Back to the Future

Heading in last fall, boat and truck loaded

(London)

It might be easier to plan an invasion of a small Central American country than get ourselves, the dog and everything we need onto our property before freeze up. 

I’m good at planning. I’m a future focussed person. The past is dead to me (sorry, old friends), I don’t have time to notice the present and I’m usually racing through the future at full tilt like a teenage lout on a stolen moped.

On my way back to Canada, pocket full of stolen phones

That means I’m good at planning but less good at relaxing. Neil arrived home from working in Cumbria last Friday to find me hysterical. “I can’t find the list of parts we need for the snow machine! They won’t deliver hide-tanning crystals to Dawson! We must order a box of handwarmers!”

It was a balmy summer's evening in South London. He slowly lowered his suitcase and looked around our little council flat, as if to check there was no dead moose that needed imminent skinning and tanning. 

Really the most pressing issue was, what are we having for tea and shall we go to the pub? But, bless him, he said, “Let's get the computer on and look at an exploded diagram of a ’93 Polaris Indy Lite and work out what parts we wanted.”

Thrilling Friday night in Woolwich looking for spare rod ends

He is very patient and there is a marvellous balance between our personalities. In fairness, if it were left to Neil, we would arrive back in the bush with a few bags of crisps and a jar of Marmite to see us through the winter.

Neil’s full time job decommissioning nuclear stuff up north has left me trying to get everything else sorted, as well as working myself, so it’s all a bit more real for me.

Canary Wharf, London

Monday went like this - I’m doing a roleplay job on the 35^th floor of the HSBC Building Canary Wharf. I’m racing from side to side of the floor, from one panoramic view to another, paying no attention because I’m trying to get a signal on my phone to call Gary at Yukon Yamaha in Whitehorse to see if he can get me a new sled by the end of August.

Incredible view from "my" office

I can’t get through, and have to dash into a training session for senior managers and pretend to be a slightly obstructive HR Director. 

That over, I’m bashing out emails to see if some kind soul can get our truck 400 miles out of the bush and down to Whitehorse to save me flying to Dawson City and then hitchhiking out into the wilderness to get it.

Then I’m back into another training session, this time as a short tempered Managing Director. (“I’ve been at this bank for 20 years. Are you telling me how to do my job?” I love it. Nowhere else in my life can I be just so damn rude.)

View towards City of London

I’m coping with all this by projecting myself into the future. Sounds exciting, but unfortunately I’m not zipping around a Blade Runner-type city in a flying taxi-drone and reading Snapchat messages on the inside of my eyelids. I’m mentally wandering the aisles of Canadian Tire hardware store in Whitehorse trying to visualise the things we need.

The future. Parking lots and hardware

Living in the future, in a different country, whilst doing a day job here means I’m in danger of forgetting I’m in London and getting run over by a bus. Or locking myself out of the flat, which I did on Tuesday. Luckily the local estate agent has keys, as we rent the place whilst we are away, but he was most surprised to see me in flip flops and shorts with a bag of recycling at 9am in the morning.

So it does all get rather stressful, and really I am a saint and Neil should feel very lucky he has me. 

He will be staying in England until September to finish his contract whilst I fly back to Canada frighteningly soon to get our supplies, hardware, truck etc. so that we can head north to the bush as soon as he swans in, I mean, lands.

Fall 2016. First ice in the river

Last year, the Yukon River was running with ice in the first week of October so we could no longer get to town by boat. We didn’t have a trail along the river for the snow machine until the end of January.

That’s almost 4 months without being able to get some little thing we fancy or desperately need like, for instance, athlete’s foot cream. Four months of itchy toes. How much fun was that?

So getting the winter's supplies to our very remote property by the beginning of October is kind of important.

You’d think each year things would get easier, wouldn't you? Last year was tough. We had to buy a boat and outboard motor so we could get to our cabin, (we had arrived the year before in the depths of winter by snow machine.) Then we realised we needed a truck so we could tow our boat from Whitehorse, where we’d bought it, to Forty Mile, where we would launch it. 

Launching the boat, badly. Listen out for the crunch of tail lights.

Then, thanks to my amazing ability to visualise the future, we realised we might need a boat trailer too. Yup, it wasn’t just going to drag behind the truck for 400 miles. So that’s 4 massively expensive items, none of which we had ever owned or operated before.

Buying the equipment was daunting, but at least we had it with us. This spring, we came back to Britain before "break up" so we left all our equipment snowed in and frozen. Our truck is in the bush, 60 miles from Dawson, and our trailer is a few miles away from it with a broken rear light (thanks to us being so crap at launching). Our boat is in our yard, 20 miles off any road system and the outboard is on a pallet in our cabin. Or we hope so, anyway.

Photo of our yard with boat and house, sent by a kind pal in June

We haven’t actually seen any of these items since we left in April. So we might have a bear floating Alaska-wards in our boat, our truck swept into a ditch and our outboard motor painstakingly deconstructed by lemmings in a hundred thousand pieces on the cabin floor.

Most recent photo of our truck, sent by a pal, May this year

Anyone who has lived in the bush will tell you, the hardest thing is often logistical planning. Gone are the days when folk snow shoe-d in with a rifle, some snare wire and a knapsack full of flour. There is nothing stopping us doing that except, you see, a lot of those folk died.

Feeling stressed makes me want to drink coffee. That makes no sense at all and I’ve drunk so much it’s no longer working. I’ll have to move onto cocaine if I want to keep getting the hit, so in a more grown up attempt to soothe my nerves, I’ve just got this book from Woolwich Library. 

It’s great. I’m far too stressed to read it but I feel better just having it on the table and can heartily recommend it.

Some calming news, yesterday. Our wonderful Alaskan friends have offered to drive our truck to Whitehorse airport for me. Hopefully they will bring the boat trailer too so I will convert it into a flat-bed trailer and pack it with supplies.

I said that very casually “I will convert it” I have no idea how I will convert it. None at all, but it should be possible and if I can’t do it with duct tape and a piece of plywood, I could simply buy another a boat, strap that on it and fill it with stuff.

Our house as it looked in June, apparently

Currently we don’t know how we will get to our house. If no one can take us by boat, we could rent a canoe and float, with the dog on a rubber ring behind us. Or we will stump up the dollars for the eye-wateringly expensive helicopter-taxi from Dawson and hope no one, human or otherwise, steals our supplies from the truck before we can get back to them by boat.

We will find a way and, often, someone will help. I’m a control freak so I hate all this uncertainty, but 5 winters in the bush has reinforced something 20+ years an actor taught me- you prepare as best you can, then it's all just luck and timing and there really is no sense in worrying about it.

I’m sure that’s what it will tell me in The Mindfulness book, if ever I get time to open it.