The Conflagration at Green Damselfly Cove

The Board of Directors of the Neverwas Nonesuch Angling Society held their 123rd annual winter meeting this weekend. There were two main items on the agenda. One was to set a date for the opening of the 2008 season here at Fish in a Barrel Pond which impacts me, as their caretaker, directly. April 28th was the unanimous decision of the board and I am going to be one busy guy for the next six weeks, but more on that later.

Setting a date for opening day was an easy item to deal with. The tricky item of the day, though, has already created a rift among the membership and on one side of the divide is a group of relatively young, successful professionals who point to the pages of their “outdoor lifestyle” publications and want the cabins and cottages here to look like those. On the other side of the issue are a group of relatively young, successful professionals who wish they could have been here in the good old days and want the place to look just the way it does. They are joined in their fight to preserve rustic appeal by a number of older members who actually were here in the good old days and say things like, “I’ve seen a lot of changes in my time and I’ve been against every one of ‘em!”

The catalog people lost by a vote of 5-4 so, for now, there will be no insulation, no fancy wainscoting and chair rails, no lights with wildlife silhouettes cut in the shades and especially no carpet, even if it is the kind Martha Stewart uses in her entry area with quite satisfactory results. The status quo is maintained but I had to ask one of the old-timers why he was so adamantly opposed to sprucing things up a bit.

“No good can come from it,” he declared. Then he told me a story, which I wrote down so I could get every detail just right:
In the snow, odd shapes are seen in the woods above Green Damselfly Cove. Upon closer inspection it can be seen that the shapes are actually the ruins of a small cottage that burned to the ground many years ago.

 

The cottage was a rather crude affair but it served its purpose, the only real drawback being that it was cold. Even in the summer the air was much cooler around Green Damselfly Cove, and some kind of geographical anomaly made it hard for any stove or fireplace to gain any meaningful draft. Wood, coal, gas, kerosene and any number of other fuels and methods to burn them had been tried but always with the same poor, punky results – lots of smoke and little heat.

Mort Hulett became the caretaker at Fish in a Barrel Pond in 1953 and he resolved to remedy the situation in the little cottage near Green Damselfly Cove, no matter what.
Mort got the support of the men who most often stayed in that cottage by talking fast and using three dollar words like “vortex” and “venturi” like he knew what he was saying and, once he had their blessing, he went to work scrounging old oil drums, scrap iron and sheet metal.

“She’s going to have one heck of a draft!” he told them.

All summer, and into the fall, Mort worked on his woodstove in the barn, welding, soldering and banging away late into the night. The season came to a close and the members of the Neverwas Nonesuch Angling Society all went home but Mort assured them that they deserved no less than a perfect product and he wasn’t going to let them down, even if he had to drag his stove over the snow and ice that winter, which is exactly what he ended up doing.

Well, not exactly. Mort’s stove turned out to be heavier and bulkier than he had planned and with the promise of good hooch to seal the deal he recruited some of the Society’s members to come up in January and give him a hand with the moving and installation.  Three men showed up on that cold Saturday in January of 1954 and, after a ceremonial sampling of the hooch, they set out to push, pull, roll and drag that 600 pound jury-rigged contraption of a woodstove a mile into the frozen Vermont woods.

“She’s going to have one heck of a draft!” promised Mort.

Pushing and pulling Mort’s stove through the woods turned out to be easier than expected, thanks to the runners Mort had welded onto the legs, and when it was discovered that all four of them could sit on the barrels or stand on the runners and ride their giant steel sled on the down-hills the men seemed to gain more confidence in Mort’s abilities and promises. It was a bitter cold day but the work went quickly and the men slid to a stop at the door of the cottage shortly after noon.

The old woodstove was removed and Mort, who had measured very carefully, directed as his new stove was skidded into place. Once it was lined up correctly and an old piece of roofing tin was in place as a heat shield, Mort began working to hook the stovepipe to his creation which, due to his innovative design, was a rather more complicated job than on an inferior store-bought stove. Tossing his helpers another jar of hooch, he said, “Help yourselves, boys, but get a blanket to stand on or something, would you? You’re getting snow all over the floor.”

The men did as they were told and stood on an old wool blanket, stomping their feet in the cold while Mort banged and clattered and cussed. They had helped themselves to another jar of hooch from Mort’s bag, and were half-way through it, when Mort finally stood up and said, “There she is! Let’s light her up! She’s going to have one heck of a draft!”

