Thin Ice

It is the season of thin ice
On Beaver Lake,
The time of year when I had just begun to believe
That this time around, the lake ice,
solid beneath our feet for months,
Must surely be impenetrable.
How can it possibly surprise me, year after year,
When it begins to melt—just at its edges,
Water lapping quietly at the shore for the first time in many months?

I am fascinated every time this thin edge of water reappears,
As if I had forgotten water had ever been there.
I crouch down, gaze into it,
Watch as shrimp dart
Under the edge of ice and back into the daylight again.
If I watch long enough, I can even trace the slow path of a stonefly larvae
As it drags its finely-masoned cocoon across the mud.

Most nights, the edge ice refreezes,
Re-covering what water was open yesterday afternoon
And will be again,
Hesitant to take that next, bold step
Into a new season.

Three osprey have been circling high above the lake, of late.
I thought I heard their shrill call a few weeks ago.
I caught my breath, not daring to hope.
Too early, I thought, eyeing the nest to which they return
Year after year,
But sure enough, here they are,
To reclaim old territory.

The thin ice on the edge of these mornings
Is not like the snow covered, solid surface of winter.
Light seems to emanate from objects below—
Colored pebbles, pieces of discarded boat covers,
Fishing lures,
Splashes of color missing for a season
Illuminate the delicate, feathery veneer
Just glazing the surface.
In this rare time, I hold two worlds in one view.


Three days ago I walked the still reliable
middle-of-the-lake ice.
Lost in thought, I was startled by a sound,
unheard for a season.
I looked up. Not far from where I stood,
A small piece of water had opened,
A transition zone of cattails and reeds between a small pond and the larger lake.
There, hidden in the dried remains of last year’s vegetation,
Stood two Canadian Geese,
Waiting.

Yesterday I returned to the geese’s claim,
And instead found a pair of mallards splashing there,
Content.
Soon, the lake will open
Negotiations will begin, decisions will be made
About how this place will be shared.
But for now, the early comers relax
Into these days of incremental change
Trusting in the cycles of the earth.

I am not always so trusting.
Impatiently, I try to peer around the next corner,
Attempt to interpret each small change as it occurs,
Believing I might choose where my next foot will fall.

In the cold season,
The ice forms layer by layer,
Capturing a record of each day.
Now it melts much the same way,
Each event of the past season
Slowly revealed:
Pieces of a doe’s tan and white fur scattered in a semi-circle,
Marking the place she was taken down.
Thousands of fishermen’s holes,
Each hidden, as it snowed,
from the next fisherman’s view,
Comic now in their pattern and number, covering
the lake’s surface.

The same is true of our footprints.
We have walked the lake all winter,
My husband, my dogs, and I,
And now our footprints are everywhere,
Covering the lake.

Examining them, I realize
I never know the destination or even the direction
Of the trail I make while I am walking.
It is only on these rare days of transition,
These days of thin ice
When I can step off the path,
Look back from a different vantage point
And trace the patterns created by my footprints.
Only then, do I realize
The true arch of experience
Which has carried me to this place.

Part Two of "the Easy Life", in which Dorris gets her oats....

First, a big “tank you” to everyone who commented on the story so far. I know the writing isn’t that great, but the story itself is just too good not to tell. If only it were too good to be true.

OK, part two of The Easy Life…

At the end of part one, having lived through a miniature first-person screening of the closing scene from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, I decide to work from the outside of the tank to get it to pop back into shape. First, I carefully build a very large and heavy beam across the top of the hole in which the tank sits. The new idea is to somehow attach a tow chain or big cable to the top of the tank, and use a several-ton hand-winch to pull the top of the tank up to the big beam I just built. To make sure I don’t just yank a hole in the top of the tank, I cut several two-foot diameter discs of heavy plywood, bolt them together, and use them as a backing inside the top of the tank. Then I borrow a large shackle from the axle of my truck, and bolt the shackle through the top of the tank and the plywood backing. I carefully crawl out to the center of the beam, and precariously balanced, begin to crank the winch handle and draw the tank back into shape. At first it pulls easily, and the tank begins to regain some of its original volume. Eventually, though, it stops cooperating. I have about four tons of pressure applied to the top of the tank, but instead of continuing to pop open, the entire tank begins to lift out of the hole. I let just enough pressure off the tank so it settles back to the bottom of the hole, then cautiously tap at the top of the tank with my foot while hanging off the beam. I would say that a sane person would venture no further, but actually, a sane person would never find themselves in this position in the first place. Of course, the cautious toe tapping doesn't yield results, eventually leading to a wholesale jump from the beam onto the top of the tank… and it works!! The tank actually pops back from a half-crushed five or six hundred gallon volume to its original thousand-gallon volume in just a split second. “I’m a $#&*@@$ genius”, I think to myself as I rise into the air along with the thousand pounds of rocks and dirt that was also occupying the particular five hundred gallons of the universe that the tank had no use for just a moment before.

I have developed a sort of standard response to situations where I find myself lying on the ground some distance from the place I last remember being…, and that is… I spit in my hand. Often, I’m still not sure if I’ve broken anything, or if I can even get up, but what I want to know right off the bat is… did I bust any teeth? I hate having teeth knocked out. One, its, ridiculously painful given the actual severity of the injury, and two, its’ gonna cost a lot of money. So before I even start to work up the nerve to move various body parts around, I wanna know if any teeth were involved. And whaddayaknow? No blood in my hand. No teeth. Its’ still a good day.

