Beautiful day!  Cold, bright, sunny.  The sea is calm.  It is the kind of day you say to yourself, “Wow! Today would be a good day to go and do such-and-such!”

And then you bundle up, get your tools and head out to undertake the task-at-hand only to feel your hands go numb and your nose-hairs get needle-hard.  Then your ears fall off.  It is really too cold to do anything and, like the bunny-kins you really are, you quickly retreat to the warmth of the cabin and make yourself a nice hot chocolate. 

Well, I do, anyway.   

I know, I know………..all you easterners and prairie-types think you know cold and -3F is NOT cold, you say.  But it is!  Cold near the water is colder than the dry-ice type cold of the interior.  That’s what everyone says and this time I believe them.  Hell, that interior kind of cold isn’t really cold until it is 25 below.  You want real cold?  Try 25 below in a storm on the coast when the ocean freezes spray on your face!

‘Course, I am just talkin’ big because I don’t even think about going out when it is -5 degrees.  I mean, ‘who am I trying to impress?’

I mention all this because I have been checking in lately with Chris Czajkowski, the author.  Chris Czajkowski of Nuk Tessli goes out in this and doesn’t think twice.  She is the intrepid, gettin’-on, single woman who has carved a lifestyle and reputation out of the wilderness for the past thirty years up and around the Caribou/Chilcotin area.  It gets to 50 below up there!  She used to hike by snowshoe for four days into her cabin alone except for a dog for company and built her cabin by hand and axe.  She is a tough chick – one of those eccentric, bicycle-across-the-Himalaya English-types who do it alone and live on only crackers and cheese.  Like Sal.       

CC was one of the inspirations for the adventure Sal and I are currently on.  Sally and Ian Wilson (two adventurers in the 80’s and 90’s) were two more and the gang at the Mother Earth News forum added to the urge-to-homestead, off-the-grid madness we have embraced with their encouragement and knowledge. 

In other words, we have plenty of people on whom to spread the blame.

It’s January and time to start planning the crops!  The last of our seed catalogs has arrived and we have to order in the seed to till and plant the back 40. 

Feet, that is.

Talk about transplanting the yuppie view of the world, eh?  We have something like 48 square feet of garden all ‘sitting pretty’ in the planters I built and, counting all three seed and garden catalogs that have arrived so far,we have approximately 250 square feet of fancy-coloured printed page!  That’s right…….5 square feet of glossy catalog for every square foot of garden.  I call that the yuppie ratio.  Magazine space vs the real thing.  The YR shows up in Lee valley catalogs, too.  I have almost enough LV catalogs to build an Adirondack deck chair.  

Given our pathetic gardening track record there is no way we can justify taking a tree to make the paper to publish the catalog to make us buy the seeds that grow virtually nothing edible but Marigolds and the squash from Hell.

It ain’t easy being green and a hip consumer but Lee Valley and Versey Seeds are trying to bridge the gap for us all.  And I am having to build another gardening box this year in an effort to justify their work.  To me, this is just an exercise in exercise. 

Sally is hooked, however.  She poured over the latest seed catalog from West Coast seed reading the write-ups on turnips, vintage grape strains, multi-hued tomatoes and heritage apples and pears conveniently ignoring the fact that we are located on solid granite and any  apple trees grown in raised planters produce very little in the way of pie filling.

“Oooh, I think we should plant spinach and kale this year.  What do you think?”  

“Well, we grew kale last year and fed it all to the dogs.  We also grew Marigolds that grew like billy-o and we didn’t eat any – but they were at least very pretty.  And let us not forget the squash from the little shop of horrors that we not only didn’t eat, we were afraid to make angry!  And then there was the half ton of green tomatoes that covered the living room for a week waiting to ripen that, come to think of it, I have not seen hide nor hair of since.”

“Yeah.  We have to pick more carefully this time, I guess. I was just surprised that anything grew at all.  It was so much fun!”

I love her attitude.  But it is not a reality-based view from behind those beautiful eyes.  She sees the garden of Eden.  I see a box not much larger than a coffin………beckoning.  Our visions conflict.  I suspect that we’ll have a ‘mixed salad’ of things that we toil over and yet our diet will change very little.  It is Save-on based if you must know.  We’ll buy organic, of course, and be sure to get our produce from within 100 miles but somehow not very much will come from within the nearest 100 feet.   Of that, I am pretty sure.

