If I can inspire people, or elicit their admiration, through the stories of my daily experiences, I suppose there's some merit in that.  I don't know.  I don't know how to interpret some of the comments I receive.  I feel mildly embarrassed and vaguely fraudulent when people express admiration for my endurance in these harsh conditions.  I feel uneasy when people misinterpret my weakness for strength and my limitation for determination.

Much more understandable to me are comments such as the one from pureeyes19, who said:

That is a very astute observation and excellent question.

If I was rich enough to afford the snowbird lifestyle, I'd be in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado or Utah, right now, or somewhere on the road from one part of the Four Corners to another, or maybe down in Mexico camping out in mejicojohn's yard, if my and my vehicle's documents were in order for the border.

If I was healthy enough to endure the hardships of the road, I wouldn't need to be rich.  I could hitch.

Since I am neither rich enough to migrate in comfort and style, nor healthy enough to do it on the cheap, I am stuck here in Alaska year 'round.  Alaska is the place I chose to stick myself because it has, on balance, more of what I want and need, and less of what I cannot stand, than any place else I have ever been.  It is more feasible, more comfortable and healthier for me to endure cold weather than hot weather, and this environment has less of the pollen and mold to which I am allergic.  I spent a few brief moments in Hawaii once, at a refueling stop between Japan and California, and had a severe asthma attack from the pollen in the air.

I was homeless from 1969 to 1973.  It's all in my memoirs, linked from the right-hand column on my main page, as those who have read them know, and those who have not can easily find out.  I arrived in Alaska in '73, at age 28, and for the first time in my life had the desire to buy land and settle down in one place.  After a few winters up here, I developed a "migratory urge" which was really nothing but a fear of winter.  Every August, when the weather started getting cold, I'd start wistfully thinking about warmer climes.

Meanwhile, not wanting to ever be homeless again, when the first year's payment of Permanent Fund Dividends provided enough cash to do so, I put a down payment on an inexpensive little piece of land off the utility grid.  With pick and shovel, topsoil hauled in from construction sites, and manure I acquired by cleaning out some neighbors' barns and chicken houses, I turned an old gravel pit into a garden.  It took about seven years of tight budgeting to get it paid off, but by the end of the 'eighties it was mine free and clear.  I lived on it in a moldy old 8' x 35' trailer, built in California in 1952 and with insulation my ex- Charley and I added over the skin and covered with plywood.

By the 'nineties, my health had deteriorated and Greyfox's credit cards had increased my material resources to the point that I was ready and able to act on those migratory wishes.  I spent two winters -- '90-'91 and '93-'94 -- on the road in the Lower 48, mostly in the Four Corners region.  Even on the cheap, camping out a lot and driving a tiny Fiat X1/9, it was too costly, and the toll it took on my physical condition was more than I would want to risk again, especially now that I am so... basically just sick, seriously ill and severely limited in my physical capacity.

Around the end of the 'nineties, we were offered the opportunity to house sit here for the winter, in a bigger trailer (15' x 55') on the power grid.  It was supposed to be for the winter, but the owner decided he liked Florida better.  He came back and got his dog, left the cats with us, and gave me title to the trailer.  It is worth every cent we paid for it:  leaky roof, holes in the floor, crappy insulation, furnace that doesn't function... and me without the money or the strength plus skill to fix it.  When I win the big sweepstakes, my first move will be to establish a more comfortable base here.  Then I will go looking for a decent winter home in the Four Corners.

I freely cop to being sick, in my physical self.  That's been a fact of life for me since infancy in this lifetime.  Denying it would be sick in a whole different sense.  I think I'd have to be a whole lot sicker in another sense, self-destructive and sadomasochistic, to keep my son and myself in this dangerous and uncomfortable situation if there was a feasible alternative.  I would accept a wide range of conditions and costs, whatever was within my ability, to be able to summer here in this Subarctic valley and winter in the Southwestern desert and mountains.  Any wealthy philanthropist who offers me a way to do it will have my instant response and enduring gratitude.

Unless and until I find some reasonable alternative, I will stay here, putting up with the hardships of winter, because I have virtually no choice in the matter.  In compensation for that, I have the clean air and water year-round, the absence of crowds of people, the beauty of the snow and the joyous privilege of these summers under the Midnight Sun.

Five leading U.S. jewelers, including Tiffany & Co., Ben Bridge Jeweler and Helzberg Diamonds, have sworn jointly not to accept any gold that might be produced by the proposed Pebble Mine, an environmental nightmare opposed by everyone with two brain cells to rub together and supported by those whose shortsighted greed and economic need outweigh their concern for the planet and future generations.  Their statement equated it with blood diamonds from South Africa.

...and in the Yukon Quest, (go on, click it, see the nifty dog pictures) Lance Mackey continues in the lead, arriving in Eagle just before midnight last night and leaving there at 7:10 this morning after a mandatory rest.  His lead has been increasing steadily since Monday, and he said he thought his team, which includes most of his winning Idita-Quest dogs from last year (Zoro, too), would be hard to beat, but that there are plenty of mushers out there who would pass him, "...if I falter in any little way."