The next part of the job is to set a pump inside the tank. Prior to this, I had set up several various types of systems where the pumps were inside the cabin, and they must draw water from the tank, and push it through the pipes to the sink. That last sentence sounds a little didactic at the end, because this is devolving into a brief but boring lesson on pumps. Pumps like to push. Pumps hate to suck. If the pump is located above the water source, it must first suck that water up. It is orders of magnitude more efficient for a pump to reside below the level of the water it is pumping from. So, I decided to use a small pump that you would normally find in someone’s well, but instead, set it inside our water tank. This will give us much better pressure, and use less much less electricity. Yay. What this also means was that it will require a sizeable 120 volt AC inverter to convert our DC battery power to AC current for this type of pump. But not to worry, because I have done my homework, and have purchased a large inverter that is actually sized for the new pump. Sometimes, I’m amazing like that.

After setting the pump in the tank, and running the outlet pipe through the bottom of the tank, I hooked up the underwater electric lines to the pump. The wiring has its’ own set of openings, and everything comes up out of the ground and is hooked into the cabin’s massive plumbing and electric system (one sink, two lights, and two power outlets). I trot down to the lake, fire up the gasoline-powered firefighter’s water pump, and fill the new tank with a sense of pride, and anticipation of a long-overdue bath beckoning. I hoof it back up the hill and everything seems a “go”. After a couple of double checks of my wiring settings, set the shut-off triggers on the pressure switches, I make the inaugural throw of the switch. And… nothing happens. At all. Turn off the switch. Re-check all electric lines. Throw switch again. Start to get annoyed.

I make a list of possible problems in my mind. Number one keeps surfacing as; the inverter is not providing enough start-up juice. With most electric motors, there is a significant initial draw of electricity that can be ten times the actual rated amperage of the motor. And they never provide that info in advance. Solution: hook up two inverters! In a brilliant act of foresight, I have a spare identical inverter on hand, as out here I always try to have a back-up for the most critical components of daily life. I wire together the output so I have double the capacity to start the pump. Throw the switch again… and right there, in my kitchen, appear the Northern Lights, the Southern Lights, the Fourth of July, and New Year’s Eve firework displays, all at the same time. I could have sold tickets to the light show. Very pretty. And stinky. And a tad spendy.

Turns out, you don’t need to synchronize DC power inputs, but you must synchronize the AC outputs from the inverters if they are powering the same device. Sock that bit of advice away, along with “pumps like to push, not suck”, in case you are a post-apocalyptic survivor. Your new neighbors might decide to keep you around instead of having you for dinner. (OK, that’s a stretch, but I’m pretending like this is practical advice I’m disseminating in story guise). (And I can’t think of another feasible scenario in which said advice might serve as practical).

So, how now to test the pump for damage? Well, the lightest gauge wiring is to be found in, of course, the underwater connections. And where is the pump right now? Underwater. Perfect. Next step… rummage around till I find one of my wetsuits, booties, dive mask, and enough PVC to devise a make-shift five-foot long snorkel. I have an underwater headlamp (where the hell did I get that?), and a pair of wire cutters when I descend through the irritatingly-tight manhole into the full water tank. Kinda spooky, I have to confess. I have to fool around for a little while to tie myself to the bottom of the tank to resist the buoyancy of the wetsuit and my inhalations. Finally, I get situated and stay still long enough for the murky water to clear off so I can inspect the wiring. Sure enough, the shrouding over the underwater connections looks burned pretty good. I realize I will have to cut sections out of the wiring, and bring down the underwater soldering set-up (and where the hell did I get that?) to fix the connections. But first, I need to cut the wiring to see how much of it got fried. And that’s when things got strange….

A very, very unusual feeling swept over me, and the tank seemed to have a strange green glow, like those luminescent sticks you break open and play with on dark nights. The strange feeling intensified, "but that’s OK", I think, " a floating feeling is natural for someone floating in a water tank…", duh… but nonetheless, I start to get a little concerned, because I begin to think I’m not in the tank any longer, even though I can see my hands holding the wire cutters against the pump feed… ...and then I notice someone off to my right, in my peripheral vision… ...I turn to him, thinking maybe to ask for help, or at least an explanation of the current situation… …but he is bent over, in pain, laughing uncontrollably, sobbing the helpless tears of an adolescent male watching reruns of the Three Stooges… … and as I realize he is going to be of no help at all, the green light in the tank goes out, the wire cutters drop from my hand to the bottom of the tank, and I cut the anchor line from my waist and shoot to the surface of the water and out onto the frozen ground.

I normally resist the urge to imbibe when working with power equipment or electricity, but I decide that now would be a good time for a glass of single malt. As in “Very Fine Scotch Whiskey”. No ice, please. I peel off my very wet wetsuit, and slip into a glass of Lagavulan in front of the wood stove. As I am drying off and warming up, I think of the fellow off to my right in the tank. I start laughing too, thinking what a sight that would have been, and gleefully imagining who the hell my imaginary friend might have been.

