my breath crackle in the receiver.
"I miss you." I say.
"I miss you too. The kids have been asking about you."
I feel a rush of pride. My eyes moisten with a sire's love.
"They're good?" I ask, and she laughs.
"Oh you know them, give them a Nintendo and they're A- OK."
We share a laugh, co-parents.
"Any more news about what's happening out there?" I say.
"Crews are working around the clock. Even the army is chipping in. They say we should be getting power within a few days. There's so much damage. It's from here to Nova Scotia."
The scope frightens me. The oppression impresses me, depresses me. Push and pull on my sensibilities.
"I guess all we can do is sit tight and wait." I say.
"Are you alright over there?"
"I'm holding on. It's kind of neat living like this."
"You would think that way."
"I do wish you guys were here."
"We couldn't get in even if we tried."
"You can't even get down the street; there are so many trees on the road."
"We've seen the pictures- Montreal looks like a war zone."
I wonder whether or not I should mention that we are down to our last power grid, how precarious the situation is. Does she need to know? I should not have found out myself, so she does not need to know. In my helplessness however, I realize that she is listening to the news as well. She may be denying me this same information and we are both omitting this very real truth.
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The rec room feels like the only room in the house. It becomes my cave, where my dog and I slide into an almost feral existence. If we are slipping into a new ice age, I am returning to the values that got us through the last one. I have the hearth, the everlasting flame that humanity hath harnessed to its own good. Candles cast a meager light in my lair, but they add to heat. They are flames, the element of my existence. Darkness surrounds me now in the night, but the light is warm. This is the dark solstice, where night o'ertakes the day, but I am brave. Whatever phantom terrors lurk out in the eternal shadow, they are kept at bay now, as I am here in my shelter of light and warmth. I reach for a bottle of wine,
naturally chilled. I feel the need to celebrate in the face of disaster. I am hominid. I am an unfurled descendent of French Cro-Magnon. Neanderthals have eyed me and wondered at my tenacity and innovation. My existence pivots on one power grid under a storm system the size of the St. Lawrence River Valley and I am not concerned. My faith in humanity is my salvation. The worst has already happened and I am content with my dog and my fireplace. Knowledge is power. Schoolhouse Rocks.
The dog sleeps through the better part of the day and night. In some ways, he has the better idea. Sleep is a finer oblivion where thoughts remain within and collate in the mind. I'm not sure what dogs dream about, but the cliché is that he is chasing spiritual rabbits in his mind space. He's never been hunting, has always been an indoor dog that will whine and scratch at doors if left in the elements too long, but perhaps there is a residual genetic memory of rabbits saved for him somewhere in his makeup or perhaps he dreams of chasing teenagers with firecrackers, which he ultimately hates, barks at with the most vigor. Maybe he finally latches onto the seat of one of those low hanging G-Units. Sipping my wine, I watch the dog sleeping. Oh, what a creature of comfort he is, unburdened by morality or culture. His brain has no frontal lobe to house or generate any higher thought. It’s our seat of consciousness that separates us from the animals, makes us sovereign from every other creature on the planet. We have consciences, considerations while his modus operandi is the pleasure principle. He doesn't care if he is stealing food off your plate or out of the garbage. He doesn't care about the mess that he's left behind when he's knocked it all onto the floor. He wants to eat and that's it. My wife always tells me "He's just being a dog." and my return is that I am just being one pissed off human. There is no excuse for his behaviour since I am the one cleaning up after him. I am the one that lost the food. He is fine, just laying there after filling up, farting up the byproducts of his rich meal. He is satisfied while I want to give him a swift punt to the rump. Sleep, you son of a bitch. Sleep that stupid sleep of yours.
I notice that I have barely touched anything here in the house- as if the other rooms have ceased to exist, as if they're anachronisms. The microwave, the television, the light switch are dreams in the ether, useless and cloaked in darkness. I still have books though. As human beings, we've survived ice ages,
Alexandrian libraries and barbarian purges. Knowledge has always been preserved. I pull out Sartre, Of Being And Nothingness. I'm able to read deeper literature now in the silence of time and space, with the help of the soothing effects of alcohol. Reading philosophy is much like reading poetry. It is a matter of precision. You can pick a sentence out of a philosophical essay and mull over it, test it on your palette before swallowing it, look at its colour and light, study its meaning. The words and the wine are one, all cultured comforts in a feral predicament. I sit back in my couch, my seat of consciousness and read.
I pull out one phrase: "Man is nothing but that which he makes of himself."
