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Monthly Archives: February 2012

Rub-a-dub-dub, No Need for a Tub

27 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by Barbara in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

For as long as I can remember, I’ve showered to wake up, warm up and wind down as well as wash up; a hot shower is refuge and reward. Gary knew this, and perhaps he couldn’t be sure I’d ever feel at home without a shower. He fretted about making what had been more summer camp than cabin into a home in when he arrived here in June, just two-and-a-half months before I did; soon he wrote me he was building an addition to the cabin to house a shower and closet. I was pleased, of course, but felt a twinge; I’d never asked for a shower, but I knew the price, particularly in time, was dear.

Gary’s letters took me through his struggle to make a home for us from the day he returned to the cabin after two years’ absence, overwhelmed by decades of stuff and the memories it contained. Beyond the truckload of belongings he’d brought from San Francisco, Gary had enough in storage to fill a boxcar, and he actually did. The Alaska Railroad unhooked the boxcar from the train, he spent three days loading it, and when it arrived he spent another three days unloading it, filling his truck and horse trailer each time, making the thirty-mile drive down the gravel road to the cabin, unloading, and going back the next day. There was more to it than that, including a broken nose, but it was still only a small part of Gary’s challenge: to clean out the place and make a comfortable space for the two of us.

Gary got the place looking great by the time I arrived. This is the cabin's main room.

Summer days are long here, but summer itself is short. Gary had to prioritize work requiring unfrozen ground, temperate weather, abundant daylight, or any combination of these. Planting a vegetable garden, digging the foundation for the addition and for the shower’s underground drainage tank, building a small woodshed for firewood that otherwise sat on the porch, these things Gary had to do early. Making an outhouse seat – it was a simple squatter before – was a small job, but one he thought best to complete before I arrived. Building drawers, shelves and a cabinet in the kitchen gave him something to do on the frequent rainy days.

Gary had to bring in the shower stall and attach the drain before putting up exterior walls, but once that was done the shower room project gave way to more urgent matters. By then I’d arrived, and we had several multi-day trips to winterize my car, find warm clothes and skis for me, and buy a snowmachine and sled, solar panels, generators, wind turbines and provisions for winter. The cabin had never been used in winter, so Gary removed the blue metal roof, panel by panel, along with a number of squirrels’ nests, positioned new insulating foam board, and then reinstated the roof. He built yet another woodshed to accommodate the load of green birch we’d bought, and began splitting wood so I could stack it there to dry. We set up the wind tower; Gary installed the turbine and together we dug four-foot post holes for the platform we needed for the additional solar panels and managed to fix the heavy sixteen-foot six-by-six timbers in the holes with no major injuries. By this time in the season the sun was too low in the sky to reach the platform, so Gary finished building it but set aside the task of installing the panels.

The large woodshed going up.

Separated as it is from the main room with its hot wood-burning stove, the new addition is cold in winter. We close it off in extreme weather to retain heat where we need it most, but when temperatures dip much below zero we can’t imagine showering there. So priorities shifted to logging deadwood to refill firewood stores, installing the solar panels, keeping trails open and packed with the snowmachine, skiing and generally getting out to enjoy the season. With the upturn in temperatures recently Gary refocused on the new addition; he installed insulation, paneled the interior walls, built the closet and shelves, configured a workspace just big enough for his carving bench, and put finishing touches on the shower stall. He was going to paint the shower area, but previously-frozen latex paint never returns to its liquid state, come to find out. Last fall we bought a pesticide sprayer that holds three gallons, and after a certain amount of futzing it was ready to function as the shower’s mechanism.

This is the pesticide sprayer that serves as the mechanism for our new shower.

Meanwhile, we’d been making do with nightly sponge baths and the old-fashioned Saturday night bath in the galvanized steel tub. (See www.indeep-alaska.com/2011/09/27/complex-solutions-for-a-simple-world-part-ii.) Well, Saturday night for me, right before our Saturday night movie; Sunday for Gary. Gary loves his bath, reading or working Sudoku while he soaks.

I love how I feel after my bath; the experience itself is hardly relaxing. First I mix the water from one of the large stock pots on the stove with cold water or hotter water until I’ve got it just right. I kneel on a towel next to the tub and stick my head over it while Gary ladles the water onto my hair. (This sounds easy enough, but involves some rarely-used muscles to hold the position.) Once my hair is wet, Gary pauses while I lather up, then gives me a rinse. The once-weekly schedule means my hair is really dirty, so it’s rinse-lather-repeat. When we’ve decided my hair is clean and shampoo-free, I climb into the sudsy water and bathe. The process is much like any bath, except there’s no room to maneuver in the cramped space; how to get the soap to the harder-to-reach body parts is a puzzlement. When I’m done I really should rinse off the soapy water, but it’s not worth the trouble; I feel clean, and that’s enough. Of course there’s still the matter of the tubful of dirty water; we can empty it right away or trip over it until we do.

