Thoughts on the summer's heat so far - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston
Hopefully, by the time you read this at the end of the week, the heat and humidity that hit us early in the week (30°C+ temperature, though slightly cooler along Lake Huron) will have passed.
Climate experts tell us that we need to get used to hotter summers and yearly forest fires, as global warming makes summers more extreme. Already we’re seeing one of the worst forest fire seasons we’ve experienced, and summer is less than a week old.
Toronto education officials late last week admitted that few of their schools are air-conditioned and so the last days of the school year would be punishing. As hot summers continue, no doubt parents will pressure officials to provide air conditioning, even though it will only be needed a few days a year and other education costs are already rising.
How things have changed. We still lived in Toronto when Jill and I first got married, and the apartment we rented wasn’t air-conditioned. Jill would walk home from work at a Bell Canada office, getting hotter with each step, and take a detour through air-conditioned Eaton’s department store at Yonge and College to ease the heat. When she got back to our apartment on Jarvis St., she’d take a shower.
We first moved to our old farm house in the summer of 1975, soon after the first performance at the Blyth Festival. There was still a “summer kitchen” at the house then, as there was at virtually all farm houses. It had become a custom in the days when wood-fired stoves provided the cooking, to move the kitchen to the summer kitchen in order to keep the main house as cool as possible. The other part of the back kitchen when we moved here was a “woodshed” nearly as big as the summer kitchen. It was the job of the men of the farm to cut wood from the bush and fill the woodshed so that the house stayed warm all winter and there was dry wood to burn in the kitchen stove all summer. (One advantage back then: they didn’t worry about hydro blackouts that we in the rural-Blyth area have suffered too many times this year.)
We had electricity by the time I was growing up on a farm north of Lucknow but we still heated the house with wood for some years. Each spring, when it seemed warm enough, we would move the wood-stove out of the kitchen. So I identified with one of the funniest skits from the Blyth Festival’s first hit, the stage adaptation of West Wawanosh native Harry J. Boyle’s Mostly in Clover.
“Stove Moving Time!” featuring Gord Bradley as “the stove” and Jim Schaefer and Ron Barrie as the farm hands and Angie Gei as the housewife sparked laughter at every performance as the men tried to manoeuvre the heavy “stove” through the kitchen and out the back door while the housewife fretted.
When Jill and I first moved here 50 years ago, we had a furnace and cooked with electricity, so we no longer needed the summer kitchen or the woodshed. There was still linoleum on the kitchen floor and, when we removed it, we discovered beautiful maple hardwood flooring, but with burn marks where coals from the kitchen stove had dropped to the floor and burned it. Even after several sandings and refinishing, some of the marks remain.
Those are the lone reminders of how things used to be on our farm. Over the years we’ve remodelled to remove the last of the stove-pipe holes through walls. The summer kitchen and woodshed were removed 20 years ago, replaced by a bright, window-
lined room, designed by Blyth architect John Rutledge, which allows us to bring the outside in.
We also don’t worry about the heat - inside at least - because 15 years ago we had Cliff’s Plumbing and Heating, run by the husband of my old assistant Anne Mann at the Blyth Festival, install geo-thermal heating, which can be reversed to cool the house in the summer heat, like this week’s.
How things have changed. As an old man, I’d no longer be able to spend my winter cutting up wood to heat the house the next winter. But we also have air-conditioning to cool our house in summer heat like we’re currently experiencing. When I was young, we looked to spend time outdoors where the breeze at least cooled us. These days, we prefer to stay indoors in the air-conditioned cool.
Air-conditioning is so common these days that people just expect it. I remember when we started the Blyth Festival we sweltered in the heat. But James Roy, the founding artistic director, ordered a heating/cooling system and insisted on ducts so big that there would be no distracting sound when the system came on. I have no doubt that thoughtfulness helped with the success of the Festival 50 years later.
Oh well, the heat will soon pass, and we’ll be bundling up to ward off winter’s cold.