The Radon Room

Most houses don't have a Radon Room, but we are lucky. This building, our home, was built on a concrete slab, they say, and when a house is built on a concrete slab, there's not much separating it from the bare-bones of Mother Earth. Traditionally, houses in New England are built upon a more three-dimensional sort of foundation, which are known as cellars. Cellars serve many purposes, including protection against geological shifts such as Frost Heaves, the phenomenon which in the wintertime causes our lead-footed friends, family and neighbors to slow down dramatically as they cross over that frustratingly corrugated patch of road down there by the Niles'. Cellars also insulate the house from beneathe, by existing in a state of perpetual emptiness, except when we store our bicycles down there, and maybe the gas grill, which we'll bring up come springtime. Actually, there are usually many items in the cellar, and sometimes they get wet, because sometimes cellars flood. Sometimes there are monsters, too, because cellars are poorly lit. The point being, though, that the cellar is a place where all the things we don't want in the house can go to feel like they're in the house, but really aren't, i.e. cold air, geological destruction, outside things, grimey water, evil, and less notably, yet ever so importantly, Radon.

New England houses are also traditionally furnished with poorly insulated windows. Many in the world might consider this a flaw in such a climate as ours, but there are two good reasons why it's not. Firstly, this feature allows cold air to get in, at least a little, so that we can have fires in our woodstoves in the winter, and snuggle up all cozy and content with hot cocoa and a book, and maybe stay there for 5 or 6 months, which is important to the well-being of Northerners. Secondly, the draught from the windows is evidence that air is flowing through the house, cleansing it of impurities and keeping it fresh as a brand new box of Cheez-Its, in a very 'Feng Shui' sort of way, and everyone knows Mainers won't do anything unless it's Feng Shui compatible. Having a draught going through the house is clearly as good a feature as the basement, and could even be said to be in cahoots with the great cavernous entity below, preventing anything that happens to get into the house from staying there for too long, diffusing potential danger to the inhabitants of the house. You might imagine the sedintariness that might overcome a house, and maybe even kill it's dwellers if the house had properly insulated windows.

So clearly you can see that the early architects of New England were thinking only of The People when they built their 'Cape Cods' and their 'Saltboxes.' Clearly each design that we now take for granted, and even sometimes complain about, is characteristic of perfection. But then some west-coastie comes along with his fancy pants ideas and 'new age' and 'environmental' concepts. He makes the coolest house ever. He makes the house that any creative entity in his or her right mind would love to live in, even if just for a moment. He comes, and he builds this house, our house, as it were, on this concrete slab, which cracks in the turmoil of Maine winter, and the yet-unnoted-upon tightly-sealed windows, and thinks the world of it and himself. But you see, in warm climates, windows do not need to be well insulated, because, well, isn't it obvious? So, this striking young lad from California, who noticed the draught in his cousin's uncle's brother's wife's house in Dover-Foxcroft, thought himself quite wise to build a draught-free house, quite energy-efficient indeed, as if the natives had never thought of it before. You can see why the tourists should watch themselves before getting too keen on making changes to our fine state. It's just like when the Brits colonized Australia and decided to build all the new houses with illustrious and large south-facing windows.

Additionally, Maine is a state consisting of a great Granite pluton. That is, there are rocks everywhere; in the street, in the woods, underwater, underground. Ledge is what we call it when it's underground, and it's fun when it curiously pokes its head up some spring and all of a sudden the children have new terrain on which to set up their GI Joes and Barbie Dolls. Aroostook County Barbie never caught on in the rest of the country. But usually the ledge stays underground, and what you don't realize is that it's toiling. It's coming up with a plan, just like the man who thought of Panama Canal. It's there thinking, not about pleasing the whims of children, but about causing them great medical misfortune, and not just in the form of skinned knees and stubbed toes.

No. The granite is thinking RADIOACTIVELY! It is devising ways to get into the house, no doubt, how to deceive its great enemies, the Cellar and the Poorly Insulated Windows. Most of the time, it fails, but in the event that a house is created with little-to-no cellar, and that little-to-no cellar happens to get a crack in it (as it most assuredly WILL if you live in a region with heavy frost-related ground shifting), and/or the house has poorly poorly insulated windows, such is ours, the granite sends in the Offense: RADON.

Radon is everywhere, but it doesn't matter unless it's confined, just like bad ideas and useless analogies. It is created when Uranium decays, and there is (or was-but now it's dead?) a lot of Uranium in soil and in rocks, like Granite. Really, there is a risk of it EVERYWHERE, and there is a warning put out by the federal goverment that goes a little something like this:

If you smoke and your home has high radon levels, your risk of lung cancer is especially high.

That's right. Especially high. That means that Radon's primary form of attack is a tumer, or at least the augmentation of an existing one, and so we feared only for our lives when we found that the radon level in our house was 7, which is not neutral as a lover of the pH-scale might think. Actually it is very high.

Fortunately for us, we at 9 Pine Needle Alley are a Social Democracy, so we submitted a referendum to the local House of Representatives, and then the Senate, and we all agreed that we didn't want to get cancer, especially from something not nearly as enjoyable as your common, everyday vices, like smoking or drinking too much coffee.

The problem was, though, that the government wouldn't fund us in our not wanting to get cancer. No one organized a walk, or sported green (the official color) ribbons. There was, however, a pretty good suggestion from our local Radon expert, which was to get a radon diffusing system. We did so, and the system is really nice, and works like this: a hole was drilled through the concrete slab, into the soil. The hole was shaped like female Radon to attract the Offending Radon, and lure it up into a Radon Refinery, which is kept in the Radon Room, underneathe the stairs in the house. The Radon Refinery mixes the radon with sugar and bleaches it white, essentially brainwashing it into assimilating with the rest of the air in the house. It works 90% of the time, and so now our Radon level is 4 instead of 7, but we'd like to get it down to at least a 2. Maybe we should eat more Subway sandwiches?

Despite the vague and varying tone of this piece of writing, Radon is a very serious (invisible) problem facing mankind today, especially in radically designed homes. The only invisible problems that are worse than Radon are Germs and Restless Spirits, both of which, unfortunately, we also have in our house. We need to be aware of the number of people who have DIED because of Radon and it's evil clan of overlords, Rocks. If you have stories about Radon, please write in and share. We want to hear your voice!