Wednesday, February 5, 2020

East Pole Journal February 5, 2020: Life on a hillside

 The view downhill. Lower left is the pile of wood waitng to
be split. The snowmachine is about where it got stuck and
the remaining wood is down the hill to the right.






I
have some pretty good trails around the cabin by this time in winter and that makes walking easier.

Still it's a hillside, steep enough that if you lean even a little the wrong way, especially if you are carrying something heavy, you are likely to tip over, or find yourself skiing down the hill or, worse, running, or falling face first into the snow. A day seldom gets by where I don't shout epithets at the cursed hill even though most days with the trail good and some traction from boots getting around is fairly simple. This week, we've had maybe 4 inches of snow over the past couple of days and that makes all those easy walking spots slippery (worse in the steeper parts where you really need traction to move uphill or slow yourself going down) and just that little bit of snow obliterates the border between hard-packed snow of the trail and the almost-waist-deep snow one step off it. Given that background here's how my day went. Mind you snow fell the whole time this was going on.

Accomplished:
Gathered enough snow to produce water to wash dishes with.
Two sled loads of firewood in the round brought up to the splitting yard in the large sled. (3x7)
Two smaller sled loads (2+ x5) split and placed in the woodpile under the house for next year.
One smaller sled load split and put on the deck to burn.
One smaller sled load of seasoned birch and spruce brought from under the house to the deck for the next couple days.
Difficulties overcome
Slipped and fell at least five times.
Slipped and skidded but eventually maintained balance too many times to count.
Stepped off the trail into deep snow three times at least (several uncountable while attending to the next item).
Got snowmachine stuck when it, too slid off the trail into deep snow and had to use a comealong to get it out.
Repaired the trail filling the hole the snowmachine made sliding off it. About half an hour of shoveling and stomping.
Soaked three pairs of gloves and one pair of mittens.
Duration: about four hours.
Early on when I first started living here more or less full time, people used to ask me what I did all day. I didn't really have an easy answer. I would say live, explaining that everything you do in the normal course of living in a house, takes longer in the woods. You don't just turn on the hot water faucet to wash the dishes (imagine one of those electric dishwashers), you have to draw water somewhere. I have found I can keep up melting snow. But when I was married and my wife came out, I ended up having to buy five-gallon containers and go a couple of miles to a creek that runs through the winter and fill four of those containers every three days or so to keep up with her usage. Then of course you have to heat it somehow and finally you can wash your dishes. Now, for heat. Those two sled loads I put under the house today toward next year, given they are spruce (which burns faster than my favored birch) they might last four days if I am conservative with it. No thermostat to turn up when it gets cold. Now multiply that by every single thing you do in a regular house and you get the idea. What do I do all day? Live.
Birds update
I've been seeing a few more redpolls these days but only a couple at a time. Not the big hordes of the past. And there's this. The chickadees have all but emptied the second 40-pound bag of sunflower seeds this winter so I have to go out tomorrow and head for the store.
But then there's the view of Denali.
The East Pole Journal

A COMMENT FROM FACEBOOKBetty Sederquist Ha ha, you should be all settled into the Pioneers’ Home, all cozy. It would leave more time for writing. You could reminisce with others about the difficulties of hauling water. But I know that will never happen.

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Memorable quotations

The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

"If only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us." — Mick Jagger

"You can do anything as long as you don't scare the horses." — a mother's favorite saying recalled by a friend

A poem is an egg with a horse inside” — anonymous fourth grader

“My children will likely turn my picture to the wall but what the hell, you only get old once." — Joe May

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” — Ernest Hemingway

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth. Kurt Vonnegut

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The thing about ignorance is, you don't have to remain ignorant. — me again"

"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

"The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling," Adm. Ernest King, USN

Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

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“The rivers of Alaska are strewn with the bones of men who made but one mistake” - Fred McGarry, a Nushagak Trapper

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

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Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

Exceed your bandwidth—sign on the wall of the maintenance shop at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center

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Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world.—Brett Arends

It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

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“I’m going to relax in a very adult manner.”—Danica Patrick after sweating it out and qualifying half an hour before Andretti

“Asking Congress to come back is like asking a mugger to come back because he forgot your wallet.”—a roundtable participant on Fox of all places

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