Heat (18 page)

Macaulay related a rhyme from the time of chimney taxes, attributing it to the Pepysian Library:

Despite air pollution and taxes, people needed heat. They needed heat not only in their homes but in their businesses. And their need for heat drove coal mining forward. The shallow seaside diggings of the thirteenth century grew deeper. By the middle of the fourteenth century, shafts dropped vertically into the earth and widened at the bottom to form bell pits, shaped like inverted funnels. The miners dug horizontal tunnels to cut into the black veins of coal wedged between other layers of rock. At times, miners would leave pillars of coal in place to support a tunnel’s ceiling. Then, as the tunnel was abandoned, they mined the pillars and made their way out.

Men, women, and children from small villages and farms who found their way to work underground developed a rough culture, a miners’ way of living and talking and interacting. In the seventeenth century, they were described as swearers and drunkards, “skums and dregs” who had been driven from their rural homes, “some having towe or three wyves a peece now living.” The men worked the mine face, and women and children hauled coal to the surface. From there it was carried by people and horses and carts onto ships. The ships were called coal carriers. In 1596 there were two hundred coal carriers along the coast of England. By 1615 there were four hundred. By 1635 there were six hundred.

A historical footnote: Captain James Cook, explorer extraordinaire, learned to sail on a coal carrier, a coaster that shipped black rocks to London.

A second historical footnote: both the HMS
Endeavor
and the HMS
Resolution,
the ships used by Cook on his voyages of discovery, started life as coal ships, originally named the
Earl of Pembroke
and the
Marquis of Granby.

Picture yourself as a miner in the early days of coal. The shaft is dark and damp and cramped. The air you call “choke damp” can suffocate you, and the air you call “fire damp” can explode. Both are invisible. You do not know it, but choke damp is air without oxygen, and fire damp is methane. What you do know is that healthy men suddenly drop dead, overcome by choke damp, and mines suddenly explode, burning with fire damp.

You have heard of a case in which nine miners dropped dead at once, together. You met someone who nearly died, but, being hauled from the mine, he regained consciousness. He is slow-witted.

You work in a deep mine. You know that fire damp might be present. It seeps from cracks in the coal veins. Sometimes you can hear it in the darkness. Once you were knocked down in an explosion.

Your foreman has hired a fireman. The fireman is well paid. He is not the kind of fireman who extinguishes fires. His job: crawl into a mine tunnel with a candle on the end of a stick, staying low in case the fire damp ignites so as to allow the flames to pass for the most part overhead. He pushes the candle into a dead-end chamber, where the fire damp accumulates, intentionally igniting it. Today his luck holds. The fire flares suddenly, then becomes smaller, and finds its way back into a crevice.

When the fireman finishes, there is a third kind of gas to deal with, the white damp, carbon monoxide left over from the flames. So you wait. Maybe you take a caged canary with you to see if it will stay on its perch or drop to the bottom of the cage, dead. And after a while you start work. You start to mine.

In the coal you find impressions of plants, but plants unlike those you know at the surface. You suspect something dark, an underworld connection that would explain the strange plants and the sulfurous odors and the deadly gases.

To manage ventilation, flaps of canvas are draped across tunnels, or wooden doors are installed. The flaps and doors are called “traps,” and they are operated by “trappers.” As you approach, pushing a cart full of coal, a trapper opens the trap, lets you through, and closes the trap. The trapper is a child.

From a parliamentary commission report in 1842, the testimony of a twelve-year-old girl: “I have to trap without a light, and I’m scared. I go at four and sometimes half past three in the morning and come out at five and half-past. I never go to sleep. Sometimes I sing when I’ve light, but not in the dark.”

Charles Dickens was once involved with investigations of child labor in coal mines. In 1841 he thought of writing an article on the topic, but if the article was written, it has since been lost.

Dickens himself, like many others, had been a child laborer. Later, writing as the narrator in
David Copperfield
: “I know enough of the world now to have lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything; but it is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age.”

Like Benjamin Franklin, Dickens often published his own work. He owned the weekly literary magazine
All the Year Round
, and he was half owner of its predecessor,
Household Words
. In an 1850 edition of
Household Words
he printed an interview with a coal miner. The miner talked of being an “undergoer” tasked with crawling into holes to undermine blocks of coal, allowing the blocks to be extracted.

“In general the miner does not use the pick,” Dickens was told, “and become a holer or undergoer till he is one-and-twenty. I was set to do this at nineteen, and earned four shillings a day, and sometimes more. Got badly burnt once at this work. I was lying in a new working where the air was bad, and I was obliged to use a Davy lamp. I had bought a new watch at Tipton, and I wanted to see what o’clock it was by it—else, what was the use on it?—and as I couldn’t tell by the Davy, I just lifted off the top—and pheu! went the gas, and scorched my face all over, so that the skin all peeled off. It was shocking to see. I was laid up with this for two months—and sarv’d me right, I say now, but it was hard to bear at the time.”

Dickens did not necessarily need lamps to ignite his characters. He wrote of the spontaneous combustion of humans. Believers in spontaneous human combustion say that a person could be sitting peacefully or walking down the street when ignition occurs without warning. Once burning, the spontaneously ignited person cannot, in general, be extinguished.

In
Bleak House
, Dickens’s character Krook, alone is his room, combusts spontaneously. “There is a smouldering, suffocating vapour in the room,” Dickens wrote, “and a dark, greasy coating on the walls and ceiling.”

The surviving characters notice a pile of white ash. They realize the ash is all that remains of Krook. “Call the death by any name your Highness will,” Dickens wrote, “attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally—inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only—spontaneous combustion.”

Dickens was neither the first nor the last to write of spontaneous human combustion. It is a phenomenon that is difficult to explain. In fact, it is a phenomenon that cannot be explained. It cannot be explained because it exists only in the minds of believers and the pages of writers. But it is a phenomenon that comes in handy when a novelist, trapped in a literary corner, has to kill off an inconvenient character. And who could blame Dickens, creator of so many characters, if now and again he had to dispose of one abruptly and without the entanglements of a long illness or a murder investigation?

I call the Firewalking Institute of Research and Education. I catch the instructor on his cell phone as he drives a truckload of firewood through Dallas. The truck is a sixteen-foot flatbed. The firewood is, of course, cedar.

“It is 105 degrees,” he tells me. He has just finished loading—by hand, by himself—three cords of firewood. There is no need for me to ask about the intended use of this wood. He can have only one use for three cords of cedar.

“How’s business?” I ask him. “Is the economy hurting firewalkers?”

“Things are really picking up,” he tells me. “Things are turning around. Corporations see that. They’re starting to send employees back for motivational training. They’re starting to look forward. Let’s get our heads out of the gutter. Sure, things were tough for a while, but business is getting better. People need to be energized.”

I ask if he has ever seen peat burn. He has not. He has not even heard of peat fires.

I ask if he has seen coal burn. No again. He has never seen a coal fire. His focus is cedar. More accurately, his focus is the heat of burning cedar and what it can do for those willing to stroll across its dancing molecules.