February 22, 2008
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Those who don’t know, want some info.
I started to answer these questions in the comments to yesterday’s Coming Clean entry, using that nifty new “reply” feature. Then I changed my mind and decided to do it this way.
EminemsRevenge asked:
Where the hell do you live?
I am in the Upper Susitna Valley of Alaska, in Subarctic Suburbia. That’s at approximately latitude 62° North, and just about 25 road miles in either direction from the nearest small towns; 50 miles or so from the closest town big enough to have a pharmacy, bowling alley, or fast food joint; 62 miles from the hospital (That’s the mileage the ambulance service charged me to the new hospital. Until recently, it was almost ten miles farther.); and over a hundred miles to the nearest international airport and federal offices (where we’re required to go if the IRS wants to see us or if we have business with Social Security).
It is more or less what my old neighbors when I lived in Kansas and Texas would have called, “the sticks,” but not far enough off the road system to qualify to be called, “The Bush,” in Alaska.
I am indebted to forwhomthebelsentolls for my third hearty laugh of the day (the first two came from Morning Edition on NPR). He suggested I get Doug to “rig up some plumbing pipes.” With apologies to my Xanga buddies who have heard it all before, several times, here I go again [edited after feedback, to clear up what appears to have been a confusing explanation]:
It has been done before. It was done here, when this trailer was moved onto this lot, by Mark, the southern white boy who ended up giving up and giving it to me around the turn of the millennium.
The trailer came with all the standard plumbing features: water pipes in and out, water heater, toilet and flush tank, etc. Mark had a well drilled, installed a pressure tank in the little one-room cabin that was on the land when he bought it, and piped the water through it and into the trailer. The debris lying around in the yard and under the trailer when we moved in indicates that the pipes were wrapped with electric heat tape to prevent freezing.
His well is shallow. Down 500 feet or a little more, there is a bountiful supply of clear and wholesome water. Maybe Mark didn’t talk to his neighbors before he hired the drillers. Maybe the drillers he hired weren’t familiar with the area, or maybe Mark thought they were just trying to get more money out of him by recommending a deeper well. He is/was sorta paranoiac. By the time we had moved in here, he had learned; he used the rusty, smelly water from his shallow well for washing and the garden, and got his drinking water from the same spring where we and most of our neighbors get ours.
Mark never could handle Alaskan winters. He would leave the place and his dog and cats in the care of house sitters and go to Mexico, Hawaii, or Florida. One of those sets of house sitters, some young people Mark had found in town somewhere, found themselves here during a cold snap that coincided with a power outage. That was during the years that Doug and I were living off the grid, when the only way we found out about power outages was when we went to the lodge or the laundromat.
Mark’s oil-fired furnace has an electric igniter. His kitchen range is electric. His house sitters couldn’t take the cold and the dark, with only the wood stove for heat, so they locked the place up and fled back to the lights of town. Water expands when it freezes. Not only the water pipes froze. The ceramic tank of the toilet froze and burst. The water heater froze and burst. The pressure gauge on the tank in the cabin froze and its glass face broke.
Maybe by then Mark had gotten acquainted with a few of his neighbors and learned why so many of us get all our water at the spring. Maybe he just got a bad case of fukitol. By the time we moved in here, the old water heater and toilet were on the ground in the backyard, the water heater compartment (with its door on the outside of the trailer) was empty, providing shelter for feral cats, and the water supply in here was cold only, and only in the summertime, coming in through the kitchen window in a garden hose.
Maintaining it was out of the question for me, draining the pressure tank and a few hundred feet of hoses each fall before freeze-up, just for use in the garden, because boiling stinky water in summertime for dishwashing, letting my clothes get that rusty look, and leaving the kitchen window open to let in mosquitoes all summer, did not appeal. I quit using the well even before we decided to leave the TV antenna down the last time the snow load tore it off the mast. Getting the water system repaired professionally is certainly much more expensive than I could afford. I don’t know, haven’t asked, because I don’t want the grief.
Even with global warming, permafrost is still just a few feet below the surface. Around here each winter, more houses burn down from people trying to thaw their water systems than from creosote fires. A walk around the neighborhood will take you past a number of abandoned cabins with defunct water systems. Even having one’s own backup generator in the event of a power outage isn’t enough. You’d need a backup for the backup because at thirty or forty below, pipes can freeze and burst while you have the generator shut down for maintenance or refueling. I know of a couple of my neighbors who learned the hard way not to try refueling a gasoline generator while it’s running.
I don’t understand it. I’m not alone. Once in a while, when I run into a neighbor at the spring or sit around and schmooze with a few of them at the lodge, we agree that we don’t understand the city people who come out here and try to bring civilization with them. It generally turns out to be more trouble than it’s worth. Most of them feel this way about the power grid, too, which seems always to go down at the most inopportune times and costs a bundle to tie into in the first place. If Mark hadn’t been connected to the grid before we got here, and if we hadn’t become addicted to the web, we wouldn’t be on the grid now.