Maybe some squash. 

The Marigolds, however, will grace the table almost all year and for that alone, it is all worth it.      

As you might expect, me being all ‘mountain man-ish and all’, we heat with wood.  What you may not know is that we get our wood as it floats by.  None of that lumberjack crap for us.  Delivery to the front door, if you please.

Sadly, nature has not complied with our expectations as much as usual this year.  The log count is down.  The logging industry is virtually shut, mills closed, very few booms being formed and thus, fewer booms coming apart in storms.

But whatever there is in the way of flotsam, it shows up in December and January.  Makes sense actually – all you have to do is think like a log.

A log makes a break from the confines of a boom and, not being nimble of foot, simply goes with the flow or the current in this case.  The flow, however, has a ‘high’ and a ‘low’ tide and a log, lacking sentience, can easily get caught up on a falling tide.  Of course, the tide continues to rise and fall and, tho the log makes sporadic attempts at freedom, it is usually caught and trapped somewhere along the freedom path (i.e life becomes a beach).

Sometimes it is collected by the local bounty hunter – the log salvager – and sometimes it just sits on the highest point of the beach ‘hiding out’, as it were. 

January and December bring the highest tides often supplemented by forceful storms.  If a log is ever to get free again, this is the time for it.  In fact, the new year usually sees a virtual carpet of loose, natural and man-liberated wood on the inner channels and some choice logs are amongst them.  This is our opportunity to hunt and gather our years wood.

Typically, there is enough that we don’t have to go far.  A few hundred yards this way, a few hundred that way and, so long as we are watching carefully, enough choice pieces float through the ‘target area’ and we simply ‘go get ém’.

Gathering those doggies ain’t so hard.   Stick a ‘log dog’ in one end and tow it to your near-the-house spot and tie it up.  That part is quite do-able.  It is the log-wrangling that gets a bit dicey at times.  After awhile you have six or eight thirty footers floating in an untidy raft and it is time to cut them into manageable lengths and haul them up the slope.

Sal’s work is cut out for her. She ‘beaches them’ and then organizes them.  I am not convinced organizing is all that necessary but, when she is done, Martha Stewart would be pleased at the radial display.  It is lovely to be sure. 

We choose to take only the 8 – 10 inchers as a rule.  They are poles, actually, and much easier to handle than some of the salvager-preferred bigger logs.  Still, a 30 foot, 10 incher is a heavy piece of wood and we wrangle ém on the rock-strewn, kelp-covered beach where the footing is poor and a slipping log can easily put you in harms way.  Add the required chainsaw, ropes, block-and-taykle and peevee-use and cutting-to-length is a sometimes nasty chore.

I tell you all this because sometimes people ask, “What the hell do you two do all day out there?” 

Went up to the Q-hut today to add my barely-significant contribution to the renovation we are undertaking.  We are changing the old one-room schoolhouse into a community woodworking shop.  I’ve been somewhat delinquent in my duties these past few weeks what with all the fun and hoopla of Xmas. Too much giddiness to work. 

While we (Hugh, Doug, Bruce and I) were standing around trying to figure out how the new door latch worked we were visited by Tim, a new neighbour.


But first the latch…..  Doug examined it closely but it was too confusing so he gave it to me.  I stared at it for five minutes until I looked in the packaging and found two more parts.  That helped.  It took four of us about 15 minutes more of analysis and we had to run through it a few extra times before Hugh believed the rest of us were right…..and this was just for the door latch! 

Anyway….. 

Tim seemed very nice.  Perhaps bit too clean for our standards in a day-glo red full-survival suit.  “Nice to meet you but you’ll have to stand aside at the photo ops”. I said.  “Excuse me?”  “Sorry.  Nothing personal.  Clothes are too new, tho.  Too shiny.  No dirt.  No rips.  Waddya think this is, a Vanity Fair shoot?”

Everyone chimed in, “Yeah, that thing new this morning?  Right out of the box, eh?”  “Not really an islander yet, are ya?”    

Tim laughed.  It was OK.  Being teased is a sign of acceptance (I am clinging to that otherwise my life is too tragically cruel).  I love that kind of male worker goofiness.   It really is the best part of the job. 

As Bruce was whacking away at something in the corner, I asked over the din, “Sheesh.  What the hell is Bruce doin’?  Doug replied, “No idea.  Not part of any plan for this building.  But don’t disturb him none as he is the only one doing anything!”  Hugh chimed in, “Lunch time yet?” 

