Chimneys

Every home needs warmth, but fire and spark must be contained and directed and managed.  Today, a bit about our friend, the chimney.

It’s the season for chimneys.

Bringing in firewood.  Sitting warm by the fire.  Walking through the neighborhood at night, the wonderful smell of a woodstove, the comforting cozy promise in the chimney smoke. 

Hanging stockings by the chimney with care.  Imagining Santa coming down the chimney.  Leaving cookies on the hearth.  More bounty and blessing, thanks to chimneys.

It’s also the season for chimney fires.  Like the one we had on Thanksgiving night. 

The propane wall heater can warm up our living room, but a fire in the woodstove adds something more than just quick heat.  You walk into a room with a fire in the fireplace and your eyes are drawn like a magnet to the flames.  A hearth is a sacred place, a primitive memory of light in the deep darkness, food and safety in the campfire.  We make fires not just for warmth, but for connection, coziness, memory, smell, crackling, color, beauty.

We usually clean out the long stack of our wood burning stove every year.   Climb up on the roof with the long pole with the stiff round wire brush at the end.  Make sure the doors to the Vermont Casting stove down in the living room are shut.  Push the brush into the stack, run it up and down, hear the built up creosote, hardened ash, tumble down to the stove. 

So what if it’s been a couple years since we did that messy somewhat scary rooftop job?  We don’t have that many fires, it’s been climate change warmer, we don’t close the stove doors and get it really hot which makes more creosote build up, we don’t burn trash like our neighbors do, we only burn dry seasoned wood – excuses, excuses. 

The black stack was glowing red, smoke came out into the living room from the seams of the stack sections, huge sparks shot out from the “spark arrestor” grating at the top above the roof.

Or so I am told.  I wasn’t there. Our adult children, home for the holidays, were in the house preparing dinner for us.  They lit the fire we had laid earlier in the day.  We were driving home from visiting my father.  They called.  “We’ve got a problem here, Mom.  The chimney is on fire.”  By the time we got home (it takes 40 minutes), they had called 911, hosed down the stack, the fire and the roof, and stayed pretty calm. 

We came in to find our friend Scott there from our local volunteer fire brigade, checking out the roof.  All seemed to be ok.  He asked about the construction - double wall? flashing?  He patiently considered and described the possible issues around smoldering ceiling and roof boards.  He conferred by radio with the professional Cal Fire folks who had also responded to the fire and waited with engines up the road.  We all stood around and looked up at the ceiling.  Finally we accepted that there was nothing more to do this cold night.  Scott asked to use our phone.  (Why not use the radio?)  He called his partner Evan – “Hi honey, turn the oven back on, I should be home soon for our Thanksgiving dinner.” 

Our official Thanksgiving dinner was not until the next day.  That night we finally settled down our nerves and adrenaline and had the simple supper they had been making. 

By habit we sat around the stove, but it was cold, and a little wet, and sat empty of wood.  We watched a favorite old movie to calm our nerves.  On Friday we had our good dinner, and the warmth and smells of cooking were a pretty good substitute for the missing hearth coziness.  By Saturday we had taken the stack apart, cleaned it out, made plans to visit the sheet metal folks on Monday, realized they probably make stronger safer stacks since we put this one in 25 years ago. 

Much to be thankful for this season.  And a new stack will be ready for Santa in less than a month.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

Locking the Front Door

In the days soon after the Paris terrorist attacks, some thoughts on religious buildings in times of violence and tragedy.

When do we leave the front door of a church unlocked, and when do we bar the door?

On Sept 11, 2001 churches and synagogues across the US unlocked their doors and invited folks just to come in and sit, pray, meditate, simply have a place to go and not be alone.  The response was tremendous.  I’ve heard that they same thing happened on Nov. 22, 1963.

But this past Saturday the doors of every religious building in Paris were shuttered, as was most of the city, in shock, fear, danger.  So were many religious buildings in Beirut and Kenya after the bombings there this week.  It was still dangerous out there, and people were in shock. 

When it’s not terrorist season (will there ever be such a time again?), in many big cities, New York and London and San Francisco, yes and Paris, you can easily find an unlocked church any day; you are walking down the street and see an interesting building and can just walk in.  Often there’s a friendly volunteer to tell you a little history.  A blessed place to rest your feet, read.  Some tourists even take time to pray.  But in most cases it feels like these churches don’t just have open doors, but are open minded – anyone can come in and no particular devotional acts are expected.  Very trusting. 