Shower, sweet shower. The room is small, so I couldn't get any farther back to take the photo!

But now we have a shower! We just fill the pesticide sprayer’s reservoir with water, pressurize it by pumping the handle maybe 150 times, carry the sprayer into the shower and, voila!  The hose is long enough to hook the nozzle up so it sprays down like a standard shower head, or it can be used like a flexible European shower handle. The nozzle works much like a miniature gas pump; it can be set for continual spraying or not.

I can shower as long as I want with about two gallons, and there’s always at least that much water warming on the stove. The water drains to the underground tank, so I can just relax when I’m done. It’s not the same as the kind of showers I’ve known and loved before — nothing’s the same here. But I guess that’s the point.

Happy Leap Year! Ella spotted the elusive snowshoe hare for me. The hare's not posing; he thinks I can't see him!

Sunrise: 8:11 a.m.
Sunset:  6:06 p.m.
Weather:  High 30°, low 16° and snowing. We’ve gotten about six inches of snow since Saturday night.

Ten Things I’ll Miss About Winter and Seven Things I Won’t

17 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by Barbara in Daily Life

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

warm woolen mittens, winter solstice

“Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes” aren’t nearly as lovely as the ones that hide yellow snow. And you won’t find me singing about warm woolen mittens, which are just straitjackets for hands; if they didn’t rhyme with “kittens,” I truly doubt Julie Andrews would have sung about them either.

“Winter solstice marks the death of winter,” Gary wrote me years ago.

Early evening colors

I feel the truth of it. Daily life now reflects the tone and tempo of longer, warmer days. We don’t rise early, but we do rise earlier, usually before 8:30; we still fix dinner shortly after dark. A surprising number of hours intervene, temperate and bright, perfect for wood gathering, skiing, snowshoeing, all sorts of outdoor work and play. We’ve rediscovered lunch, irrelevant since sometime in November. When I moved here, I had no idea there would be so much to love about winter, or that I would actually worry about its passing. Here’s what I’ll miss most:

Our resident moose calf is about eight months old and has lost his (or her) mama.

1)      A constant fire in the wood stove, which can be a great slow cooker or hot fire for baking, as well as a hot water heater; it keeps us warm and its dancing flames are a joy to behold.

2)      Long underwear. It may not be a joy to behold, but it’s no worse than sweats or yoga pants when company comes unexpectedly, and it’s incredibly comfortable.

3)      Slow mornings and long evenings spent in front of the fire in our long underwear.

Sundog at sunset

4)  Sunrise and sunset extending through most of the short day, with occasional sundogs in between.

5)      Animal tracks in the snow. We follow the comings and goings of caribou, fox, wolverine, martens, voles and mice, and the snowshoe hare whose presence has brought a lynx to the neighborhood. We have a resident moose calf whose mom disappeared a week or so ago, and see him (or her) most days, but still count on tracks in the snow to see where he’s been and where he’s made his bed.

View under river's surface at my water hole

6)      The changing beauty of ice and snow.

7)      Snow travel: skis, snowshoes and sleds for hauling, sleds for riding, and mushers on sleds.

8)      Northern Lights. A Valentine’s Day aurora started around 9:00 at night and was still going strong when we gave up and went to bed at 5:30.

Valentine's Day aurora

9)      The frozen river, an ever-changing highway through a landscape shared only by the animals.

10)   Room in the refrigerator (which we turn off in winter) to store empty pots and pans.

I could only come up with seven things I won’t miss about winter:

I dropped this glove on my daily walk and found it the next day. A raven or fox or something thought it might be tasty!

1)  Without opposable thumbs, what am I? That’s how I feel bundled up in gloves and mittens, which fail to protect me anyway because I have to take them off to do anything requiring fine motor skills (like putting on skis or snowshoes); once I do, they disappear or fall in the snow and turn icy and cold.

2)      Yellow snow. Also, snow and ice on the outhouse seat in a layer so thin as to be indiscernible until it’s too late.

3)      Traveling to town and beyond: it makes going to the airport the day before Thanksgiving look pleasant. www.indeep-alaska.com/2011/12/16/three-days-to-thanksgiving/

4)      Congealed shampoo and cooking oil. Peanut oil stays liquid at lower temperatures than olive oil, but there are times when even it won’t pour out of the bottle.

