Off the Rails

In every process -- or maybe just in many processes -- there is that moment where it all can, to use a train metaphor, go off the rails. One moment, everything is fine -- under control, exactly as it should be, utterly predictable -- and then, in an instant that is sometimes imperceptible and sometimes notable for its incredible clarity, everything is out of control, exactly as it should not be, and predictable only in its calamity.

Today, that instant was crystalline: standing the basement kitchen, making a note in my notebook, and smoke pours out of the coffee roaster. Roasting is generally smoky, but the smoke that is now filling the kitchen is unprecedented. For a moment, pen still in hand, I pause. It is beautiful, gray-black smoke, and some of it is filtering in boring straight lines into the exhaust fan. The majority of it swirls hypnotically into the kitchen. It smells pungent, like dry woodsmoke mixed with chocolate and some sort of essential oil that an old hippie might burn to cover up the scent of pot. The coffee roaster is still on the stove. The coffee is still in the roaster. It is popping, like that dry wood fire. The cell structure of the coffee beans is audibly breaking down. Soon, I know (from research, not experience) the flaked-off coffee matter and the oil that is pouring through the compromised cell walls will combust, probably very dramatically. The coffee, the stove, the roaster, the thermometer that I have jerry-rigged into the roaster, the notebook, and the man who was moments ago noting how well the process was proceeding will all be consumed in the fireball. It may even travel up the exhaust fan and billow out into the side alley. The fire trucks will definitely appear, perhaps in time to save the house.

Sometimes (though never in my experience playing with H-O scale model trains as a child) the train goes back on the rails.

I pull the roaster from the heat, coughing in the smoke. I pour it into the cooling tray atop a fan, forcing  cool air through the bed of beans. I set the roaster to the side, waving the smoke towards the exhaust fan. Both the roaster and the beans are still smoking, and for a moment, I fear that the beans are going to ignite the cooling fan, and that the resultant electrical fire will be unstoppable. But the smoke dies, and as it does, I station myself beside the smoke detector, waving the clouds away, fooling it with artificial wind. "What a fresh, autumnal breeze," it thinks in its robot brain, "everything is under control in this house. No danger of fire."