This could be my last post. Today I delve into my battery bank hook-ups and it doesn’t matter how many times I do it, I fear it. There are over 600 amps at 48 volts with exposed terminals all over the damn place and I’ll be in there messin’ with a crescent wrench and trembling hands. I can see the arc-of-death flashing up the wrench and melting it and me in the process already.

I am going to have to be extra careful. Mind you, I have been so bloody careful so far, I haven’t gotten anything done! This chore is a year overdue. But, you see, it is hard to get electrocuted if you stay the hell away from everything electrical. And so I did (exception: flashlights, computer and movie screen). ‘Let deep cycle batteries lie’. That’s my basic ‘working-with-batteries’ motto.

But there is no hiding today. A neighbour wants the old batteries and is coming over to get them. Embarrassingly, the new ones have been sitting around expectantly for over a month. And I have no more excuses. My procrastination (fear) has been exposed and is now getting visitors. If I had any way of avoiding this, I would, and this blog would be about something else.

Ravens are a popular theme.

It occurred to me the other day that I should maybe teach more in these blogs. Be more informative, you know? More How-to stuff. As I learn a lesson or two and become fairly sure about it, I should share that knowledge with would-be off-the-gridders eager to learn at the feet of the master? Right? The problem is that I have yet to become fairly sure about anything.

Most of it is all still a mystery.

Well, I am pretty sure about advising the burning of dry fir for your firewood if you can get it but some old hands do recommend dry Alder instead so maybe the jury is still out on that one? I am pretty damn sure that building the cabin is not #1 on the to-do list, infrastructure is. Makes for much easier building when it is the cabins turn. But everybody builds the cabin first and so, even tho I am pretty sure about that advice, few seem to agree with it. I strongly advise having two of everything at the very least. But I would have advised that for the cul-de-sac resident as well.

So, what the hell do I know? Marry well is the only really good advice I can give. Maybe being the Yoda of off-the-grid living is not going to be my calling. But I will advise this: when working with deep cycle batteries, wear thick gloves, use insulated tools, work slowly and hope for a sacrificial fool/anode to come along and do it for you.

I hope to be able to report back tomorrow.

Living out here is a bit of a challenge. But it is not that hard. Mostly it is just different. We are still learning how to be off-the-gridders as best we can. And we have a lot to learn. That is why we garden, buy winches and putz about. We are at the beginning of the learning curve. I’d say we are still at the ‘juniors’ stage, not even sophomores yet. We’ll likely really be seniors (chronological) before we are really seniors (expertise). May not even get there. Ever.

I write about this because I have not seen much on making this kind of a lifestyle change from the convenient and comfortable to the harder and more physical. Urban to rural. Domestic to feral. Most people tend to move in the other direction, I suppose.

I do try to read anything I can get my hands on about homesteading or living ‘alternative’ (part of learning, isn’t it?) and I have to say, most of the off-grid authors I have read so far are dimwits. There was the book by some National Post editor that had her living on an island (with all the modcons) about 60 miles from her Toronto office. She had a hard time finding milk and making the ferry on time. Poor baby. Her biggest challenge: to get her boyfriend to do things for her while she was away writing the adventure novel of her life!

Nick somebody wrote a book about off-grid people and, unbelievably, didn’t understand the basic concept! He wrote about people who live in cardboard boxes and in their cars. He wrote about dope growers who filch juice from the power company and he wrote about house-sitters. How do these idiots get published?

Don’t get me wrong – there are some great stories out there about living feral but they are few and far between. Hell, even H.D. Thoreau only rented a cabin at Walden for 3 months!

The very best: Frontier House by PBS. A documentary.

But Chris Czajkowski writes about Nuk Tessli and is great! She’s cast from the same mold as Ann Mustoe and those other eccentric female Brits who suffer great hardships with only tea and a biscuit for comfort (preferably served under a tarp against a stone wall ruin in a rainstorm in some desolate out-of-the-way hell). But they at least write well and really do have great adventures.

Ian and Sally something did a series on traveling Canada like the old pioneers. They were great, too.

There was the guy who walked across the middle east during all the wars! The other loon who lived alone in the arctic and had to resort to eating mice. There were the two who chased after elk and lived amongst them. And the couple who did the same with wolves. And the maniac who tried to do that with Grizzlies! Now those people had adventures!

