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.