June 7: Not for the fastidious

Today's milestone: the season's first shower!! I've been avoiding it because... well, I'm stingy with water at the cabin. Until we get a good rain, I'm never quite confident enough that it'll rain at all and if it doesn't, we'll have a water shortage and the problem will be greater than dirty hair. Part of me knows it's the wrong mindset because that part lives in a generous world, but the part in charge of heating up the water for a bath must live in a world of scarcity.

I can shower in town, but the bunkhouse I like to shower in -- the one with the locking door -- isn't opened up till some time in mid June. So until then, if I want to shower with hot, running water, I have to take my chances in one of the men's showers that doesn't lock. I'm not sure my insurance would cover the shock that a hapless fisherman could suffer if they came into the shower room at the crucially wrong time. So it turns into: smelly but otherwise merciful.

Roy again came to the rescue - this time, though, it may have been a public service more than an act of friendship toward me. I've used the showers in his bunkhouse before - at the end of the season when all the other bunkhouses are closed. I forgot that these showers have nifty little rooms in front of the shower itself with a door and everything for all the privacy a wet person could want. But still, it'll be good when the regular locking door shower opens.

At the cabin, our water source is rain dripping (sometimes pouring) off the roof, into the gutter (that's attached with wire) and down into the rain barrel. That gray barrel in the photo catches the rain and I dip out of it with an old laundry
detergent bucket. I learned to give the full bucket some counter space – otherwise, the dogs thought it was a water bowl and I wasn’t sure whether it was a net gain or loss to wash my face in the resulting fluid collage. I could use a bilge pump to bring it into the cabin - sort of like running water. But I kind of like using a bucket.

The electricity is similarly primitive. I do have some solar panels and they keep a couple of big batteries that reside in the loft charged. Those batteries run the
antenna for the Internet and sometimes I drain them by charging my laptop. Other than that, I have a couple of 1000 W generators, the kind with an inboard inverter so the power that comes out is kinder for delicate electronics. In the photo, the solar panels that are on the roof and standing alone in the tundra are circled in red. The antenna for the Internet is circled in yellow. It’s really time to paint.


The stove is powered by propane, as is the heater. But the thermostat on the heater gave up a few years ago (and that was the heater's second thermostat), so I put the two ends together and hold them there with a clothespin to start the heater, and take them apart to stop it. Here the ends are, held apart by the clothespin for OFF and held together by the clothespin for ON.

The refrigerator is powered by permafrost. It's a hole in the floor of the cabin with a bin about 18" above the permafrost. I used to wiggle out that hole to get out of the bolted-from-the-inside cabin at the end of the season and back into it at the beginning of the season, but the cold, wet, slimy tundra I had to squirm over and through was just too gross even for me – plus, even in a raincoat, since I wiggle out feet first, all the icky, gooey, cold, slimy stuff went right up my back and soaked me from about mid-back, up - so I got a security door which is as impenetrable as the plywood bolted from the inside. And now use the exit as the refrigerator. You’ll only get a picture of the refrigerator in action – I do have an old photo of me climbing out from under the cabin… but it’s in Seattle.

When Alex's then 15 year old friend came fishing with us in 2007, his first words as he topped the cliff were, "This is the ghetto-est place I've ever been. Cool." Yeah, that's us.

Returning to the cabin at the end of the day, I parked the truck on the beach access road because the tides have been coming partway up the cliff (it’s a strange feeling to go out and look down and see the bottom of the stairs descending into the water) – that’s not so good for the truck. So I walked the last mile. Sage is half husky and half German Shepherd. A medium-ish dog of 65 lbs. There were two adult eagles flying near her and they were both as big as she is - if they had decided that she looked like dinner, I'm not sure she'd have stayed on the ground.

When we got back to the cabin, I saw a young eagle on Debby's outhouse, a building
made of 4' X 8' pieces of plywood, and got a photo. I think they can hear the camera because it took off after a few shots. Here it is, becoming airborne.