Bear Paw Meanderings
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Last night when I turned off my light on the night stand and prepared to go to sleep, I laughed out loud. Someone would think that to be very strange to laugh when turning off a light. But not to me.
Years ago I had a cabin up by Baldy on Beaver Creek that did not have electricity. At the time I was teaching in Glasgow and I went into Markles hardware one day and found an “Aladdin Lamp” for sale. Now I did not know what an Aladdin lamp was but it had a large and fragile wick and it came with directions.
I filled it with kerosene and lit the lamp one night and it just smoked and smoked even more. That was my experience with that lamp for several years. I vowed that if I ever got electricity I would quickly turn that lamp into electric and laugh every time I turned it on.
Much later in my life when I had another cabin that did not have electricity, I learned much about Aladdin lamps and saw what I had done wrong. First, where we live you need a tall chimney on your lamp to make it work at all. Then, when you light the lamp, be sure and let it warm up for at least twenty minutes before turning it up. Do all of that and you will have the equivalent of a sixty watt light bulb in your living room. I did all that for years and had success maybe half the time.
The best light ever for me is just a plain kerosene lantern. It does not provide much light but enough to read a book with in a dark room if the light is positioned correctly next to the chair.
Turn that light too high and it, too, will smoke you out.
At the School House Cabin on Clear Creek we had a Coleman pump type lantern hanging from the rafters. That lantern put out some light but it hissed and hissed so much it was way too noisy. Best of all about that lamp was that when turning it off and going to bed, the lantern took a about four minutes to shut off and that made for time to get snuggled into our various sleeping bags strung on World War II bunk beds around the cabin.
Well, it is night and getting dark and I am going to stop talking about lamps I have known so I can rush up to my bedroom and turn on the dreaded Aladdin so I can turn it off and laugh out loud one more time!