But back to work, Lad. Now that I have successfully discharged the capacitors built into the pump... (!!!!! so that’s what happened... (note of interest; total capacitance for this pump; @~24,000 volts) !!!), ... at least it should be safe to re-enter the tank and solder new connections in place. This time, I wear a drysuit. It is warmer. It also turns out to be even harder to keep submerged than a wetsuit. But, “Bricks-in-His-Drawers” and/or “Perseverance” is my middle name, boys, and I solder the lines underwater without burning a hole in the most expensive suit I own. (I’m detailing all the little successes like that, so you don’t think I’m completely incompetent). (The success tally is now at... uh, "1"). And now for the bummer. That is the anti-climatic ending to this part of the story. Afterward, I hooked up the generator directly to the pump, and it *actually* worked. I pumped thirty gallons of water inside, heated it on the wood stove, and took a loooooooong hot bath. And put a serious dent in that bottle of Lagavulin. Just another week in paradise under my belt.

Post Script… the following year, I was assisting at a Blackfoot sundance in Heart Butte. One evening, midweek, I was telling this same story to some Blood friends, one of whom was the elder holy man for the Sundance ceremony. We were all laughing very hard at my follies, and after wiping away some tears, the elder, George Goodstriker, looked at me with an earnest but troubled grin, and said, ”That was Napi. Who you saw in the tank with you, that was the Creator. And I’m afraid you are going to live a very long life, because the creator loves to laugh, more than anything in the universe.”

Keep the Shiny-Side Up

“Pickin’ up those pieces….pickin’ up those pieces…puttin’ them away.
Not wanting to meet my savior….not wanting to meet my savior, ...not this way.
Sweatin’ out my worries….sweatin’ out my worries, ...just another day.”
by Widespread Panic


This is a song Bob and I listen to a lot. A glorious piece of music, mandolins sing notes clear and pure, winding their way up and down and around our hearts as we listen. Bob has researched the mandolin player, Matt Mundy who, at what might have seemed the prime of his career, put the mandolin away and made a different choice. Famous musicians still beg him to play on their albums, and he politely refuses. His reasons are his own. And this fascinates Bob—who has made similar choices at various junctures of his life. We choose the ways in which we live each day, aware that this will be the way we live our lives. Best we choose carefully.

Pickin’ Up Those Pieces…Puttin’ Them Away

We’ve had a standing joke since we first moved to the cabin. I would agree to move to the woods, we would tell people, if Bob would agree to help me actively seek a replacement husband—you know, someone who could be on standby in case something happens to him. A few of our friends are in on this joke. “Hmmm….would we hold auditions of some kind?” we would laugh together, knowing looks passing between us. “ And what might they include?” One day, we were with a group of friends down by the dock, playing with the dogs in the water, enjoying the sun and our time together. While we were all down there, one of my friends from school dropped in, or I should say paddled over, since he arrived by kayak. He had stopped by before, visited with Bob a few times, but none of our friends had ever met him. We introduced him, we all visited for a while, and then he left. “Boy, he really seems to love this place, and he obviously likes you well enough…” a friend said, turning to me, raising one eyebrow. “How are his mechanical skills? You know, he even looks a little like Bob…..”

The joking has helped me accept a hard reality. Living at the cabin, the way that we do, I feel more vulnerable—more dependent on another person-- than I have ever been before in my life. There are many things I just can’t do here, things that need to be done. Bob does them all. They have become his full-time job. Most of the time, I don’t actively worry about this, but it’s one of those thoughts that creeps into my thoughts in the middle of the night, that time when fear sometimes takes over.

Occasionally that fear will bubble up unexpectedly, working its way into the light of day. So I talk about it. And Bob laughs. “Nothing is going to happen to me,” he says. I so want to believe that, but I know it’s a guarantee no human can make. “And besides,” he continues, “You could learn to do any of this. You might not do everything the same way we do now, but you could live here on your own. I’m sure of it.” I picture myself hauling water from the lake, rather than using the pump; living with no electricity at all because who knows how that battery box is put together, skiing the three miles out to the road because I don’t know how to operate the snow plow that he somehow magically attaches to his truck, the list goes on and on. “Maybe I could learn to do some of those things,” I think, and shake my head doubtfully, knowing full well my lack of mechanical ability, “But I wouldn’t.” So, I realize, if something happens to Bob, I would move. By myself. All these pieces of our lives. And a whole new list of worries begins.

Bob just shakes his head. “You can worry from now until forever,” he says, “But what do you want to do?” Do you want to move now—lose the opportunity to live here because of something that might happen?” Sometimes I say, “Yes, let’s leave right away.” That’s when fear has taken over. Most times, however, I look at the lake and the trees, listen to the silence, and realize the gift that this place has been to our lives. Who knows for how long? Who ever knows? It doesn’t even matter. Clearly I need to focu my thoughts on this moment, this day, this year. And I right now, I want to be here. So I pick up those pieces of my thoughts and put them away, at least for now.

Not Wantin’ to Meet My Savior….Not this Way

The late June morning he headed over the mountains on his motorcycle, Bob listened to Matt’s glistening mandolin and these words repeat themselves over and over in his earphones. He had a photography job that would take him away from the cabin for several days. After a bit of debate, we decided it would be best—most efficient and most fun—if he rode his motorcycle. He was crossing Highway Two, known as the Highline, which runs across the entire northern part of the state in pretty much a straight line. It truly is the road less traveled—you may not pass another vehicle for several hundred miles. So, he carefully packed his camera equipment onto his beloved yellow and black BMW, put on his matching leathers, and rode away. I grinned at the thought of this giant bumblebee speeding across the highline.

