As winter finally curled its icy fingers around Western North Carolina, the furnace beneath our mountainside home let loose its final warm, comforting breaths. The cold outside and the cold inside joined forces, challenging my wife and I — along with visiting relatives and friends — to find ways to generate warmth as the holidays and a wedding occupied our lives.

There are a host of cliches and old sayings to describe how things tend to go wrong at the worst possible times, and I was relying on every one of them — along with a few choice words I hope my kids will forget — as repairman after repairman tried to coax the furnace back into heat-spewing mode before folks began arriving. It was all a total waste of money and time, something akin to the fad diets and exercise regimens that began Jan. 1 and have already suffered unceremonious deaths.

I like to think of my wife and I as “do-ers,” people who do not like to live life vicariously. Whether we are able to or not, we try to be in the action, doing the things we read about or dream about. We also enjoy dealing spontaneously with whatever situation arises.

That philosophy, though, also allows me to rationalize away the fact that I am a somewhat unorganized person. I put up a facade when co-workers and others tease me about this, but I know the truth. A look at my desk renders my defense pointless. Perhaps someone once told me about preventive maintenance on furnaces. I’d forgotten. Now I’ll remember — don’t wait until it’s cold to make sure your furnace is working. If anyone has a day or two to listen — and a warm pot of coffee in a well-heated room — I will gladly go into detail.

As I write this, a friend’s old electric heater is whirring away in our bedroom, its miniature heat coils resembling the copper tubing of a moonshiner’s whiskey still. The 50-year-old technology keeps my hands from going numb as I beat down a deadline on my sleek laptop that will be outdated in another year. Downstairs, three more heaters  two borrowed — are doing their job.

The fireplace during this holiday season has been much more than a ceremonial gathering place or a mood-setting luxury. The woodpile that was supposed to last this winter and into the beginning of next will be gone in a few more days. My young children are learning the finer points of how to stoke and kindle a fire, how to strategically place logs on coals to keep the blaze burning.

Like the settlers of old, we get the house relatively warm before bed  with sweaters and long pajamas on — only to awake cold, piling on layers as we begin the cycle anew. On one particularly cold night last week the kids changed into their pajamas in front of the hearth, each taking turns as I warmed their clothes by the fire before they put them on. The small details of staying warm have quickly become second nature — wood always on the porch, the oven left open after cooking, doors to unoccupied rooms shut, quickly going in and out to save heat, layers of clothing piled by the bed, slippers and socks always nearby.

The thought that almost all people living in cold climes existed like this for eons has stayed on my mind over the last few weeks. The Danes and Vikings, the Indians of our northern plains, the Cherokee right here in our mountains. Life in winter must have been, mostly, a matter of moving between being cold and warm places, a migration pattern I now know well.

Really though, we have not truly suffered. Three weeks without a furnace is a mere inconvenience. I recently re-read John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, his book about the ill-fated Mt. Everest expedition of 1996. Remembering those harrowing descriptions of cold has had a warming effect. Another book I read a couple of years ago, The Birthday Boys, a novel about Robert Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition of 1912, will envelop you with cold that goes bone-deep. I recommend both as suitable bedside reading for anyone who might be feeling sorry about their own plight.

We have been lucky, though, because in many ways the time between Christmas and now have been among the warmest our family has ever known. My wife’s sister, Julie, was married to Joe on Dec. 29 in Waynesville. She is the youngest child in her family, the last sister to take the big step. My wife, my children and even I had a role in the wedding, and it was a truly meaningful event. As family and friends came to the mountains, we rekindled relationships, relived old times, created a whole new set of memories and even gained new relatives.

It was a fitting way to end 2001. As we continue our little insurgency against the cold and think dreamily of the soon-to-arrive new furnace, it is suddenly easy to see what it will take to get us through the days ahead — close family, good friends, and a big pile of wood.

(Scott Mcleod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com)