I served a church in a low crime US small town that proudly left its doors open all the time, 24/7.  Indeed the sanctuary door was built without a lock, and at its dedication in 1965 they made a big deal about it being ever open.  (Actually, there was one night a year we did lock it, and, since there was no lock, we had to wrap chains around the door handles to keep it shut.  That was Halloween.  Our great Christian trust knew it met its match in adolescent goblins and tricksters.  But other than that, we never had a problem, even sometimes found a thank you note for shelter in the night.)

But this was a small exurban community, and the legacy of the founding pastor who had preached that vision cast a long shadow.  And we locked up the candlesticks. 

I look back and think I was naïve to brag to my colleagues about that door without the locks.  I would pontificate that when you lead with trust rather than fear, people will respect that.  Tell that to the folks in at least five black southern churches that were destroyed by arson this fall.  Or synagogues and mosques – they’d be crazy to leave their door unlocked.  I visited Trinity UCC church in Chicago, where Obama had worshipped, until he disowned the fiery preacher there, Jeremiah Wright, and there were security guards and we had to check our bags.

One way to think about when to open and when to bar the door is to consider what we do in our own homes after tragedy.   Someone dies in our family.  Or is murdered.  Or there’s violence in the streets.  Like the people of Paris, we are sad and scared and mad.  So we hunker down, stay safe inside, lock the doors.  Or if we are a store owner and there is a civic tragedy, we close in respect and solidarity with the suffering.  I think that’s what the shuttered churches in Paris were about Saturday – hunkering down, grieving in private, solidarity.

But then we realize we need to be with others, we need to talk with others about what happened, to rant, pray, organize.  Then we unlock the doors and invite folks in.  Maybe we put a guard at the door.  But we no longer want to be alone.  Sometimes we even go out into the streets to show our solidarity and hope.  That’s starting to happen in Paris.

I’ve been to Paris many times and visited lots of churches there.  I’ve been the tourist with my guidebook, I’ve been a pilgrim sitting and praying and I’ve been a Sunday worshipper.  I did an all night vigil once at St. Gervais – they do that every Thursday night. 

And I’ve been to three different Paris churches for 12 step meetings.  At the American Church on the Quai d’Orsay the sanctuary is unlocked to all, but to get into the offices and meetings rooms there’s an intercom;  the AA meeting schedule tell you what to say to get in.  Once you’re buzzed in they say, “The meetings is down in the crypt.”

Crypt sounds scary and dark, but in this church it’s a room used for church school and the choir; there are kid books and robes hanging around.  It was a great casual setting to share coffee (tremendous French expresso, not the usual horrible instant coffee) and our life stories.  It actually felt sort of appropriate to go down into the depths for a meeting about finding new life.

But after this week’s violence in Paris I got to thinking about how trusting it is to welcome outside community groups into your sacred space, especially your tender children’s space. Sure, come on in, stranger from another country, sit in this ancient beautiful building amid our children’s drawings and pageant costumes.   Try not to spill your coffee and please don’t steal something as a souvenir.  By the way, do you have any weapons on you?

I wonder if that trusting attitude will change.  I looked at the American Church website on Friday and they had two announcements; they had cancelled the planned “Marche de Noel”  (Christmas Market) on Saturday and the building would be closed all day.   But they assured their members and visitors that the church would be opened on Sunday, services held.  We need to be together, it said, we need each other as we mourn and try to recover.  And a reassuring note that extra security had been added, and “we are in regular communication with the Police Commissaire.”

So maybe it’s another example of the wisdom of Ecclesiastes.  To everything there is a season.  A time for locking and a time for unlocking.  Let’s hope it’s not too late.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

Measuring Tape and Tape Measures

My mother has been dead for 36 years, but I got a sudden flash of her this weekend as my husband asked me to measure a board for our roofing project.  I think it was the tape measure that got me thinking of Ma.  And how she taught me to sew.

I was up on the roof of our new addition, nailing black paper and shingles and metal flashing, making a mess with roofing tar, trying not to drop things off the edge or tumble off myself. 

