November 7, 2004

• SuSu’s Subarctic Suburban Survival School

  This comment from misunderstood47 motivated this entry, although I know that much of it will be old news to my regular readers.

  How can you survive in that kind of weather?… doesn’t the darkness affect your mood? [edited]

  Some additional elucidation of my lifestyle was suggested by this unrelated comment from one of my new favorite bloggers, skintype,
  about whom I know more than I know about many of my long-time
  subscriptions thanks to a serendipitous first visit to his site when he
  had posted a lot of personal info.

  It’s always a struggle between your ideals and the bread you need to feed yourself. [edited]

  Some of you may struggle thusly.  I gave up the struggle. 
  The ideals won.   Life experience taught me that many things
  are worse than doing without money.  Along the way, I discovered
  that I now have and have always had all that I need.  My continued
  survival is the proof of that.  I choose to believe that this will
  continue to be true.

  The combined household income for the three of us is well below the
  U.S. “poverty” line.  Greyfox’s work is seasonal and irregular,
  dependent on weather and the vagaries of tourism.  My income is
  sporadic and dependent on factors even more unpredictable than
  Greyfox’s.  Doug’s work thus far is all unpaid.  He does the
  physical work that Greyfox and I can’t handle.   I live in a
  beat-up old mobile home that was given to me by the same man who allows
  me to keep it parked on his land rent-free, because he decided that
  life in the subarctic was not for him, and I was the last of the series
  of housesitters he’d left here over the winters that he had spent in
  Florida, Mexico or Hawaii during his Alaskan residency.  The cats
  he left with me are the “landladies” for the rest of their lives, and
  then the place is mine.  In a few years, if I don’t hear from Mark
  in the meantime, the land can be mine too because I’ve been paying the
  taxes on it since he disappeared in 2000.

  We have only two ongoing utility bills:  electricity and the combined
  phone and internet bill from our rural communications
  cooperative.  My whole family dresses well, often in clothes with
  designer labels, which we find in dumpsters and thrift stores. 
  One of those thrift stores gives us generous discounts on what we buy
  there because we frequently contribute to them the things we’ve
  salvaged from dumpsters and can’t use ourselves.  We eat better
  than most people, due to my having studied both nutrition and culinary
  arts.  Most of our food comes from supermarkets, but I’m confident
  that should the shit hit the fan and those barges and airlifts of food
  be stopped, I can forage for adequate rations.  I’ve done that
  before, both here and in more temperate climates.

  Over a quarter century ago, when my chronic illness finally ended my
  employability, the man I was married to then and I lived entirely out
  of dumpsters.  It was in the economic bust that followed the boom
  during construction of the Trans-Alaska pipeline.  Charley and I
  did better than many people who were either too ignorant, too proud or
  too sqeamish to go dumpster-diving.  We also met a bunch of
  wonderful people around those dumpsters and at the flea markets where
  we sold things we scavenged and didn’t need.  Those friendships
  endure.   Another huge benefit of my enforced joblessness was that
  I started doing what my heart, soul and spirit led me to do.  I
  kept a garden to feed us, and sold my surplus.  I used things we
  scrounged from other people’s trash as arts materials, something my son
  is now doing, too.  That provided some cash income as well, and I
  still earn money with my arts and crafts.  Also, I started accepting
  payment for my psychic readings.

  Funny thing about those readings:  back in the late 1980s when
  Charley had moved out and Doug and I had no income at all, I asked my
  spirit guides if I should try to move to the city, where there would be
  more of a clientele for my readings.  My Guides told me no. 
  They said that Spirit would lead the people to me who needed me, and
  that my needs would be met.  They have been — all my needs, body,
  mind and spirit.   That list, by the way, is in inverse order
  of importance.  As long as my spiritual needs are met — the need
  for conscious contact with Spirit — then my mental needs will be
  fillled.  My mind needs peace, self-respect, and a continuing
  source of things to observe and learn.  Communication is nice,
  too.  Communion and communication are two biggies in my life,
  without which the physical life of this body would not be worth
  much.   One of those people Spirit led to me back around that
  time, JadedFey, led me to Xanga, where I’ve found more communication than I’d ever had before.

  Ironically, at those times in my life when I had the most money, I was
  also doing the most harm to my body with alcohol and other drugs, with
  other risky behaviors, going without sleep, eating toxic “foods” and so
  forth.  If that proverbial shit does hit the metaphorical fan and
  I’m reduced to snaring hares and picking mushrooms and berries, it will be a tasty and
  nutritious diet.

  I was asked how I survive the cold and dark.  There’s a saying I
  first heard from mountainclimbers here to scale Denali, our mountain
  (AKA Mount McKinley):  “There is no such thing as bad weather;
  only inadequate gear.”  When I was living out of dumpsters
  full-time twenty-some years ago, I wore salvaged moon boots lined with
  plastic bags and
  rags.  My feet stayed warm.  Right now, I’m wearing a pair of
  PolarFleece® booties inside wool socks inside fleecy sheepskin
  slippers, all from thrift shops at a cost of under $10 for the
  lot.  In a back closet I have a pair of five-year-old Sorel®
  pac-boots rated to -80°F, bought new at a time when the family had
  abundant cash and credit.  Even if I have to go to the spring for
  water in the coldest winter weather (and inevitably, I will), my feet
  will be warm.  I also keep my hands warm in reflective glove
  liners inside woolen gloves inside PolarFleece® and leather
  mittens.  Most of the body’s heat is lost through the head, and I
  usually wear a bandana to keep my hair out of my way, even in
  summer.  In winter, I stop to put on a PolarFleece® hat or woolen
  watch cap as I go out the door, even if I’m only going to the
  outhouse.  Longjohns are my friend in winter, and I can layer on
  two or three pairs when needed, but of course in
  summer I enjoy getting back into a smaller size of jeans.

  Any dweller in the far north will tell you that the dark of winter is
  far harder to bear than the cold.  Our populace here is bipolar,
  manic-depressive, manic in summer when it never gets dark and it’s not
  uncommon to see kids out playing past midnight, and depressive in
  winter when the natural urge is to hibernate.  We all tend to
  sleep more in winter.  I was in bed ten hours last night. 
  The fifteen years that I spent off the power grid with only candles,
  flashlights and propane lamps for light, taught me the necessity for
  getting out in the cold when the sun is shining, to get the
  light.  Fortunately, snow is reflective and when we go out in
  winter we get LIGHT in abundance.  Now that I have electric power
  I use high-intensity, low wattage, full-spectrum lights.  Walking
  into my kitchen from the dark outdoors can hurt the eyes until they
  adjust.  But I still bundle up and go out (and sometimes take
  pictures to wow you Xangans) when the sun shines.

  I remembered what my original blog topic for today was: 
  NPD.  I intended to (and still might) copy and paste some of the
  latest email newsletter from Sam Vaknin.  It’s very
  informative.  Then there is the politics-and-religion rant that
  was suggested by one of your comments.  I might get that one done
  today, too, unless I go veg out with the PS2 after I finish my reading
  d’jour over at Old Man Coyote’s Place.  If I don’t restrain myself, this could become a six-blog day, a record for me.

  

  • 4:29 pm
  • 6 Comments