Column: The night the furnace died
By Rick “Harv” Giese
As I rolled over in bed I was suddenly aware my nose was cold.
I checked the alarm clock: 1 AM. Now I’m feeling the entire bedroom is cold. Arming myself with a flashlight, I make my way to my indoor/outdoor thermometer. Outdoors, -10; inside, 59 degrees and falling.
Crap. The furnace must be out.
It’s Sunday and I have a heat emergency. How do I survive until dawn when I can call for help?
A contingency plan begins to take shape in my brain. I can turn the oven on; move the toaster to the bathroom; strategically position my infrared space heater in the living room; prepare to break up the oldest furniture and start a fire in my decorative fireplace.
Checking my furnace for a magic reset button isn’t exactly an option. My house is old, older than I am. It has no basement. Just a crawl space that ends up in a cellar that has become a retirement home for spiders. They spend their golden years mindlessly knitting webs you can actually trip over.
It is lit by a single 60-watt Edison light bulb. I have not ventured down there in months and I’m not about to in the wee hours of Sunday morning. My cellar also houses my furnace.
Resolving not to give in to panic, I start to put on my entire wardrobe, noting the temp has dropped to 58 degrees. My three cats are trying their best to sleep, ignoring our common plight. They can curl up with their nose in their butt to stay warm. I am not that flexible.
Fast-forward 7 AM. I have duties at church, to which I need to tend before I can address my heating emergency. Finally returning home, I make the dreaded call for assistance—it is a Sunday and this is going to be expensive.
The repairman, on call, is currently working on a call in Rosholt. He will be over in about an hour. The temp is now 56 degrees, and still falling. Since I haven’t visited my cellar in months, I decide to be proactive and cut a path through the factory of heirloom spider webs so the furnace guy can find the furnace.
Gingerly opening the trap door to the cellar, I feel for the switch to turn on the 60-watt bulb, which seems even dimmer in the cold air.
At the bottom of the steps I can see the remains of what was once the cellar window: frame and glass smashed on the planks that make up the cellar floor. I carefully descend the narrow steps and prepare to navigate the glass when my eye catches sight of a large dark form next to the steps.
It’s a body.
But what kind of body and how did it get there?
Through the broken window, of course, which was missing a pane that had been covered by a piece of cardboard. Is that a large cat or a small dog? It’s obviously been dead for months and is desiccated. I look more closely to try and identify it when, to my chagrin, I recognize neither cat, nor dog, but raccoon.
The doorbell rings. I scramble the steps to find Will, the furnace repairman on my steps.
“You’re not going to believe this, but there is a dead raccoon next to my furnace,” I tell him.
Descending the steps to the cellar, he spies the coon and laughs. If it wasn’t copyrighted I could hear him thinking “…we know a thing or two, because we’ve seen a thing or two: January 14, 2018.”
The mystery of how, when, and why the raccoon came to be in my cellar will probably remain just that: a mystery. Did it seize upon the missing window pane as an opening of opportunity? There is absolutely no food to be had in the cellar, just shelves of dusty, antique Mason jars.
Because of the relative lack of damage, only the window, and a couple jars smashed, it must have passed on to its animal reward relatively soon after entry. Why didn’t I hear anything? Was I sleeping or not at home during the incursion? The damaged window frame may have finally succumbed to gravity and fallen earlier that night, thus allowing frigid air to enter and freeze the exposed pipes.
In another corner of the 10×12 cellar was the remains of a rabbit in a similar state of decomposition.
I planned to remove the bodies on Groundhog Day, after the crime scene had been fully investigated. Do dead raccoons see their shadow? Should I call the DNR? What if the raccoon died of rabies? Would they accuse me of trying to hide an illegal zoo: three cats, rabbit, raccoon?
I console myself that the raccoon probably died peacefully, not from starvation, but from boredom.
The rabbit? He was just collateral damage.