But he didn’t make it that far. The next time I saw him, early that same afternoon, he was lying in a hospital bed, broken, the torn remnants of his jacket and pants in a bag the closet. I had gotten that call people most dread. “This is Kalispell Regional Hospital,” a voice said. “We have Bob here.” I suck in my breath, waiting. “He’s alive, but he was in a motorcycle accident.”

We might choose the way we live our days, but not many of us choose when or how we die. Like most people, I fear death. Not so much my own death—that doesn’t actually seem too hard. I fear losing the people I love. What this really translates to is selfishness, masquerading as love. I rely on many people to meet my needs—physical, mental, emotional--different people for different things. What if one of those people is suddenly no longer there? How do I deal with the hole this creates in my life? You see? Selfishness. And it’s crazy. The one thing I know about this world is that change is a constant. Like all living things, human beings have life cycles. Death is as much a part of the cycle as living—whether I choose to acknowledge it or not. Everything can change in an instant. Feelings of safety and security are figments of our imagination, created, I think, so we can sleep.

I didn’t sleep much over the next few days. The “what if’s” loomed large in my mind. Losing Bob would leave such a gaping hole in my life, I don’t know how I would ever fill it. In the same moment, a member of my teaching staff was facing this very question. Her husband Joe, also a member of our faculty, had died the same morning Bob was admitted, in the same hospital where Bob now lay. Joe had two young children. The reality of his death caused the “what if’s” to grow even larger in my mind. Yet Bob was here, alive.

Bob doesn’t remember much about the accident, so what we have pieced together comes largely from the woman who was in the car behind him, and a police report. It seems Bob hit a wall of wind, shortly after he crossed the Continental Divide. The woman behind him said it looked like he hit an invisible train. The wind ripped the handlebars out of his hands, and sent Bob sailing off the bike, rolling across the asphalt before coming to a stop in the gravel at the side of the road. The bike, we later learned from he police officer who visited the hospital, had remained upright and kept going—driving itself down the highway, until it just—plunk-- fell over.

Our most interesting, and unexpected, sources of information didn’t arrive until the following week. It turns out one of the passersby, also on a motorcycle, was an amateur photographer who decided to photograph the aftermath of the accident. Who knows why. While Bob was still in the hospital, this man had called to see if he could find out what had happened. The hospital operator transferred his call to Bob’s room, and they had a nice conversation, which Bob remembers little of, in which they exchanged e-mail addresses. Nothing was said about photos during this call. It wasn’t until about a week after Bob had come home, that he got an email from this same guy, asking if he would like to see the photos he had taken.

Bob was more than interested. He had a few fleeting memories of lying on the pavement, yelling with pain each time he tried to take a breath (the result of eleven broken ribs and a broken scapula, we later found out.) He remembered that two ambulances had been called and turned back, and the he had finally been airlifted out, after lying there for over an hour. And he remembered a woman named Hope, an ER nurse just leaving on her vacation, who happened to be the first person coming in the other direction. She had her nurse’s bag in the car, so she checked Bob’s vitals, held his hand and kept him from panicking during the entire hour they waited for help. Anything else that happened during that time was lost to pain.

In typical Bob fashion, he didn’t tell me about the email he had gotten from this guy. One morning, we were sitting in the living room, each on our computers. “Want to’ see something interesting?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said moving over next to him. And there he was, still helmeted and suited up, surrounded by people, lying on the side of the road. I wasn’t quite sure I was ready to see the rest.
Having already looked through all the pictures, Bob said, “No, keep looking. This is amazing.”

As he clicked through the photos, one by one, what we saw was nothing less than human kindness. So many people had stopped to help. People were holding up umbrellas to shade him from the sun. There was Hope, in a number of pictures, her stethoscope around her neck. Others were directing traffic—or craning their necks to watch for the arrival of an ambulance. So many people –so much love.

It wasn’t until the helicopter arrived that someone finally removed his helmet, cut him out of the leather clothing that had saved him. The temperature was well over ninety degrees, and all these people were in the full sun for all this time. All but Bob—they saw to it that he was in the shade. I imagined how sore people’s arms must have gotten—holding up umbrellas and blankets, and the worry they must have felt, wondering what was going to happen to this man.

Tears formed in Bob’s eyes as he continued to look at the photographs. He had had no idea all of these people had helped him. It was because of them that he was sitting there right now, with me, in our living room. Despite my initial reluctance to see these photos, to confront the reality of what had happened and my own guilt over having not been there—to love and comfort Bob myself, I am now so grateful we have these pictures. Where would we be without the kindness of others? Yes, where indeed…

Sweatin’ Out My Worries…Just Another Day

Our whole lives didn’t change that day, close to two years ago now. Almost doesn’t count. Just as we can never really lose a person we love, because they have actually become a part of us, neither do we lose the lessons each life experience delivers —especially when the package arrives so unexpectedly. Both of us were shaken by this experience, of course. My worst nightmare almost came true. Bob faced a change in plans for a very long time to come. Recovery, physical and mental, from such an accident takes a very long time. In some ways, we are both still healing.