Some doofus contracting his new house out in Sayulita (near Puerto Vallarta) drove me nuts with his pathetic litany of challenges (where to find a really good cup of coffee, suffering awkward chairs in which to sit!). His was not an off-the-grid story – it was a lament by a spoiled brat!

But I read it and hate myself for doing so.

To be honest, we live closer to the spoiled brat author than we do the mouse-eaters and I doubt that we’ll ever try to get hardier than we are now. Which is OK with me. It’s tough enough going shopping in town. I can’t imagine having to forage with the elk and scavenge with the wolves. I have bad knees. Hard to kneel. Even harder to crawl at any speed. Lichen for lunch? Yuck!

I am telling you all this because this blog is about the real life adventures of two relatively soft individuals who couldn’t survive in the wilderness for two nights and, after three, wouldn’t want to. We have just the right amount of adventure, thank you very much. Don’t want more. I am looking for easier not harder.

Having said that, I can’t imagine what constitutes an adventure story anymore when people publish accounts of their problems with their new condo in the Bahamas or having to make-do without a dishwasher in the cabin they rented on the Gulf Islands. Puleez……..

In that regard, I have to agree with the editors in the old days of the newspapers: if it bleeds, it leads. Other than that, it is no big deal. Yesterday Sally cut her ankle. Blood. Ergo, yesterdays blog story.

Get up at 7:15, drink tea and pack up for town. By 8:00, I have the boat out front and Sally is throwing in the totes and backpacks. Seas are up a bit. It’s been blowing all night. Maybe a two foot chop. We pound over to the other island, lug totes, coolers and packs up the hill and race for the 9:00 ferry. Miss it. Catch the ten.

First stop is at General Paint for, you guessed it, paint (for the bunkhouse). No luck (we need ‘off-tints’ porch paint for the community’s meager ‘budget’). Then Canadian tire (oil, muffin tins). Next: Canada Superstore (chicken for dogs) and then the Fudge shop (Sal has a serious habit). Off to Home Depot and get the usual 6 out of ten items on the list. Average success rate this time. 8 items is a miracle. All ten? Never gonna happen.

Blitz a quick lunch at the Ideal Café and then race off to Andrew Sherrit for plumbing crap. Sal gets that while I hit up the propeller shop for two new props – one has to come up from Vancouver in a week. Then off to Western Equipment (mallet handle, log dogs, quick perusal of pulleys) and then to the bank. First the Royal, then BoM.

London Drugs is next for us. After that I go to the nearby LCB and Sal heads over to Save-on for the BIG shop. I then divert to Lordco (gas-line fittings) and then back to Save-on to help Sal load the totes and, while waiting, decant the scotch into a large plastic bottle so that I can return the stock glass bottles now rather than carry them back and forth on a small boat). LCB staff more than a bit curious. “Never mind. I’m green! Planet is going to hell! Causes me to drink heavily, being green, ya know, but at least I am recycling my scotch bottles!”

Chuckle to myself as we head up to Baba Ganoush (Syrian restaurant) for a donair and some hummus. They are closed. Damn. Then to Katies for sushi supplies and down to the ferry and catch the 2:30 back to Quadra. Just under four hours and 18 stops. Not bad.

Hit the island and put on a batch of wine at the do-it-yourself store, pick up a few cheap B flicks at the renta-movie place and then head off down the road. That is 21 stops (not counting the coffee shop and the fact that the propeller store took two visits).

Unload the truck into the boat (light load this time) but the seas are a bit up. Been blowing the whole time we’ve been away.

We live on a rocky beach. Not a beach, really. Like Point Atkinson is a beach. The tide is running hard (two knot current) and the wind is at my back at about 20 mph. As I approach our beach the waves are making the bow describe three foot arcs. Sal leaps onto a slippery rockface and turns to grab something from the boat as I attempt to hold it off the rocks by throttle and forward and reverse. We miss. I am swept down stream.

“I’ll come around! You may just have enough time to grab one item at a time!”

