Inside Out
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Summers in Kansas City in the nineteen-thirties were so hot that my mother’s father moved his bed into the porch, which opened off the living room and was screened on three sides. My grandmother spent many hours there, too, mostly reading in a big wicker chair between a card table and a floor lamp. The house I grew up in also had a screened porch, which my parents added when I was eleven. That house had primitive central air-conditioning, installed by a previous owner, but running it was so expensive that my mother could seldom persuade my father to turn it on. In hot weather, the porch became our family room, dining room, playroom, and party room, and when I was in high school my girlfriend and I sometimes took my mother’s little black-and-white kitchen TV out there and turned up the volume so that we could hear “M*A*S*H” or “Love, American Style” above the droning of what seemed to be millions of cicadas. My own house, in Connecticut, has two porches, one screened and one not. The screened one is a great place to read on summer evenings. I once looked up from “Bleak House” and saw two black bears walking by, thirty or forty feet away. They looked less like bears than like men wearing bear suits.
During hot months in the era before air-conditioning, a porch was usually the coolest room in a house; now it’s often the hottest. I can tell from Google Earth that most of the screened porches I knew when I was a kid have been closed in, presumably so that they could be air-conditioned, too. Artificial climate control has become such a standard part of American life that to most people the loss doesn’t register as a loss, but it is one. My wife, whose name is Ann Hodgman, and I finally got air-conditioning a few years ago, after surviving thirty-seven New England summers without it, but we’re determined never to enclose either of our porches. One of them has recently become our favorite place to sleep.
Porches are semi-magical spaces, intermediate between inside and outside. Charlie Hailey, a professor of architecture at the University of Florida, has written—in “The Porch,” published in 2021—that porches embody “the benefits of public life, the thrills of nature, the atmosphere of weather, the exhilaration of coming and going, the calm of simply sitting down, the warmth of family and friends, and the restfulness of solitude.” For years, they also played a prominent role in American efforts to prevent, manage, or cure several devastating diseases, among them tuberculosis, influenza, and pneumonia. In many parts of the country, though, porches have either disappeared or ceased to serve anything like their original purposes. There are two comfortable-looking chairs on the front porch of a house not far from my house, but I’ve never seen anyone sitting in either of them. The porches that do survive constitute a fragile and weakening link to a past that most people have forgotten, if they ever knew about it at all.
In 2009, Hailey contributed a long article about porches to a scholarly journal called Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review. In it, he quotes from a passage in John Adams’s diary in which Adams describes sharing a bed with Benjamin Franklin in a tiny room at an inn in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a month after they had signed the Declaration of Independence. The room had one small window, and Adams asked Franklin to close it, because he was “afraid of the Evening Air.” Franklin, according to Adams, “began an harrangue, upon Air and cold and Respiration and Perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep.” Franklin’s theory, ahead of its time, held in part that colds are caused not by exposure to low temperatures or outside air but, Adams writes, “by breathing over again the matter thrown off, by the Lungs and the Skin.”
In 1776, and for a century afterward, many illnesses were believed to be caused by miasma, or foul-smelling vapors arising from swamps, excrement, polluted water, and the habitations of the poor. (The word “malaria” comes from “mal aria,” medieval Italian for “bad air.”) In the second half of the nineteenth century, though, anxieties about miasma began to be displaced by their virtual opposite: faith in the therapeutic value of keeping windows open. Florence Nightingale was a proponent of what became known as Nightingale hospital wards, in which beds were arranged in rows in rooms with lots and lots of windows, partly to admit light but mainly to increase the flow of outside air. In her book “Notes on Hospitals,” published in 1859, she writes that, in crowded wards with poor ventilation, “we are quite certain to have the air become so infected as to poison the blood not only of the sick, so as to increase their mortality, but also of the medical attendants and nurses, so that they also shall become subjects of fever.”
Nightingale’s book contributed to a broad change in thinking about the relationship between respiration and disease. From roughly the time she wrote until the development of effective drug treatments for tuberculosis—beginning with the discovery of streptomycin, an antibiotic, in the nineteen-forties—open-air sleeping was one of the most frequently recommended therapies for pulmonary ailments of all kinds. (More radical interventions for tuberculosis included removing ribs, surgically collapsing diseased lungs, and severing the nerve that controlled the diaphragm.) Some sufferers believed that breathing cold air would cure them or relieve their symptoms, and they spent winter days wrapped in blankets on lounge chairs on porches at facilities like the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium, in Saranac Lake, New York, which was founded, in 1884, by a great-grandfather of the cartoonist Garry Trudeau. Others sought relief by breathing hot, dry air; Scottsdale, Arizona, was known for years as White City, because of the many canvas tents pitched there by “lungers.”
