It’s like Tom
Fleet doesn’t know what he’s got in his hot little hands.
Or maybe it’s that dry ice—the must-have of heavy-metal roadies
and scary-movie set decorators—is just so been-there-done-that for
Fleet that he simply can’t share the enthusiasm we everyday
Halloween-lovin’ schmucks feel about the stuff.
“Yeah, I sometimes use it at Halloween,” he says. “I haven’t for a
bit. I don’t have young kids anymore.”
Fleet is sales manager at Praxair. No, of course you’ve never
heard of it. Because it’s one of those businesses burrowed away in
Dartmouth’s Burnside Industrial Park that supplies the kinds of things
you never need to think about—namely, atmospheric gases like oxygen,
nitrogen, argon and helium.
And, as it happens, carbon dioxide.
Big deal, you say. I make it every day. I just breeeeathe it out of
my cakehole.
True enough. But you don’t have it in liquid form, and you can’t
compress it into solid 50-pound hunks then custom slice it into
one-inch nuggets for people to stick into cauldrons or pumpkins or
whatever else they feel like making look like the “Thriller” video.
That’s the exciting part of dry ice: When you put it in water and it
starts to sublimate, which, Fleet explains, “is when it boils off from
the block and it turns into a gas.” (Not to be confused with the
decidedly un-exciting part of dry ice, which is its use in labs and
hospitals for preserving samples. It also gets stuffed into dry ice
blasters and propelled at walls to remove mould or soot, which I find
slightly more interesting than sample-shipping, but nowhere near as
awesome as chucking a few—oven-mitted—handfuls of it into a
water-filled lobster pot on my front lawn and watching my yard turn
into creepy-town. Preferred pre-creepification activity: a screening of
John Carpenter’s sublime 1980 horror film The Fog.)
Of course, Tom Fleet probably won’t do any of that.
Sure, he knows a lot about it: “Here’s a little interesting
tidbit,” he offers. “It exists in three states, that would be liquid,
solid and gas…. Kind of like water, although there’s no residue—as
opposed to water where there is a puddle, right? With dry ice there’s
nothing left.”
But Fleet’s been at Praxair 15 years and he sells the stuff every
day. Ho-hum.
“Seems for the most part to be keeners,” he says, “people who have
parties on a Friday night.”
How many zombies-to-be will descend on his door, Fleet says, depends
on what day of the week Halloween falls. This year, with Allhallows on
a Saturday and Praxair closed on the weekend, it’s anyone’s guess.
The company doesn’t advertise at Halloween, and if Fleet is worried
about those $60 Canadian Tire fog machines with their separately sold
liquid “fog juice” taking away his business, he’s not letting it show:
“I’m not actually familiar with what they have going there at all.”
And who needs non-toxic fog juice anyway? Don’t you want a little
danger in your Halloween?
Dry ice is -78 degrees Celsius. You need gloves to handle it, and
putting it into a drink, Fleet says, “is definitely a no-no.” And
there’s not only esophageal frostbite to consider if you accidentally
swallow a piece. “Because it’s so cold it could shatter the glass.
Things get really brittle when they get that cold.”
Fleet suggests the front-yard cauldron set-up or carving a pumpkin
and putting a small container of water and dry ice inside.
He also suggests partiers probably shouldn’t inhale too much of the
vapour. “It displaces oxygen,” Fleet says. “If you were in a confined
space and you had a big, big quantity, that would be a problem.”
Still game? Toss a cooler in the trunk (simple Styrofoam will do)
and brave the Burnside maze. No need to call ahead. Praxair can
compress and slice a 50-pound block in 10 minutes. Er, wait—“maybe
less than that,” says Fleet. It’s a buck a pound with a 10-pound
minimum.
That’s probably not enough for KISS (whose Halifax concert Praxair
supplied), but it’s enough for a party. Go for 20 pounds if you’re the
better-safe-than-sorry type, but you’ll probably be waking up November
1 hungover and worried your apartment has been transported to
the surface of Venus.
Which, if you think about it, is pretty friggin’ cool.
Just imagine…Tom Fleet could wake up that way every day if he
wanted to.
Contact Praxair
40 Gurholt Dr
Halifax, NS B3B
(902) 468-1666 (yeah, that’s right one-6-6-6)
This article appears in Oct 29 – Nov 4, 2009.
For extra fun, add a little detergent to the water with the dry ice and you get fog-filled bubbles. Or, drop some dry ice in a balloon and tie it off and watch it inflate. Or, put a chunk of dry ice in a small hard-plastic sealable container (like a film canister or smaller) and hide it in a co-workers garbage can and wait for the “POP!”. Or, using the same principle, you can build a dry-ice rocket.