'Bye for now... seeya later.

The big cold snap has apparently broken.  It began warming up yesterday.  Before that, it had been getting colder by the day.  On the coldest night, just before temps began to ease upward, I watched the thermometer.  The reading went down from minus 22 around sunset to minus 37 (F) before I crawled between the covers around midnight in my polar fleece pajamas over a t-shirt and two pairs of socks, with two hats on my head and my hot water bottle (affectionately named Piggy) snuggled against the base of my spine.

During the coldest days, I endured by sitting in bed with Piggy under the covers on my lap, and the book I was reading propped on top of Piggy.  It was cold enough that I decided keyboarding on my laptop was out of the question.  Using rubber bands and a plastic clothespin to keep books open, I was able to keep my hands under the covers most of the time.  Doug didn't even try to sleep in his room, but has been sacking out on the couch by the wood stove.  In the best of times, he sleeps while I'm awake to tend the fire, and vice versa.  Lately, both our sleep cycles have been all screwed up and when we have slept at the same time we have resorted to using the kitchen timer to make sure that one of us wakes up in time to keep the fire from going out.

That became harder several days ago, when the average burn time in our stove went from four or five hours down to about two hours.  All was going as usual, as usual as it can be when the temp is deeply subzero, when I woke Doug to tell him I was going to sleep and it was his turn to tend the fire.   He knelt in front of the stove, opened the door, did a double take, and said to me, "You didn't tell me about that piece."  Not knowing what he meant, I was about to ask when he picked up the old blackened rock hammer and poked at the fire.

Then he said, "That's not a piece of wood.  It's metal!"  That impelled me out of bed, and I saw the baffle that had previously hung at the top of the firebox, to keep rain, snow and falling creosote out of the fire and to keep flames from licking up into the stovepipe and igniting any creosote encrusted there, lying aslant on top of the fire.  It had been welded in, and presumably the heat of the fire combined with the cold ambient temperature had warped it sufficiently to break the welds.

One thing we knew was that we didn't want to just remove it and leave the fire open to the sky, especially since the stovepipe hasn't been cleaned for a while.  Creosote fires in stovepipes burn down about as many houses and cabins around here in winter as are burned down by people (those prosperous enough to afford running water) trying to thaw frozen water pipes.  We have had a few, and while it can be exciting to see the flames shooting out above the roof from the top of the stovepipe, it's a pain having to monitor the glowing indoor portions of the pipe, spritzing them with a plant mister to keep them from melting, and misting the ceiling around the pipe to prevent its igniting.

We collectively dithered and fussed for a while, expressing our mutual thoughts that this just had to happen when we needed the fire most.  Then I said we'd work out a solution and get by, and Doug said, "That's what we do best."  A little experimenting showed us we didn't want to just lift the heavy iron baffle and stuff wood in under it.  As the wood burnt away, there was a risk that the baffle would shift the wrong way and break out the glass in the stove's door.  Finally, I hit upon the temporary solution we've been using since the past weekend.  The baffle is in there on a diagonal, with its front right and left rear corners resting on a pair of flanges to either side of the firebox, about halfway up.  That limits the amount of wood it will hold to slightly less than it could contain just before I did the burn-down-and-clean-out procedure described in the previous entry.

Temps are in the teens above zero now, and this would probably have been the day we cleaned the stovepipe, if I hadn't gotten much sicker a few days ago.  My shortness of breath is not quite as severe as it was just before Doug phoned 911 two months ago, but worse than it has been since I got home from the hospital.  In addition to my long acting pills and inhaler, I'm using bronchodilators in the nebulizer every couple of hours when I'm inactive and more frequently if I need to get up to use the pot or whatever.  Doug has been doing almost all the fire tending, letting the dog and cats in and out, etc., for several days.

During the coldest days, the cats didn't want to go out at all, and Koji only went out when not doing so would have broken his house training.  He never wasted a moment out there.  One night, he was whimpering even before he started back across the yard to the door to be let in.  Cats accustomed to outdoor activity go squirrely when confined for days at a time.  Occasionally one of us will yelp or go, "Ooof!" as cats charge across the bed or chase each other over the back of the couch on their way... wherever.  They seem always to be on an urgent mission.  Four of them were wrestling on the top shelf of a book case and knocked down the stereo speaker up there, which in turn knocked down two hanging plants.  Cleaning up after them has made Doug's and my efforts to keep their water dish thawed, with frequent additions of warm water, somewhat grudging.

A couple of days ago, we were startled by a loud explosion.  It was a can of pop that I'd previously moved up off the floor when I'd noticed that one can in that six pack had quietly popped its top and spilled a little.  Apparently, moving it up to a warmer level hadn't been enough to prevent the blowup.  Our usual tactic of placing water jugs on upturned milk crates to prevent freezing has been only partially successful.  We have a bunch of partially frozen water buckets and jugs.  The exploding pop can spewed a mass of ice fragments that could be swept up, but the pan that had been placed on my work table under a roof drip, when the cats pulled it off, and later, the water jug they knocked off a milk crate, left a sheet of ice that has only just begun to thaw and soak into the newspaper Doug laid over it at the time of the spills.

