Winter at the Homestead

Well, things sure have slowed down here since the summer.  Just before winter hit, we had a spell of really nice, warm weather.  It allowed us time to overhaul the engine in the moving truck, and Jeanne spent time every day, peeling the bark off of logs to be used for the timber frame of a future greenhouse/garden building we plan to build.  Here's a picture of her, peeling one of the last of the 40 or so logs we'd gathered.

It's amazing what she accomplished.  The pile of bark chips alone grew so big that it was taller than she was, even after we'd removed it once (and chipped it in the mulcher for garden paths).  Spread out over days and weeks though, a few logs a day, she said it was good exercise and very peaceful and meditative.  She'd usually arrive back at the yurt with a story about a Stellar's Jay that visited and talked with her, or a flock of turkeys that wandered by, scratching in the leaves.

We also both worked at cutting up, splitting and stacking several cords worth of firewood logs that we'd gathered from the national forest with a fuelwood permit during the summer.  We don't own a chainsaw yet, and possibly never will.  It's slow, harvesting trees and cutting them up with one and two person timber saws, but it's great exercise, and at the end of the day you feel so good.  I imagine if we'd spent the day running a vibrating, noisy chainsaw, the feeling at the end of the day would be totally different.  Here's Linc, sawing away.

We got to the point where if both of us did some sawing, then Linc split, and we both stacked, that we could process almost half a cord a day.

We drove down to Flagstaff, Arizona for Thanksgiving with Linc's sister and his mother for a few days, then back up, away from the San Francisco Peaks, through the sandstone canyons and past the pinyon-juniper covered slopes of Black Mesa, through the towns of Tuba City and Kayenta of the Navajo Nation, and back up into the Ponderosa and Oak mountains of our home.

Linc also finally got a chance to focus his attention for a couple of days on the vegetable oil powered VW Jetta diesel that had sat since we bought it in California back in June (and had the engine die on us in Flagstaff on the way home with it).  After a day or two of diagnostic work, and consultations with our Apache neighbor mechanic Dawn, we removed the injection pump and shipped it off to Ohio to have it overhauled.  Then the storm hit.

In a day and a half, it went from cold temperatures but dry to cold and over two feet of snow.  The winds during the storm itself were like nothing we'd ever experienced here.  We didn't sleep much the night of the blizzard, with the crashing noises of clumps of snow blowing off of the Ponderosa Pines and hitting the roof like mortar rounds, the wind roaring around and around in the trees, and the yurt occasionally inflating and then suddenly deflating with a loud pop.  In the morning, we looked out on an entirely different scene.

Here's our place from the driveway looking in, with the hoop greenhouse looking like a burrito, insulated in a thick blanket of snow.

Well, snow makes things different here.  Instead of peeling logs and processing firewood for exercise, we started skiing the canyon slopes below the yurt and shoveling snow.  But the snow was this bottomless powder without any base, so deep it was hard to get any momentum, and we'd hit logs and rocks when we sank in for a turn.  We switched back to running a few miles down the canyon entrance road and back, with sheetmetal screws threaded into the bottoms of our running shoes for traction.

Two days ago, while run/walking back up the steep, narrow, snow covered canyon road, a neighbor went by, waving happily.  Unfortunately, he didn't notice that his left wheels had gone off the road into the ditch.  We watched in concern as he gunned the engine and cut the front wheel to get out of the ditch, then relief as he made it out, then horror as he shot right across the road with all that momentum and launched off the other side into the 30 foot deep gully.  Luckily, the car hit a small Boxelder Maple, stopping it about 8' feet down the 45 degree slope.  Jim jumped out yelling "I'm OK I'm OK!"

He headed down the canyon on foot in hopes of reaching someplace with cell phone reception while we hustled 2 miles back up the road back to the yurt to get help.  When Linc returned, Jim's girlfriend had arrived, but in her haste to back down the hill in her car to call a wrecker, she went off the road too!  What a mess.  Two guys who we know as "Cheech and Chong" showed up in their enormous four wheel drive truck with chains on all four wheels and were able to pull Jim's girlfriend's car out of the snow, but Jim's required a wrecker to drag it back up the slope.  We somehow felt guilty about all of this, maybe we shouldn't be jogging on that road, but it's such a great hill climb on the way back up...

