Over the years, I have seen many a cold winter. Perhaps the coldest was in 1983-84 in Chinook, Montana, not that many miles from the Canadian border. Montanans refer to U.S. Highway 2 as "The Hi-Line" for a reason, and while Canadians may chuckle at us "Southerners" and our warm weather ways, 46 below zero Fahrenheit is plenty cool enough to frost your tootsies if you're not careful.

No, that is not an exaggeration. The night the mercury dropped that far, in December of 1983, was definitely nippy. In that kind of weather, you either have your car or pickup equipped with some sort of engine heater or it won't start. Except, sometimes, for those vehicles using the poor man's version, which is simply a plug-in hotplate--or warm plate, anyway--that installs between the battery and casing holding the battery.(Although nowadays it might be easier to find a "battery blanket" from JC Whitney.)

That is all we had for either the Honda Civic station wagon or the old Plymouth Fury sedan that year, and they started amazingly well. Thus, before this Hub got around to heating a house, it got your car to start on a budget.

That same winter, my (3rd soon-to-be-ex) wife and I lived in a small, single wide mobile home we were buying on lease option. Before the snow flew, I'd added a small (4' x 4') enclosed entryway, which did stop a lot of warm air from escaping when people went in or out, but the little mobile was not heavily insulated. Having lived in that part of Montana before, I knew much had to be done.

Heat was provided by natural gas and supplemented by a freestanding metal fireplace, one of those conical orange contraptions. Such a fireplace is not an efficient heat source. After searching through several area second hand stores, I managed to find and purchase a small cast iron stove designed to burn either coal or wood. Replacing the fireplace chimney with triple wall stovepipe (and one piece of sheet metal I had to shape by hand), the "new" stove was ready to go...sort of. There were two remaining problems.

The most dangerous factor was the stove's location. In order to utilize the same hole through the roof previously in play, the new beastie wound up sitting quite a bit too close to the wall for safety. Cast iron radiates serious heat, and older, cheaply paneled mobile home walls are not exactly confidence building insulators. Of course the installation was nowhere near code.

In a sense, code didn't matter unless a building inspector came around, which was not likely. Insurance? Who carries insurance? Still, the idea of getting through the cold season without burning our home down to the frame with us still in it...that did have a certain appeal. Hmm. What to do?

It took a while to figure it out. In the meantime, I had an old college friend who owned an acreage a few miles down the road. We also had an old, beatup Ford pickup and a working chainsaw. Danny was happy to have us clear out some old deadfall cottonwood. For a few dollars worth of gas and oil, plus a fair amount of sweat, we had a sizeable woodpile.

Additionally, someone mentioned a working coal mine that would sell coal to private parties at reasonable prices. We bought some, which turned out not to be the best burning coal in the world by a long shot. You had to have a fair amount of oxygen to make it burn fiercely hot, and the stove I'd put in had a clearly inadequate supply.

The oxygen supply problem was solved by drilling 32 quarter-inch holes, evenly spaced in a zig-zag pattern, through the front of the stove beneath the doors. To regulate the amount of air going through, you simply opened a front door and used a tool to move some ashes: Either up against more holes for less air, or away from a few holes for more air. Crude, but it worked like a charm. We now had a serious heat source to back up the gas furnace.

We were in Chinook because I had taken a job as a Child Protective Social Worker with most of my clients being Gros Ventre and Assiniboine people living on the Fort Belknap Reservation. One day shortly after our first early snowfall, I rode out to the Rez with my friend John Spence.

Note: John, if you happen to read this and would like to get in touch, I'd love to hear from you!

John needed to stop by his house and pick up something. What, I don't recall. What I do recall is the tinfoil that was hanging in one corner of the living room behind the woodstove, just a few inches away from both walls, forming a reflective corner.

I'm certainly not suggesting that anyone reading this Hub should attempt to heat their homes without conforming to code. I'm simply telling what happened. If the principles involved help in some way, of course, so much the better. That day, John helpfully pointed out what I had instantly realized: The four inches of free flowing airspace between the reflective tinfoil and the walls produced a true safety buffer.

How did it work? Simply put, heat bounced off the foil and warmed the living room instead of soaking into the paneling. The paneling, in fact, was actually cool to the touch.

Before bedtime that night, I had set up a similar Aluminum Curtain using nothing but a roll of Reynolds Wrap and a roll of Scotch tape to attach the foil to the ceiling. We got through the entire winter that way. True, our son refused to make his bed so that on that super cold day, he came home after school to find his pillow and one sheet frozen fast to the outer bedroom wall. The extreme cold had driven frost clear through to the inside of the dwelling.

Other than that, we stayed toasty warm on a nothing budget, saved the money we did not have, and greeted the early spring thaw with ear to ear grins on our faces.

True, I had run away from my 3rd ex-wife by the time all the snow had melted, but that is another story...for another time...and another Hub.

Thanks for reading,

Ghost32