The Dragon in the Bathroom

After an unusually mild autumn, we have been suddenly plunged into the deepest winter along with so many other people in the country.  A few days ago we were working in the yard with the temperature in the high 60s (the high teens for those of you who use the celsius scale), and last night we hit a low of 7 degrees fahrenheit (-13.9C). This is not the lowest temperature we will record this week.

Naturally, I awoke in the middle of the night worried about the chickens.  It was 19F (-7C) in the chicken coop. They were probably still where I had last seen them, sitting on their perches with their feathers fluffed up for insulation from the cold as the little oil filled heater made a valiant effort that was proving too feeble to be much help. I tossed and turned thinking of strategies to further insulate their perches, which was ridiculous since there was nothing to be done about it at two o'clock in the morning.  

Then I heard it...

My old nemesis awoke from his six month rest. The mystery fan roared back to life in the hall bath. Rattling, buzzing, whirring, sputtering loud enough to wake the living and the dead. Of course, Salt and the dogs apparently can not here what the dead and I can hear at night, but trust me the racket raised by that fan would wake anyone except for them.

Salt and I dubbed it the mystery fan -- though it sounded more like a wheezing, dying dragon -- because we had been unable to find it ever since we heard it during the home inspection. The inspector, Salt and I searched in the attic, the adjoining rooms, the rooms below, but could not find an exhaust to go with that fan. In a house with only partial electricity, we had tried every wall switch to see if there was an effect, but it didn't seem to be attached too anything. In fact, we could only localize the sound to the hall bath where it seemed to live in the walls. 

On the day we moved in, the mysterious rumbling had seemingly ceased but began again in the middle of the night. Occasionally during those first weeks I would climb around the bathroom listening at the ceiling and the walls, trying to pin point the sound. It kept me up at night and toyed with me by turning itself on and off at seemingly random intervals, until the day I finally started using the heaters in the house (see "Moving Part 2: What Happened When Things Got Worse"). Then the randomness settled into a pattern related to the temperature of the house. The rotten dragon had a thermostat attached to it.  

We began to suspect that someone had walled up a heater, and not bothered too disconnect the fan from the power. So we resolved to listen at the walls with a stethoscope the next time it switched on. That was when the weather warmed and the mystery fan ceased its operation. We suspected we would hear from it again once the weather turned cooler. 

Then we forgot all about it until this morning when the dragon awoke, interrupting my thoughts and making it further impossible to sleep.  Like many mornings last spring, I made up my mind to ignore it and lay awake listening to it for at least another half hour. That awful dragon was enough to make me want to curse. Oh, stuff and bother!

Finally, I decided that I had gone crazy enough to get out of bed and tackle the bathroom walls with a stethoscope. I walked into the bathroom, closed the door behind me, opened the cupboard, and stooped down to rummage through the medical supplies where we keep the stethoscope. The roaring was suddenly louder. I stuck my head into the cupboard and pressed my ear to the wall. The cupboard was not the source of the sound; the sound was behind me in the vanity. 

It would make sense to heat the plumbing under the vanity, so I opened the vanity cabinet. I looked, I listened, but there was nothing. So, I felt the cabinet walls and floor... bingo! It was under the vanity. 

Finally, at three o'clock on a snowy morning in November I was laying on the bathroom floor looking at the dragon rasping its last cold breaths behind a piece of trim under the vanity. My enemy had been cornered. 

I went back to bed with the satisfaction of knowing where my quarry lived. At a more reasonable hour, Salt did me the favor of dispatching it, which he did with his usual efficiency. After only a few minutes he emerged with the dusty carcass of an old heater. Its knobs were missing, its coil was broken and its fan was now forever disconnected from the grid that had kept it alive these last years. The dragon lives no more.

#farmdiva