I write these columns about building as if I were some master carpenter, but I am basically the crew to my husband the designer and builder.  But in over 30 years of marriage I have learned some basic skills in hammering and sawing and nailing.  I can think of five different roofing jobs I have done on various additions and outbuildings.  I learned wiring this past year and installed the plugs in our new addition.  Some of this I learned by observing other builders.  Or reading the directions.  Also, my husband is a good and patient teacher.

When we first got together I sort of knew how to hammer, I think from my mother, just around the house repair jobs.  And I knew how to saw wood, from firewood jobs we had done as kids.  But I had never sat down and made anything, a box or a go-cart or even shelves. 

But I did know how to sew.  I remember my mother teaching me; how you figure out what you want to make, chose the fabric, measure it with measuring tape, cut it to the lengths and shapes you want, pin the pieces together.  Then you put it in the sewing machine, or maybe you sew it by hand.  How to thread a needle.  When you’re done, when you have attached the pieces together, you have created something new and nice.  Maybe a few bent pins or badly aligned seams, but it’s probably ok, and you can always rip it out and try again. 

So in my 30’s I started learning about building with Ron, about different kinds of hammers and drill bits and grabber nails and saber saws and staple guns and the difference between pine and redwood and cedar and plywood.  Early on in my building education I said to him, “This reminds me of sewing with my mother.  We select the materials, measure them, cut and attach.  Just different tools and different ways to attach one thing to another.  Building a house is not that different from making a dress.”

And of course, as I’ve said in this column on several occasions before, a house and a dress both need to be strong, useful and beautiful (firmitas, utilitas, venustas.) You want even the most beautiful dress to stay in one piece, and for the zipper to work. 

One of the first construction projects Ron and I did together was building a flight of stairs, to make it easier to get to what was then Ron’s rough bachelor-built cabin.  We were tired of climbing up to the house on a zig zag path dug out of the hillside.   It was our impending wedding at this house that finally motivated us, so our guests, including my 84 year old grandmother, could get there more easily and safely.   

Looking back it seems crazy to build a flight of stairs in the last few weeks before a wedding.  But at the time it was sort of comforting, as we waited for the big day, to have a tangible job to do, and to have a very tangible result to show for it.  I could look at that flight of stairs and say with certainty - I built that!

Maybe I was comparing our marriage to a building project, that we would be building a life together, hoping to build a family.  And like the stairs, there were things    I wasn’t sure of-  what to do to make the relationship stronger, how to help it last a long time.

Ron did the design and the measuring and cutting the boards and I did the nailing.   I was doing an ok job, but not great. Nails would get bent over and I had to wrestle them out and try again. You have to build stairs carefully; to be safe, each step should have the same size rise and tread.

And my mind turned then to my mother as well.  But these thoughts were more immediate and sad.  She had just died three months earlier. I was both happy to be married and sad that she wouldn’t be there for the wedding.  Long ill, we both knew she would probably not be there, and she had urged us to plan the day anyway.  I wonder sometimes, if she had been well, would she have made my dress?  Or would she have helped build the stairs?  That’s more likely actually.  Sure, she taught me to sew, but she was more of an outdoors person, sawed firewood, shoveled snow, hiked and explored. 

So as I measured that board on the roof this week I remembered my mother’s cloth measuring tape that lived in her sewing box by the Singer sewing machine.  I remembered her gentle hands showing me how to push the needle without poking myself, how to thread the bobbin, how to let the sewing machine take the fabric, don’t push it, don’t force it.  I remembered what a patient teacher she was, and how she showed me how to correct mistakes and just start all over again. 

I thought of how she built me, and how, in my building, I was remembering her.  Thanks Ma.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

Disaster Planning and Penguins

I’ve been writing for the past few weeks about two big public buildings I like, our local hospital and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where I volunteer once a week.   Every October at the Aquarium we have practice evacuation drills and go over where all the emergency exits are and what our job is in case of a fire, earthquake, tsunami, chemical spill or active shooter.  Some thoughts about disasters and getting out safely…….

Big public buildings have many different rooms and floors and corridors and doors.  Also many different people, and not just staff, but visitors, many of whom are there for the first time. 

If you add in a hurricane with lots of wind and rain, or an earthquake with lots of things falling down, or a fire inside or outside, and then take away electricity and elevators, you have many, many problems.

Just ask the people of New Orleans, who ten years ago this fall suffered the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.  Or residents across the western US experiencing this summer and fall a horrific fire season.  Or the folks of Mexico blasted this week by the worst recorded hurricane in history.  A big wet El Nino season is predicted for the California coast this winter.  (And we wonder if the climate is really changing?)