In time, breathing itself came to be viewed as therapeutic. An article in Country Life in America from 1909 began:
“Sleep outdoors and be well.” This is the battle cry of an army of people who have “appeared in our midst” in little more than a year. They are twentieth-century crusaders whose Peter the Hermit is “oxygen.”
Foxcroft, a girls’ school in Middleburg, Virginia, which was founded in 1914, required boarders to sleep not in dormitory bedrooms but on open-air porches. People in the South had been sleeping on porches during hot weather for years, but Foxcroft students slept on theirs in cold weather, too, and they still do. “Sleeping porches are a distinctive part of our School culture and are instrumental in our mission to nurture healthy minds and healthy bodies,” the school’s Web site says today. Ann and I have a friend who graduated from Foxcroft in the seventies. She told me, “In the winter, we would dress up in our Lanz nighties and wool caps and heavy-duty socks and sweat pants, and cover ourselves with fourteen layers of blankets, but I loved it and, to this day, I keep a window open in our bedroom even when it’s freezing.”
During the influenza pandemic of 1918, which is believed to have killed fifty million people worldwide, health officials often urged people to sleep on porches or, at least, to keep their bedroom windows open. A homeowner whose house didn’t have a sufficiently well-ventilated space could buy a Korff Sleeping Porch, which bolted over a window and had screens, curtains, an awning, and room for a mattress. It was promoted by its manufacturer as “a big help in treating any disease—and especially necessary in the case of consumption.” (That word is treated nowadays as a synonym for tuberculosis, but for a long time it was applied to a number of pulmonary problems as well as to a general physical decline that sensitive, creative people were believed to be unusually susceptible to.) In “The Sleeping Porch,” a short film released in 1929, Raymond Griffith portrays an ailing stockbroker, whose wife, on his doctor’s orders, tells him that “sleeping on that porch is the only thing that is going to cure you.” He puts up a fight, but—spoiler alert—when the movie ends, he’s under several inches of snow. Parents who wanted to protect their children from flu and tuberculosis but worried about frostbitten ears could put them to bed in insulated hoods, which were sold for that purpose.
New Yorkers who live in old buildings heated by steam radiators often complain that they have to open windows during the winter to keep room temperatures in their apartments tolerable. Most assume that the cause is a flaw in the design of those buildings’ heating systems, but in many cases the excess heat was a deliberate response to the flu pandemic. Dan Holohan, in “The Lost Art of Steam Heating Revisited,” published in 1992, writes that, beginning about 1920, the authors of engineering manuals revised their recommendations for boilers and radiators in new construction. The changed specs called for equipment that was “large enough to heat the building on the coldest day of the year, with the windows open,” he writes. Those overheated buildings are, in effect, the remnants of an early theory about the prevention and treatment of respiratory disease.
Leland Ossian Howard was an entomologist on the staff of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He went to work there in 1878, and later edited the department’s journal Insect Life. In 1911, he published a book called “The House Fly, Disease Carrier: An Account of Its Dangerous Activities and of the Means of Destroying It.” In it, he mentions a “man who entered a dimly lighted railway restaurant and asked for ‘a piece of that huckleberry pie’ and was informed that it was not huckleberry but custard.” The man had misidentified the pie because it was covered with what Howard calls “typhoid flies.” At the time he wrote, flies were so plentiful in many parts of the country that they sometimes made kitchen and dining-room ceilings appear almost black. Horse manure—which abounded in New York and other cities until automobiles took over the streets—was a major contributor. So were horses that died in service, as thousands of them did every year. Because their corpses were so heavy, they were sometimes left to decompose until they could be pulled apart and removed piecemeal.
In warm weather, flies and other insects complicated the efforts of almost anyone trying to keep cool or to gain the putative health benefits of exposure to outside air. One defense, beginning in the late eighteen-hundreds, was flypaper, sheets of which were coated on one side with an oleaginous substance that lured flies, then permanently trapped them. A leading brand, invented by a pharmacist in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was Tanglefoot, a trade name that at one time was as familiar to American consumers as Kleenex and Xerox were later. Tanglefoot and similar products were used so widely that Allied soldiers during the First World War were told that they could identify the poison gas chloropicrin because it “smells like flypaper.”
