The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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When I got my refugee status on the South End, I bought an old 1910 shack with a wellhouse behind it and one other building, a big shed out in the field built from alder poles buried directly in the ground. 38 years later we still have the shack, but the wellhouse got rebuilt and the shed, no surprise, is gone. Over those four decades the shed with its 20 foot wide GOLDEN CARGO fruit crate label painted on the side by Joe, my old roommate, served as art object, a goat shed, a repair garage, a boatbuilding barn, a junkyard, a truck garage and a storage unit. It got remodeled time and time again until finally the cedar shake roof with the 4 inch carpet of mosses and bonsai trees began to leak.

A few years back I decided it was time to tear it down. Sad, I know, but I figured to salvage some barnwood milled from cedars off the place before rot or a windstorm beat me to it. One big alder pole held the center of the roof. I figured if I could pull that down the rest would drop like a house of cards so after I’d salvaged what I could, I pulled up with my trusty little pickup, wrapped a chain around that alder pole and to my bumper hitch. I was maybe 20 feet outside the shed, plenty far enough for safety I figured, so I snugged up taut then popped the clutch.

The centerpole snapped away easy enough as I watched from my rearview mirror. Good, I thought, expecting to see the shed drop straight down. Instead I saw the dark shadow of the building coming right at the truck. Holy criminey, I thought, it’s going to collapse on the truck and me, one final act of revenge for the shed.

It didn’t quite reach my Toyota and me. But it scared me pretty good. I hopped out, revved up the chainsaw and went to work, adrenaline running fast. An hour later and too many nails in the chain to count, I gave up. If I thought a dryrotted old structure would come apart easily, I learned the hard way it wouldn’t. I tried pulling some of the mossy old shakes off and they were holding fast. For a crummy old building, it was reluctant to accept demolition. So I did what any dyed-in-the-wool South Ender would do. No, I didn’t leave it there to rot away the rest of my lifetime, I put the saw away, grabbed some matches and kerosene and set the whole miserable she-bang on fire. It took about an hour. Incredible flames shot out once the roof caught, an inferno twenty feet high. No one noticed. No 911 calls were placed by alarmed motorists or nosey neighbors. And another iconic edifice disappeared into the lost history of Camano Island.

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Today, class, we need to address the dangers of creosote buildup in your chimney. One way to prevent this dangerous condition is to leave the stove door ajar when you first build your fire in the morning, get up a good flame and burn out the creosote in the stack you created by damping down. You can hear it tinkling down as the flames eat up what collected on the pipes. The trick, of course, is not to catch it on fire, sending flames up into the chimney at ferocious temperatures. Otherwise you risk a chimney fire.

As kids, me and my brother caught an old stone fireplace chimney on fire burning Christmas wrappings. My father was a U.S. Forest Service ranger and we were encamped in an historic ranger station at what is now the ‘Birthplace of the Forest Service’ near Asheville, North Carolina in the Pisgah National Forest. I was maybe 5 years old and my brother was 3. I still remember the old man outside watching flames erupt from the top of the chimney sending sparks onto the roof which he worried,rightly, might catch fire. It didn’t, the house survived and we were given our first lessons in woodburning safety.

Forty or more years later I would recall my father’s angry admonitions. A little belatedly. We caught the chimney of the shack on fire one snowy day by leaving the door open too long. We heard it before we saw it, an infernal rushing of gas and flame from the stove up the stack and into the chimney. I closed the door and shut down the damper to keep it from feeding on oxygen, but it was too late, the stack was on fire and that obsidian-like creosote was now burning. I climbed the roof in the snow, slipping a few times and sledding down to the lower roof over the bathroom, but I finally made the summit, no little feat, where I could look down the guts of the chimney. It looked like the hellish mouth of some masonry dragon, red and glowing. I considered dumping snow down its gullet but I worried that would crack the brickwork. Maybe, I thought optimistically, it would clean that creosote out once and for all. Just keep an eye on it, make sure nothing came through any cracks in the masonry to catch a floor on fire, might just be a good thing after all.

The mizzus, of course, wanted to call the VFD. Naturally I pooh-poohed that. Calling the Volunteer Fire Department is like asking for directions when you’re lost. The worst was over, the sparks weren’t sailing out the chimney any more. Things were under control. An hour later I put my hand on the chimney in the upstairs bedroom. It was hot. Half an hour later it was hotter. I got buckets ready, just in case. Half an hour more and I couldn’t touch the bricks and the floor was smoking. I tossed some water on it and steam hissed up immediately. Now I was worried. For the next two hours I spritzed the floor and the ceiling to keep them from catching fire. The heat from the glowing creosote was incredible passing through the bricks. All that energy stored up from thousands of fires, just waiting for its chance.

I got to tell you it was a long night. But … we didn’t lose the shack. Course we could never trust the mortar in that chimney after that. Any crack between the floors might let a flame through we’d never see until too late. So shortly after, I deconstructed the chimney brick by brick. But those were clean bricks, I can testify to that. Not a speck of creosote on those beauties. The stovepipe we replaced the chimney with, well, it never compared with that old chimney. I am glad, I have to say, I learned my lesson on the sauna about clearances to the roof. Otherwise I would’ve probably burned the house down learning it. Education comes with a pricetag.

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The old shack came equipped with an ancient brick chimney whose mortar had loosened and whose interior was glassy with obsidian creosote. Every year I cleaned the stack with a homemade chimney brush, being too cheap to spring for the commercial one made of steel bristles and attached to a steel rod you could add connector lengths to for reaching the twenty feet I needed to clean. My old roommate Joe and I had made the first one out of a block of wood wrapped in chicken wire we punched down from the top with a long pole. The block was going to be pulled back up with a rope attached to an eyebolt we had ingeniously screwed to the block. Sure, we probably would be applying for a patent, sell em on late night TV by the thousands. Buy now, we’ll send you a second one same price, just add a small charge for shipping and handling, our operators are standing by.

So I stood at the peak of the roof and pushed that block, that soon-to-be-patented-and-marketed Chimney Plow (insert trademark) down the gut of that ancient brick chimney. Trouble was, the chimney was built about 1910 by hand and so it didn’t exactly go rectilinearly, it sort of curved and the block, being designed for modern masonry, didn’t. We got ourselves a long 2×4 and rammed that puppy down through fifty year old creosote, scraping away years of potentially flammable crud. Until it jammed…. This is where the rope and eyebolt would come in handy. You know, IF the eyebolt hadn’t pulled out of the block of wood. Now we had the chimney completely blocked and our sole means of heat was rendered useless. The Three Stooges couldn’t have done any better than us two idiots.

We tried bashing on the block, we took off the stovepipe and could just reach it from below, we screwed an eyebolt from below and tied a rope to it, we bashed while we pulled, we swore while we cried, we cut away chicken wire and we whittled on the block. Hours later we got it to slip free. The shack was dead cold, we were half dead and the chimney was scraped free of creosote. Well, not the glassy decades-old hard stuff in the cracks and crevices of the mortar. We decided not to worry about that as night fell over us. Some years later we would regret that decision, but as we always said when times got tough, tomorrow is soon enough.

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