Here in California October is Disaster Preparedness month, because it’s the anniversary of the big Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989.  It was also in October, 1991, that a huge firestorm destroyed 300 homes and killed 25 people in the Oakland Hills.  So we’re having lots of news stories and “where were you?” accounts and reminders to stockpile food and water and fuel and have a disaster plan.

Not being myself a very good planner, and prone to denial, it is a challenge to get organized to buy those extra canned goods and clean out the culverts on my dirt road in anticipation of record rainfall this winter.  Maybe I’m writing about disaster planning this week to get myself motivated.

At the Aquarium, with our 2 million visitors every year and our complicated building (a former sardine cannery, much modified, hanging out over the bay), the security staff teaches us 1000 volunteers every October where all the exits are, how to try to convince guests to evacuate and where to gather afterwards.

They gave us a handy little booklet to carry in our volunteer guide jacket about what to do in an emergency; different situations each have their own tab: earthquake, fire, hurricane, chemical spill, active shooter.  (Aquariums in other nations probably don’t have to include that last tab.  The advice actually is to run, and if you can’t run then hide, and if you can’t hide then you’re supposed to “fight, using any resources available.”  They told us shooters are scared and can be taken down.  I think I’d be the most scared person in the room….)

Mercifully they don’t ask us to help evacuate the animals at the Aquarium - that’s the job of the staff.  But we have some experience there, from the receiving end. 

Ten years ago, when the New Orleans Aquarium was hit by Hurricane Katrina, with power our for days and severe flooding the building and its animals were devastated.  All 10,000 fish died from loss of oxygen pumped into the water.  But the brave staff was able to save the sea otters and the penguins, that is, from immediate death.  All they needed, while mopping up and rebuilding, was a temporary home for them.  Enter their friends at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, who did the usual thing that concerned friends and colleagues do– call up and say, “So sorry for your loss. Anything we can do to help?” 

Betty WhiteWell yes, actually there is.  Could you provide a temporary home to 20 penguins and 5 otters?  OK, said the Aquarium.  But how to get them 2000 miles from Louisiana to California?  And do it right away – we won’t have power for weeks.  Enter Betty White, fantastic TV star and feisty old lady and animal lover and Monterey area resident.  The Aquarium called her up, she wrote a check for $80,000, and a chartered, refrigerate plane brought the refugee animals to our place for almost a year, until they could go back home.

Guests loved this story, but wondered if “our” penguins might be feeling a little crowded with these new refugees in the exhibit.  No, actually, they are used to being in big crowds – this felt more like home.  And some of these refugee penguins were actually their cousins – they are all part of a captive breeding program to ensure a genetically diverse population of these South African penguins, in case another disaster – an oil tanker spill – wipes out their native brothers and sisters at the tip of Africa.  So there were some family reunions during that refugee year. 

So, perhaps a few lessons from these various disaster stories:

 -The usual: Know your nearest exit, ask for help, stockpile needed goods, practice drills and learn from them, have a plan.

-Be generous when asked for help.  (You may not be Betty White, nor able to write a big check, but share something.  When we were evacuated in 1998 in the last big El Nino and the Red Cross put us up at a local motel, we made a small donation afterwards, and they told us that 80% of their donations are from folks who have received their services.  Who are probably not big rich donors.  Just grateful former victims.)

-Remember the needs of the most vulnerable.  Not just penguins, but people who can’t walk to the nearest exit, like folks in wheel chairs.  Without elevators, they will have a hard time getting out of the Aquarium, with its long flights of stairs.  But there is a plan, and there are litter-type carrying chairs at all exits, for four people to carry handicapped folks. 

-Work for gun control to reduce the odds that an active shooter will complicate your disaster planning.

-Remember that welcoming refugees can sometimes make us feel more at home, not less.  And that we are all related, especially in a disaster.

Happy Disaster Preparedness Month!

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

Heating and Cooling

“How was your house heated when you were a child?”

The retreat leader asked us this question as a way for us to get to know each other. Around the circle so many different answers, and sweet childhood memories.  Vivid descriptions of furnaces and fires and radiators and space heaters and different climates and comforts.

