“Up North”
I am thinking about Hurricane Matthew right now. Because the internet is patchy here and I often go days without turning on the radio, I was shocked this morning to find out it has ploughed through Haiti and Cuba and the lesser Antilles and is about to pounce on Florida. I know someone in Saint Lucia and was wondering why she didn’t answer my email yesterday. Duh.
As for us, up here on the farm…in some ways we’re quite organized and in others, well…there are still numerous boxes stuffed into corners and cubbyholes that haven’t been unpacked, and therefore there are lots of things we could use but can’t find, like a skinny short screwdriver to tighten up the screws on the carburetor on the generator. For the want of a screw, we could end up with no power (which means no water because the pump is electric). I have searched all the stores within a day’s reach and no one has had a screwdriver like that in stock: but once I unpack all my boxes I’m sure I’ll find one or two of them.
The cabin is great! But it’s small and now there are three of us here. Kesia has brought her friend Tim to live with us. She went to England with Wayne in August for a couple of weeks to do Aikido, and met this lovely man and they’ve been communicating constantly, and she just spent a week in Vancouver doing errands and picking him up at the airport and now he’s here indefinitely. That is the short story. He’s nice, he chats, he helps, he’s kind to the animals…and he has all sorts of talents with wind and solar and general handiness that we are yet to experience.
Projects: Kesia and I have an agreement to rip down a small barn out in Telkwa (east of Smithers) in exchange for the wood. Tim has arrived just in time to help with the roof! We now have a pick-up truck (in England they call them “those small lorries with open boots”) to bring our bounty home. Kesia and I have cleared out a section of our barn (3 sided, sloped roof, quite big, 3 separate bays and a couple of “rooms” full of stuff the previous owners collected.) Some of it is incredibly useful to us, like lumber, and some of it not so much. We have made some substantial dump runs and tidied up quite a bit.
The horses have the run of the entire place, except the barnyard and house yard which they do invade every now and then to get at the grass that’s always greener. They use the barn at night and have a little enclosure to loaf in, though it is open to the 30 acres of hayfields (and the rest of this big, beautiful property) that they roam daily, eating their fill. They are in the best shape of their lives, really beautiful to see. The filly is 15 months old, wild in the best sense of the word, really proud and fit and a force of nature. She got out the other day and soon had all of us in line. The goats were running from her, the chickens were scattering, the dogs were taking cover and Tim and I were sort of waving sticks and carrots at her. Finally I texted Kesia at work (she’s helping out at Skeena Watershed Conservancy, for Kai’s friend Shannon McPhail who is also a force of nature and a fifth generation Hazelton person) and she told me to put some alfalfa pellets in a pail and open the gate wide, go into the field, shake the pellets and get Tim to shut the gate. I thought, what could go wrong, besides me being loose in the field with three feisty horses? I put the pellets in a bucket and shook it a bit to see if there was enough in there. Uh oh! Surrounded by large beasts. I managed to keep my cool and walk into the field and then drop the bucket and leave, closing the gate behind me.
Yeah, so the challenges here are constant, but they’re quite different, at least on the surface, from city challenges. Although it strikes me that they actually are similar, because what is usually involved is quick thinking, facing some fear or another, and figuring out an action, not necessarily a successful one. Or not a permanent solution to a recurring problem, like the goats breaching the garden fence. (There didn’t used to be a fence, or indeed a garden. I keep reminding myself of things like this. There didn’t used to be goats. We have done quite a lot in three months but on a homestead there is apparently no resting upon your laurels, or at least not for long.)
Case in point: this morning I slept in for the first time since arriving. I got up early and fed the two dogs (the lovely Jimmy the bear dog who sometimes gets a scent and is gone for hours chasing it down out in the hundreds of acres of bush behind us, and the lovely Bea the farm dog who at five months is 50 pounds of beauteous joy, if we can only bottle it and transform it into chicken and goat protection instead of constant invitations for the other animals to play and wrestle) yes and then back to bed for awhile before the three cats start walking up and down my body hinting for the bedroom window to be opened wider so they can descend their conveniently placed step ladder and disappear into the fields and the hedges. Well, except Bella, who in her old age has become a house cat. Kesia and Tim had left coffee and headed off to Terrace (the Big Smoke) to buy insulation for the chicken house, rubber boots for Tim and to pick up friend Sara the historian whom we met when she was researching the history of the Japanese on Mayne Island. Sara and Tim are both vegetarians so we will have a small chicken and a lot of veg for Thanksgiving dinner. Meanwhile I have the place to myself. Shower! Canning the rest of the tomatoes! Make salsa with the tomatillos, along with root vegetables, cabbages and squash that Kesia scored in Lillooet on her way home with Tim. (The garden was lovely for a time but wasn’t able to finish growing before the first frost, which came earlier than I expected, I think because we’re up on a bit of a rise. Notes for next year.) Oh yes, the place to myself. I should eat. And shower. But first, answer my email because there are two bars of internet!! Quick, while it lasts! Oh and now I’m distracted looking up a quote from Lee Harvey Oswald, of all people, to impress my editor, who is helping me get through the first draft of a novel I started two years ago through a program at UBC. She now lives in St. Lucia, in the lesser Antilles, and Hurricane Matthew just thundered through there, as I mentioned. Look up Hurricane Matthew, whew, ST. Lucia not hit too hard. But she’s busy with that, and has had no time to look at my latest submission, 30,000 words which I want her opinion on before continuing, but with the constant distractions and necessary tasks here, things like writing a novel set in the 50’s seem less and less important.