Hugh asks about lunch at least three times a day and at least once after lunch has been had.  It is one of those timeless jokes that doesn’t lose a thing in the re-telling.  I guess you have to be there………..

At one point I was standing alone looking into a darkened corner where the floor boards have yet to be put down.  Then I saw it.  Movement!  As I adjusted my myopic, blurred and fading vision, I saw the last of a long tail disappear under the building.  It was black, it was hairy – but not bushy – and it was at least 18 inches long!  Some critter had been watching us and it was no house-cat!  “Hey!  Hey, guys!  There was some kind of animal over there.  Something with a long tail.  Big.  I think.  Hey!”  

“Gotta expect animals in the forest, Dave.  They come with the territory.”   
“Yeah, but……like………….this………huge………….like……………”

“Lunch?”

Some lunatic gave me a magazine – the Special Housing Edition installment of Senior Living (Vancouver Islands 50+ Active Lifestyle Magazine).  Oh my GAWD!

First off, it seems their definition of senior is 50 and their definition of active is brunch!  There are numerous pictures of so-called seniors reading, walking, petting dogs, drinking coffee with other seniors and getting in and out of special bathtubs.  Whew! How do they keep it up? 

Then there is a picture of a blond woman in pretty good shape reading on a beach and thinking, “I wish that I’d moved in sooner!”  She is about 60 and is referring to a retirement village in Parksville that arranges her ‘activities’ and makes her meals.  The 60 year old women I know are climbing the local mountains, learning Mandarin in Shensin or working with lepers in India.  Who are these people in Parksville? 

10 pages of the magazine are dedicated to listing assisted-living residences.  Some features: ‘walker friendly’, ‘raised gardens’, ’emergency call service’ and HandyDart.  For a real exciting time, there are escorted walks, group shopping and supervised gardening.   

I have no idea why she didn’t enroll sooner.

I guess what I am saying is this: there is a modern mindset of dependence/helplessness that prevails about ‘seniors’ and that word, in itself, is a mindset.  I am 63.  I think I am just starting to sneak up on the s-word.  Not quite there but close.  Knees are there.  Lower back is there.  But the rest of me is still middle-aged.  OK, maybe my waistline is on the cusp.  But, generally speaking, I am NOT a senior.  But these Parksville-types are getting special bathtubs in their fifties!  Or, at least, special bathtubs are being marketed to 50 year olds.

Somebody must be buying them.

One thing is for sure; out here you are young if you are in your fifties – still a sex symbol (if you ever were).  50 year-olds are still wet behind the ears and not in the least because they are still flying about in boats in all kinds of weather.  60 year-olds are feeling their joints but are otherwise in the prime of their life and still learning, socializing and traveling to Mexico or Hong Kong.  The 70 year-olds are the main contingent, the backbone of the community.  They have the power.  They have the wisdom.  And they still have the ability to exercise it.  The 80 year olds are the ones whose health we inquire about but they still get in their own wood, do their own shopping and kill their own bears and skin ém.  Even the 90 years olds are a feisty old bunch.

You don’t get old as fast out here, I guess.     

Put shelves in the closet today.  Sal’s happy.  She likes it when things are neat and organized.  A tidy closet makes her very happy.  Right now she is making us a great spaghetti dinner, drinking wine and listening to the CBC.  With a smile on her face.  All because the mop and broom are hanging on hooks, the bottles are on shelves and the cans are lined up regimentally.   

She thinks it all so very civilized.

It’s freezing but our water is still running.  That means showers.  Ever since Sal and I lived on boats, we have had an exaggerated appreciation for the basic shower.  We seem to be able to go with the flow, handle what comes up and roll with most of the punches, but afterwards, we increasingly need a shower. 

I think this shower-need is the first of the ‘old geezer’ items we simply now must have.  You know how people get as they get older and more set in their ways –  what was a pleasure is now a requirement.   “Oh, I just can’t start my morning without a cup of coffee.  Not even breathing is easy without my coffee.”  Or, “Don’t expect me to go out there.  I’d catch my death”.  Or “I couldn’t possibly walk that far; call a cab!” 

The ‘softy’ list grows longer with the teeth. 

