Scintilla Day Five – that thing you got away with

The Scintilla Project,  Day 5: Talk about a time you got away with it.

I didn’t really get away with it. But on the plus side, in the end I didn’t go to jail. I didn’t even cultivate a shiny new criminal record. It was so mortifying that I did not tell anyone who didn’t absolutely have to know about what happened. As a matter of fact, I never did tell my parents. Now, though, with the passage of quite a few years, it’s a great “most embarrassing moment” story for when you have to do one of those nerve-wracking ice breaker team-building exercises.

I was 25 or 26, and living in a house that was basically a shack, with paper thin walls, no insulation, and a bathroom floor that was slowly caving in. The rent was very cheap, and we were very poor. My best friend and my future boyfriend/future husband were living there too. I had left my first husband and left DC, and I’d moved back to Boone NC planning to go to grad school. Not so much planning to become a convict forced to wear stripes and work on a chain gang.

It was late on a winter afternoon, and I was at the house by myself. The best friend and future boyfriend/future husband were both still at their low-wage restaurant jobs. I must have worked the day shift in my low-wage restaurant job that day. It was very cold. It was snowing. And then the power went out.

We had a cute little wood stove that sat in a corner of the livingroom. The cute little woodstove would heat the whole house up, so losing power should not have been a disaster.  And had we been the sort of people who were prepared for things like snow and winter (in a town where snow and winter usually seem to last for about eight months of the year), it would not have been a disaster at all. And we did have a big stack of wood against the side of the house. What we didn’t have was kindling to start a fire. We did not have a scrap of kindling, and since none of the three of us have ever once been prepared for a single thing in our lives, we did not yet own an ax. So I couldn’t just chop some kindling off a piece of the stacked-up wood. And there was snow all over any bits and pieces of twigs and brush that might have been used for kindling had they been dry.

I tried to start the fire with cardboard and newspaper, but it would not catch. I was not yet very good at starting fires- this was the first wood stove I’d lived with, and although my parents had a fireplace and froze us to death with it every winter, my dad always took care of the firestarting stuff. So despite my cardboard and newspaper, the big hunks of wood would not catch fire and burn. And it was cold. And getting colder. And I really really hate being cold. Panic was setting in.  

We lived beside a little motel. The little motel had several cabins with fireplaces, and they had a shed just beyond our house where they kept their kindling and firewood. I’m sure you can see exactly where this is going. I was getting colder and colder and my fire would not do more than smolder and die, so I ran over to the motel’s shed and grabbed a handful of kindling. And said a cheery “hello!” to the maid I passed, who did not tell me a cheery “hello!” back, but instead just stared at me. I hurried back to my freezing little shack, stacked the kindling in the woodstove, and soon had a blazing fire and a toasty house.  

About half an hour later, someone knocked on the door. By then it was probably 9:00, dark outside, but warm and cheery inside. I’d been reading a book by the fire, with candles and kerosene lamps burning since the power was still out. It was like being a pioneer, but much cozier. I opened the door, and found a sheriff standing on my porch. He told me I was under arrest.

“But… I was just reading a book!!!” I said. I actually said that. Because I had no idea what he was talking about. It was the most surreal moment ever. He was very nice, and told me that someone said I was stealing wood from the motel. And I was going to have to come down to the courthouse with him, because unfortunately he was not kidding about having to arrest me. He would, however, let me just drive on over myself instead of taking me in all handcuffed with the sirens going, if I’d rather. I would rather, and fortunately the future boyfriend/future husband arrived while I was going around in confused circles, and he drove me to the courthouse. Where they were very nice to me and posted a very small bail on my own recognizance and made me promise not to leave the country and then they let me go back home instead of throwing me into an icy concrete cell.  

As it turned out, someone really had been stealing large quantities of wood from the motel, and they suspected the people who’d lived in the house before we moved in, and who they assumed still lived there. I went and talked to the manager and begged forgiveness and swore that I’d only taken a handful of kindling, and apologized profusely for it not once crossing my feeble frozen cold-addled brain to just go down to the front desk and ask if I could buy a little kindling from them, in which case they’d probably have given it to me. I still had to go to court (I told everyone I worked with that it was for a traffic ticket – I was SO EMBARRASSED) – and the motel people dropped the charges. I paid them $15 for the kindling, paid my court costs, and bought an ax.