January 7, 2010

• The Icicle Harvest

  

  For a couple of months or so, Doug and I have been getting all of our water from melted snow and the occasional icicle.  I don’t recall exactly when the big snow came down, but ever since then, buckets of snow have been sitting around the woodstove, each with a few icicles thrust into the slushy snow.

  

  Snow fills a bucket easily, then melts down to about a quarter of its original bulk, more or less, depending on how fresh and/or fluffy it was when collected.  The first big snowfall of the season was light and fluffy and required many trips out with the buckets to gather enough to fill Kermit, the green enamel pot on top of the woodstove, our main “water heater.”

  

  Icicles offer a much higher yield, so we (usually Doug, because he is taller) grab them as soon as they grow long enough to reach.  He plays with the icicles.  They’re fun.  He makes whimsical arrangements of icicles in the snow buckets, and feeds one or two chunks of “crunchy water” to Koji, who seems to like them as much as he does his dog biscuits.

  

  Originally, foraging for our water had been dictated by necessity:  I was down with a respiratory virus, the car was buried, the driveway blocked by an enormous berm thrown up by the snowplow.  By the time Doug shoveled the driveway, I had recovered enough to scoop about half the snow off the car into the melt buckets.  We needed to remove a lot of snow from the woodpile to provide access to our fuel, so… why drive to the spring and haul heavy water buckets up a steep slope, when we had so much of the stuff just lying around the yard in our way?

  

  A week or two ago, Greyfox said in one of our nightly phone conversations that he didn’t know why we went to all that “trouble” of melting snow.  He suggested that Doug could take a couple of jugs and hitchhike to the spring.  He added that he had done so a few times, “early on” when he still lived up here.  He remembers that better than I do (naturally, since I wasn’t the one hitchhiking), but I’m betting that when he did it there hadn’t been three or four feet of snow on the ground.

  

  Yesterday, I asked Doug how he felt about melting ice and snow instead of hauling water from the spring.  He said it was fine with him, and agreed with me when I said it was easier and the water was just as good.  We do boil the stuff we drink, just in case some organic contamination gets in with the snow.  Using this oh-so-available and abundant water is thrifty.  Doug might have been taking the thriftiness a bit far last night, however, when my long-haired cat Val came in with big gobs of snow caked in his belly fur.  Doug cradled him in one arm and picked out the snow, dropping it into an old aluminum coffeepot on the woodstove.  I questioned it, and he reminded me that it would boil — oh hell yes — that little pot boils away every day.  It’s our humidifier.
   

  • 7:26 pm
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