We didn’t used to say those kinds of things.  Not Sal, anyway.  She is simply too tough and had an English mother with the archetypal stiff upper lip as a role model.  Me? well, mostly I suppressed it for the sake of trying to appear as macho as Sal (or her mother).  Eventually, of course, I just let my inner whinger out but I did it quietly and rather later in life.  Then, as the mewling increased to embarrassing levels, I moved to the woods. 

The implication of their (my) declarations of weakness, of course, is that these people are helpless (or hopeless) without Jamaican coffee, high-thread-count cotton sheets or warm-room comfort to within one degree of their preference. Self-limitation, it seems, is being used as a statement of taste rather than what it is: self-limitation.  And the older we get, the more refined our taste until we can’t seem to do anything.

Sadly, it is a club I now belong to.  

Sal and I used to shake our heads at these self-imposed personal ‘requirements’ for life.  Six billion people around the world don’t ‘need their special pillow’ or ‘stop walking without their Rockports’.  They carry on in the old, well, ‘carry on’ tradition.  And so did we.

But then the need for showers started to creep in.  Then wine and/or martinis around dinner.  Dinner could still be a ten-peso tortilla with fish paste but we simply had to have the cerveza-with-lime-wedge at the very least.  Rot began to set in.

I’m afraid it is embedded in me.  

Now we are cream-puffs and I have the silhouette to prove it.  We simply must have our showers, don’t you know?  And Sal her chocolate, me, my scotch.  Internet has crept in to the picture, too, damn it!  I’ve even traveled with my special pillow.  It is probably just a matter of time before we start drinking bottled water and buying organic Brie.

And really, just what kind of a meal would it be without sorbet between courses and finger bowls after?

Mind you, I now dress like a homeless person so maybe it all balances out in the end. 

Not much happening today.  Took a nap.  Good way to start the year.  And, in keeping with that theme,……….

It has been not-so-subtly pointed out to me that there is a kind of irony in marketing off-the-grid living.  You know; like being a hermit with a busy calendar, or a vegan butcher – not impossible but awkward in the concept.

In some kind of weird way, this dissonance is a metaphor for my life.  The only circumstance I can think of where my nature and abilities coincided with my interests was my singular lack of interest in playing basketball or being an actor (tho, to be fair, I was a model for a short period of time.  I was a ‘spokes-model’ for Old Style beer in the 70’s.  It was a very short exposure to fame).  In both those other careers nature took it’s separate course and I was OK with it.       

And so I agree with the point raised.  Marketing off-the-grid living by way of consulting to urban wannabes is not a ‘make-it-up-in-the-volume’ kind of business.  Not for me, anyway.  I am thinking a single client a year would be considered a lot.  Maybe one a decade. Anything more would resemble very hard work.

It would also be full-time because, face it, if you don’t know know enough to say, pick the right property, you are certainly going to come up short in everything else.  That kind of rube would need a lot of hand-holding.  We know this.  We learned it by holding a lot of hands.

Fortunately for us, we were right some of the time, assisted by wise people much of the time and lucky in the extreme all of the rest of the time.  In other words, maybe I am not well-suited to being a Dan’l Boone-type consultant.  I don’t really know very much, I still recoil at getting my hands dirty and I hate bugs. 

I think I was just lucky.
  
So, the question is: to be a consultant to urban escapees or not to be?

I think I’ll put a stop-work order on the advertising campaign for now.   

Weather is gorgeous – as sunny as Mexico but without the corpses.  Not going South for the winter is a lot easier when it is this lovely outside and that dangerous south of the US border.  This is good.  Fewer bullets to deal with when shopping for bread and milk, you know?

Sal and I may spend the day (January 1, 2011) log salvaging.  The tides have been high and there is a lot of wood floating around out there.  Some of it pretty good.  We can start our ‘next year’s firewood haul’ early if we go snag a few now.  Nothing like a polar bear boat ride log salvaging to ring in the New Year.

I may have bought an engine.  Yamaha 50.  Comes with a boat similar to the one I have.  So, the fleet may grow.  This is NOT good.  Boats tend to gather like vehicles on a reservation.  In clumps.  It is not so much that the boat is no good or that the owner wants a heap o’ boats in the yard, it is rather more like they just get blown in like plastic bags to a fence in Arizona.  It just happens.  Resistance is futile.

