Morning fire

or How to Be an Aging Homosexual Antiquarian

Until this past year when I moved into my house in the country, I’ve lived in apartments and houses with “instant heat.” Almost every place I’ve lived in had a natural-gas-fired forced air furnace. When you want it warmer, you bump the thermostat, and hot air comes out almost instantly. When you get up in the morning, you stand over a register to get toasty.

In the 1906 Victorian we lived in when I was 11 and 12, my mother and I would compete for the best register. The one in the living room set in the floor was capped by the original cast-iron curlicue grate with movable iron shutters that went “clank” when you opened and closed them. Either she or I would be standing over it in a nightgown or a bathrobe, the cloth billowing up as if were were some busted, white-trash Marilyn Monroes.

One or two of my later apartments had electric baseboard heat, which is also instant, but also ugly, wretched, and ruinously expensive. Whoever decided to use electrical resistance to supply main heating obviously liked inefficiency and wasting money and making things ugly.

Where I live now I have propane-fired heat stove. It’s a cast-iron device, very pretty, and gives the appearance of a woodstove without the wood. But it heats by radiant and convective heat, not instantly warmed air. That means it takes longer for the stove, and the room, to come to temperature. The fire has to heat all that cast iron up first before much radiates to the room.

Make and model: Vermont Castings “Stardance” stove. Available for propane or natural gas

It’s a trade-off. It takes longer to bring the room up to temperature, but it also cools off more slowly as the stored heat in the thermal mass of the cast iron radiates long after the flame goes out.

I put the heat back to 60 degrees at night, so when I get up, it’s chilly, but I don’t get instant forced air heat. This means I have to wear a heavy robe and sit close to the fire if I want to be warm with my coffee.

Or, as I did this morning, it means lighting one of the big kerosene lamps. I collect antique kerosene lamps, and have probably three dozen of all shapes and sizes.

The ones you think of as “oil lamps,” like the kind seen on Little House on the Prairie, or the dime-a-dozen such lamps at antique stores, are not what I’m talking about. Yeah, I have many of those, but the ones that put out the really big light and heat are less familiar to modern people.

There’s a whole class of kerosene lamps called “center draft.” What makes them different from the small, one-inch-wide-flat-wick type “oil lamps” that come to your mind is the size and shape of the wick. The center drafts have large round wicks, like a heater. They put out multiple times the heat and light of a flat wick lamp. In fact, they’re both heaters and lights. Those pictured below put out the equivalent of at least a 40-50-watt traditional incandescent electric bulb when they’re at full flame. They also put out enough heat to warm a room.

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Left to right: Rochester center draft lamp (with the yellow shade), New Juno center draft lamp (lit, center frame). The lady peeking out from the picture behind is Joan Crawford. That is a real four-color publicity card Joan Crawford sent to Maybelline, inscribed by hand thus: “To Maybelline-The eye make-up I would never be without—Joan Crawford.” Yes, it’s real, and with her famous grandiose and well-underlined signature. A gift from my friend Holly, who is the best gift-picker.

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Living in this house set up as it is-it also has no room in the kitchen for a dishwasher, so that’s not part of my life anymore-has been a “step-down” in terms of instant convenience. But keep it in perspective: these things, the stove, the lamps, are in fact “mod cons.” The stove comes on with the switch of a thermostat, happily burning gas compressed and delivered for my wood-free convenience.

The lamps may be “old-timey,” but they’re very high technology. These were the tech that got highly refined in the age of kerosene light, and reached their peak when trying to compete with new-fangled electric light. They are precision appliances with well-engineered carburetion and draft, and they don’t smell (it’s a myth that oil lamps “stink”-they only stink because modern people burn the wrong fuel in them. Clean lamps with clean kerosene are odorless except on lighting and extinguishing.). They’re a huge step up from stinky tallow candles and the weak flame of beeswax tapers.

All of this may appear and seem “old” and “inconvenient,” but that’s only relative. This is the kind of technology and convenience that no human had until the last quarter of the 19th century. Actual royalty rich beyond the dreams of avarice could not buy this kind of comfort for almost all of human history. It did not exist.

To the degree that it is old-fashioned compared to what we’re used to in the 21st century, it helps reveal what our technology and addiction to convenience hides from us. To have light and heat, there must be fire and flame. Somewhere. Our natural gas furnaces hide it inside a metal box burner in a basement. Our electric baseboard heaters disguise the fire burning from coal or wood at an electrical generating plant. Sure, there’s hydro electric, and nuclear electric, but for the most part, there’s a hidden flame somewhere behind the intermediating layers of technology and devices that separate our living room from the flame that makes it possible.

I like having the flame here with me, right out in the open where I can see it. I’m convinced that flame light is life-giving in a way that no other light is. This feels right. It tugs at deep human longings for light, and heat, and safety that fire has satisfied for countless millennia.

Good morning.