Off line & off grid in the Yukon

Have we been here nearly a month already? Hard to believe!

This morning I’m sitting up in bed at my in-law’s house in Carcross where we spent the night after celebrating Mr. C’s birthday. Happy Birthday, my beloved!

image

We’ll get back to the cabin sometime this afternoon, not too late. So far, my trips to town have been few and far between. And thats okay. Town trips are mainly to run errands and grab a few minutes of internet. I mean it about the few minutes, too…only one hour per day is allowed at the library.  And so, I haven’t opened Facebook in a couple of weeks, nor answered very many email notes. My online life totally neglected at the moment, but honestly, not really missed.

 

imageI’ve been writing (almost) every day for a couple of hours. I’m thick in the middle of novel rewrites. I’ve also been doing a lot of critiquing & beta reading for the writing groups I belong to. I feel as though the learning curve has steepened again, and it’s really wonderful. Writing is something of an emotional roller coaster … One thing I can say, now, is that I’m finally starting to feel like a writer. If that makes any sense. Maybe someday I’ll also be an author, lol!

imageI’ve also been out on the deck nearly every day doing an hour of yoga in the sunshine. And managing to keep up with the Splendid Sampler quilt blocks, for the most part, too. Now that’s a miracle, to be sure!

imageDont be shy…drop on by. There’s beer in the fridge and the kettle’s always on! Thanks to Bill and Heather for the visit the other day and these wonderful photos.

 

Cabin Living: missing the solar shower

We’re home! What was the first thing we did when we got home yesterday? We turned on the hot water tank so that we could have a luxurious soak.

Actually, it’s stinking hot here, so what we really wanted was a luxurious cold soak just to cool down! But you do still need a little hot water mixed in. Otherwise you might as well shower in ice water, and unless you’re a polar bear, that’s too cold!

So…how did we shower at the cabin? I can hear you wondering!

Well, Mr. C walks with the big canning kettle down to the lake and scoops it full of water and carries it back up to the house. We light the propane stove and put the water on to heat. In the winter, we heat the water on the wood stove. But in the summer, it’s too warm to have the wood stove going. Since we use a solar shower bag, we could fill it and leave the black rubbery plastic bag out in the sun to warm (its intended purpose, after all), but we prefer to shower in the morning, before the sun will have worked its magic on the water. When our shower water is just the perfect temperature, we pour it into the shower bag and hang it up in our home-made shower stall. The shower stall is located in the small room off the main cabin, the “little addition room” we call it, not just because it is an addition built onto the main cabin, but because it contains all of our “additionals.” A spare bed which will sleep one guest – Michael’s childhood bed, as a matter of fact; the wood bin which we keep full all year ‘round; a chest for storing towels and spare bedding, with one drawer dedicated to “junk”; an antique sideboard that belonged to Mr. C’s mother, good for storage but that also has a good flat work surface; the cat’s litter box, shelves where I keep various odds & sods: my crafts, my collection of hats, spare boxes of Kleenex, Mr. C’s binoculars. In one corner of this tiny room is the home made shower stall. When the shower bag is hung, you must stand in a sort of deep-kneed squat in order to get your head under the nozzle. It’s actually quite a clever way of getting in one’s daily calisthenics…active showering!

Showering at the cabin can also be a bit of a shivery affair. You don’t get that buildup of warm steam that insulates you in your little bathtub world at home. Here, when your shower is finished, the cool air comes pouring in and you have to jump quickly and dry off (especially in the winter!)

Our showers are like the ones you take on a boat or in an RV, if you’ve ever done that. You open the nozzle and get yourself wet all over, then stand in a puddle of rapidly cooling water while soaping up and shampooing your hair. Then you open the nozzle again to rinse off. The solar bag holds enough water for two showers if I don’t need to wash my hair. Mr. C always goes first because he likes the water hotter than I do. I get a bit of a longer shower because Mr. C usually underestimates how much water is left in the bag and leaves me more than half. Or maybe he’s just being courteous. He’s like that, you know.

For some reason that I can’t put into words, it is an exquisite pleasure to shower this way. And it’s also an exquisite pleasure to live this way for a bit of time each year. Without phone, electricity, running water, internet. It reminds me of how little one really needs to be happy.

…And of how nice a hot shower is. Especially when you’ve scooped it, carried it, heated it and poured it yourself.

Morning

The rumble of thunder woke us up early. I lay in bed and listened to the rolling echo bounce between the hills across the lake, the rain drumming on the roof. We stayed long in our housecoats, had second cups of coffee, ate leftover dessert for breakfast. Later, when the rain stopped, Mr. C loaded the truck for an errand run to town and I rolled my mat out on the deck, ready for my daily hour of yoga practice, content with only myself for company. More thunder grumbled in the distance, the air fresh and clean and slightly cool, the sky blue and milky-white and blue again.

IMG_0903.JPG

Cabin Living

Well, we’ve been living at the cabin for 3 weeks now and I am enjoying it immensely. We don’t have electricity or running water, but we do have propane lights, fridge & stove, and a wood stove for heat when it starts to get chilly. Surprisingly, the hardest thing to adjust to was not having any TV or internet! I was a bit shocked to realize just how much time really spent zoned out on the couch. After the first week of feeling like I had ants in my pants, though, I’ve figured it out and am liking the quiet time with books, handwork and the radio. CBC has really great talk programming and I’ve started looking forward to listening to favourite shows while I hand quilt or do other hand stitching.

079

Here’s my log cabin kitchen:

081How do we stay clean with no running water, you may be asking yourselves…we heat water on the stove, fill the solar shower bag, and shower just like everybody else. Except we can’t stand and luxuriate under an endless flowing stream. Showers are shorter, but just as enjoyable.

I brought some pots of flowers to make it feel more homey, and so that I can say I’ve got a garden…and the first thing the ants did was set up a colony in the tomatoes. I got tired of trying to scare them away. So now we have an ant farm in a pot. I guess they can’t hurt anything…

025

It also takes longer to commute to work – an hour each way. So we get up earlier, of course. And at the end of the day, we take the dog for a 5 km walk before driving home, which means we don’t get home until about 7pm or later if we’ve had to stop for groceries. After preparing a nice supper, doing dishes & taking turns with the shower, we only have an hour or so to settle down with books/crafts/radio shows before bedtime. Sometimes we watch a movie on the laptop (which is recharged with solar cells).026

 

So there you go…my summer-time life in a nutshell!

082