Bob recently shared with me that he has come to understand the fear I feel about being so dependent on him for so many aspects of this lifestyle we have chosen. Since the accident, he has not worked an outside job of any kind. As he has recovered, it has taken everything he has just to maintain our lives here. It is a lot of work. He too, has felt this kind of dependence, because I am now the sole wage-earner. We have come to see that what we have here is a partnership—in the truest sense of the word. I have always been a person who loves somewhat cautiously, selfishly clinging to some parts of my independence, trying to maintain some degree of what I thought of as control over my life. Well, you know what? There is no such thing as control. What we have come to think of as safety and security---financial, physical, emotional--is an illusion. We—none of us—know what will happen from one minute to the next. Everything can change in an instant.


Worry really is a waste of time. Worry is based on my expectations about what I think should happen in the future. But I have little control over any of that—no one does. Once I realize that, what becomes important is the way I choose to live this instant, and the next, and the next. How will I treat people? How do I choose to spend my time? How will I love more completely? Each day truly is “just another day”—a day in which we make choices. Best we choose carefully. This particular day? This day is a beauty. This morning, I will gather my husband and my dogs and go out for a walk, where the sun is shining on a still-frozen lake. Who knows? Tomorrow, the ice might begin to thaw…

The Easy Life

If anything has proven to be the bane of my Beaver Lake existence, it is water. Pumping, storing and freeze-protecting the water, to be specific. Living on a lake, one might think the problem to be relatively straight-forward to resolve. I would have agreed, and did, shrugging it off with a no-big-deal pronouncement. I mean, we only use about 300 gallons of water per month for all our needs, so we’re not talking some mega-scale operation here. And what follows is a very typical story of how wrong I usually am about most things that involve re-inventing wheels, or rather, taking a wheel from a tractor and putting it on a Volkswagen, because nobody makes exactly what it is we need… and when that doesn’t exactly work out, trying several semi-successful iterations on the theme until finally taking an entirely new and equally-likely-to-succeed tack. This particular story is from our third winter, so I’m bringing you up to speed on my water miseries mid-course. I’ll tell those early stories, too, if this all works out.

This story is pretty long, and all of it,I’m sorry to say, is true. This is part one of this particular story, and I decided to illustrate it with a series of pics my brother sent when I was in the hospital two summers past. They were all captioned “why women live longer than men”, and are true to the spirit of this tale.

After our second winter, and dozens of 200’ popsicles littering our backyard that spring (another story in itself of trying to pump 32.5 degree water from the lake uphill through 10 degree cold water lines, followed by a week of minus 20 degree weather, during which a temporary system was frantically set up with a 350 gallon tank inside the cabin for the rest of the winter), I decided we needed to set our water storage tank underground. The 1000 gallon plastic tank then in use sat on a platform on the hillside above the cabin and the outhouse. The tank and its’ surrounding insulation and connections resembled… uhmmmm…, ok, imagine if you gave a bunch of fifth graders a pick-up load of duct-tape and access to the local dump and asked them to build a life-size mock-up of the 1969 Lunar Landing Module. Pretty much exactly like that.

Somehow, the following summer and its delightful weather came and went before the coming winter finally put my back to the wall, and I had to set about making up a new water tank storage and delivery design, and bury the beast in the front yard. It was nearly Thanksgiving, and Wendy was away for a week at a conference, and I thought this would be a good time to dismantle the old and install the new. Step one was renting a large track-hoe from the nearest town to do the excavation. I got the biggest one they let you haul with your own vehicle… in my case, a one-ton diesel crewcab with a bed hitch, so I got a pretty sizeable excavator for the job. After picking it up late Saturday afternoon, I decided to stay in town and watch our Montana college rivalry football game, instead of heading straight home. Getting in to our cabin from the end of the gravel county road requires traveling the last four miles on un-maintained state forest roads. The forest road had been lightly snow-covered mud, soft and wet when I left for town earlier that day. By the time I was rolling back in after the game that night, it had frozen up solid and slick. About two miles in on the forest road, on a slight upgrade, I lost forward momentum despite being in 4wd. The truck stopped, then slowly began picking up speed in reverse direction, pulled backward by a twenty-ton excavator. I made a quick decision to derail the train before I picked up any more speed, and cut the wheel hard right, sending the excavator (followed by my truck) about twenty yards over the edge of the road embankment. The only thing that stopped us from continuing down the slope was a huge old tree stump. I surveyed the mess, then walked the last two miles home to grab a beer and two sets of tire chains and tow chains and slog it all back to my truck. It was about 11 o’clock by the time I finally got my truck uncoupled from the trailer. I was soaked and freezing by then, the temp already below 20, so I headed home for something hot to eat.

This time of year is peak hunting season in Montana, and I knew the next morning before sunrise there would be hunters coming in this road, and I needed to get back to the excavator to try and haul it up on the road before the area got too much traffic. So at three a.m. I got back at it. I managed to set up a multi-point z-rig with chains, pulleys and cables, and with my prized hydraulic winch (many stories to be told by that piece of equipment) managed to pull the entire truck/excavator/trailer unit back up on the road before the hunters started filtering in. “Phew!” I thought, I lost a nights’ sleep, but I’ve got the excavator home and ready to go, right on schedule. (Seriously, I’m idiotically optimistic in that way, unable to heed premonition when whacked in the face with it).