Mort scrambled outside, to the little lean-to where the dry wood was kept, returning with a larger than average armload. After kicking the snow from his boots onto the wool blanket, he stuffed his whole load into the stove and struck a match.

“But don’t you need some kindling or something?” asked one of the men.

“Oh, I’ve already got the priming chamber loaded. Besides, she’s going to have one heck of a draft!”

With that, Mort opened a tiny port near the bottom of the stove, held the match near it while spinning a small wheel with his other hand and they all watched in amazement as the flame on the match lengthened and leaned into the hole. Whatever Mort had in his “priming chamber” caught quickly and ferociously and the metal of the stove began to tick-tick-tick with the heat.

Then Mort shifted the cover off a larger opening and a loud whirring sound began, which Mort attributed to his “vortex driver” and the wood in the main chamber caught fire with a woof. The air in the cabin filled with the sounds of combustion and expansion as the fire intensified inside the metal chamber. Happy with the results thus far, Mort sent the men out for more wood and when they returned he opened another jar of hooch and passed it around.

Mort stuffed more wood into the main chamber while the men took off their heavy coats and they all marveled at the intense heat the contraption gave off as they watched the snow melt from their boots and soak into the wool blanket.

Mort closed the hot metal door, turned to them and, with wisps of smoke coming from his eyebrows, hollered “What did I tell you? She’s got one heck of a draft!”

But the men couldn’t hear him because they had their fingers in their ears, trying to block out the roar of the stove, which had begun to glow and pulsate like an angry cuttlefish. Clumps of dust, old pine needles and other detritus from the previous summer began pelting the men around their ankles, drawn toward the fiery maw by the heck of a draft and when those failed to satisfy the fiery beast it demanded more.

Loose pieces of paper and an entire library of Louis L’Amour paperbacks flew from the bookcase. Mort’s gloves, which he dropped on the floor while lighting the fire, slid closer to the stove and were sucked up one at a time with two small thumps. A screwdriver was next, clanging twice before melting in the heat, dumbfounding the men, but when their coats began to be pulled from their pegs on the wall, the men snapped-to and started gathering as many loose objects as they could. One of the men carefully set the last jar of hooch on the hearth and, just as he did so, the sodden blanket they had been standing on began to move.

Sucked in like spaghetti, the wet wool entered the inferno, gaining speed as it went, and was instantly turned into a glob of dense felt that plugged the first bend in the smokestack. The roaring stopped for a second and the men were tempted to relax, but the heat was too much for the joints of the stack. Stretching like taffy, the metal gave way and white-hot flames screamed straight out the back of the stove, deflected off the roofing tin, and sprayed in all directions like fireworks.

Mort’s stove began to shake back and forth, from side to side, on its runners, and the men had to clutch doorways and window frames, hanging on for dear life to avoid being sucked in themselves. The situation in the little cottage was in real danger of getting completely out of hand when the jar of hooch on the hearth was drawn explosively into the combustion chamber. As the flames shooting out its back turned from white to green to blue the stove began to shriek and, instead of shaking back and forth, it began sliding forward, off the hearth, leaving a hot, noxious plume in its wake and a deafening silence behind as it rocketed out the door.

Aided by gravity as it left the cottage and headed downhill, Mort Hulett’s stove traveled some seventy yards across the ice of Fish in a Barrel Pond before melting its way through to a watery grave and on calm days when the water is low, its outline is still visible on the bottom, just as the remnants of the cottage are in the woods if you know just where to look.

It was such a nice cottage, too. It is a real shame that it burned to the ground six months later. Mort had spent the rest of that winter and most of the spring cleaning the place up and airing it out. He bought fancy new curtains to replace those sucked into the stove, along with some nice throw rugs to place here and there. Mort even painted the walls a lovely off-white and bought a new kitchen table and chairs at a tag sale, hauling the whole lot to the cottage by himself. As a final touch, Mort bought some scented candles from a bunch of beatniks in the city, so the living room no longer smelled like burned felt and, eager to hear the approving remarks from the men on Opening Day, he lit one of those candles and left it burning for them, near the open window, where the fancy new curtains billowed in the soft spring breeze and caught fire, burning the little cottage near Green Damselfly Cove completely to the ground in under an hour.

And that is why some members of the Neverwas Nonesuch Angling Society still don’t want fancy new curtains.