And that is what I do. I take the boat in as close as I dare and drift down past Sal who is precariously perched on the rocks. As the bow goes by, she grabs what she can. One hand for her safety, the other for a full cooler or heavy tote. When I go around again, I take a minute to move the other items to the very front for her to reach. Plus the boat needs a bit of a pump out each time because the waves are breaking over the stern. I am soaked by the time we get everything off. Sal has a nasty cut on her ankle.

Dock the boat. Head back to the other side to help Sal with the coolers and the totes and we bring it all up on the funicular. It’s almost 5:00. Feed the dogs and pour a glass of wine. We sit like lumps for a bit and then put all the food away. Eat store-bought sushi and clean up. It is 7:30 pm. It’s only been 12 hours since we started and we managed to do 90% of the shopping on our list.

Pretty efficient this time.

Imagine a set of steep, steep stairs, like a set leading to a cellar in an old house. That angle is around 30 degrees, the same slope as the hill we bring the logs up. Now imagine an imaginary ‘landing’ halfway down the stairs. That ‘landing’ would be the ‘bench’ of rock we have on our 120 foot-long hill. The ledge is about 40 feet up from the beach and is where the logs are stored for drying before coming up later for further processing (bucking and splitting and stacking).

Each log segment is about 12 feet long and 10 inches in diameter or about 400-500 pounds. Sal ‘hooks ’em up’ using a choke and block and taykle and then the winch drags them up to the bench area. There the log is released from the high-line and piled with others in a big heap. Sal does the releasing and the piling. Gravity does most of the work but she has to wrestle the odd one into place and make sure it is situated securely enough so that it does not shift suddenly and take the increasing heap of wood – several tons – on a ramble down the hill.

Yesterday we were finishing the lift up from the lagoon and adding the last few pieces. The pile was a bit higher than we thought it would be. There were about 16 or so on a narrow ledge arranged like pick-up-sticks. They were about four or five logs deep. Logs akimbo. Sal was nimbly dancing across them as she tugged a log to and fro trying to get it to settle down into the right place.

I stood at the winch controls and watched the activity from about 70 feet away and from an elevation of 40 feet higher. It looked to me like an accident waiting to happen.

“Sal! I don’t think scrambling over the pile is a good idea. There are four or five tons of unstable logs perched halfway up a steep hill and you are dancing on top of ’em like a Chinese acrobat. What would WorkSafe BC say?”

“Don’t worry! It’s not hard. I got my balance. And they are lodged in pretty good. I’ll be fine.”

We’ve been together forty years and if there is one thing that separates us (besides appeal) it is her NO FEAR attitude. Sal laughs at danger and piles scorn on warnings. Worse, she takes umbrage at being told what to do even if the message is delivered with tact and sensitivity to her being an adult (in other words: when it comes to safety, she thinks like a 16 year old boy on a skateboard in front of a gaggle of girls).

I am a bit more careful by nature (a flying squirrel is more careful than Sal). But I’ve learned not to warn her directly, I do not instruct directly and I do not criticize her at all. I am also careful about what I say.

And, of course, I have a sense of fear about that, too.

But this was too much.

“Damn it, Sal. Get the hell off that pile! Stay upside the logs at all times and be safe for once! You are freakin’ me out! If you don’t get off that pile, I am coming down to drag you off!”

That little outburst surprised me. Those could have been BIG fightin’ words. I was hung out on a very thin chauvinistic limb. The smell of immediate danger in the air was palpable. Foot was inadvertently put down firmly and it usually ends up in my mouth when I do that – especially when telling Sal how to do something she has been doing well for a long time.

I cringed at my indiscretion………..

“OK, sweetie. I’ll play it safe.” And she got off the pile and completed the job taking the necessary care for her own safety.

I was in shock! I have no idea what just happened there. Everywhere I looked, there was danger. I looked left and looked right and leaped blindly into the fray. And it worked out. Thank God.

It is so easy to make a mistake out here and then someone can get hurt. Logging is a dangerous pastime.

Telling Sal what to do? Suicidal!

Yep. We went a-loggin’ again yesterday.

As you may have noted from past blogs, we gather rosebuds and fire wood logs when we can. We had gathered a nice little cache in the lagoon and they needed to get hauled out of the water (logs not rosebuds).

