Chapter Thirty-Two: The Heat Is (Not) On

In rurality, the elements must be respected, and they do not always play ball.

Late September had arrived, and with it came cold and damp. I had experienced wet and chilly weather already in Le Perche that spring, and on visits out before I moved. But this particular autumn was something else. It was the gateway to winter, and I had nowhere else to be, and that terrified me.

My living room, essentially a fishbowl with too many windows to count, revealed itself to be drafty as hell. Its vastness was impressive, but very difficult to heat. While Linda and my mother were there, we had a few fires in the wood-burning stove at the far end of the room, which were pleasant.

Now I would need to come face to face with my boiler, which lived deep in the back room of my basement like a malevolent mythical spirit that needed to be appeased. Murder basement is maybe the more appropriate moniker for that space, a pair of low-ceiling caves with dirt floors and only tiny openings to let in light and air. Light, air and, if my nose was working, the neighborhood stray cats, who seemed to be popping in with some regularity.

On the eve of the handover of the house from Monsieur to me, that basement was still filled with filthy outgrown kids’ clothes and dead toys and old sinks and racks and piles of empty crumpled up plastic bags. I set everyone’s hair on fire when it wasn’t cleared out the following day at the handover of the keys. Emergency notary intervention, and the threat of sequestering €10,000 from the sale of the house to pay for someone to haul it if Monsieur and Madame didn’t snap to, occasioned the most bone-chilling of their high-volume verbal contretemps.

Nothing speaks as loudly as money. That afternoon, finally, their shit was gone. Monsieur told me he was generously leaving me a stack of wood pellets, which were used to fire the furnace. There were about twenty of them.

I had never before seen such a strange machine. Previously, I had had standard boilers, hooked up to the Paris natural gas mains. You might have to get them serviced, but their workings were invisible. My ex and I had to put in a new system in our old house, a €7000 behemoth with programmable settings that handled the hot water, the radiators, everything. There was one setting with a martini glass icon—party time!—I can’t even remember what it was for. So many options. Apart from my computer and phone, it was the most modern piece of equipment I’d ever part-owned.

By contrast, my guy here looked like he had been designed by Richard Scarry. If only Lowly Worm were there to explain to me how it all worked. A bit banged up, mostly red, with suspicious smudges of soot, it was a Czech brand I had never heard of and there was no instruction manual to be found either physically around the house or online. It was part of a Rube Goldberg-style setup comprised of the furnace itself, plus a big silo that connected to it by a plastic tube with a metal coil inside.

This was AFTER it was cleaned.

Monsieur had already explained that I would need to empty the sacks of pellets into the silo, which would automatically dispense the right amount to keep the thing rolling. How many sacks per day? “Sometimes seven or eight,” he said, and I could tell he was lying.

Now, on a legitimately cold September morning, it was time to actually fire the thing up and crank the radiators. I held my breath and ducked into the gremlin-sized doorway to the basement, my phone flashlight guiding me past its new, equally shitty detritus, now all mine: a Wassily chair with a broken arm rest, a vintage sink I ended up not using, Hefty bags full of old clothes I still didn’t know where to donate, Charles’s ten-speed bicycle. (That is not detritus, that thing is gorgeous, and unfortunately just a little too big for me to use.)

I went in to try to fire the bad boy up. I grabbed a bag of pellets. It weighed… I don’t know but far more than I was used to carrying. As much as a sleeping toddler. I tore open the bag and sawdust got everywhere. Hoisting it up to shoulder height to tip it into the silo, I almost dropped it. Finally I got one in. Then another, then another. My lower back and shoulders were on fire long before the boiler was.

I turned the system on and miraculously everything seemed to function, but realizing I was expected to do this multiple times a week, because the silo wasn’t big enough to hold more than a couple day’s worth of pellets, was a kick in the head. I was not trying to have a life where I shoveled coal only to go upstairs to wash off the grime in my palatial giant bathtub. I am not someone who always has a nice manicure, but I could be that person more easily than I could be a frequent schlepper of raw materials. This is classist, and it is also true.

The cold started to really settle in in October, so I’d light fires in the living room, and then because the room got warm, and Monsieur had idiotically placed the thermostat sensor in the same room, it would tell the boiler to shut off, so the heat would go off everywhere else in the house, requiring me to go back down to the murder basement to reboot the whole process.

It didn’t always fire up. Finally I tracked down the one guy in the area who had any experience with past-due Czech furnaces. He came to give it a clean and told me I was going to have to throw all those pellet bags away. They were too old, and the pellets had started to decompose into dust, and the dust would clog the passage through the giant pipe, and cause dangerous problems.

I filmed him as he showed me how to clean the firetrap, which I would need to do bi-weekly. Even standing next to the dude I got soot streaks on my puffer coat. I was now expected to reach my own precious writerly hands into that filthy maw? He showed me how to speed up the dispensing of pellets for when it slowed down too much. Maybe I could make it work, but I was not made for this. I did not move to the country to shovel things routinely. I moved to the country to stare out the window at a better view, and have noble thoughts about nature, and occasionally even spend time in it.

So I went to the local hardware store and ordered the delivery of more wood pellets. Minimum order for such a luxurious service was one ton and I’d have to pay for the truck rental to schlep it. The day it arrived, there was nobody to unload but me, because apparently most other people in this part of the world are self-reliant and so hardware stores don’t think to warn their skinny-armed new customers that they’re on their own when it comes to lifting and stacking.

The driver gnashed his teeth and finally agreed to help me unload—readers, it does sometimes help to be a white lady on the verge of tears. That meant sliding the sacks down into the basement via a metal ramp. I waited down in the cool damp to receive them and then stack them in an orderly fashion on my end. The vibe was Lucy and Ethel on the chocolate assembly line except filthy and with absolutely no laughter. It took almost an hour. I gave the truck driver several bottles of wine as a tip, because I already knew that even if money talked, cash was insulting here. He left with a smile on his face, happy to have saved the middle-aged damsel in distress, and I collapsed in a heap of bewildered and desperate exhaustion. Apparently I’d need to do this a couple times before end of winter.

Literally fuck you.

One early November morning, the problem resolved itself when, sitting upstairs in my office, I looked out the window and saw black smoke pouring out of my basement. I called the firemen and ran down to see what was going on. Apparently, I had boosted the delivery of pellets through the tube to a speed the furnace was unable to handle, the pellets got caught in one wrong passageway, and they caught on fire. This was typical of me, the least patient person in the world, to rush the exact wrong thing.

The tube melted into something unrecognizable, and it was the melting tube caused the whole thing to shut itself off before doing any real damage to the house. Now the faulty machine sat before me in a sooty heap. There would be no fixing this bullshit. I’d need a new heating system, which would not come cheap. Nor would it come before the end of winter, because another thing about Le Perche is, there are a lot of cows and nowhere near enough tradesmen to handle the massive turnover in houses. It’s why they’re all so insufferably arrogant and late and you always have to treat them like gods, because that’s what they are.

Invest in space heaters was the advice I was given. Great.