Well, back at the yurt.  Being in the yurt in winter is like being wrapped in a warm blanket on a cold night.  You can hear the sub zero wind outside, the snow pelting the roof and sliding off in great, noisy bursts, but inside it's warm, especially when you walk over and stand in front of the cook stove, with the pot of water murmuring away on top, and the aroma of a baking Buttercup Squash rising up from the oven.  And while we can hear the wind and the birds outside, the snow acts to muffle any sounds from civilization that we'd normally hear during the summer (vehicles driving by on the main road at the end of the cul-de-sac, a neighbor's generator humming).  Instead, it's quiet, and we feel like we could be 100 miles from the nearest people.  We feel like we're back in Gothic, four miles from the nearest plowed road, studying field guides again.  Just us, in a tiny yurt, with a huge supply of firewood, a root cellar full of vegetables, a storage box full of dry goods, a cistern full of water, but with a phone, internet and radio to stay in touch with everyone else.  It's a good feeling to finally be able to relax and slow down, and it feels like the right thing to do at this time of year.

One of our naturalist friends (from a stint of volunteering as naturalists introducing local elementary school children to the outdoors in September), taught Jeanne how to make pine needle baskets.  Jeanne, who's always been an avid crocheter, took to basket making right off.  She quickly made a basket to use for rising her sourdough bread in, and then immediately started in on a second basket, including learning how to make plant-based dyes to color the needles and the natural cordage that's used to lash the needle coils together.  Here's a photo of her first basket.

All of the stillness and the chance to do nothing in winter also makes you introspective.  You look back on the year and give thanks for all of the things that you've experienced.  I roll in the snow and run naked and yelling back into the enveloping steamy warmth of the wood fired sauna we'd built earlier in the fall and realize that this is all a gift.  The sauna is a gift, the snow is a gift, the trees that gave us the fire that heated the sauna are a gift.  Yes, we built the sauna with our own hands, but even those hands are a gift.  There's so much we all have to be grateful for.

But, any introspection always ends up looking forward too, not just backwards.  And for me, looking forwards brings worry (it runs in my family).  We're middle aged, we abandoned our "careers" almost a decade ago in search of lives with more meaning, and when we tried to return to them last winter we found that it's hard to go back.  It's not just remembering the skills, it's that we've changed, and it isn't where our hearts lie any more than it was when we left.  We'll probably still do it whenever we can to keep ourselves afloat I'm sure, but it does seem like we're headed away from engineering and physical therapy.  It's not that there's anything wrong with those careers either.  If our hearts were in it, we could do something really beneficial with those skills, and who knows, someday maybe we will.

But where do we go from here?  We've learned a lot in the last few years about what things are wrong with our civilization, about how good it feels to live very simply on small fraction of what the average American spends, meeting basic needs as directly as possible, and about how to connect with something wiser than our own minds (just sit outside for 45 minutes a day in one spot, day after day and you'll understand what I mean if you don't already).  But we still need an income to make it in this world.  I need to be involved in something meaningful on a community level and as a career of sorts.  Jeanne, a hermit at heart sometimes, believes she could probably be happy just homesteading, but I think I need the homestead and the community and good work to feel whole.  And, it still comes down to needing to make some money.  We haven't been able to find work in this area that is sustainable, that in doing it you're helping to grow something that is better instead of, like so many jobs, impoverishing an ecosystem or ruining the lives of other people or of future generations.  Heck, we haven't been able to find jobs here at all, nor have several of our unemployed neighbors.  So, it looks like we'll be moving soon.

Gosh, taking this whole homestead apart and carting it somewhere is going to be tough, but we've tried selling it as is, and so far have no offers.  So, move it we may.  We're looking now for land in a community of irrigated organic farms, ranches and orchards, in a valley surrounded by mesas and mountains, still in Colorado.  We'll keep the blog going though, so stay tuned.

We did get the veggie oil Jetta running again, two days ago.  The injection pump came in, Linc shoveled the car out and spent two days hovering around the engine compartment, occasionally running into the sauna to thaw out his hands.  Late on the second day, we primed the pump, charged the battery, and cranked it over.  Nothing.  Linc bled the injector lines and we tried again.  Finally, coughing great clouds of black smoke, the car came back to life.  Great!  But, the car is now about 100 feet from the nearest plowed road, needs a lot more work before we can be driving around on used vegetable oil, and it's too cold out for car mechanic work now, so we'll abandon it for the time being.  But stay tuned if you're interested in the idea of running a car on used fryer oil, it's definitely in the future of this blog.

Have a great holiday season!