Yesterday we lifted 13 logs up to the drying bench (a place half way up the hill that allows for the wood to dry without being underfoot). Today we’ll do five more (plus some sundry heavy equipment later). When they are all processed we will be ‘good’ for at least two years and likely three.

I had a selection of pulling winches for this task from which to choose but, remembering the old maxim; ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!’, I went with the old slow winch to ensure the job got done. It was slow. But it got done.

Sometimes you just have to hold off on the fun part of a job and so I’ll select and place the right winch when I can maximize the fun quotient sometime later. Cement, heavy lifting, greasy cables…….Oooh, I can hardly wait.

Weather has finally gotten beautiful. Things are as they should be. All is right in our world. But the summer is well underway (according to the calendar but not the weather) and we are a bit behind in our chores (Sal is slowing down a bit, you understand). So we are going to have to pick up the pace a bit or else exploit the scheduled guests. I prefer the latter.

You see, we are seasonally oriented nowadays. And this is the season to get things done. The year is no longer just one long ‘same ol’, same ol’ workday’ at the office. We have to do some things in the spring and fall and way more things in the summer and way fewer things in the winter. And the tasks themselves are seasonally oriented. Gardening, logging, building. They all have their start-dates and finish-by dates. Work is different out here.

And we are appreciating a little help more and more.

I love the enthusiasm with which a newly arrived guest will attack a pile of wood needing splitting. There is a lumberjack inside everyone, it seems. They pick up the maul and start a’ whacking. Wood flies in all directions. For a few minutes, anyway. Then they slow down. After a bit, they stop, get some water and look around for a face-saving way out.

Of course, I usually try to make it easier for them to quit, “Hey, man! Lookin’ a bit bagged, ain’t ya? Y’all might want to rest up for later when you may be called on to lift a few beer cans and your knife and fork! Ya big pussy! Damn! My little Chinese girls – all 80 pounds of them – would have had that pile chopped and stacked by now. You seein’ a doctor regular like?”

That works on the guys.

The women are different. “Wow! You are good. Most women can’t get that maul over their shoulders, let alone swing it anywhere near the target. You are at least hittin’ the choppin’ block and that’s a good start. The little Chinese girls couldn’t hit the ’round’ either. Usually took ém at least ten or so whacks before they started gettin’ the range. Hooeeeee! Then the wood started flyin’!”

Then I leave. Come back when it is done…………(he heh heehe)

Here’s a bit of information for you: at a certain point in the year – sometime in late April – we are supposed to tilt our solar panels to catch the maximum rays from the sun’s ascending arc in the sky. We usually forget until about mid May. This year we didn’t ‘adjust’ until June 1. By June the sun is high in the sky and every year we are stunned by the jump in the solar panel output. Not so much this year as it has been so cloudy but, even at that, we can now go a whole week without running the genset. It is truly magic.

In the dead of winter, we run the genset for two hours every day or three every other day. And, even at that, we run the BIG genset once a week for four or five hours so our gensets are a-hummin’. In the summer, we may put on an average of two hours a week. Sometimes nothing.

My wind gen is good. But not great. It is only a 400 watt wind turbine but it just doesn’t produce enough to warrant having it. I suppose it earns it’s keep in the winter. It will certainly keep the batteries ‘topped’ when we are away – which is a damn good thing. But it cannot make enough juice to ‘use’ unless the wind is howling. I may gamble someday and get a bigger one but the key determinant is low wind speed generation and few, if any, produce much below 15 mph.

Well, I see ol’ Sal strapping on the boots and getting the chokes ready. Seems we are off to do a bit more log haulin’………….

A friend of mine and his wife have had a tough couple of years. I won’t bore you with their not-at-all-boring story (the medical part actually deserves a book) but last week, their self-built and locally familiar 30-foot-plus sailboat caught an errant spark and burned to the waterline. I sincerely hope it is the final chapter in their current litany of tribulations.

None of us are insured out here so this loss was felt not only in the hearts and minds of those who know them and knew the boat but it also made a pretty big dent in their equally as battered wallet.

You wouldn’t know it to look at him, tho. He’s handling it all remarkably well. Much better than I would.

