The Missing Stove Mystery

Wednesday, Sept 23 - The Missing Stove Mystery

While staying at the KOA cabin in Rocky Harbour, Newfoundland, strange and mysterious events occurred. This is a retelling of one of those gruesome tales…

After waking and having a shower in the early morning hours, I took it upon myself to prepare tea. The cabin, being a three-room building with a small kitchen containing only four drawers and two cupboards is easy to navigate. In no time at all, I had located the pots and pans. However, there was no kettle in sight so tea-making would take a bit of craft and ingenuity. Not a problem, I quickly formulated a new plan to boil water in a pot. But then, a mystery unfolded. For, after a carefully conducted search of the kitchen and a more extensive search of other parts of the cabin, I came to the well thought out conclusion that there was no stove. I informed Sonya of this mystery. She agreed that this was a very strange situation. After all, there were pots and pans so one would logically deduce that a stove would also be present. We had a mystery on our hands of Sherlock Holmesian proportion and since Benedict Cumberbatch was nowhere to be found, it would fall upon me to solve it. I vowed then and there to not rest or eat or sleep until the puzzle was unraveled. Or, at the very least, until the kids were up and it was time to go into town for breakfast.

Sonya suggested that there could be a stove outside.

A stove outside? What a preposterous notion. And yet… Sonya had unwittingly and inadvertently given me a clue, a small scrap of something worth considering. My great mind, sleep-addled though it was, went immediately to work. Yes the possibilities seemed too great to fathom but, I knew, they were not infinite and so my superior intellect would churn through those possibilities. I considered: outside there was a firepit but that did not seem to fit into this complex equation that I was solving so I quickly moved on to the second, and final possibility. The barbeque. Here something tugged at me. A vision began to from in my mind’s eye.

In the meantime, as if from a distance, Sonya was saying something about there being a stove on the barbeque but I did not have time for irrelevant commentary for I was locked-in on this great puzzle and, like a pit-bull, I would not let go until I had what I wanted, which, unlike a pitbull, was a solution!

In my mind’s eye, I began to picture the barbeque. Not the one that was just outside the door to our cabin, some four feet away from me but the one at home in Calgary. I have carefully honed the skills of the mind that within a few seconds I was able to picture a stainless steel form that vaguely resembled a barbeque that could easily be comparable to my barbecue at home. With this image in my head, and still blocking out any outside distractions, include the sound of my wife’s voice, I zoned in on what I was looking for. And I had it! That barbeque has a burner on one side, a propane burner that can be used as a stove. Eureka! A potential solution. Now, only one thing remained. I sprang to the door and whisked it open. Taking a step onto the balcony, I gained a clear view of the barbeque. Though it looked nothing like the one at home, it did have a propane burner inconspicuously attached to its side. Surely, this must be the mysterious stove that I had been hunting for all of these many seconds. Proud as a lion-tamer who had just faced-down his first big cat, I marched back into the cabin and informed Sonya that the stove had been discovered and that tea would soon be prepared.