This seems sensible to me. What have I made of myself? I have my family, my house, my car. My goals have been achieved in life and I am here, living in it. I therefore exist. This is what I'd been building since I was a child, from the ground up and the inside out. First, I'd built my character, stepped into my teenage years asserting my tastes and wants, where Rush and Hipgnosis dictated what I listened to, the virility of beat literature dictated what I read. I'd pulled myself from my parents' influences, the tight skin of diapause into freedom of imago and grown wings and legs to move through my world, happy insect that I was. Satisfied, I then built my world, radiated out from the center. I was a god, an egoist creator. I fashioned my world in my own image, choosing my faculties and my implements, my home and company.
I'm proud of my home. I'm proud of my bookcase full of interest, the rich poetry and deep knowledge. I'm proud of my couch, which keeps me comfortable in front of the fulcrum of my existence; the wood stove. I get up off the couch, cloak myself in a blanket and walk through the house. I love the colour that we had chosen for the rec room walls, the rich golden warmth of it. I remember how I argued with my wife about it and how we had to compromise, how I fell in love with it over time, seeing what she saw. I shared my world with her, so it was good to share her view of it too. There are trophies on shelves that I had won from playing hockey years ago and others from my son's hockey wins more recently. Up the stairs, there is that familiar creaking of the steps, which would always make me worry, thinking I would
wake the family late at night. I get that feeling again, but realize there is no one to wake but the dog, and he is not waking. In the family room is a picture of my grandfather, mending his fishing nets, his 300 year old house in the background. He had done right, I think to myself. My own father had worked his factory job and kept myself and my siblings fed and healthy. I've put my own family on this step, my own sons stepping up with the momentum of life that I had given him. I've done things to be proud of in this life that I've build out of pride and virtue. It's cold upstairs. I walk into the kitchen and see the appliances sitting there in hibernation. I'm amazed at how much I own, from the spoon in the sink to the dishwasher. I bought that bread crumb on the counter. I'm also amazed at how little I need, how I am content with my warmth of atmosphere and thought in the cave downstairs. I'm down to the bare minimum and still happy. I look at the thermometer and it says it is 32 degrees fahrenheit. My house is cold. All is cold but all is well.
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Walking outside, I find the rain has stopped, but the silence is still atmospheric. The night is like a wall, behind which the world recedes, swallowed by darkness. The cold is still solid and a gloom hangs in the air, unmoving and lifeless. I walk through the snow, my feet crunching through the crust of ice that glazes the ground. It's an abrasive sound, clear and crisp over the silence. The world is cruel. The elements have no feelings for us. Our kindness is indoors, where the warmth and light are.
The stillness betrays our assessments. One day, it's holocaust, the next day it's apocalypse. We live from disaster to disaster, hyperbolizing about our situations and beyond it all, the weather just stands outside, not caring. The cold night is all around me, monotonous, monolithic, superior and neutral. It makes our furor look silly and impotent. The urgency exists only in our minds while the world stands independent of our thoughts, impervious to our impressions and urgings for clemency, hulking against our petulance. It seems stupid, but it is ultimately more powerful than we could ever be. Ignorance is indeed strength because it is completely unmoved by our efforts to break it. My footsteps crackle into the
night. I stop and look up into the sky, invisible in the darkness and I wonder where the stars are. They are behind it all, always there, only cloaked in our own problems.
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I wake up to sound. Somewhere in the house, a radio is playing. It's faint, but it's profound against the depth of silence that had preceded it. I lay a while listening to it, not sure where I am, what the sound is doing there. I try to gather context. What is this sound doing in my quiet world? I'm not annoyed, however. It's a distant herald. Something has arrived. Getting out of bed, I feel a warmth that had not met me in the morning in a long time; days, seeming weeks. I can hear a hum of electricity coming from the walls of my house. It's as if the house has a pulse. I awaken to the fullness of an active house. I walk up the creaking stairs, surprised, even amazed by the pervasiveness of warmth through the house. The house is busy with noise, having a life of its own. In the kitchen, the noise is stronger. The fridge especially is vociferous, almost angry in its work. I look inside at the food- some of it will have to be replaced. Yes, this is the plan. I come to the realization that my ice age is over and I am thrust back into my time, the brink of the second millennium. We will have to see what the roads look like to make this trip to the grocery store. I laugh at the sudden leap my mind has made into logistics. My laughter is noise too, jumping into this vibrant world to join it. I look out the window and it doesn’t look like anything has really changed, but the propensity for change is there. I can see it happening. It will be cleaned up soon, the rains have ceased and the world will soon burst out of its icy encasement, shake off the frost. I follow the sound of the radio down the halls to the bedrooms. The music, I finally find, is coming from the alarm clock in our bedroom, its sound filling the room fittingly, there to wake us from our sleep in our absence. Its face blinks off and on, 4:05, 4:05...
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