5)      The way the icy door refuses to latch shut, blowing open when we least expect it.

They look awful, but if you trim the tops off the green bananas and store them in a cool dark place, the fruit will not get overripe for several weeks. These bananas were six weeks old.

6)      Trying to keep produce useable for months on end. Only carrots, onions, apples and bananas last more than a few weeks, but now — after nearly two months since we resupplied in Anchorage — the carrots don’t look great, I wash mold off the apples each morning before slicing them onto our oatmeal, and we’ve run out of onions and bananas.

7)      Stepping in my stocking feet on snow tracked into the house.

We could still have a cold snap, but change is in the air. The chickadees returned three weeks ago; temperatures have been hovering in the twenties and low thirties for two weeks now, with only quick dips below zero. Spring here is a season of snow and sun, and I’m sure it will be lovely. I’m just not quite ready to give up my winter pleasures.

Valentine's Day aurora view past the wind tower

Sunrise:  8:47 a.m.
Sunset:   5:32 p.m.
Weather:  High 26°, low 18°, mostly cloudy and calm.

Small Victories

10 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by Barbara in Daily Life

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Alaska off-grid living, Glossary of Alaska Terms, woodstove baking

I once read that happiness in life is most often found among those who continually take on challenges, challenges small enough to make success achievable but not so small as to ensure it. Researchers found that happy people stretch themselves, maybe just a little, but often. Meeting the tests successfully more often than not, their sense of achievement, self-determination and self-assurance grows, and this seems to lead to happiness.

Work of any definition can be fertile ground for pursuing happiness through challenge. I was lucky to have mentors in my career who fed me a steady diet of challenges I could (with their support) manage successfully often enough to get beyond my failings and not infrequent failures. My challenges now are, arguably, much smaller; they are surer of success, and in success or failure negligible in their impact on others. In a recent post (www.indeep-alaska.com/2012/01/30/division-of-labor-2) I mentioned a few: learning to build a fire, drive a snowmachine, stack wood, and can berries.

My second attempt at woodstove yeast bread, a little oddly shaped as I had to flip it over to brown the top.

I’ve been learning to bake atop our wood stove. With varying degrees of success I’ve made pumpkin and cranberry-orange quickbreads, chocolate chip cookies, brownies, sweet potato biscuits and lasagna. I finally conquered my long-standing fear of baking with yeast by attempting French bread. The first loaf was heavy and dense, successful mainly as a butter-delivery system and because it had been ever so long since we’d had bread. But the second loaf and all that followed were really good, excellent even. The big surprise was how easy it is, yet it took so long for me to try. (It’s so easy, in fact, I was making a loaf a day in hopes of freezing a supply, but had to stop. We were eating most of it hot off the stove, a daily feast of refined grain slathered in butter.)

Homeward bound, looking upriver as we return from logging

This week I’ve been learning to tie knots, and was pleased with myself all out of proportion when I used a bowline knot to secure my snowshoes (I wasn’t wearing them!) to the sled I was hauling behind the snowmachine. That was another first: as Gary led the way downriver to the woods to do some logging, I followed in his old snowmachine, smaller and less stable than our new one. I’d never driven it before — never driven on river ice either, for that matter — and Gary had warned me the machine tips easily. So I declined to try when he suggested it last week. When he mentioned it again yesterday, I felt ready. Snowmachines have seats; at least they look like seats and feel like seats, but God forbid you actually sit down. I had to stand or put one knee on the seat in order to shift my weight quickly enough to stay upright through uneven snowdrifts and curves. On the return trip I carried a sled full of skinny logs we’ll use as poles, which Gary had carefully tied down. Good thing he did: I was so focused on the path ahead, the whole load could have slipped off and I wouldn’t have noticed. It didn’t, of course, and we all got home without incident. It’s a victory of modest measure, but satisfying still.

Home from logging with both snowmachines

In my past life, when free time was in short supply and home life unhappy, I found it difficult to extend myself. Baking a loaf of bread seemed too much to attempt. I did take up running, a fair challenge. But that was nearly twenty years ago, and it’s no coincidence I wasn’t working at the time.

I’m proud of friends and family whose work touches lives, directly or indirectly, and in so doing contributes importantly to the larger world. It isn’t only by comparison that my victories here are small, their impact isolated. But these little victories change me. One at a time they broaden my understanding of the possible, bring me joy and renewal, and ready me for challenges — great and small — that lie ahead.

Spruce grouse in a spruce tree in our yard

Sunrise:  9:06 a.m.
Sunset:  5:14 p.m.
Weather: High 32°, low 24°, breezy with occasional snow.

