Extra Green Elephant Drivers and Diving Submarines

Living in a foreign country entails a lot of extra work that is fun in the way solving puzzles is fun. Part of the charm of living abroad is figuring out who has what you want or need, then finding out  where that who is and how to get there . You don't really grasp how much you know about your own culture and society until you have lived abroad: in your home country you understand who to call, who to talk to, what to ask for and how to ask for it, and where to go almost without thinking, and you don't realize that knowledge is practically in your DNA. It is endlessly interesting to see the different ways other countries and cultures organize themselves and the different approaches they take to getting things done.  Well... charming and interesting, that is, until you have an emergency and then it becomes something else.

We returned to Suisse Romande from forced exile in the latter part of the winter to very grey and very cold weather on a Thursday afternoon. That evening as I turned all of the furnace functions back on I noticed that the fuel level was down very, very close to zero, when full is around 3,500 liters. My hair stood on end at the prospect of running out of fuel in the middle of February - that would be really bad.
The next morning I dug through the old bills and figured out who the fuel company was and called them and, reading from the old receipt,  asked for an emergency delivery of mazout extra-vert.  Mazout extra-green? I wondered silently to myself. Wasn't a mazout an elephant driver??  I know, I know.  Mazout, mahout... whatever.  If George Bush can disremember neucular stuff and have wings that take dream, and Sarah Palin can  refudiate history and have Paul Revere ringing jingle bells that warn the British they weren't taking away our guns, then I can have extra-green elephant driving Mazouts in my world.

After various calls back and forth I was informed that, unfortunately, there was no way for delivery that day and I would have to wait until Monday. I looked at the fuel gauge hovering around 200 hundred liters and made the mental calculations. 3,000 liters a year - high end maybe 10 or 15 liters a day. It should last until Monday. Ok, I capitulated. Monday morning at 8 a.m. they would deliver fuel. I went about the house unpacking and doing laundry and such and then, early in the afternoon, I noticed an unusual silence to the house. I turned on the hot water in the kitchen and ran it for a few minutes and it was barely warm. I went into the furnace room and looked at the furnace and hit the reset buttons. It made some sparking and chugging noises and then went silent and refused to restart. It was Friday afternoon and we were out of fuel.

I called the fuel company back and pleaded for an emergency delivery which, I was informed again, was quite impossible. Now, I was also informed, I would need a technician to come out and restart the furnace after the fuel delivery, as it wouldn't just start up like nothing had happened. "Couldn't I come to the depot and pick up some fuel myself" I queried.  No, that was not possible either, I was (sympathetically) informed.  The woman there did offer some help, however:  I could go to the gas station and buy some deisel and put that in the cistern, which people sometimes did in an emergency, and that should hold us through until Monday.  "Really?" I asked, disbelieving. Yes, I was informed. Ask the people at the gas station and they will know exactly what fuel you need. Tell them it is for your furnace cistern. Hmmm. First I had to find the fuel cistern.

I only had a few hours before it was dark so I bolted outside to look for the cistern and figure out how to put fuel in it. After 15 minutes of frantic searching I found the iron manhole like cover beneath a carpet of leaves, under a 4 foot high steel beam overhang, and tried to open it with my bare hands. The thing was a meter in diameter and must have weighed 100 kilos and I couldn't even budge the it. What to do? What to do? Time was getting late!! I rummaged around in the utility shed and found a neolithic pick ax with a 2 foot spike on it and hustled back to the cistern and was able to pry up the lid and slide it a few feet sideways and expose the filling nozzle. Success!!

I stood up abruptly and smashed my head directly into the overhanging steel I beam and staggered around in the leaves like a drunken sailor before falling on my knees in a semi conscious daze. I put my hand on my head and felt a 3 inch long furrow which rapidly turned into a 3 inch long lump which I tried to keep squished down. After a minute or two of true stupidness I realized I'd better ice it and got a plastic ice pack out of the freezer and put it on my head as I walked around and tried to regain my senses. I pressed it hard on my head to keep the swelling down and after a while pulled it off to see how the wound felt. The blue plastic block was covered in scarlet and I felt blood dripping down my forehead. I felt like I'd been hit by a truck and wanted to go lie down, but the vision of us huddled in the dark house with frosted breath as the water pipes froze and burst kept me on my feet and moving. I climbed in the car with the ice pack pressed to my head and unsteadily headed off to the nearby town where the gas station was.

At the gas station I hurried in and explained what had happened and what I had been told by the fuel company. Oh yes, the woman nodded. She discretely eyed my head matted with wet blood and said nothing. Yes she knew people who had used deisel in their cistern. But first, she informed me, I needed to go buy some gas cans to put them in. Following her precise and almost incomprehensible directions (I was really having trouble thinking and understanding people as a result of my head mash) I tore off in the general direction she had pointed and eventually found a giant Migros everything store and got the gas cans. With darkness falling I arrived back at the house with 40 litres of deisel to dump in the ground. It didn't seem like nearly enough to make a difference, but I had been told it would do the trick.  I needed giant pliers to open the fill pipe and then dumped in the fuel and after resealing the fill pipe I stood up, very carefully this time. I headed into the furnace room to fire up the unit.

As I came into the furnace hallway a buzzer was pulsing at about 130 decibels like the submarines in the old World War II movies as the destroyers are bearing down on them dropping depth charges: aaahooogah! aaahooogah! Dive! Dive! The din in the furnace room itself prevented rational chains of thought. The red light on the fuel unit was flashing a warning that the vacuum seal to the cistern had been broken. Luckily I had been through this before: I turned on the vacuum switch and mercifully, the buzzer quit. How had I been through this before, you may be asking? Ah yes. That would be when Tasha, in a bout of lightning and thunderstorm induced panic, had chewed through the bundle of vacuum and venting tubing in order to escape out the cat door and into the thunderstorm, and had set of the vacuum breaker alarms and an 18 hour cycle of phoning and repair services. Useful experience, that was.

So, an hour and a half later after the vacuum had been re-established I went to the furnace and hit the restart button. There was some encouraging whirring and machinery sounds, a fan started, the sparking mechanism clearly fired, and there was a large poofing and popping sound as an enormous black cloud of smoke puffed out of the furnace and filled the room with the smell of diesel.

I hate it when that happens.

We survived the weekend huddled around the upstairs fireplace in multiple layers of clothing and drank lots of wine.  By Sunday night the house was down to about 45 degrees but no water pipes had frozen, and we washed our faces by heating teakettlefuls of water and pouring them into the bathroom sink. The fuel delivery came right at 8 a.m. as scheduled, then I waited for the technician to come and restart the furnace.

He showed up about 10:30 with tools and electronic diagnostics and did various preparations before starting the furnace. I mentioned to him that the fuel had run out even though the gauge indicated a few hundred liters left. "They always run out before they hit empty," he told me. "That's just the way those gauges work." He hit the restart button and the same black smoke puff appeared for him and he looked slightly bemused. He informed me the sparking unit was fouled and he had to replace it, which he did. He pulled the old unit out and gave it a sniff, and shook his head. "Smell that!" he instructed me. I dutifully gave it a sniff. "It smells like diesel," he said matter-of-factly. I furrowed my brows and nodded in agreement, saying nothing. "That is not extra green elephant driver," he stated. He looked at me knowingly. "I think the fuel company is delivering poor quality fuel," he told me. "Your house is the fourth or fifth one I have serviced in the last two weeks with diesel smelling fouling in the fuel!" He shook his head in mild disgust.

"Imagine that!" I said shaking my head in accord with his. "Strange!"