As it stands right now, we have a dozen boats sprinkled around the immediate area.  I have a sailing dinghy with a small hole in it that I keep meaning to fix.  We have the inflatable with a few small holes in it that we are not likely to ever get around to fixing as they are ‘slow-leakers’ and we can still use it in a pinch.  We have Sal’s boat, my boat and now, the new boat.  That makes 5 not counting three kayaks.

Could use an engine or two, tho.  

John has another batch.  His big one, his two aluminum ones, three kayaks and usually one stuck on a beach somewhere that he salvaged until a high tide floats it away again.  That’s a minimum of a dozen here at Sheer Heaven.

Go to anyone’s place on the coast and you’ll see their áu current bateau, it’s immediate predecessor half-filled with rain and no engine, an upturned earlier one on the beach, another one half-buried in the forest and maybe a few more here and there.  It is like some kind of weird, unconscious habit we all have.

“Hey, a friend of mine wants to get rid of a nice little runabout cheap.  Maybe free.  You want it?”     

“Gawd No!  A thousand times ‘no’.  I got boats up the yin yang.  Nope.  Can’t use it.  Don’t want it.  Don’t ask!………………………………………………..but, ah………………what kind of boat is it?”

And that is how it happens. 

December 31, 2010.  House is fine.  We are warm and toasty.  Water is still flowing though it is -3.  Takes a bit lower than 32F/0C to freeze water in a pipe and we are on the ‘edge’ of freezing so I drain the system every night.  Sky is clear.  Stars are gorgeous!

Today is the community ‘gift exchange’ but I am not attending.  Sal may bop in for a bit (the Suzi is like ‘money in the pocket’ to her – it is burning a hole).  She needs to ‘fly’.

Too much socializing for me already.  We’ve been ‘peopling’ since mid-December and, nice as they are, people can get a bit ‘much’ after awhile.  I need a break.  Sal and I have a bottle of bubbly and a few good movies and I think we will ‘ring in the New Year around 9:00 pm.  We like to get a jump on these things.  Probably ‘shut ér down’ around 9:15.  No sense gettin’ all crazy.   

The RCMP left yesterday.  Constables M and V often stay at our neighbour’s over the holidays and this year was no exception.  So we had an evening with them.  Always good.

Then a luncheon the next day 10 miles up the coast on Rendezvous Island.  Sal flew over the light chop in the little whaler up in the direction of Bute Inlet with me and the dogs.  The water is like ice.  So is the air temperature.  We are one-step-further out there when you get to Calm Channel (which is rarely calm).  It feels like an adventure.

The Suzi done good.  

Our distant-neighbour, J, had Sal, me, R&L over for an afternoon and we ate and talked and hiked all over the outer island.  They all like that hiking stuff.  I’m a smidge ambivalent, preferring the woodstove and cookies to exertion of any kind but one has to put on a show, I suppose, for the locals.  So, we hiked.  As usual, it was uphill both ways. 

We hiked over to another neighbour who is building.  They are constructing a very lovely 1500-foot cabin with big timbers, all the mod-cons, a beautiful verandah and an even more staggering view.  It is really beautiful.

It is also costing about $600 per sq ft.  $1M is not far off the estimate and, when all the roadwork, additional buildings and what-have-you are all done, well, the cost will be off-the-chart.  Living off-the-grid is like that.  Everything is ‘off-the-something’.

I still recommend this life highly but I am starting to see that an off-the-grid consultant could save their fees by a huge margin just by advising clients how to go about doing something like this.  Almost all of us learn the hard way – simply by doing it.  In this case, the people expected their place to come in around $300 a square (unrealistic for any construction out here, really, and exceptionally so for ‘quality’ work and all the mod-cons).  But a bit of better planning and a bit better of a construction plan, delivery system, etc. and they may have shaved $100,000 off the total.  Maybe a smidge more.  Hard to say.

But one thing is clear – a good architect is worth his weight out here.  Such a professional ‘knows’ local, off-grid stuff and that, as much as the design itself, is what makes a project work.  Add a good contractor – not just skill – with a ‘remote builder’s attitude and such a combination would make the project where failing to have such a team would end in frustration at the least, disappointment most likely and cost over-runs every time.

I prefer to do things myself (if I do anything at all) but the further you get from the range of the yellow pages, the more reliant you are on others out here.  And there are some good ones (worth their weight in gold) and there are some bad ones (not worth their weight in poo).  Building out here is a big undertaking and not one you fully appreciate until you have done it.  So…………be careful if you are planning something like this.