NOTE: I’ve added a glossary of Alaskan terms to the website as a separate page at www.indeep-alaska.com/glossary-of-alaskan-terms/. Enjoy!

Return of the Sun and Making the Grade

02 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by Barbara in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Return of the Sun

On Tuesday, January 24th, I used my red pen to record one of the year’s highlights: for the first time in months, sunlight streamed through the kitchen window.

Winter solstice is a tease. It took four days after the solstice to gain one minute of daylight. But now, more than a month later, each day is about six minutes longer than its predecessor. That may not seem like much but it adds up quickly, and the shifting rhythm of the day keeps me off balance. I find myself ready to settle in for the evening with an hour of daylight to spare, or I forget to start dinner until dark, not soon enough when the freezer’s operating at thirty below. Our shortest days were four hours and thirty-two minutes long, and today we have seven hours and eighteen minutes of daylight.

Sun on the riverbed at 3:37 p.m. on January 23rd, the day before it finally streamed through our window

We’d been watching, wondering when the sun’s arc would rise over our hill high enough to hit the window. We’d seen sun hit the trees and riverbed, but we’d had no direct sun since November and no wind for weeks.  That left us dependent on our gas generator to charge the large (128-lb.) batteries we draw from when we use electricity. But when the batteries wouldn’t hold a charge, Gary discovered one was dead. The end result — which is all I fully understand — is that we can use as much electricity as we want for the six hours it takes the generator to run out of gas (it holds a gallon and a half), but without the generator we’re limited to the radio and maybe a quick check of email or brief use of an electric light. That is, unless we get sun on the solar panels or a good sustained wind. We’re comfortable working in the dimmer light of our propane lamps and staying offline for a couple of days at a time, but eventually our tools, computers and cameras need charging. The generator is noisy and keeps us glued to our computers as we work to take full advantage of it, so we’d rather not use it. With the return of the sun, Gary focused on putting up the additional solar panels he’d bought last fall. On the 24th we began work in earnest.

“Do you want to stay on the ground or work up on the platform?” Gary asked as we prepared to hoist the set of eight panels onto the twelve-foot high platform.

We got the panels up! Gary is fixing them to the platform before connecting them.

“I can guide them, but I can’t lift them,” I answered, assuming that would mean staying on the ground.

“OK, climb up then,” Gary replied.

Oh, well. He pushed as he climbed, I guided and supported the panels with a rope, and Ella looked on, emitting worried whimpers.

Tools freeze to the platform, hands stiffen in the extreme cold. It was about 38 below here.

Gary’s work was slowed by the weather, which stayed between twenty below and forty-five below the days he was outside. When I went up the ladder to help him mark a metal brace for cutting, the felt pen tip iced up. Wire becomes inflexible and brittle, tools freeze to the platform, and metal is so cold to the touch that it burns. Gary was in and out of the cabin every few minutes to warm up or cut a piece of metal or wiring, or to do small tasks that in any other weather he would have done on the platform as he worked, like finding the right bolt from his bucket of nuts, bolts and screws. We didn’t know we’d see temperatures rise nearly eighty degrees this week, so he pressed on. He finished the wiring around midnight a week ago Friday, and the next day we woke to clear skies and eight new (used) solar panels feeding the batteries.

Making the Grade

Heavy equipment crosses the bridge

Months ago we heard a rumor in town that the military, or possibly a mining company, was planning to have our road plowed this winter. We weren’t sure what this would mean to us. If it were actually plowed, we might have trouble getting to town by snowmachine, riding on the less stable shoulder. We have Gary’s diesel truck here, but it doesn’t like the cold.

Gary took Ella up the road Tuesday morning last week, and when he returned he simply said “Go check out the road.”

The grader followed the heavy equipment out, leaving the road smooth again.

The machine had come and gone, leaving a hard-packed surface so smooth I could almost skate on it in my mukluks. A grader normally pushes, whereas this machine was like a Sno-Cat dragging behind, but for lack of a better term, I’ll call it a grader. It was preparing the road for the military or mining equipment.

A few days later, once the smooth road had set up, we saw the grader heading east, followed by huge semis with tracks replacing the tires, which made a mess of the grader’s work. The crew has been back and forth a few times since then, even carving a graded path to our snow shelter outside the campground as it made a U-turn. The other day the equipment haulers carried a load west, toward town, with the grader (mercifully) following. Today they headed east, apparently headed back for another load.

Sunrise:  9:30 a.m.
Sunset:   4:38 p.m.
Weather: High 28°, low 26°, high winds, light and blowing snow. This is 76 degrees higher than it was at -48°, where we stood most of the day Sunday.

Ella checks out the smooth road.

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