How to Keep Warm

This Personal Environmental Narrative was produced in Andrea Scarpino's seminar on the humanities, in Union Institute and University's Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program, during the spring 2011 semester. 

I bought my first copy of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album at a yard sale in my Pennsylvania hometown; I was fifteen years old. As I listened to “Black Dog,” “Going to California,” and “Stairway to Heaven” among other anthems of teenage rebellion, I marveled as much at the cover as I did at the music: a photograph of a smiling, bearded English vagrant with patches on his knees and a derby hat, hunched over in a field, carrying on his back a massive bundle of sticks. As a child and adolescent, I had never known such circumstances, not even on camping trips—in the picture, these were likely the vagrant’s firewood for the night, the result of his day’s work, some collected, stolen treasure of resources meant to keep himself from freezing. Whether or not the album cover reflected the blues and hard rock contained therein, I have never forgotten that hunched vagrant, moving his fuel in daytime, across a field still green. He is braced for conditions to come; at fifteen, I sought to be similarly braced, but had never known such high stakes, such hauling and hard work, for heat.

In science class we adolescent suburbanites learned of mass and weight, displacement and conversion, real and potential energy. The last two concepts helped me understand the sticks on the man’s back: firewood is literally potential energy, waiting to be released. I knew little of such physical labor, however, having never been challenged to amass a resource to ensure my own survival. In my family’s modest suburban home, mysterious metal grates in the walls connected duct work to each room, and forced air kept out the cold. All we kids knew of the furnace in the basement was that it burned something expensive and besides heat, gave off a deep whirring rumble at night.

I have sought, in my adult life, to develop and redefine my relationship to the sources of heat that have kept me from freezing; I still want to rely upon a philosophy of warmth: knowing where the heat of my homes has come from, and how its production relates not only to my own existence, but how larger economic and social structures are changed, because of how I choose to keep from getting cold. Believing “authentic” heat may come from sources less mysterious than the oil truck I recall as a child, my journeys through Vermont have allowed me opportunities to experience different systems of home heating. While political and economic demonization has and may continue to motivate society to discover and embrace alternative energy sources for home heating, through personal chronological narrative this essay seeks to establish only my own philosophy of warmth. The most difficult distinction in my evaluation of heat comes as individual structures are briefly critiqued for their ability to hold in any source of heat: favorite blankets aside, this discussion is as much about the places in which I have come out of the cold as much as it is about the virtuous, discernable ways in which I keep warm.  

Rampant industrial development began in Delaware County, Pennsylvania shortly after the Revolutionary War; I am privileged to have grown up in one of the most industrially-developed regions of the country, a place where factories and big business have long been the norm. The banks of the Delaware River, long been relegated to heavy industry, once included large-scale oil refination and massive shipbuilding facilities to support the import and export of crude oil. One refinery alone in 1892 covered “some sixty-five acres of ground, with pipe line supplies requiring forty or fifty acres more, employs two hundred men and uses one hundred thousand of barrels of crude oil every month” (Garner & Wiley, p. 250).

My parents’ parents were the children of immigrants, only the second generation to inhabit this suburban southeastern corner of the state. My mother’s grandparents met on a ship coming to America in the early 1920s, Lena Wydra from Lithuania and Spiridon Karplick from Russia. Within months of settling in suburban Milmont Park, Spiridon found work at Sun Ship, as a cook on tankards’ long voyages across oceans; he supported Lena most often from afar. During the Great Depression, Spiridon fished often from the back of the oil tankard as they traveled far and wide, bringing back to Lena whatever exotic sea creatures he caught. After his death in 1956, the sale of Spiridon’s valuable stock in Sun Oil allowed my grandfather to leave his own position at the refineries, to start his own career as an electrician.

Lena died days after I was born; my grandfather’s career as an electrician grew into a business, riding the continuing wave of suburban development installing traffic lights. I grew up without direct present-tense familial connection to the refineries—but also never came to know a truly darkened night sky until I moved away. Above the complex refinery towers and industrial complexes, an orange flame burns brightly, the top of a smokestack lit and forever glowing above the physical din of refineries along the Delaware. Burning off unknown noxious byproducts of the oil refination process, the light in the sky has always been a sad economic and environmental presence. In elementary school, we were told by our teachers to be worried if the flame ever went out. We repeated rumors and stories of underground caverns full of oil, with leasing rights owned by Sun (BP); we marveled at the barbed wire that kept us from climbing the fence and investigating the mysterious tank farms on the edge of our suburb.