Today, cats are going in and out frequently.  Doug has just moved from the couch into my bed, all grumpy and only half awake after days of interrupted sleep.  I took some notes during the cold snap and intend to blog out a few of my frustrations and fears sometime in the next few days.  Even though I have to get up occasionally and shut that door the cats can open but not quite close, and have to nebulize whenever I need to do that or anything else, I'm looking on the bright side.  We had it relatively easy here.  In some villages in the Alaskan Interior, that stubbornly stable high pressure system brought temperatures more than seventy degrees below zero.  At best, we were able to maintain an eighty degree differential between indoors and out, and usually it was only about a sixty-five degree difference.  Most of my houseplants have survived the cold snap.  I continue to survive.  Greyfox has begun shopping around, comparing prices and collecting wood stove brochures.

The Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Challenge started in Fairbanks on Saturday.  Lance Mackey, who won it and the Iditarod in 2007, started in eleventh position and at latest report was leading the pack.   I just heard a little sound bite from him on public radio, talking about the "incredible" sixty below temperatures.  The race was shortened and dog teams trucked fifty miles or so because of exposed rocks where high winds had blown snow off the trail.  An early report, before the start of the race, said that on one mountainous stretch of trail, three hundred trail markers had to be replaced after the original ones had been eaten by caribou.

I'll be back... maybe it won't be such a long hiatus next time.

We have been living with this cold snap for over a week now.  A couple of days ago, temperatures went down to around 30 below zero (F, which is colder than C, all the way down to -40, where the scales cross) at night, and have been creeping lower by a few degrees each day.  They come up to single digits below zero in the daytime, which is a great relief, but I'll be even happier when once again we start getting positive readings on the thermometer.

We have had to keep a roaring hot fire in the woodstove all this time.  [aside:  To the ones who have from time to time suggested small portable space heaters -- We have a few of them, which we used to use, but we can no longer use them due to insufficiencies in our electrical system.  There's a whole blog there, but not today.  Just visualize a bunch of heavy duty extension cords carrying current from functioning outlets in unused rooms, to rooms where the outlets are dead.]  Keeping the fire hot all the time involves burning small splits and filling the stove with fresh wood before the previous load has had time to burn all the way down.

One consequence of that is an accumulation of coals, growing deeper all the time.  Ideally, the top of the bed of coals is lower than the sill of the stove door.  When it is higher than the bottom of the door, burning wood tends to fall out when the door is opened.  That's hazardous at best, usually painful, and sometimes destructive.  This morning when I woke, I could see through the glass in the stove door that the bed of coals was so deep that only a single layer of splits, none of them over about three inches thick, would fit in there. 

Since most of the air for combustion comes in around that door, then is channeled up over the fire and out the stovepipe, the front edge of the bed of coals burns down, leaving an accumulation at the back with a sloping front face, just waiting for one of us to open the door.  Ever heard the phrase, "live coals?"  It doesn't just mean hot, afire.  They are active little things, popping, shooting sparks... perhaps you get the picture.

Midday today, I stopped feeding wood into the fire and let the coals burn down.  Doug had the kitchen range going, heating water for dishwashing.  While he washed dishes,  I periodically raked the coals with our fancy high tech fire tool:  a blackened old rock hammer, blunt on one end, pointy on the other.  Raking lets the fine ashes sift to the bottom and brings up dead chunks of charcoal that have been suffocated under accumulated ash.  Raking, if done gently, can also pull up massive chunks of clinker, encrustations of metallic debris.  One of those I hauled out of there today was larger than both of my hands together.

I spent three hours going back again and again to rake up the coals and encourage them to burn.  Each time, I could tell it was time to quit raking when I started burning my chin on my zipper pull, which became very hot from the radiant heat.  After six or seven rakings, I shoveled out most of the fine ash and whatever small coals were mixed with it, leaving enough large live coals to restart a fire. Then I tossed a bunch of small pieces of birch bark on the coals and greasy black smoke started billowing out into the room.  Doug went up on the roof to poke a smoke hole through the bottleneck of creosote accumulation where it condenses at the roofline.  (A thorough cleaning of the stovepipe will have to wait for warmer weather and a cold stove.)

On top of a couple of layers of bark scraps, I placed a few layers of thin kindling (a byproduct of regular wood splitting that accumulates during times when we don't let the fire go out) under enough small splits to fill the fire box.  Then I blew (through a soda straw) on the coals at the base of the fire until the fire was roaring again.  Now, since the house has cooled and the sun is going down, I'm going to do some baking.  While my bread pudding is in the oven, Doug will do another load of dishes.  By then, it will be dark and much colder, but the woodstove should be back up to adequate heat.

It's too  cold to sit here and write.  I'm standing, sorta on my way between the warm(er) front room where my bed and the woodstove are (and Doug is asleep on the couch because his room is too cold), on my way to the kitchen to cook something to eat.

I have been making little scribbled notes on a pad by the bed, topics for later blogging when the weather warms up.  It is 23 below zero outside now, and in the forties above in here.  That "forties" is up at head height or higher.  Down at floor level, it's freezing.  I'm outta here for now.