Comments (14)
Curious…there’s a xangan by the name of subartic_suburban. You two know each other?
@gwennieg - No. Since she came along relatively recently, (to Alaska and to Xanga) I don’t know if she picked up
the name from my site, where my old left module used to be titled, “Welcome to Subarctic Suburbia,” or if she came up with it independently. Its
alliteration just sort of suggests itself, especially in the Su Valley.
You sure have your hands full. I have an idea where Anchorage is and I have an idea where Wasilla is. I gather that to get to where you live, from Wasilla, would take at least an hour, depending on road conditions, and if I tried to do it, I would get lost. I don’t think they’d have a fire department come and put out those various fires that you’ve mentioned. My guess is that all of the plumbing would have to be redone from scratch with all new parts in the summer, but that there is so much wear and tear on anything mechanical that it might not last very long. But if I understand what you’re saying, the original well wasn’t deep enough and the water that Mark was using, damaged the pipes, the water heater, and anything else it came in contact with.
I wonder about the wear and tear on the U.S. Air Force’s F-15′s and F-16′s. The Air Force generals, good shepards of the co-ed Air Force Academy and other such places, are saying they need hundreds of billions of dollars for new airplanes such as the F-22 and F-34 in large quantities but meanwhile those are at least 10 years away and the F-15′s are getting much more use than had been anticipated. These airplanes are flying 1500 miles an hour and making sharp turns way up there. So there is wear and tear on them. I wonder what the Israelis are doing. Also, I think that there is an increasingly anti-Israel mood in the American public, and they are likely to blame Israel for American casualties in Iraq, which doesn’t make sense but there is so much dumbing down that the “running of the Jew” as Borat would call it, seems rather predictable. Everybody needs bigger and faster and tougher strategic fighters and then you have Israel and Iran, air supremacy contests on paper, with nuclear weapons under a mushroom shroud, yet the low tech weaponry of the suicide bomber with nails and screws hegemonizes the conflict on everyday, quotidian public transportation. Or in discotheques. This is bad, a depressing subject that needs to be changed, quickly.
@forwhomthebelsentolls - No, the water didn’t cause Mark’s problems, that was just the cold. Even those with deep wells have their water systems freeze and burst, even sometimes when the pipes are buried deep, insulated and wrapped with electric heat tape. “Wear and tear” is not the problem. The tendency of water to expand as it freezes is the problem. Why keep replacing something that is just going to break again? The stinky water is my reason for not using the well at all. With money so scarce and hard to get, it makes no sense to have the well redrilled a few hundred feet deeper, when it’s impractical to have it piped into the house.
I’ve just been skimming your page, and I have to say I find you, your lifestyle, and pretty much everything about your writing fascinating. I’m not sure whether or not it’s a compliment to you, as it seems you’ve had your share of hardships to get where you are, but I really admire you, your outlook and your wit. I’ll be checking this place out. Cheers, from one from the uncivilized world.
SuSu, when I read your posts, I come away with a new perspective on the human spirit and survival. Unless we walk a day in each others shoes, we really have no idea at all. I’m grateful for the information hiway as my feet don’t have to feel the cold while I’m allowed in your shoes for the moment. Where’s Oprah’s home redo people when you need them? ha ha Have a good weekend. Breathe deep. Lyne
Well – I, for one, am glad that you aren’t living off the grid and have become addicted to the internet!
I have no delusions about myself – I could not live where you live (or not for very long at a time). Between the cold in the winter and the mosquitoes in the summer, I’d be a total bitch all year round. (and miserable)
Spoiled brat, aren’t I?
Take care!
just curious, were you born in the subartic or what brought you there?
*chuckles*
It all makes for an interesting story and gives a different perspective to life style choices. I just wish you felt better…. it seems like a very difficult life with your physical health. Maybe that’s just me with my aches and pains, knowing how 2 degree weather affects my muscles… and then thinking of you with those major below zero numbers.
~Colleen
@S2Know - I would be worse off in any city, and that’s something I have been discussing with my husband lately. It’s probably time to blog about it again.
@illgrindmyownthankyou - Here is how I ended up here, and most of the rest of my life story is linked from my main page, in the right hand column, under, “Those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it.”
You make so much sense!!!! how REFRESHING! I think alot of people, myself and my husband included, talk about going off the grid, and how we spend years of our lives in what amounts to a form of indentured servitude, compelled to pay x-amount for water, fuel/energy, food, shelter. When you allow yourself to take even a brief step back and see things more clearly, you see that on some level, you have more choices than you think. I applaud you and your husband for having the good sense to have made those choices! Few people can truly say they lived free….seems like y’all are doing that abundantly. Cheers! –laurie
p.s. and yeah…the internet as an addiction is sort of on a different level. Alot of addictions are turned inward, upon self, but the net is a connective tool; it’s OUTWARD…and friendship is sooooo necessary!