All of my schools consumed oil for heat; my elementary school was demolished during my senior year of high school for, among other environmental factors, high levels of carbon monoxide emitting from the heating system (two other elementary schools in my school district were repurposed facilities built to accommodate Nike missiles during the Cold War). After the mechanics of oil refining were explained to us in science class, we didn’t ask many more questions: many of our parents worked at the refineries, or at the service industries that supported them. We understood the difference between gasoline, kerosene, heating oil and lubricating oil; we could watch the ships dock at the processing plants, especially when crossing the Commodore Barry Bridge, to New Jersey. On a family vacation at a former World War II fort that guarded the entrance to the Delaware Bay, and my hometown  and its industries farther upstream, an old timer and informal park historian told me: if it wasn’t for the oil that came out of Delaware County, we would have lost the war, and that if the Axis forces were to attack anywhere, it would have been up the Delaware Bay. Concrete bunkers were sinking back into the wide dunes; ships moved across the horizon and became distant shadows, and might as well have been carrying my great-grandfather.  

We drove home and the vacation ended; winter came and the oil furnace kicked on. My friends and I spent our nights in high school—those last few years before everyone dissipates into a new beyond, beneath that familiar orange glow—between the goalposts at band camp, or outside tying knots at Scout meetings, on parked on suburban Lover’s Lanes. We came to accept how the glow meant the wheels of some elusive industry were spinning, in one of the regions of the country where industry had been spinning the longest.

At home in winter the thermostat was changed often, trying to conserve oil while trying to keep ourselves more comfortable. Like any bill, my father complained about heating costs; for a time, a kerosene heater occupied a reverent place in the living room. The strange new caged device threw a different heat into the room, intended for “only on the coldest of nights,” said my father. He bought the kerosene from a special pump at the gas station, filling a big white plastic tank with the thick purple-red liquid. All night—at least up until the moment us kids went to bed-- the round metal contraption held in its core a small yellow circular flame. For only a time, my family had found a method that allowed us to turn down the thermostat that controlled the oil furnace.

A different kind of warmth entered my parents’ house, with the arrival of the kerosene heater in my childhood: it required work, maintenance, monitoring, the attainment of fuel. While my father stopped using it when its wick lost its structure and almost “burned the house down,” I had seen my first evidence of a heat more authentic than having a truck pump black crude into a tank in a basement: like a neighbor, whose wood stove smoke curled from their chimney on the most rare of occasions, we had a chance to participate in what heated our living room.

Kempton (1986) identifies two interesting “folk” theories regarding home heating system thermostats: one “holds that the thermostat senses temperature and turns the furnace on and off to maintain an even temperature,” while the other “holds that the thermostat controls the amount of heat… a higher setting causes a higher rate of flow” (p. 78). My experience in communities, who share the characteristic of keeping from freezing together, helps me understand how a “rate of flow” theory works—the heat is available over having to be generated to keep out falling temperatures. While Kempton dismisses both theories as prone to “types of operational errors and inefficiencies” (p. 78), my own most recent experience encourages me to advocate for Kempton’s former theory of residential thermostats, one in which the interior of the home stays a consistent, preset temperature.

I left for Vermont without knowing much about how to keep myself warm; I brought plenty of blankets, not knowing what to expect. I chose to go to college in Vermont to escape the orange glow, hoping to make more sense of it from afar. A good friend went to work after high school at a BP station, selling the freshly-refined crude produced down the street, while I went off to college, where I was relieved of most all duties of self-care, including having to provide your own heat.

Institutional heating systems built to withstand Vermont winters are themselves industrious affairs: running hot water to dozens of buildings through underground passageways unintentionally melted the snow from the sidewalks that led to our dorms at Green Mountain College. We thought little of the heat, except when it was simply too much for us to bear, which was often. Hot water flowed through pipes in our rooms, radiating and providing easy explanation for the weird noises we heard at night. The main boiler plant, which was fueled by oil, was located out by the parking lot; when we opened windows for cool air on nights when the system wasn’t regulating itself properly, we might as well have seen some of the environmentally-detrimental orange glow I knew from back home, creeping into the edges of the sparse Vermont sky.