Far more effective than flypaper was woven-wire screening, for windows, doors, and porches. The credit for introducing it is usually given to a company called Gilbert & Bennett, based in Connecticut. Benjamin Gilbert had started out as a leather tanner. Preparing hides yielded vast quantities of animal hair, and Gilbert’s wife and daughters wove some of it into screens for grain sieves. Sieves eventually became more profitable than leather. In the eighteen-thirties, Gilbert borrowed a carpet loom from a neighbor and began making the screens from metal wire instead. The company had many sieve customers in the South, and that market disappeared with the start of the Civil War. To stay in business, Gilbert & Bennett turned its inventory of unsold wire cloth into window screens. People had sometimes used cheesecloth or other fabrics to prevent insects from flying through open windows, but wire screens worked better, lasted longer, and were easier to keep clean. In 1893, the company exhibited its many screen-based products at the Chicago World’s Fair and promoted them in a souvenir booklet called “Wire Wonders.”
Woven-wire screening is seldom included in lists of nineteenth-century medical breakthroughs, but it belongs there. In 1897, Ronald Ross, a British medical officer who had lived in India, proved that malaria is caused not by miasma but by a parasite transmitted through the bite of a mosquito. That discovery, for which he won the Nobel Prize, in 1902, would have been less significant if screens didn’t make it possible to keep mosquitoes out of living spaces in the first place. (Albert Freeman Africanus King, a doctor who helped carry Abraham Lincoln out of Ford’s Theatre on the night he was shot, deduced the connection between mosquitoes and malaria at least fifteen years before Ross proved it. In 1882, he suggested protecting Washington, D.C., by building an immense wire-mesh enclosure over the city—less a serious proposal than an observation about cause and effect.)
Screens also contributed to the popularity of open-air sleeping. President William Taft had a screened sleeping porch built on the roof of the White House in 1910, and he and his family slept there on sweltering nights when they couldn’t escape from Washington. The following year, an article in the Rensselaer, Indiana, Evening Republican noted that a prominent resident of Kansas City had been sleeping on his porch for several years. According to the article, his wife said, “He liked it so well that our neighbors took up the idea and now of the 10 homes in the block only three are without sleeping porches.”
Many of the houses in my parents’ neighborhood were built not long after that, and I can tell from their fenestration that a number of them almost certainly had sleeping porches, too, since each has at least one second-floor room with multiple tightly spaced windows on three sides. My parents’ house originally had two sleeping porches, both upstairs, one east and one west. We never used either as the architect intended, although one of them opened off my parents’ bedroom and my mother slept there to escape from my father’s snoring. On the hottest summer nights, my sister, my brother, and I turned our own rooms into sleeping porches, by going to bed “upside down”: on top of the covers, with our heads at the feet of our respective beds, as close as possible to the screened, wide-open windows.
A couple of years ago, Ann and I began occasionally sleeping on our screened porch, on a queen-size foam mattress. Last year, I realized that, if we rearranged some furniture, we could turn the unscreened porch into a full-time sleeping porch. I bought a fourteen-inch-tall metal frame, to make it easier for two people in their late sixties to get into and out of bed. I also bought a king-size zippered, weatherproof storage bag, which is big enough to protect the mattress and all the bedding, including pillows and blankets, when no one’s using that bed. We just unzip it and roll down the top before we go to sleep.
The only remaining issue was bugs. That porch has a rustic railing, built a little more than twenty years ago from irregular lengths of unpeeled cedar; it looks like the web of a giant spider. Permanently screening in the opening would have meant removing or ruining the railing, as well as partially obstructing the view, so I bought a tent-shaped mosquito net, which was just large enough to enclose the bed, and hung it from hooks that I screwed into the ceiling. Mosquito nets, in one form or another, have existed for centuries, and they remain one of the most effective tools for fighting malaria, yellow fever, and other insect- and arachnid-transmitted diseases. (Ann has an entire mosquito-net suit, which she wears when she works in the yard.) But our mosquito net was, for us, an imperfect solution, especially if the wind was blowing, or one of us rolled over, or we had trouble finding an opening in the dark. Luckily, through the miracle of the Internet, I discovered MosquitoCurtains.com, a company that custom-makes heavy mesh screens that hang from metal tracks and can be pushed aside when they aren’t in use. I measured the porch and ordered one that day.
Mosquito Curtains was founded by Kurt Jordan, who spent eighteen years as a bond trader but came to hate the job. He made his first screen, for his own porch, with help from a local tailor, then eventually began making screens for other people. He enjoyed doing that more than he did working with Wall Street types, but perfecting the design and establishing the business took several nerve-racking years. He told me, “I remember my daughter saying, ‘Daddy, why do you walk around all night?’ ” Now, though, he employs eighteen or nineteen people full time, and sleeps well. We spoke on the phone recently. He said that, at that moment, they were working on a mesh enclosure for “a koi-pond fanatic,” who wanted to protect his fancy fish from raptors.
