ORANGE, N.H. — When Gary Hamel woke up at about 11 p.m. on Tuesday to put more wood on the stove, his only heat source, “right off the bat I could smell something.”
“I glanced at the woodstove and saw the glow between the chimney and the wall,” the 67-year-old artist said in an interview on Friday.
Hamel doesn’t have a phone at his home on Tuttle Hill Road in the shadow of Cardigan Mountain, so he immediately ran to a neighbor’s house and alerted them to call emergency services.
“The police arrived very quickly and fire trucks from all over the place,” he said. “The fire department was there till three in the morning.”
The Canaan Fire Department didn’t respond to questions about the fire by deadline on Friday. A message left for Canaan Police on Friday was not immediately returned.
Hamel, the home’s sole occupant, was safe from the blaze, as was his work — paintings, prints, collages and assemblages — which is stored in his Canaan studio on Route 4 between Barney insurance and the now-closed Red Wagon Bakery.
Rescuing himself came naturally to Hamel that freezing night; he was even hurling handfuls of snow at the billowing, collapsing roof until firefighters arrived.
Just this past summer, he had resuscitated his career with a long-awaited new show in White River Junction after a prolonged health issue crippled his creativity.
“Maybe this is a new start,” Hamel said on Friday, which he spent rescuing what’s left of his childhood home. “Maybe this is heaven saying, ‘You’ve got to simplify this.’ ”
Still, the future is uncertain. Hamel said he doesn’t have home insurance. He doesn’t know if the house, built in 1968 by his parents Alice and Ozzie on 1.5 acres, can be made habitable. The property is assessed at $247,000, according to town records.
He grew up in the house and after leaving to study art, “it was a sort of independent study,” returned in 1985 and stayed there ever since.
Now, he doesn’t know if he would be better off in assisted living. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
But of all the uncertainties still shrouded in the smoke of Tuesday’s fire, one thing seems clear, and perhaps liberating.
“Maybe it’s time to sell the collection,” he said. “I thought for some years I’d like to live with less. This could be the most freeing thing.”
Hamel’s art collection, which spans 45 years and has around 500 pieces, was mostly unscathed. It includes work by other artists, ranging from close friends in the Upper Valley to a Matisse and a slew of Hiroshige prints.
“There are some valuable things,” Hamel said about his collection. “They’re only things. They’re only things.”
His collecting grew out of an oil painting of poppies he sold in his first show in 1980, realizing that it was patronage of artists that perpetuated creation of art.
“The other thing about collecting art is that having a piece was sort of like having my friend near me,” he said amid ash-dusted painting and smoke-stained photographs.
A group of fellow artists had turned out to help him pack up the collection in the blaze’s aftermath on Friday. Buoyed by their support, Hamel had returned to his damaged home in good spirits, even as water used to fight the fire had frozen over what was left of his furniture and other belongings.
“It was just like drop everything and what can we do,” said Lisa Rogak, an author who has known Hamel since the early 90s. “Which is the essence of the Upper Valley.”
Another longtime friend, Ashley Mills, organized a GoFundMe just hours after the fire, which just a couple days later swelled to over $25,000.
Hamel on Friday recalled the immediate aftermath of the fire. Just hours removed from the first smell of smoke coming from inside the wall behind his woodstove, he was trying unsuccessfully to sleep in a house offered as shelter by a friend.
Hamel made a gratitude list.
“I’m safe. I am not hurt,” he thought. “I’m fine.”