I came to know that system, its passageways and nuances well, as well as the oil-burning centralized hot water systems of two other Vermont colleges, through full-time, year-round positions in residence life. From this, I have had the chance to see dorm rooms fully coated in ice, the result of windows left open over vacations, and the resulting frozen and burst pipes; I’ve helped relocate whole dorms full of people due to heating system failure, on the coldest winter nights. I’ve seen systems so inefficient that the water in the toilet is unnecessarily warm in winter—gross misuse of energy, the product of unregulated “rate of flow.” Institutional heating isn’t intended to provide those it warms with any sense of authenticity: while other purposes take precedence to those individuals located there, heating systems become less of a priority.

The heat I can recall from campfires on Boy Scout weekends, however needless or inefficient, may always be my favorite example of community being formed around a source of heat itself: large-scale residential heating systems seek no such community or shared virtue of staying warm. If systems function properly, the act of staying warm may be accomplished alone, requiring individuals to not leave their respective, assigned rooms.

Dormitories share this characteristic, but little to no labor is involved—seldom are individuals offered even access to a thermostat. My career has helped provide me perspective on institutional warmth derived from oil, and my first few apartments were the similar: one had a bathroom sink that had been dripping hot water for so many years, that the unregulated “rate of flow” had worn away a stripe of the ceramic finish, right down to the cast iron. Another rental, a house I shared with three friends after college, had a woodstove, but my roommates and I were too broke to pursue the tools to process the cords of fuel necessary—and we didn’t know how anyway. We stayed warm, because we lived on couches, beneath blankets, watching too much television; we bought tanks of oil cash-on-delivery to kept the pipes and ourselves from freezing.

Heat is a commodity, not always readily available; sometimes far more complicated of a transaction with the non-human world is required to stay warm through winter than merely adjusting a thermostat and paying a bill. While domestic and private use of heating systems that rely on oil have helped create a culture that may support a “rate of flow” (Kempton, p. 78) folk theory of heat (one that employed my great-grandfather and grandfather alike), realities of keeping warm have led me away from this notion. Efforts of energy efficiency—from sealing up windows to wrapping pipes in insulating foam—may be seen not only as efforts to hold in heat, but to fend off the cold.

Because the cold will always take over, and win. My biggest learning about heat has come from my current domicile: built in the 1930s as a hunting camp, I’ve rented this structure for over four years from its owners, who purchased it for a song in the 1990s, after it was relatively abandoned. While it’s been improved a great deal, including a complete new roof and wood stove, the lessons in keeping out the cold have been, for me, immense, the stakes no higher.

Two sources of heat at this cabin characterize Kempton’s opposing theories: a Vermont Castings wood stove and a kerosene-fueled monitor heater with digital thermostat. Over four years, I’ve learned to use the woodstove constantly and the kerosene sparingly at best, not only for economic reasons, but for general efficiency and localism. Most of my firewood comes from privately-owned forests, whose owners process and deliver the split 18-inch sections themselves: after initial investments in gas-powered log splitters and reliable trucks, only their labor is required to turn a profit. The kerosene is delivered by a local company, and in over four years, I’ve used less than 100 gallons; according to its manual, the heater will consume one gallon over twenty-four hours of steady use.

The need for heat is never steady; the need to keep out the cold, and to keep the pipes from freezing is what necessitates the kerosene monitor. Setting its green digital thermostat to a desired “room” temperature, the warmth at the end of a two-foot probe wire determines how and when the kerosene will be burned. As an extra measure of efficiency, a special mode seeks to raise the air temperature around the probe by ten degrees above the setting on the thermostat.  When I’m not home for extended periods of time, however, the kerosene monitor has failed to heat the house sufficiently—to the extent that the pipes would not freeze. Last winter’s emergency repairs in this imperfect autonomous structure debunk Kempton’s “rate of flow,” as the small, candle-like flame that eminates from within the kerosene monitor system has rarely served to make this cabin inhabitable: the air around the heater may reflect the desired temperature, but farther corners are less warm, more susceptible to the ever-encroaching cold.

