A Nice Smoky Flavor

After a hard day of blunking and wrestling with work-related matters, I came home Wednesday night to a delightful scene: dinner was being prepared, and one of my daughters was pitching in to help. I demonstrated the proper technique for removing the skin from a piece of fish.

On the dinner menu: broiled cedar plank salmon and red potatoes. Mmm! Heart healthy. We usually broil or grill the salmon on a cedar plank to give it a smoky flavor. With the rainy weather outside, that sounded perfect.

Then my wife asked me:

“Can we have a fire?”

“Yeah! That’s a great idea,” I said, thinking that this would be nice way to warm up a rainy day. In the fireplace, we had built up quite a load of papers to burn (credit-card inducements, old utility statements and other items with personal info on them), so I had to haul a ton of stuff out of it before starting a fire. I piled stuff up right in front of the fireplace, completely hiding Michael’s shoes, which he had decided to take off right there for some odd reason.

I opened the damper, got a good layer of papers and kindling set up, and touched it off with a match.

In almost no time, smoke began drifting out of the fireplace.

“Whoops!” I said. “I guess I forgot to open the damper! Sorry!” I reached in and pulled the damper lever, then leaned back to fan the growing flames.

I got up and turned to grab a log. I looked back at the fireplace, and was face to face with Satan’s own inferno.

Not only is smoke disgorging from the fireplace in massive wafts, but orange flames are hungrily licking the bricks below the mantel.

And it all went downhill from there.

“OPEN THE DOOR!” I shouted to my daughter (who stood nearby, mouth a perfect “O” of astonishment) and my wife. I was hoping that by some miracle the smoke would obediently march outside through the doorway, and that the fireplace flue would figure out what to do and let the smoke escape up the chimney. My daughter opened the door which the smoke ignored entirely in its inevitable search for higher ground.

My wife came running over with the fire extinguisher. She pulled the pin and handed it to me.
“Here. Extinguish it. Or I’m calling 911.”

I had no idea how to work the thing, but I finally managed to squeeze the right part. Yellow powder blasted out of the nozzle and doused the fire.

“Now sweep,” my wife instructed me, silently recalling the PASS acronym from her regular emergency training.

By this point, the smoke coated the ceiling two feet deep. Both smoke detectors are now very much alert. Sister B poked her head out of her bedroom door and leisurely ambled downstairs. Had the alarms been reporting an actual fire, she would have become an unfortunate statistic.

“WHERE’S THE FAN?” My wife shouted at me.

Michael repeatedly whirled around in a circle, hands over his ears, yelling: “I don’t want to die!”

“I DON’T KNOW – MICHAEL, YOU’LL BE FINE! THE FAN IS – YOU’RE OKAY, MICHAEL! – IT’S UPSTAIRS!” I yell, trying to be heard by my wife and reassure my son above the piercing alarms.

I head upstairs to get the large box fan, pausing briefly to silence the upstairs smoke alarm. I bring it down and hold it up in the doorway, aiming it to blow outside. The smoke is blasted out in a thick, grey column.

“WHERE ARE MICHAEL’S SHOES?” wife yells.

“UNDERNEATH ALL THOSE PAPERS I SCOOPED OUT OF THE FIREPLACE,” I said. All the while soothing Michael with calming words, she got down on her knees and frantically excavated through the pile for his shoes. Michael had his hands firmly clamped over his ears and screamed “AAAAAH! FIRE! THE BEEP BEEPS!”

“Michael, I need to get you outside for air,” she told him, putting on his shoes and sweatshirt.

Michael shouted back: “No! I don’t need air! I don’t need air!”

Sister B finally arrived in the midst of the chaos, and assumed responsibility for Michael. She whisked him outside, where they remained safely out of harm’s way. L took over holding the box fan while my wife and I headed upstairs to deal with smoke removal there.

Outside, Michael tried to get his sister to listen to reason:

“B?”

“Yes?”

“There’s a fire.”

“Yeah, kinda.”

“We should call 911”

“It’s not really a fire. Daddy has it taken care of.”

“No! We should call 911!”

“It’s just smoke. There’s not really a fire.”

“We need to call 911”

B calls her boyfriend.

“Hello, 911,” sister B says into her phone.

“Huh?” her boyfriend responds.

“Is that your boyfriend?” asks Michael.

From the outside our house must have looked like quite a scene: every door and window disgorging dark clouds of smoke. I was sure someone would call 911.

From the inside, the house was engulfed in a thick layer of smoke; my head was entirely lost in the murky atmosphere. The smoke rolled upstairs in great billows, covering the ceiling there to an even greater depth, until the exhaust fans that my wife and I turned on began to vent the smoke away in earnest. Gradually the tide turned, and the air cleared.

As the smoke abated, I knelt down and tentatively reached in the fireplace and checked the damper.

It was closed.

So: when I had originally thought I’d forgotten to open it, I was wrong. Then I mistakenly closed it, thinking I was opening it.

My two wrongs had made an even wronger wrong.

“Honey? Guess what? The damper was closed after all. How about that?”

After the dust had literally settled and all was under control, Michael went back to playing with his Leapster and his sisters went back to their respective phone call and art project. I got down to clean up the mess in front of the fireplace.

From the kitchen, where she finished dinner preparation, my wife observed:

“I have to say, my life has been far more interesting since I met you.”

Thanks, honey. I’m glad I can at least provide solid entertainment.

Oh: the salmon? It had a nice, smoky flavor. Perfect for a rainy day. I really could have used a beer.