The first job was to move the tank off of the rickety platform it had been sitting on since last fall. (I guess this is as good a place as any to mention that I failed to calculate the total weight of 1000 gallons of water before placing the tank on that slope in the first place… ummm, turns out it’s over 16,000 lbs… ). To make things just a little more challenging this day, the tank still had about three hundred gallons of water in it that had not been drained out, (remember how somehow summer came and went?) and now it is a 5000 lb ice cube in the bottom of the tank. No worries, though, I have a mighty excavator at my disposal. I hooked up a chain through the tank’s top opening and around a series of large timbers bolted together inside the tank. I picked up the chain with the bucket of the excavator, lifted the tank neatly, and as I swung the tank toward its’ new resting place, the timbers snapped. The tank was high in the air, almost directly above the outhouse… oh…, no…, not that… and miraculously, the tank thudded to the ground, missing our outhouse (yay!) and bouncing back up into the air, heading downhill, picking up speed, and bouncing, bounding, … right into my waiting truck. The right side, the side I had just, the previous week, had the body work done to. I guess truck doors are supposed to have dents (large ones) and broken mirrors held on with duct tape. The universe apparently demands it. That’s ok. Besides, the collision with the truck broke up the ice cube in the tank, and now the tank can be emptied. Yay!, says the Idiot.

Next job at hand is to set the tank in an eight foot deep hole in the ground I’ve just dug, with a little extra space on one side to access the pump hose coming out from the bottom (thinking ahead on such projects is not always my forte, so I’m bragging here). To make it easier to re-fill the excavation after setting the tank, I’ve left the dirt from the excavation piled up around the opening. I also hope this will aid in getting the tank to drop straight down into the hole and rest on its bottom, not on its side. After struggling to get the tank in place over the hole, it doesn’t want to drop in place. Puzzled, I look around all edges, but can’t see the problem. I enter the excavation from the little dugout area for the pump access, and inspect the bottom of the tank and the edges of the hole. I reach up and yank on a little rock, and the tank snuggles neatly into place. And man, is it heavy, sitting there on my chest. The only thing keeping the tank from sitting level on the bottom now is me. Personally. Physically. I’m on my back, and the tank is resting solidly on top. Hmmm. It’s Sunday. Wendy is due home Wednesday, I think. That’s a long time. And I get bored easily. Since the bottom of the hole was leveled off with back-fill first, I’m able to move a few loose rocks around with my finger tips. I keep at it until I can move my whole hand around, then move an arm around a bit. Eventually, I have enough of a depression that I can begin to twist my body and legs around until I am face down. At that point, I am able to pull my knees slowly up and lift the tank little by little off my body. I move rocks around some more, and am able to block up the tank about a foot on one side, and wriggle over to the opening I came in through. At this point, I am freezing from being underground for so long, and head in for heat, food and rest. I still need to put a roof support structure over the tank before I put dirt over the entire thing, or else it might collapse the tank in. It is not an underground tank by design, but I figure I can work around that problem. I am so tired, however, that I decide to call it a night and get up early. Tomorrow I’ll build the support cover over the tank, and use the excavator to push the dirt back in place and then get the excavator delivered back to town before 9:30 a.m. No problem. The hard stuff is done. Yay!, says the Idiot, again.

I push myself out of bed well before sunrise, and make coffee. I step outside in the early morning twilight to finish this job, and… the tank is… gone. I go over and peer in the hole, and I cannot see anything there at all except a hole. Not enough coffee? I fire up the excavator and swing the lights around to shine on the hole. It still makes no sense. The hole I dug was eight feet around and eight feet deep, and the tank I put in it was eight feet across and six feet tall. The hole was still at least five feet deep now, and covered with loose dirt at the bottom. As the caffeine starts to do its prescribed job, I start to realize that the dirt piled up around the edge of the hole has caved in the edges of the hole, filled in on top of the tank, and imploded the thing. The 1000 gallon tank will now hold maybe 200 gallons? Great. My only thought is, will more coffee and the light of day make this situation seem better or worse?

I use the excavator to carefully, carefully remove as much dirt as I can off of the imploded tank. I’ve only got an hour now to load up the excavator and get it back to town. As I swing the bucket around to head down to the truck and trailer, the excavator breaks loose and starts sliding down the hill on the ice. I swing the arm back around and drop the bucket quickly, smartly stopping the run-away excavator and cleanly knocking the tailgate off my pick-up. Clearly, I have professional potential. And I return the excavator to town without causing a single fatality.

The rest of the job will require a lot of manual labor, but I am not dissuaded. Surely the potential for collateral damage is reduced without having heavy machinery at my disposal. Says the Idiot. Again.

I jump down on top of the imploded tank, shuffle around the remaining rocks and dirt, and unscrew the man-hole cover. There is a little channel inside the crushed tank that leads to the bottom, and I hang upside down into the tank and peer in with a flashlight. Amazingly, the tank hasn’t split anywhere, and is neatly accordioned in on itself. There is about two feet of height inside the tank now, and I decide to try and reverse the implosion by crawling inside and putting some hydraulic jacks under timbers and unfolding the tank by raising and blocking the ceiling with jacks and timbers. Although it was a time consuming process, it was working pretty well. I had the thing ¾ of the way back to its original shape, when one of the timbers slipped off its jack. The next scene was from every cartoon you have ever seen of things bouncing and ricocheting off of walls at high speed in a confined space. I played the part of the google-eyed Idiot, and the steel jacks and timbers played the part of the hilariously, impossibly fast objects exchanging impossible trajectories, as the tank went back to its two-foot high volume.