My story was about a mysterious pipe valve thing in the side yard.  How we had to be careful on the lawn, when we played badminton after dinner on summer nights, not to trip on this metal protuberance.  How once or twice a year a big heating and oil truck parked on our street and unrolled a massive hose and clamped it onto this valve and pumped something mysterious, we couldn’t see it, smelled it a bit, down into the ground.   There was a tank down there?  Some kind of oil under the lawn and the badminton net?  That’s what kept us warm in cold New York winters, just push the lever on the wall thermostat and whoosh, warmth.

I wrote last week about my two favorite big local public buildings, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Community Hospital, and how they had some similarities that I found intriguing. 

In both places we mostly experience the public side, waiting rooms and exhibit windows.  But I’m always curious about the behind the scenes stuff, infrastructure, pipes and furnaces, how air and water get moved around.  Like my childhood oil tank hidden under the lawn, the engineering of water and heat and power is somewhat mysterious.

Hospitals want to assure us they are clean and healthy, so pipes and vents are hidden away.  Don’t worry about how we convey power or waste – we’ve got you covered.  Literally, covered.  White walls and neat corners and perfectly sealed ceiling tiles.

The Aquarium, on the other hand, uses the “show it all” style of infrastructure, like the Pompidou Centre in Paris.  Just look up and you see all the pipes and wiring and vents, exposed in the ceiling, not hidden away.

This makes it easier for us Aquarium volunteers to explain the complicated plumbing system, how we bring all the water for the exhibit tanks in from the bay.  Since we filter it during the day for more water clarity, and let it in unfiltered at night for more nutrients and naturalness for the animals and plants, you can look up and see two different sets of pipes, marked RSW, raw sea water, FSW, filtered sea water.

If the Hospital wants to assure us that they’ve got us covered, all is clean and careful, the Aquarium wants to take us inside, unveil the mysteries of the deep that we usually can’t see.  I have been to other Aquariums that were more like museums (or hospitals,) more pristine aesthetics than open source science.  Perhaps it is because it was tech genius David Packard and his family who started our Aquarium, that there is a deliberate exhibit celebration of the delights of engineering as well as the delights of marine biology.

Another way to describe this difference is that while the Hospital’s goal is healthy people, the Aquarium’s is healthy oceans.  So the Aquarium doesn’t just show us pretty fish, it tries to educate us on how to keep the ocean healthy for more pretty fish.  So we also have exhibits on plastics and pollution and climate change.  These are not all pretty pristine exhibits. 

And the Aquarium tries to reduce its own energy use, not only to save money, but to show the harmful effect that burning fossil fuels has on ocean health. 

For instance, the water temperature in the exhibits.  The Aquarium saves money, and the ocean, by turning off the furnace and using instead the hot air and body heat we visitors provide as the sole heating source for the water in the Open Sea Exhibit. 

The water in the tanks for coastal animals comes right in from the bay, same temperature.  The kelp forest exhibit and other tanks of animals and plants that live right along the coast, they like that 50 degree water from our cold coast California current.  But open ocean animals, hammerheads and tuna and sunfish and turtles, who live fifty miles offshore, they are used to water that is more than ten degrees warmer, low 60’s.  These open ocean animals live in the million gallon tank.  How to heat that water up over ten degrees?  What would that heating bill be? 

Well, nothing, it turns out.  The Aquarium engineers figured out a heat transfer system that takes the great gift our visitors bring it - hot air - and uses it to warm up that water. (Don’t ask me for more detail, I don’t quite get it, something to do with coils, turning the heat of 2 million visitors into heat energy, but I’m assured that’s how they do it.)

Hospitals want to save money also of course (or make it) and our Hospital also touts its energy saving lights, and asks you in the bathrooms to conserve water.  But conservation is not the main goal – healing is, so they can’t really turn off the heat. 

A theme in these columns is how our bodies are like buildings, or buildings are like our bodies.  A few lessons we might learn from these comparisons:

-Our own body infrastructure is mostly hidden.  We are discouraged from too much explicit talk about our own physical  plumbing and pipes.  We follow the Hospital design model more than the Aquarium.  But I think we might all be healthier if we talked more about our inward parts, reduced some of the taboos about “potty talk.”

-If health and healing is all our goals – big institutions and little bodies, we could probably do well to expose and reveal more, rather than hide behind perfect walls.

-Like big buildings we could all try to reduce our excess consumption.  

-And we might try turning some of our excessive hot air into something constructive, like heat for those who really need it.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter