Six Below

It was six degrees below zero.  At noon.  I opened the wooden cabin door to go outside and pushed on the screened door behind it.  The door didn’t open as rapidly as I’d anticipated and I almost mashed my face into the screen.  The subzero temperature had gummed up the hydraulic cylinder that keeps the screened door from slamming, making the door hard to open.  I pushed, and it gave way reluctantly.  I opened it a quarter of the way and slid out, calling Duke to follow me.  We were on the way to town to buy groceries, drop some trash by the dump, and pick up some handwarmer packets.

Six degrees below zero, I was discovering, requires some adjustments.  At six below, for instance, you would not walk outside with wet hair unless you wanted frosted tips.  Nor would you run to the truck in your bare feet to retrieve something unless you wanted to risk getting frozen to the walkway.  If I seem to this blog’s regular readers – Mom and Dad, that’s both of you – a little preoccupied with the outdoor ambient air temperature of late, that’s because I am.  These adjustments are new to me. I have never been anyplace where the day’s high temperature did not exceed 0°F.  When I got to the truck, it almost didn’t start.  I had to crank it five times, and when the motor finally caught, dark gray smoke billowed out of the exhaust pipe for five or ten minutes.  The diesel engine, which normally rumbles like a well-balanced washing machine, was sputtering loudly, then going quiet, then sputtering loudly, then going quiet, at the approximate pace of footsteps on gravel.  I had to let the truck warm up for twenty-five minutes before I could drive it.  When it’s six below, Duke is a lot less eager to go outside and a lot more eager to get back in.  When I stay outside for long periods, I’ve started leaving the middle button on my jacket and shirt unbuttoned so that I can alternately thrust one hand and then the other inside my shirt, like an ambidextrous Napoleon Bonaparte, to keep my fingers from stiffening like the hydraulic cylinder on the door.  At six degrees below zero, I could move an object from my truck to the deep freezer, and it would warm up.  We don’t have this weather in Georgia.

But the adjustments can be made.  Humans have adapted to much colder temperatures than this – for instance, the projected high temperature for Wednesday in Arviat, an Inuit town on Hudson Bay in Canada’s Nunavut Territory, is -19°F.  And Arviat is located well south of the ranges where other Inuit populations have lived and thrived.  So Duke and I can adjust to a Montana winter.  Duke can wear, if necessary, the neoprene vest that I used to put on him at night when we were packing across the Sierras.  My hands presented a slightly more difficult problem – in extreme cold, the capillaries in my fingers constrict so tightly that gloves and mittens are almost useless.  There’s no heat to retain, so insulation does no good.  But if I shoved handwarmer packets into mittens, I thought, I’d be okay.  I knew less about how to fix the truck.  I probably needed a block heater, which I had recently learned was an electric heating system that plugs into a 120-volt outlet and keeps the engine block warm.  But for the first few miles on the way into town, I couldn’t push the truck past thirty miles per hour.  I’d step on the throttle, but once I reached 1300 RPM or so, I lost power and couldn’t accelerate.  As the truck warmed the problem lessened, but even after traveling fifteen miles, I still couldn’t top sixty.  I wasn’t sure if a block heater could fix that.

So after buying groceries, dumping trash, and finding handwarmers, I stopped by the Cenex gas station in town for advice.  It was an old-school gas station that still had a full service pump.  Dad had told me that he’d met the folks who ran the place, though I couldn’t remember how he knew them.  I parked the truck and walked inside.

A bell jingled when I opened the door and a man in coveralls came out from the garage, wiping his hands on a soiled cloth.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

“I need to ask about a block heater,” I said.  “I think I might need one on my truck.”  I started to explain that I was from Georgia, where you don’t have to plug your truck into a wall socket before you start it, but I could tell from his nodding that my accent had already placed me.

“Block heater,” he said, still nodding.  “What kind of truck?”

“Dodge with the Cummins diesel,” I said.  “5.9 liter.”

“I’ve got a Cummins, too,” he said.  “Mine’s an ’01.”  I told him about the smoke, and running rough, and no power while the engine heated up.

“What kind of fuel are you running?” he asked.

I paused.  I couldn’t think of what types of fuel he might be referring to.  “I don’t know,” I said.

“Well . . . where did you last fill up?”

I pointed out the window to his self-service pump.  “Right there,” I said.  “Couple days ago.”

“Number one or number two diesel?”

I didn’t understand this.  I’d never heard of number one or number two diesel.  I’d heard of farm diesel – a type of less-refined fuel that it was illegal to run on public roads – but surely he wasn’t asking about that.  I looked at the pumps.  Sure enough, one pump was labeled “# 1 diesel” and the other “# 2 diesel.”  And it wasn’t just the pump numbers, either; from the placement of the labels you could tell that they supplied different types of fuel.  He saw my blank look.  The number two diesel was fine for use in summer, he told me, but in winter, you needed to use some number one.  The number one was basically kerosene, he said.  Burned hotter.  He ran about 25% number one in his truck, and 75% number two.  Had I put any additive in my fuel?

I looked at him blankly again.

In winter, he explained, when it got below zero, it helped to use some additive.  He handed me a pint-sized bottle of diesel fuel injector cleaner.  The bottle treated 125 gallons, so I could just put a little in whenever I filled up.  No need to measure.  Just splash a little in there.  As for the block heater, he didn’t have one in stock but he could order one.  Cost about fifty-five dollars.

“Thanks,” I said.  I told him to go ahead and order a block heater.  “You know, I think you’ve met my Dad.  Jim Butler.  We’re at CM Ranch on up 191.  The old Musberger place.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said.  He stuck out his hand.  “Bill Wallace.  Good to meet you.  We’re neighbors up there.”

“I didn’t realize that,” I said.

“Yeah, we’ve got the game farm.”  There was a farm about a mile north of our place where they raised pheasants and grouse.  I’d driven by it a couple times.

“Oh, I know where you’re at,” I said.  “Good to meet you.”

I told him I’d be right back for the additive and went outside to put in a quarter tank of number one diesel in my truck.  I was standing by the truck hoping that the tank would fill before my fingers went numb when Bill appeared at my elbow.

“Hey,” I said.

He pointed at my truck.  “Are you sure you don’t already have a block heater on there?”

“No,” I admitted.  “I got the truck out of Lexington, Kentucky, so I guess it might.  I don’t know how cold it gets up there.”

“Let me take a look,” he said.  “I didn’t know they even made these engines without them.”

I popped the hood and Bill looked at the engine block, then knelt by each front tire and peered under the fender wells.

“I don’t see one,” he said.  “You don’t keep it garaged?”

“No, it won’t fit in our garage because of that camper,” I said.  “It’s two or three inches too tall for the garage.”

“What about the old electrical shop?” he asked.

For the third time in the ten minutes of our acquaintance, I looked at Bill blankly.  He might have come to accept it as my natural expression by now.  If that were true, I reflected, I would have to produce an even more clueless expression to convey my ignorance.  What might that expression be?  Jaw slack, maybe; head tilted, eyes droopy, a little drool . . .

But Bill understood the blank look.  “You know, the big bay over there in the out building.  Used to be an electrical shop.”

Bill, I realized, was giving me directions to a building on my family’s own property.  “Lord, I forgot about that bay,” I said.  “Over in the barn.  It might fit in there.  I’ll try that.”

“Okay,” he said.  “Then call me if you still want that block heater.”