June 11, 2004

• more than you want to know

  As I wrote this morning’s blog, Doug woke up and wandered out here to
  stand over me and wait to get on here and post his intro to the final
  round of the fanfic tournament he’s hosting.  The semi-final round
  was a pip, set in the universe of American McGee’s Alice.  I have
  long been impressed by the writing skills of that bunch of young game-obsessed
  creative geniuses with whom my kid consorts at RTSG/Random
  Insanity. 

  Impressed is also the only word for my reaction to what I’ve seen Doug
  do in this, his first survivor-style fanfic tournament as
  host.   As I watched him a few days ago, tabulating scores on
  a spreadsheet, I thought about how these experiences might be presented
  on a resumé.  But such idle musings on my part don’t matter. 
  What does matter is the experience, the learning and the creative
  expression.  When one works so hard at play, then the play is Work
  of the highest type.

  I posted my blog hurriedly, typos and all, and with my butterfly
  moniker somehow ending up in the middle instead of at the end. 
  Gotta fix that, but first gotta blog some more.  I must also go
  through my picture files and see what I can delete because the space
  I’ve been allotted with my lifetime Premium Xanga is almost all full
  and I can’t afford to buy more space now.  It’s either get rid of
  old pics in past blogs or stop adding new ones.  I don’t want to
  stop doing photoblogs, so my course is clear.

  A few minutes ago, the sky dropped on us what in North Texas we used to
  call a gully-washer.  Doug said it looked like special effects
  rain, drops so big they were bouncing.  Now the drips I’m hearing
  in here are reminders that summer is short and we’ve got to fix the
  roof again.  Somehow I just never seem to think of that on
  pleasant sunny days.

  Some curiosity has been expressed regarding a reference I made to our
  outhouse.  So, for new or intermittent or inattentive readers I
  will reiterate some of the facts of our lifestyle here, and maybe add a
  thing or three I’ve forgotten or neglected to mention before.

  We
  live in a squalid rundown 15′X55′ trailer on a one-acre lot amid some
  of the most
  beautiful surroundings on this planet.  It adjoins a dirt road
  with sparse traffic, and none of our neighbors (some of whom live
  year-round in dwellings similar to or even more squalid than ours, and
  others of whom, mostly weekenders from Anchorage, camp out occasionally
  in some fairly decent cabins) is visible from any of
  our windows.

  Compared to the squalid rundown moldy 8′ X 35′ trailer half a mile or
  so away where my 22-year-old son Doug and I lived from the time Doug was two until he was seventeen (first with Doug’s
  dad Charley, then just the two of us for a few years, and later with my current husband Greyfox),
  this place is posh and palatial.  It has the advantage, anyway, of
  being on the power grid.  The other place is not.  For
  fifteen years we lived there with no electricity except what we
  generated ourselves, and no running water

  As all mobile homes, this one came with plumbing and a water
  heater.  The man who owns the lot here (I own the lot across the
  highway where the moldy little trailer now sits uninhabited but far
  from empty, and Greyfox owns a cabin on an acre a mile up the highway,
  where Charley lives–Don’t I have an interesting family life?) had a
  well drilled, but it is shallow, polluted (as many wells around here
  are) and the water from it is so full of iron that using it for laundry
  turns all the whites a rusty brown.  Good clean water around here
  can be obtained if one drills down far enough, but we and most of our
  neighbors get our water in buckets from a spring just off the main
  highway a couple of miles away.

  Mark, the owner of this lot, gave me–simply signed over to me–the
  title to the trailer so he would not be responsible for the maintenance
  of it.  That was during our third year here as housesitters for
  him.  That housesitting gig was supposed to be only for the winter
  of 1998-’99.  He was going to Florida.  He came back
  twice:  once to get his dog the following spring, and again in
  2000 to empty his safe deposit box and sign over the trailer to
  me.  We have not heard from him or any news of him since
  then.  He vanished and we pay his property taxes here.

  Mark came to Alaska with big plans.  He was going to get rich
  quick growing marijuana.  Then he learned what the climate was
  like and that outdoor growing was out of the question and indoor
  growing under lights has its own hazards and limitations.  He
  didn’t make friends here that I know of, but he made a few
  enemies.  I think he was here for about five years, and went
  Outside (out of Alaska, south) every winter, to Mexico, Hawaii, or
  Florida.  Each winter he left a different set of housesitters in
  his trailer here.

  A year or two before we moved in, the housesitters were some youngish
  city dwellers who were apparently no better equipped to handle winter
  in the Alaskan Bush than Mark was.  There was a power
  outage.  There frequently are power outages here.  Instead of
  keeping the woodstove going, draining the water heater and the pressure
  tank in the little cabin beside the trailer, and taking care of things
  here, they left everything and went to town where there was light and
  warmth.

  The water heater, toilet tank and toilet bowl, and some of the pipes to
  the pressure tank, froze and burst.  Mark never replaced the water
  heater, did some slipshod plumbing on the pressure tank, and brought in
  but never installed a new toilet bowl.  By the time we got here,
  the place had cold running water in summer, via a garden hose through
  the kitchen window.  It was unsafe to drink and going to the
  laundromat was preferable to trying to use the washer here with the
  hose stretched across the kitchen and the waste water running out on
  the ground behind the trailer.  In winter, the pressure tank had
  to be drained and the well shut down.  Leaky pipes in the little
  cabin got worse over time and after a couple of summers we just stopped
  using the pump.  We were used to hauling all our water from the
  spring anyway, and it is clean, clear, pure water.

  After Mark’s toilet went tits-up, it became his habit to use a honey
  bucket for his bodily waste.  He’d line it with plastic bags, and
  would in turn load those shit-laden small bags into the heavy-duty
  empty bags in which he purchased his Pro-Mix growing medium.  When
  he got a big bag full, under cover of darkness he would take it out and
  leave it in the woods.  I stumbled upon one once on a walk in the
  woods, but I won’t go into that. 

  The fall that we moved in here there had been another couple set to
  housesit the place.  During their brief stay, they dug a trench
  behind the little cabin and made a makeshift enclosure for it of tarps
  and freight pallets.  They arrived in October and left in
  November, I think.  We still use their outhouse, except in winter
  when the “shitcicle”, the stalagmite of feces that freezes and grows
  under the seat, becomes too tall for comfort and too thick and hard to
  break off and shove over into another part of the pit.  Then we
  retreat to the warmth and comfort of the bathroom, and a
  honeybucket.  When the bag in it gets full, I get our shit
  together, tie the top of the bag in a knot, and usually Doug schlepps
  and Greyfox drives, and they take it across the highway to our old
  outhouse over there.

  Aren’t you glad you asked, Rachel?
  

  • 9:07 pm
  • 4 Comments