Neighbor’s Laughed When He Built a Second Wall Around His Cabin — Until It Kept His Cabin 21 Degrees

Eirik opened his door and showed Harwick his smoke test. He puffed pipe smoke at the outer planks and watched it bend and escape through invisible seams. He held a feather at the inside log wall and the feather trembled against nothing. “Outer wall takes wind,” Eirik said. “Inner wall sits in still air.”

Harwick asked for numbers. Eirik liked numbers; they listened. He set a ledger. Each morning at six he placed his mercury thermometer at the outer sill and then again at the interior log surface three feet from the stove. He wrote dates and degrees with a steadiness that had nothing to do with pride and everything to do with simple curiosity.

On October nineteenth, with the stove banked to coals, the outer sill read fourteen below. The interior log wall read seven above. Twenty-one degrees’ difference. Harwick could not make that number into a joke. On the twentieth it was similar: minus six outside, plus five inside. Day after day the ledger told the same story—between seventeen and twenty three degrees’ difference, the best morning showing twenty-one. Eirik kept his figures like a man counting favors returned.

The township had to account for its surprise. Martha arrived on the eighth morning with her school thermometer to do what teachers do—measure the world. She took readings at Harwick’s and found pre-dawn lows that made breath fog: minus five to five degrees. Then she came to Eirik’s and found steadiness: plus four to plus ten across the inner surfaces with water pale liquid, with no ice forming where frost had been a regular, hated ring. She recorded it, not out of loyalty but because facts are stubborn things.

When the wind broke again on November third, it came with a hunger that put the earlier storm to shame. Forty mile an hour winds drove temperatures down to thirty-eight below and made indoors a dangerous kingdom. It was in this storm that practical wisdom failed some and saved others. Three cabins in the township were in true peril; the grandfather at the Morrison place had breathing drawn by cold like a bellows; a baby at the Johansson household coughed with the chill in her lungs; a mother at the Johansson place had the kind of fear that burrows into a woman’s voice.

They came to Eirik because fear had no other shelter. Harwick, his wife and two boys, the Morrisons with the failing grandfather, the Johanssons with the coughing infant—they crowded into Eirik’s fourteen by eighteen cabin until eleven people pressed into the warm hush. The musician wind scraped at the outer planks, but inside the inner wall held a lobed calm that insulated human bodies and human tempers. Eirik added extra muslin at his vestibule, shaping an air-lock, and the small demonstration of tobacco smoke at the threshold made the point. Where before the smoke moved a quarter-inch, now it deflected less than an eighth.

That night the air was mercy. The grandfather’s breathing eased; the baby’s cough softened; the Morrisons stopped burning furniture. Fuel use per person fell by thirty percent compared to their previous consumption. Eirik taught them quickly and without ceremony—lash a temporary plank skin eight to twelve inches off the windward wall, stuff loose straw or hay into the gap, hang blankets inside, and make a vestibule. It was not elegant work. It was desperate and plain as hands. Harwick did the first retrofit on his north wall with bailing wire and rough boards. In forty-eight hours his pre-dawn interior temperature rose twelve to sixteen degrees. That was enough to stop frost where it had been forming every night.