Sad, really, that it takes adversity to bring out the best in people. (Ironically, hardship doesn’t work that way with me. Adversity just brings surrender, tears and a lot of crying and moaning. Usually a lot of sniveling, gnashing of teeth and blaming others,too, if I can squeeze it in. I like to think of those as my coping mechanisms).

Mind you, that suggests that he was not ‘the best’ before and that is wrong. R is a fine fellow. But mettle is forged, it seems, in battle and he has had his share of late. And yet his mettle is still shining. I think my tarnished suit would get even darker if it had all happened to me. I really need things to be easier, not harder. I would fold like a towel in Sally’s arms if things got really hard. Hell, I do that whenever I can as it is. I prefer the idyllic and not the horrific. Heaven is better than hell, ya know?

Which reminds me: it has been no walk in the park for his wife, either. She has had an issue or two as well, to say the least. For all the resilience he has shown in recovering, she has shown the same as well as strength, courage and grace – the load still got carried. Troubles don’t discriminate. The family has had a lot to deal with and she has been equally as tested and found capable if not more so.

Yesterday morning we went with a few other neighbours to help them rid the provincial park beach from the remains of the vessel. The burnt hulk was on the shore and the authorities thought it unsightly. We chopped and hammered and unfastened, we chainsawed, dragged and pried, and we basically just tore it to pieces. I had a brief sense of what being part of a savaging wolf pack and pulling apart an unfortunate deer might be like. It was brutal.

I called him last night to tell him what I was thinking…..

“So, like you mean, I get maybe a 6 out of ten or something on the manly scale?” he said.

“Geez, man, if you’re gonna call a guy with this kind of message you’d think I’d be due at least a 7 out of ten!”

He has a point. With a sense of humour like that, we can stretch to a 7 out of ten for him, don’t you think?

It is July the first. Canada Day. It was wet and chilly all day and it just loomed so bleak, I lit a fire in the wood-stove. What climate change?

Today was a no-work day after all. I spent much of it horizontal. Not enough, tho. I may try to add some more to the R&R ledger tomorrow.

The comment (you may have read on a previous blog) in the ‘comment section’ describing me as English is from a friend of mine living in a somewhat cloistered society of Dutch descent. Old Dutch. They refer to all those ‘outside’ their community as the ‘English’. I guess I sounded kinda typical of the English-cum-‘westerner’ in that entry. Thus the comment.

It is hard to believe I sounded normal in that blog but I guess normal is in the eyes and ears of the beholder. Which prompts this thought: if I hung out with ugly people would I be considered more handsome? Am I considered ugly now because my wife is so beautiful? Am I just living in the wrong aesthetics context?

Hard to know, really…………..

I once bumped into a whole Mayan family (5) while moseying the market place in Chichicastenango. I was so much taller than they were that I didn’t see them. The father barely reached my navel. So, in some parts of Guatemala, I am tall.

I’ve been to a lot of places where I was regarded as rich, too.

I wonder where I have to go appear smart?

This weird blog is the result of a day spent not being busy.

It has been a whirlwind of activity this last week or two. We are exhausted. Today may – just may – be a day ‘without work’. We’ll see. Sal will set the pace. As usual. If something needs doin’, it is hard for Sal not to do it. And so it will get done.

I confess that it is easier for me to ignore a chore and not lose a second of downtime to worrying about it. Not Sal. I also confess to actually enjoying watching her do it sometimes but that can be fraught with danger so I try to at least ‘hide’ when that energy-cum-guilt discrepancy is manifest.

And, of course, there are still things needin’ doin’ by me like getting the newly found logs up, getting the winches off the dock and completing the tracks for the funicular extension. Not to mention Sal having the garden, the clean-up after the guests, re-stocking the larder and all the weird paperwork that seems to be attached.

And that is only the half of it. Things like checking the water levels of the batteries, the cistern, refueling, gardening, gutter-cleaning and those jobs more accurately described as regular, routine and mundane are just as pressing when they have been ‘put aside’ for a few weeks of guests.

I have to swap over a few batteries, too………..

Then there is the world around us. A friend bought a huge 85-foot luxury-commercial fishing boat and wants to plan business strategies. Another had an accidental spark burn his boat to the waterline. He needs help in the clean-up. There is a mediation a-brewing in Vancouver. The teachers we are sending to Hong Kong are needing information and administrative support. We have seasonal chores, guests arriving next week and I still have a few days left on the Bunkhouse project.

