The Furnace

Remortgaging the future on the bet of stability has meant owning a furnace again. There is a lot to be said for living in an apartment building big enough to warrant a super…not to mention a pool. We never seem to move from one sort of place to a similar one. Just as the move from a century old farmhouse on two-acres of onions and grass to a hundred plus unit mid-rise was a re-education, so too is moving into the 1960s suburban dreamscape. One friend who bought into the modern suburban dreamscape looked at our tree filled streets and yards the other day and was immediately ticked: “great, now I get to come over and think about how great our place will look in 2037.”

But every thing comes with a cost and that means we now have our own furnace to tend…and water heater and laundry and air and other things I really don’t understand yet. At least we don’t have a well and a septic system. Nothing feels better than cutting a cheque for $5,500 on a new poo treatment facility on your mini-farm. A poo eating machine. Because they are all machines and a house is just a stranded ship filled with machines.

Before the farm out east, we rented the upper story of an Ottawa Valley lumber barons whome from a couple of pals who lived on the main floor after dividing it into three apartments as an investment. We ended up with the two upstairs ones for a year and a half. Ten or more foot ceilings, two kitchens and more than eighty paces from the front door to the TV. That place was an ocean liner, two hulking metal boxes in the basement the size of mini-vans providing the heat. They needed tending…for if you didn’t anticipate the effect of impending shifts in the continental low and high pressure systems upon the inert thing that is a 30 by 50 by 100 foot, twenty room house of stone built for a rich dreamer in around 1890, you (and your thoughtful tenants upstairs) roasted or froze – depending on the whim of the season – usually for two days and usually at solstice but magnified during a quirky thaw, intense heatwave or summer coldsnap, as the furnaces were stroked and stoked, as the pipes creeked and coaxed hot water radiators to convey more or less energy into the mass of rock that encased our families, landlord and tenant in equal subjugation to the laws of thermal dynamics and Victoria home engineering. Men who knew not enough and knew they knew not enough worried over these machines at such times. Worried and drank beer in the basement, watching.

Apparently the new furnace, air cooling and water heating matrix in the new dark room down there is in good shape and has been well tended. I have some time.