Leaving

It seems like everything requires more thought when you live simply, even leaving. Gregg and I left the cabin for our first-ever vacation last May, not a visit to see family, a real vacation. Living offgrid with the nearest neighbor eight river miles away requires a lot of forethought be given when getting ready to leave the cabin empty for two weeks. There are hungry, wild critters in the area, the occasional crazy person, and our dog to take into consideration.

Since we don’t have a refrigerator or freezer, in the spring, we have a cooler that sits right outside the front door where we keep fresh meat and vegetables, condiments, and cheese. We spent the last couple of weeks before our departure eating up everything that might go bad over the course of two weeks. The only thing left were some condiments in jars, so Gregg took the cooler downstairs into our storage area which will stay cool during our absence, and detour hungry animals away from the front door of our cabin.

High water when we returned home

Next, we had to make sure the cabin was clear of as much food smell as possible. The jug of old oil needed to be taken to town. The saved bacon grease needed to be used up and the entire kitchen scrubbed clean, including the stovetop. The container that we put eggshells in for compost was taken downstairs to the storage area along with the cooler. All dishes were washed, dried, and put away.

Since our trip would mean we would be away from the cabin when the river started to rise from the snowmelt in the mountains, we had to make sure everything below our lower deck was secured to higher ground (this is also why our greenhouse is on stilts). Sure enough, when we returned, the water was up to the third step!

All of our vegetable starts had to be replanted into their summer homes in the garden and greenhouse, and we made sure everything got a heavy watering the morning of our departure. Even with friends promising to stop by in a week to water things, they’re going to get pretty dry while we’re gone.

Bear Welcome-Mat

Finally, we shut the front door, leaving it unlocked because we’d hate for someone to break a window if they were trying to get into the cabin, and Gregg went around to the back of the cabin to collect the bear welcome mats, three by four foot pieces of plywood with 4-inch nails hammered through and then placed nail side up. We laid one of these in front of the door and one on the back side of the cabin where the deck meets the outhouse trail through the woods. We don’t know for sure if they deter bears, but it makes us feel better. Gregg did have a bear break into the cabin once after stepping on the board, and the bear tracked blood everywhere inside as he continued to tear apart the kitchen cabinets. However, as luck would have it, this was not to be one of those times.

Nuka and Luggage loaded up

It’s an eery feeling as we drive away in a boat loaded down with luggage and our dog. Nuka, our Chocolate Lab, will spend the two weeks with some friends in town who also have a dog. We considered taking her with us, but that’s another $200 airfare and limits our freedom on vacation. She ended up having a terrific time with playmate Kona, a Miniature Blue Heeler.

Planning ahead is a part of our daily life. Whether it’s making sure we take enough fresh meat home with us from town to last until our next trip in or keeping an eye on the weather so we don’t get caught on the river in a storm, forethought is the one necessity for living our simple life.

Electricity

Electricity: a form of energy resulting from the existence of charged particles (such as electrons or protons), either statically as an accumulation of charge or dynamically as a current OR a state or feeling of thrilling excitement.

Our 2,000 watt Honda generator brings us both sides of that definition. The cost of the generator, other than its $1,200 purchase price, is $5.25/gallon of gas, oil changes every 200 hours, and general maintenance, including a heater to help it start in the double-digit sub-zero temperatures of winter where we live. It costs us approximately 75 cents per hour to operate, probably more.

Gregg usually starts the generator when he gets up in the morning so he can check his email and Fantasy Football teams. I get up about an hour after he does and check my emails, Facebook, and Instagram (I call it GrandGram because that’s where I usually see the latest adorable videos of my grandsons). The morning generator also provides us light over the kitchen table and in the kitchen area where Gregg cooks breakfast. However, we do have battery-operated, under-cabinet lighting for those quiet mornings when we don’t want to turn on the generator. It’s just enough light to make coffee in the depths of winter, when the warmth of a kerosene lantern offers a soothing glow to read by.

During the school year, I usually teach some online classes during the day or sew. During the summer, I use electricity less, having no classes to teach and wanting to spend more time outside, in the garden and greenhouse, or just reading and writing. We use the generator an average of 12 hours per day in the winter and 5 hours per day in the summer. Outside of that, we are without electricity.

What do we need electricity for? Vacuuming. Cooking and cleaning on cloudy days. Internet. Sewing machine. Charging tools such as cordless drills and saws. I have a butane iron, and when I have sewing projects to do, I’ll spend one entire day cutting out patterns and ironing them without need for electricity, so that on the days that I need electricity, I spend all day sewing. I also watch Netflix or Amazon Prime while I’m sewing, trying to eek as much as I can out of that 75 cents per hour. Again, mindful living takes a lot of planning and forethought.

In the winter, when we turn the generator off at night, the intense quiet causes my ears to ring, but when I spend the night in town with a friend, the noise keeps me awake. I hear every toilet flush, every time the furnace turns on or off, the refrigerator motor. I hear the pipes making their midnight creaks, the 4-wheelers, snowmachines, and cars going past on the road outside the window, and I long for the ear-ringing silence of home.

In the summer in town, I hear village life. I hear children laughing and playing outside, way past Lower 48 bedtimes. The occasional drunken holler. The spray of gravel as a speeding 4-wheeler cuts the turn too sharp. A late freight delivery flying in from Anchorage. A medivac plane heading to Nome.

At home in the summer, when the generator is off and we finally climb into bed at midnight with the sun still shining outside and windows open to let the mountain breeze cool our tired bodies, the sounds of birds singing, ducks quacking, and fish jumping serenade us to sleep. There is no silence in summer, but rather songs of silence. In the wee hours of this morning, I heard the bird sounds rise sharply to a cacauphony, raised myself up on my elbows in bed to look out the window that serves as our headboard, expecting to see a bear across the river. I didn’t see anything amiss, but the birds were definitely agitated, even the ducks were disturbingly vocal. I snuggled back under the quilt, put a hand on Gregg’s back and as the chirping slowly returned to normal, I was lulled back to sleep.

The loud hum of the generator makes it impossible for me to hear what Gregg is calling up to me from the boat as he unloads the day’s supplies from town. Electricity makes it possible for us to operate a cable-system hoist hooked to a plywood cart on a wooden track and pulled with a winch up the steep hill from the river landing to our cabin, saving us from carrying 40-pound buckets of water and totes of supplies up 40-some stairs. He just built our “Sherpa” this spring because his knees and my back are starting to give out. Aging is not for sissies.

Electricity provides Amazon Prime Music when our one radio station is either off the air because of technical issues, as often happens, or the programming is undesirable, as in offkey acoustic artists that no one’s ever heard of or screamer rock bands. We do have an old stereo system, but the cassette player broke long ago and the CD player quit working recently. Gregg bought the stereo decades ago in a pawn shop in Anchorage, so I guess it’s lived its life to the end, now. I haven’t been able to convince him to part with those CDs yet. In 2017, I finally convinced him to put his cassette tapes in a rummage sale. Not one single tape sold. I’m not sure anyone would buy CDs nowadays. We tend to be a little behind the times.

A lack of electricity does not equate to a lack of excitement. Having the choice of whether or not to have electricity is actually a luxury, not a deficit of some sort. Having control over the mundane sounds that permeate most people’s lives to the point where they don’t hear them gives us a sort of peace. If you have never had the experience of being miles and miles from the nearest road, the nearest motor of any kind, the nearest grid of any kind, you have no knowledge of the term “peace and quiet.” It is the kind of peace that passes all understanding. It is the natural quiet of Mother Earth.