I guess our list of to-do chores is of no real interest to anyone but, don’t forget, this blog is a blog of the mundane – the daily doings of two living off the grid. We never promised you a rose garden but, now that I mention it, the salad garden is going gangbusters.

I guess, like many people, I tend to muse out loud about what I am doing, going to do, should be doing and have done recently as a way of connecting with people. You know, like sharing common experiences in life? We all have things to do and it is like ‘bonding’, I guess.

Feeling closer, are ya?

It’s Thursday and the girls have left. Jim took ’em. Jim was one of our volunteer teachers and he, like us, fell in love with the school, the teachers and the kids when he was there. And it stuck. He was keen to take over from us and take them home to Victoria where he and his wife will continue the ‘experience’ of BC. It is a good thing.

It is also a bit of a ‘moving’ thing. Lots of tears from the girls and, I admit, a bit of a misty eye from me, too. The teacher was a sobbing mess!

It is not as if I am prone to teary sentimentality when saying goodbye, being the macho, crusty type that I am. I am disinclined to sad, prolonged, gooey goodbyes as a rule. I am a romantic, to be sure, but basically a realist. People come and people go. It is the way of things.

Once, I even cracked a joke with a friend who was in the process of dying.

It is not that I am callous, it is just that goodbyes don’t mean that much to me. I always intend to see the person again – in my friend’s case, in the ‘next life’, I suppose – but, for most goodbyes, what I really mean is: ‘I’ll see you again soon’.

But this time was different. These are little girls at a crucial point in their lives – they are ‘stepping out’ for the first time. And neither I nor anyone else will see them as children ever again. These kids are on the brink of adulthood and they have entrusted some of that ‘initiation’ process to us. In that sense, we are one of the last stations on their route to growing up.

Does anyone really know how that is done?

We, of course, gave them a gift-to-mark-their-visit. They, of course, gave us one. Each gift is cherished by the recipient not because of the actual item given but rather because of the sentiment expressed in the giving and receiving. In the beginning it is ‘respect’. If you are lucky, it moves beyond that.

They gave us a typical ‘guest-who-does-not-yet-know-the-host’ gift of something Chinese but then, later (when they knew us), a gift of their own personal thoughts in a journal-diary-like summary of their time here. It was funny. It was touching. It was great!

We gave them something from the area – local Native-carved silver pendants – but I added a personal story (after I knew them). And that – the story – was what meant the most to them.

I told them the myth of Raven releasing the humans from the clamshell into the world but drew a parallel with their own release from childhood into adulthood. It was personal. They got it.

The pendants are now more than just a souvenir.

And now we are more than just ‘guest teachers and students’. Now we are real friends.

And that, dear readers, is why we do this.

White westerners are referred to as gweilos in Chinese society. It is not always a benign term but, for the most part, it is simply just a descriptive designation. It means ‘foreigner’ or ‘westerner’. Of course, depending on the context, it can take on a heavier or lighter weight in the describing of something or someone. The word also means – kinda – western ways or western behaviours, styles or habits.

Just as we tend to think of the word Chinese as a collective term, they tend to use the word gweilo. It is natural. And, equally as naturally, it is so collective as to be almost meaningless when applied to any single person, behaviour or habit.

So who knows what it really means………eh?

My friend Dennis had some idea. He wanted me to share my ‘gweilo thoughts’ with the kids. Basically he was saying, “You know how you are kinda weird and all…..? Well, share some of that weirdness with them would you? I think a little ‘weird’ is good for them. I don’t agree with any of your crazy gweilo ways but I do think the kids benefit from hearing viewpoints different from the Chinese way of seeing things. Can you do that?”

“Yeah. Sure. Any topic in particular?”

“Well, I do kind of think that the gweilo way of being a bit independent of society is good. Not as far as you go or as far as, you know, crazy guys and all that, but I’d like them to hear about independent thinking rather than ‘harmonious‘ thinking (‘groupthink’ in Orwellian terms).

“You think I am independent-thinking?”

“OK, that settles it. I am sending their teacher, Ms Wong, with them. Just to be on the safe side!”