Lentils and squirrels, the simple life

(Yukon)

You can pay a lot to de-stress yourself in a wilderness retreat with no internet, no mobile phone signal and no easy way in or out. Or you can just come here and give us 50 bucks.

Trying to fix the world wide web

We are still without the internet but with close relatives abroad, tax problems to sort out and tenants to manage we aren’t sitting around eating lentils, meditating and enjoying the luxury.

Yellow souwester weather

We’ve made one trip to town in lashing rain and fog to get a new modem, which didn’t work, and so will set off tomorrow with the satellite dish, tria arm and 100’ of cables to be tested by Bob, the internet guy.

Hair-raising drive on the Top of the World highway

Life without Facebook or Instagram means we have got on with stuff, which is a plus. Neil has gone mad for berry picking and jam making. I can barely tear him away from the cranberry bushes to help with our home improvement projects.

Mashing berries. It's become an obsession. 

We had to solve the problem of the house getting so cold in winter that tea would freeze in a cup overnight and so are going to add a new extra layer of insulation beneath the roof. We are putting in a set of rafters between the log ridgepole, purlins (roof supports) and cap logs at the top of the walls, and will place the insulation between them.

First row of rafters above the bed

The original insulation, which sits on the outside of our spruce pole rafters, has been nicked by ravens and squirrels over the past 30 years. We’re hoping that a layer inside the house will be out of the reach of thieving little hands and beaks.  

We are also extending our upstairs sleeping platform across the length of the house to make up for the space we’ll lose to rafters in the eaves, and so we can reach the ridgepole without having to work 20’ up on a ladder balanced on a wonky floor.

Yet again, we face the challenge of working with straight lumber on rounded, tapered, lumpy, knotted logs.

This plank for joist hangers looks wonky. It's not, it's spirit level straight. It's the rest of the house that's on the piss

We’re aiming to get the new floor level, but I’m not sure we’ll ever be playing boules on it. Roof construction require those maths skills I learned 30 years ago and have long since forgotten. They’re filed way back in my brain in the 1980s section with blue mascara, being a Goth and going to Rollerena.

I managed to buy only half the lumber we needed for rafters, calculating one span of the roof very competently but forgetting to double it, so I’m not too optimistic about how this all going to go.

The other half of the roof lumber bought on our trip to town on a wet day. Now thoroughly mud and silt coloured. Great.

The best thing about the project so far is spraying tangerine foam snakes into the gaps in the eaves. What a brilliant invention expanding foam is! I can’t get enough of its puffy, expanding oranginess. Buy a can, find a gap, try it. I’m scouring the property for more gaps to fill.

Expanding foam fun. Don't stand still with your mouth open, Neil

We’ve postponed moose hunting as the weather has stayed warm and there are still lots of flies which might spoil the meat. We came within 30’ of a bull moose in an almost perfect hunting position. He was taking a nap, right at the edge of a sandy bank as we motored upriver.

Moose on the bank

We could have shot him at point blank range and just about rolled him into the boat, if we’d had the rifle. He stood, quickly and squared up to us. Homer was quivering with excitement but had no way of reaching him. We had no gun. Everyone was safe. We powered the motor enough to stand still in the current and all enjoyed the thrill of each other’s company at close quarters.

At almost the same spot a few days earlier, we saw a grizzly bear cub. We were heading back after another internet-related trip (see footnote).

He was perched on the rocks, perhaps scouting for salmon, but turned in a panic when he heard us and scrambled up the cliff, sending a flurry of rocks and silt beneath him. His fur was shimmering silver and cinnamon and he was no bigger than an oversized teddy you might win at a funfair. Where was his mother? If it weren’t for the fact he could probably knock my head off in one swipe, I could have picked him up and cuddled him, poor thing.

Journey home 

Actually, where was his mother? We were only a mile from home and our excitement at sharing a moment of our lives with a juvenile grizzly began to dwindle when we thought about her. We carried bear spray as we unloaded the boat that night (utterly ridiculous as there are probably bears around us all the time and it's the ones you don’t see you need to worry about).  

Carpet of golden birch leaves in the yard

Contrary to what I said in my first paragraph, with no moose meat we are eating lentils. Lentils and squirrels.

We’ve shot so many squirrels at the old cabin now I wonder if we’ll even need a moose. My understanding is squirrels are fiercely territorial so it seems as soon as we shoot one, the neighbours are squealing with delight at his misfortune and rushing in to take over. I invented a tasty recipe (marinate the arms and legs in vinegar, chilli and soy sauce and you have a “squirrel wings” starter) so they can just keep coming as far as I’m concerned.

 

Our very own cloud

The warm weather has brought us lots of free water. It has fallen straight out of the sky, like a labour-saving miracle from the heavens.

It’s hard to explain what a joy this is when you have to trek 300 yards from a creek, up a steep bank, with heavy 5 gallon buckets full of the stuff. Most of our time here is during the winter months and so our precipitation falls as snow. It’s slow and inefficient to melt for water and we don’t bother. 

Catching rain from the gutters

To have one of our most precious natural resources just fall from the sky into our buckets is a wonderful treat and leaves more time for Neil to plunder the cranberry bushes and me to fill things with foam.

A man obsessed

We’re hoping the weather will improve tomorrow as we are setting off at dawn to get to town. Our new Garmin fish-finder makes the river journey a lot safer when it’s foggy. We’re able to plot a route using GPS and check the depth as we travel. But it’s still possible to make stupid mistakes, like the highlight of my past week- Neil’s rigorous field testing of his new waders.

After the rain

As we were landing, Neil jumped off the boat to push it away from some rocks. We were convinced this part of the river was shallow and I wasn’t looking at the fish-finder to check the depth. Turns out it isn’t. Neil plunged in over his head in his brand new waders and disappeared. This was a very dangerous situation with potential for the boat to ram him against the shore. It was definitely not a time to be laughing your head off at the tiller. Luckily he couldn’t see me from under the prow.

Clothes drying after Neil's little swim

I’m hoping to publish this blog whilst we are in town tomorrow. I’m hoping we can get our internet working before freeze up when we will no longer be able to get to town. And I’m hoping we’ll find another moose, otherwise it’s lentil and rodent eating solitude for us until February. 

Find out what happens in next week’s blog. Or not. If it all goes quiet, you’ll know why.

Plenty of time for making jam if we don't get online

Footnote - We had to visit a friend’s to go online and work out what damage we’d inflicted on our snowmachine whilst doing some basic maintenance. Turns out it’s just a plug that’s missing and is an easy fix if we can get the part mailed to us before the river freezes. Famous last words…

The check plug, right there at the bottom