March 21, 2005

• Windfall from Felony Flats

  The Matanuska-Susitna Valley has been having a severe windstorm. 
  This is the third day of winds, but they peaked yesterday.  The
  Steese Highway has been closed today because of 50 MPH winds, blowing
  and drifted snow.  The village of Nulato lost its electricity and
  the town hall burned down over the weekend.  Blowing snow and
  downed power lines have been causing havoc over a wide area of Alaska.

  For weeks I had been looking for someone to sell me some
  firewood.  Greyfox called one day with a phone number he found on
  a bulletin board in town, and I called Tim and arranged to have a cord
  delivered yesterday.  Tim called in the afternoon and asked if we
  could wait until Tuesday or Wednesday.  He’d been out there
  cutting and the wind was blowing the tops out of some trees.  I
  assured him we wouldn’t freeze and he could stay indoors until the
  weather calmed down.

  Throughout Sunday there were many widespread power outages.  Here,
  there were numerous brief outages and one that lasted for two and a
  half hours in the late afternoon.  Greyfox had a series of shorter
  outages at his cabin in Wasilla later in the evening.  Weekend
  cell minutes are free all day for him, so although we usually
  communicate through Xanga-grams or wait until 9 PM on weekdays for our
  phone calls, on Saturday and Sunday we call each other whenever there’s
  something to say.  He gave me several progress reports on wind
  damage at Felony Flats, the strip of cabins, trailers, huts and hovels
  where he lives on the edge of town.

  One of the summer denizens last year was a guy who moved in next door
  to Greyfox after his marriage broke up.  Several times while the
  weather was still warm he set up tables in his front yard and sold a
  lot of videos, tools, china, glassware, bric-a-brac, and stuff. 
  He had a lot of incense, too.  He had tried unsuccessfully to make
  his living making incense.  I remember having passed his place on
  a back road in a suburban residential area up in the hills behind
  Felony Flats.  I remembered the signs when I saw them again in
  front of his cabin beside Greyfox’s.

  I don’t know how much stuff he managed to sell, but there was still a
  lot left when he moved out.  He cleared out the cabin, loaded his
  truck, and left heaps, bags, boxes and stacks of stuff in a white
  Easy-Up shelter tucked in beside the cabin.  Greyfox reported that
  he had told Mike the landlord that he would be back for his stuff.

  Even before the wind over the weekend destroyed his Easy-Up, the snow
  load had collapsed one corner of it.  Last night after relating to
  me the shelter’s several stages of disintegration, Greyfox went into
  the office and told Mike that the Easy-Up was shredded.  Mike gave
  him a license to salvage:  “Help yourself.”

  Through the dusk and into darkness, through a couple of power outages,
  Greyfox called with occasional reports about what he had found. 
  He carried a lot of stuff into his cabin to sort and examine, then
  finally just loaded a bunch of boxes and bags into his car unsorted and
  unexamined, to bring up here today.

  I was pleased when he decided to bring it up here.  Before that, I
  had been planning to make a trip to town tomorrow (Tuesday) to take him
  a shipment of literature for our NA group that had been delivered here,
  and to pick up the goat milk he had forgotten and left in his fridge
  when he made his most recent grocery run out here last week.  I
  thought that his coming up here would be a break for me, a respite.

  See how wrong I can be.  I’m exhausted.  Last night, Greyfox
  asked if I could cook some beans.  I said I’d soak them overnight
  and have them cooked by the time he got here.  Of course, I forgot
  about soaking the beans until I’d gone to bed, so I got back up and put
  them to soak.  It was 1:30 AM when I finally went to bed.  I
  was up twice in the night to feed the woodstove and by 6:30 I gave up
  on sleeping and got dressed.

  Greyfox came in this afternoon with a whole ham (Easter sale, BIG
  bargain in more ways than one) and I cut enough of it off the bone to
  flavor those beans.  While I did that, Doug and Greyfox brought in
  the stuff from the shredded Easy-Up.  I shifted bags and boxes
  around, took a big fancy electronic “Santa’s Carousel Park” holiday
  display out of its box, plugged it in and tested it (works, plays
  carols, goes around and around, with a lot of humorous animated
  critters doing various things).  I helped Doug and Greyfox sort a
  big box of toys.

  We paused long enough to eat beans.  Greyfox dug up some of his
  jewelry and clothing to take back to town with him.  Doug kept
  sorting and gloating over action figures and Lego parts.  By the
  time we had dealt with everything that Greyfox wanted sorted so he
  could take the potential merchandise back with him, and I’d packed a
  couple of yogurt tubs full of beans and ham for him to take home, and
  cut the rest of the ham off the bone and got it into my fridge, I’d
  been on my feet more than I usually am on the days I go to town. 
  I still haven’t taped the Santa’s Carousel Park box back together and
  it is on my bed so that has to be done before I can get horizontal.

  One
  of the bags Greyfox salvaged from the storm last night contained a
  package of gripper socks and a pair of hand-crocheted house
  slippers.  In the lull that followed the passage of Hurricane
  Greyfox, Doug put on the slippers and stretched out in Couch Potato
  Heaven to unwind with the PS2.  He finally decided they were too
  tight for comfort, which is unfortunate because they go so well with
  his flowerpot hat.

  Now
  he’s wearing one of the two pairs of powder blue gripper socks, after
  having handed over the second pair to me.  I suspect I shall end
  up with both pairs, because I’ve been watching the stretchy
  socks creep down over the back of his heel as I write this.
  
  The weather guessers have cancelled the high wind warning now. 
  They replace that with a winter storm watch.  They are saying we
  could have a foot or two of new snow in the next day or two.  I
  hope Tim gets enough of a break between storms to bring us some
  wood.  We have been conserving fuel by keeping the fire as low as
  possible, just one stick at a time into the woodstove.  The goal
  is mainly to keep that big cast iron piece of furniture from being the
  coldest object in the room. 

  The indoor thermometer has been registering temps from the high forties
  to the mid-sixties, depending on the amount of solar energy we’re
  getting at the time.  A few weeks ago, such low indoor temps would
  have felt a lot colder than they do now.  That’s an effect of the
  gradient:  both the difference between indoor and outdoor temps
  and that between the temp at floor level and up where the thermometer
  is.  When it is sub-zero outside, the temp showing at eye level on
  the thermometer is deceptive.  Walls and floors are cold, even
  when the air up head high is warm and we have the fan going to stir it
  up.

  The wind this weekend was sucking the heat out of the house, making us
  glad it wasn’t really cold outside, and happy that Tim is on his way
  with more wood.  I haven’t told Doug about the winter storm warning
  yet.  He’s the one who shovels the snow.  I’ll just let him
  enjoy the beginning of spring for as long as it lasts.
  

  • 10:43 pm
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