Oops! Watch that thought! It’s all important, the chicken feed getting low, driving 25 km to Skype with a client, the early frost, the insulation, carrots for the horses, chopping kindling, patching the garden fence, spending time writing this to you. Phoning my Mom and Dad. I picked a fine time to leave them, just as they’re needing more help. Dad can’t do email anymore, often can’t hear me on the phone. Mom is adjusting to being “the stronger one”. My visits are seven or eight weeks apart, when I used to drive to Squamish every second week. The errands and emergencies now all fall on my sister and my nieces and nephew, who do step up I am glad to say.
What’s that? A car just pulled up. Do I have time to get out of my jammies? I throw on whatever I can find. A very nice woman is at the door, saying she met Kesia and Tim last night at the neighbour’s birthday bonfire (I stayed home to watch Crazy Heart because Tim has brought 100 movies on a hard drive and what a treat when you have no high-speed internet) Just a small hint here: if you have the capability of copying a movie or two onto a USB key and dropping it in the mail, it would be like receiving a CARE package! 2106 Kispiox Valley Road, Hazelton BC V0J 1Y5 Much nicer than Netflix anyway, because they would be screened by my friends and guaranteed to be good.
Oh yes, the woman is named Jill and she’s inviting us to dinner next weekend but can’t stay to chat because she and her husband are moving into town today, to the Seniors’ Intentional Living complex. I sort of talk her ear off anyway because the one thing there isn’t a lot of here yet is social life. But that looks to be changing. I have started making friends with Martha and Ernst up the road, who have a Billy goat willing to be Flora and Birdy’s baby daddy in exchange for one of the kids.
And tomorrow, we are driving east of Smithers to Telkwa with Tim and Sara to work on ripping up that old barn, which we need to finish by winter (unspecified what date “winter” actually arrives to stay), and we will use some of the wood to make the insulating panels for the chicken house and the rest will be stored to make another shelter out in the field. The man with the barn has given us a yearling quarter horse that he isn’t attached to. The poor little dude doesn’t even have a name. He was given to the man by a neighbour as company for his own stud colt but the two don’t get along, so there’s our fourth horse! With an extra shelter, we can also get a few cows. And piglets. Also the pork man at the market, who invited us out one Saturday to visit his family and find out about pigs, is willing to sell me a pregnant gilt in the spring (young lady pig having her first litter). I might just get 3 little piggies and see how that goes. Kesia will be raising chickens for slaughter as well, come spring. We know it will be hard to butcher and eat our own meat but we trust that we will be able to manage, as many other people have done and are doing. Our first goal here is to feed ourselves, and then to start feeding other people, both bodily and in other ways as we dream up and build our retreat centre.
Yes, we are new to most of this, but as we suspected, each project breaks down into specific tasks, and if you do one thing at a time you get there. But as you have noticed, because I am writing this in pieces and in the same style as I am living these days: responding to interruptions, or competing priorities (yikes! The water for blanching the tomatoes is boiling away in the other room and the fire in the kitchen stove needs stoking and I still haven’t had my shower, but I have found a pot and scooped some rainwater out of the barrel Kai installed to catch the drips off the shed and fill the pond out front that he drained and is planning to stock with Koi and aquatic plants, to rinse my hair because our beautiful well water is hard, hard, hard!)
Kai has been up several times this summer and he and Kesia have built a campsite and outdoor kitchen on a beautiful little wooded knoll just beside the house and barnyard, but separate and private with its own little road. The canvas bell tent is now pitched up there, and the wood stove that is specially designed for it has arrived in the mail, all 75 pounds of it. Theoretically the tent will be suitable for sleeping all winter. The outdoor kitchen is a platform with a heavy tarp as a roof, a heavy duty propane stove and a table and counter. And there’s a beautiful fire pit. Kai and his friends use it when they come up hunting, and I can envision it as a glamping destination for the hardy types who will want to come up and rest and rewild themselves a little bit in this beautiful, wide open, gentle place. You can hear the traffic on the valley road, yes, but there isn’t much, and you can also hear the river, which flows past just across the road, about 200 yards away, and the coyotes (and wolves on occasion) way out in the back. You used to be able to hear the rooster but after several vicious attacks on our persons I am afraid we had to make an example of him. His broth will sustain us in lean times throughout the winter.
Every day is different. I have elected not to have curtains on my bedroom windows so I wake up to the weather, often fog these October mornings. It might be rainy for days, or intermittently warm and sunny. Snow is surely coming: we can see it on the peaks all around us when the clouds lift for a moment. I grew up with snowy cold winters. We have skis and snowshoes and lots of winter clothes. We’ve got the snow tires on the pick up and the car already. The wood burners work great and the generator was professionally installed so you just flip a switch in the house and go out and start it. But first I need that short, slim screwdriver so I can tighten those two screws on the carburetor.