“We once used white shade mesh to make three projection screens for a guy in Guatemala who had a little drive-in theatre,” he said. He also co-invented a screen cover for the doors of passenger-filled airplanes parked at airports in the tropics. Mainly, though, he makes screen curtains for people who, like me, have an outdoor space that they’d like to keep bugs out of at least some of the time. Most of his customers install theirs on porches, decks, gazebos, or pool houses, but there are other possible uses, including transforming an ordinary garage into a pop-up porch or open-air workshop.
My mosquito curtain is nineteen feet wide and just under eight feet tall, and, unless the setting sun is hitting it straight on, it’s close to invisible. Installing it—with guidance from videos starring Jordan himself—took me parts of two afternoons. The trickiest step was using a provided cutting tool to insert half a dozen pairs of rare-earth magnets into sewn seams on either side of the end that opens and closes; the magnets are so strong I can make one stick to the back of my hand by holding another in my palm. Ann and I and our dog, a poodle, now sleep on that porch many nights when the forecast is between room temperature and six or eight degrees above freezing. We often hear coyotes or owls as we’re nodding off, and we are sometimes awakened by more noisy songbirds than I had realized live in our neighborhood.
When Kurt Jordan started his company, he wondered about the likely location of his market’s “fifty-fifty line”—the latitude that would divide his customer base in half. He told me that the line has turned out to be farther north than he would have guessed, and that he sells more mosquito curtains in Ohio than he does in Georgia, where he lives. Jerry Hogsette, a research entomologist at the U.S.D.A. who is based in Gainesville, Florida, told him that, because mosquitoes in the North have a briefer breeding season than mosquitoes in the South, more of them are usually active and biting at the same time. I spoke with Hogsette, too, and he said that some of the fiercest mosquito seasons in the United States are as far north as you can go. “In Alaska, they used to kill people by stripping them and tying them in canoes and sending them down the rivers,” he told me. “They were exsanguinated by the mosquitoes. You can also get large clouds that will suffocate animals in the field, because every time the animals breathe in, they fill their lungs with mosquitoes.”
Screens are such an effective low-tech, nontoxic, inexpensive defense against flying insects that you’d think you’d see them everywhere. But that’s not the case. My friend Lynn recalls visiting relatives in Eastern Europe. “They lived on a farm, and their house was really close to the barn, where they kept pigs,” she told me. “There weren’t any screens on the windows, and flies basically covered all the food they’d laid out for us.” At first, Lynn said, she and her mother couldn’t stand the thought of eating anything, but eventually they copied their hosts, and took quick bites while waving one hand above their plate. Lynn’s mother asked why none of the houses they’d seen had screens, and their host said, “How will the flies get out?” That trip took place in the nineteen-seventies, but Hogsette told me that screens are still relatively uncommon outside the United States. “It seems like a no-brainer,” he said, “but I’ve been on six of the seven continents, and I don’t know that I’ve seen screens just about anywhere but here.”
With COVID, porches actually have something like the medical value that people back in the sanatorium era erroneously believed they had, not because breathing porch air cures anything but for the reason Florence Nightingale deduced: breezes blowing through the screens make it less likely that the coronavirus will drift from one person to another. Before the first vaccines were available, Ann and I were visited by a friend who was worried about catching COVID and exposing his wife. He wouldn’t come into the house, but he was happy to sit at one end of our screened porch while Ann and I sat at the other: a pandemic living room. Sleeping behind our mosquito curtain feels healthy, too, though not for any scientifically provable reason. We both sleep better on the porch, somehow. There have even been nights when I haven’t got up to pee.
The appeal of a good porch is not species-specific. Our poodle, who is fourteen and is both deaf and blind, sleeps better on the porch, too, and often stays sacked out, pressed against Ann’s leg or mine, until seven-thirty or eight in the morning—a good hour longer than he usually lasts when we sleep inside. The house we owned before this one also had a screened porch. We kept a pillow-like dog bed in one corner, right next to the screens, and every summer the dogs we owned then, two miniature dachshunds, would spend hours curled up there, watching, listening, sniffing, sleeping. Early on a sunny morning in February, one of the dachshunds scratched at the door in the kitchen which led into the porch. I opened the door, and the dog ran to the dog bed. The temperature was in the low teens, and snow had blown in through the screens, but he climbed in anyway. Then he climbed out. I shook off the snow and went back inside. Ann and I watched from a window as he sat stiffly on the bed, studying the yard and (I assume) thinking wistful WTF dog thoughts about weather. After five heartbreaking minutes, he returned to the door and scratched to be let back in. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com