My education regarding heating with wood has come almost entirely from my experience living in this rented cabin. Over four winters, I’ve had three different stoves, the first being a inappropriately small coal stove, and the second was a mammoth Jotul stove, built to accommodate a structure three times the size of this cabin. The last and current stove was installed recently, to comply with insurance regulations. Each had its nuances, like any imperfect mechanical device; regardless of these differences, each has utilized the same renewable resource, one that remains in abundance in this region. 

Thoreau, in his journal, details the multitude of blessings he derives from his source of fending off the cold: “I deal so much with my fuel, — what with finding it, loading it, conveying it home, sawing and splitting it, — get so many values out of it, am warmed in so many ways by it, that the heat it will yield when in the stove is of a lower temperature and a lesser value in my eyes, — though when I feel it I am reminded of all my adventures. . . . “ (p. 30). Thoreau’s ability to develop a dynamic relationship with the fuel that helps him fend off cold is rewarding to such an extent that the actual temperature change of the room becomes less important. A more authentic source of heat comes in Thoreau’s comprehension of the interrogative details—mostly,  his—and the reward is inherent.

The wood stove helps identify what ‘authenticity’ may be construed from a source of keeping warm, far beyond Kempton’s theories of thermostat use in domestic systems: all of the interrogative information regarding this source of heat is available, including who, what, when, where, and why. The dryness of the wood—how long it’s been since the trees were fallen and the logs split—is critical, to avoid excessive creosote levels. Where the wood came from dictates its makeup: maple, ash, birch. With the delivery of each truckload comes a giant rushing motion, leaving behind an avalanche of fuel to be quickly stacked, prompting a flurry of human activity before any further weather hinders the stacking and proper storage of fuel.

My own dynamic relationship with my source of heat flowered when I became responsible for the care of this autonomous structure in central Vermont, one whose walls deserve new insulation, at least. Prior to this valuable experience, I kept warm by relying on larger systems; through the meditative process of stacking and making use of between three and four cords each winter, I have come to understand my previous reliance upon and assumptions regarding heating oil. Like Thoreau, I seek to obtain “many values out of” my fuel, and seek to participate to whatever extent possible in the production and renewal of these resources.

I have not, however, sought to fully embrace my winter’s fuel: my chainsaw sits idle except on rare occasion, and my splitting axe stays sharp and new. I have chosen to purchase my firewood from a handful of local individuals, conserving my time for tasks I’m more likely to accomplish. My ability to keep from freezing in winter is a skill, built first upon a tradition of home heating oil. 

Individuals who seek to participate in one’s environment may discover unexpected benefits: from the vagrant on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, to my own frosty and amateur experiences stacking firewood mid-winter, to the story my mother told me: in a town not far from the one of my youth, a man argued with his girlfriend about a lack of heat before building her a fire in the center of the living room, catching the building on fire and nearly burning down the block. Evacuated on a cold December night, those people entered into the street beneath that pale orange glow in the sky, the reflection of the refineries’ seemingly-eternal flame, a constant visual reminder of larger industries’ presence. As I grew up, I learned about the source of that orange glow, and sought to see it from afar; in that journey, I have come to understand, through practical experience alone, the need for alternative fuel sources—and the psychological and spiritual shifts that may take place if that refineries’ flame should ever go out.

Bibliography

“Album-Led Zeppelin-Led Zeppelin IV.” Retrieved from http://www.amiright.com/album-covers/images/album-Led-Zeppelin-Led-Zeppelin-IV.jpg

Garner, W. and Wiley, S. (1894). Biographical and Historical Cyclopedia of Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Retrieved from: http://books.google.com/books?id=khQVAAAAYAAJ&ots=ctkDUbbmvL&dq=biographical%20and%20historical%20cyclopedia%20of%20delaware%20county%20pa&pg=PA250#v=onepage&q&f=false

Kempton, W. (1986). “Two Theories of Home Heat Control.” Cognitive Science. Retrieved from: http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/1986v10/i01/p0075p0090/MAIN.PDF

Thoreau, H. (1906). The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journal. B. Torrey, Ed. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=UvURAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA18#v=onepage&q&f=false