Well, can’t get it done from the inside? I decide to build a heavy spanning beam across the top of the hole, set a large u-bolt in top of the tank, and using a winch and pulleys, I’ll pop the tank back open from the outside. Easy. What could possibly go wrong????

Stay tuned for part two, featuring an unintentionally exploding improvised device, scuba gear, unintentional indoor fireworks display, my first experience as a high-voltage light-emitting-diode, and a brief meeting with the Creator. And finally, a well-deserved hot bath.

Basic Needs

While teaching a lesson while visiting a fourth grade classroom at Canyon Elementary School, I asked a question that has been asked for years of fourth graders all over the country: “What are the basic needs of living things?”

This day, an answer surprised me. After the usual first responses of food and water, an earnest, dark haired boy said, “Electricity.”

The teacher caught my eye and grinned., amused. “We’ve just been studying energy,” she said.

Ahhhh…that helped me understand his thinking, but still I had to respond.

“Well, no,” I said, “Basic needs are things people can’t live without. People can live without electricity. They do in many places in the world. In fact, I live in a house with no electricity.”

“Wait….you don’t use any electricity?” the boy asked, skeptical, eyebrows raised.

“Well, we generate a little. We mostly use it for our computers—and a few electric lights.”

He settled back in his seat, looking satisfied. “See,” he said, “I knew it.”

Like this boy, I am one of the privileged Americans who has rarely had to even think about what my basic needs are, let alone how to meet them. Moving to the cabin on Beaver Lake, however, has brought this concept to the fore. It is something we think about on almost a daily basis. Life comes down to the most critical of issues: water and warmth. And yes, on a secondary level, what kind of energy we will to use to run our few appliances—the refrigerator that stores our food, the computer on which I now type.

When we moved to the cabin, I didn’t know the first thing about figuring any of this out—and I was only slightly interested. Therefore, I know only on a surface level how most things operate. These, on the other hand, are just the kinds of challenges that keep Bob going. A lab scientist and artist by training, brilliant and easily bored, he is happiest when there is a new problem to be solved. At the cabin at Beaver Lake, as you will see when he begins telling his own stories, there have been plenty those.

For me, on the other hand, much as I love living here, I have always felt a bit ill at ease. I have experienced a different kind of learning. You see, ever since I was a little girl, I have stubbornly guarded my independence. I like to feel in control. Here, I can’t even pretend. There are things I just cannot do on my own. I’ve panicked at times, saying, “Bob, what if something happens to you. What will I do?”

“Do you really want to live your life worrying? Asking ‘what if’? Would you really give up the opportunity to live here because of something that might happen?” he asks, knowing the answer. Of course I don’t. But I have had to fight myself every step of the way. I have had to learn to let myself rely on someone else, not only emotionally but now also physically. And then came the day when something did happen, taking that learning to a whole new level---but that’s a different story.

Somehow through the course of these lessons, I have learned to turn off the worry, at least most of the time, concentrating on the part of the work that is mine, counting on Bob to take care of what is his. This is the give and take of teamwork. And you know? Together we can do things much greater than either of us can accomplish alone. There are broader lessons to be learned here, in a country that staunchly promotes individuality over cooperation. But our illusion of independence is just that, when it comes to meeting our basic needs. My students can’t even image a world without an electrical grid, running water at the turn of a spigot, toilets that flush, stores in which to buy food shipped from all over the globe.

Neither could I, before moving to Beaver Lake. Now the more I see, the farther into this lifestyle I want to go. It is anything but easy. Every once in a while, I get a glimpse of the challenges Bob has taken on. Just about the time I start to feel jealous that he gets to stay home most days to do the work required to maintain our lives here, something goes wrong. At those times I think “Man, I’ll take teaching seventh graders any day.”

So, briefly, here’s how things work, and understand that when I say “we,” what it really means is “Bob.”

Water

Water is the most crucial of commodities. I first became aware of the importance of water when I taught eighth grade Science for a brief period in Wisconsin and decided to start with what to me were the “basics.” We studied watersheds, the emptying Oglala aquifer, where our water comes from when we turn on the tap and where it goes after we have used it. I have since learned that this is rarely part of any school curriculum. No wonder scientists like Isaac Asimov have long predicted that shortages of fresh water will reach a crisis until we collectively begin to act on what scientists have long known. Most people don’t know anything about it.

So even before we moved to Beaver Lake, I became focused (some might say obsessed) on water, used collectively and personally. My water bottle has become my closest companion. It goes with me in the car; I carry it around my classroom when I teach; I panic a little every time it goes missing.

Now, when we moved into the cabin, it was just a shell ---four log walls with no plumbing of any kind. Heck, we didn’t even have a floor. So naturally, my first worried questions were about water.

When I began asking these questions, the October night we spread our sleeping bags on the rough plywood subfloor inside our not yet cozy shell, Bob just shook his head in wonder. “Wendy,” he said, “We live on a lake.”

