The Great Defugging - February 9, 2012

We woke up this morning to fire engines racing past our house. There was apparently a minor fire two blocks down; the fire chief was still there when I walked Anya half an hour later, and he said everyone was all right.

The day was unremarkable weatherwise, except that it's the beginning of February and things were boringly back in the 40°F's, which is remarkable itself. Anya did not want to go back inside, or leave the dog park when I took her this afternoon.

Fire used to kill a lot of people. Not as many as you may think—the old story that lots of colonial women burned to death is a myth: most died of disease or childbirth. But still, with open hearth fireplaces the norm until sometime in the 19th century. Even the Franklin stove... how many of you picture a potbelly stove, or other free-standing cast-iron affair? Nope, check the link. It's essentially a modified hearth.

It's hard to imagine a world where even heating is done from a hearth, rather than a furnace-style stove (which essentially what a potbelly is: a miniature furnace), and even harder to imagine life before hearths became common, and homes were heated from an open fire in the center of the room, with a hole in the roof above. Being born in 1965, it's hard to imagine a life in smog like existed in 1950's London. I remember friends who smoked—heck, my grandfather smoked a pipe when I was kid. But the kinds of fuggy rooms, filled with incineration of one kind or another, that were the norm for aeons before the de-fugging of the last half-century (that's what it should be called, too, The Great Defugging), are now hard for me to imagine tolerating.

But one of the things we've done as we've switched to gas and electric from wood and coal is, we're burning things which leave less obvious footprints: it's the carbon dioxide, not the soot and sulfur, that we need to worry about. People don't die of their clothes catching on fire, or hack up a blackened lung from the coal smoke. But that doesn't mean we're not still burning our way to a sorry end.