“Yea, but the water’s all the way down the hill. How are we going to get it to the cabin?”

“With a pump,” Bob said. And after a few days of buying our drinking water and hauling the rest up the hill in buckets, sure enough, there appeared in our backyard a series of plastic pipes and tubes that snaked their way from the lake up the steep hill that is our backyard to a large holding tank. A few days after that, a water purification system arrived in the mail. The sound of that tank filling when Bob goes to the lake to pump water still brings joy to my heart.

Now, some of you might be ahead of me here. How, you ask, will this system ever work during a Montana winter? Good question…and you would not believe the number of things that could go wrong—usually when company is due to arrive at any minute. It honestly took a couple of years to get it right. All the while I watched, practicing patience.

Once the lake freezes, the entire water collection process begins with auguring a hole in the ice. You know, with an auger, like ice fishermen use. We have a hand auger. I’ve watched Bob use it many times. Last February, when we were down on the lake for an it-feels-like-spring-is-coming campfire on a rare sunny day, I decided to try the auger out—just for fun. Now, I am not in bad shape. We walk the dogs four or five miles a day and I chop wood. But I started turning the handle on that auger--and nothing happened. So I leaned on the top of it, turning as I increased the pressure, and slowly, rims of slush began to form around the auger’s spiral blade. Ahhh…now I was getting somewhere. I moved the auger away so I could see how much farther I had to go, and there was the beginning of a hole—about half an inch deep.

Determined, I leaned into it again, this time with all my weight. I turned the handle fast—started breathing hard, thinking I would break through to water at any minute. This time when I pulled the auger up, the hole was about four inches deep, and I was getting tired. After a few more minutes, the hamburgers Bob had been cooking over the fire were done, and I thankfully gave up auguring for the day. I didn’t get that hole all the way through the twenty inches of ice until the next morning just before we went for our lake walk. And this is just step one of the process Bob has gone through every month of the winter for the last five years. With every turn of that handle, my gratitude and appreciation grew.


Heat

We heated our previous house with what looked like a woodstove but was really powered by propane. You flipped a switch and it came on, like magic. It was so easy and worked so well, we decided to put one in at Beaver Lake as well. Becoming independent in so many other areas of our lives, though, we didn’t realize how irritating it would become to rely on and pay for someone to deliver the propane a couple of times a year. Then the price of propane skyrocketed and none of this seemed to make sense anymore.

Our cabin is surrounded by hundreds of miles of forest. A firewood permit costs five dollars. Two years ago, Bob moved the propane stove and put in a woodstove as our main source of heat. And I started chopping wood. Don’t laugh---people pay good money for the kind of workout I can now get in my own yard. And what a stress reliever! Bad day with seventh graders? In the throes of menopause? I have never found anything to rid myself of stress more effectively than chopping wood. So now we have a cheap, reliable source of fuel that depends only on the power of our muscles and the strength of our backs. It’s a much better fit.
Electricity

After some discussion, we decided to allow ourselves the luxury of a bit of electricity, mostly to run our computers. I had an online summer job, which would more than pay for the cost of running the generator. But we continue to think of it as a luxury—and that thought alone has changed us. Bob has become an expert on electricity. Just ask him, and he’ll let you in on a simple plan to cut the energy use of every home in our country in half. That is, of course, if the companies that provide our electricity had any interest in doing that, which obviously, they don’t.

In the early cabin years, the first thing that greeted your eye when you walked in the door was a big wooden box. When you opened the door, you would see any number of electrical switches and wires running in every direction, but mostly to a bank of giant batteries. Because one of the things we value most about Beaver Lake is its near perfect silence, Bob decided that if we stored energy in batteries, we would only have to run the generator once or twice a week. It has been a good plan. And generating your own electricity helps you learn the real cost of this form of energy. It’s expensive. So expensive that we use very little. We make sure that the few items that run on electricity are as efficient as possible. And Bob can tell you the exact number of BTU’s it takes to run just about anything.



The federal government greatly subsidizes the cost of generating electricity in this country, and our denial of the associated environmental costs may lead to some big problems. As we continue to hear news stories about electric cars as the hope of the future—something to lead our country away from its reliance on fossil fuels, Bob and I shake our heads in wonder. Where, exactly, do people think electricity comes from? It takes fossil fuels to generate it. We are decades, at least, away from any other reliable form of electricity generation at our current levels of use. I knew that before; I just had the luxury of choosing not to think about it. Now I know, in a very real way, that electricity is It is not magically produced. It is stinky and noisy and expensive. I hate it every time we have to turn on the generator. That is probably a good thing.

I am still a privileged American, but now I am at least a little more aware of what it takes in the real world to meet what we have come to consider our basic needs. I don’t think I could survive on my own if our entire social structure collapses, as some anti-government tea-party loyalists advocate without even considering the consequences. I can’t help wondering why they think they could. They might have lots of money, but meeting your basic needs with what the earth provides has very little to do with money. It has everything to do with what were once considered “primitive” skills. I now know these skills to be quite advanced—and they are becoming endangered. So, we’re trying to keep a foot in two worlds, Bob and I. We can get around in the new world of cell phones and computers while chopping our own wood and drawing water from a lake. My students find that funny, when I share my chosen lifestyle with them, but I want them to know the option exists.