#5 “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Thanks to Henry David Thoreau for the title of this episode, a chapter from his book Walden, which I loved already in high school. I think it appropriate to enlighten you at last to some reasons why I may put up with the relatively paltry privations and the plentiful challenges that I face.

Dufus of the Woods Award for the Day

First, my day would be incomplete without the Dufus of the Woods Award. Unable to wield an ax yet to make my own kindling out of the oak slabs in my cord of wood, and refusing to buy more nicely cut kindling when I’ve got a forest of twigs, I went out to break up said branches and twigs this afternoon, but didn’t wear my gloves. Urban Girl Must Remember To Wear Work Gloves. Subsequently, I somehow gouged myself with a forked branch, resulting in a wound spilling copious but not life-threatening amounts of blood in my right hand. Typing is a little difficult, I will say. Still lovin’ those hard lessons.

Completely in Love with Easeful Trees

Back to my real theme of the day, where I live and what I live for: ‘tis the stunning beauty of being surrounded by trees. Now, I know some of my urban friends out there would say that nothing sounds scarier; and sure, I’ve touched on that theme when some of the trees might fall on my head, but hey, they can do that in Sacramento, too, one of the thickest urban forests in the world.

But seriously, for me trees provide amazing company and comfort. Living spirits, dancers of the forest, creatures that shelter other creatures (including me)—so multifarious in their livelihoods, these trees, how can one not be entranced? When you come to visit me here, you’ll find an abundance of redwoods, madrone, fir, and tan oak, with a surprising bay tree on the Creek Trail.

In addition to the trees, I am in love with the other flora and fauna here, especially the creek that emerges during the winter season and the moss leaping greenly with the rains. I deeply appreciate the opportunity to be a steward of the earth and learn to enjoy and enhance the earth’s offerings. The absolute joy of the Creek Trail, for example: I have begun to clean up its bed just below the cabin, where falling branches over the years left a chaos of debris (photo, left, January). Now (photo, right, March after clearing) you can see the mossy banks of its running waters (though only in the winter—it dries up over the summer).

Over time, I’ve been building a trail down along the creek. Cholo comes with, and stop to watch as I take my loppers and clippers and clear a path. If a 14-year-old dog can make it, then anyone can, I figure. I’m discovering clearings in the woods and tiny ponds collecting in the creek bed. I invite you to come build trails with me one day. I’ll give you work gloves, I promise.

The Land I belong to here is comprised of 23 acres, very steep, shaped in a pie, with the widest part where the cabin is at the top along the road and heading straight down the hill. This land was timbered decades ago. Hence, you find enormous trunks of slain redwood giants here on the land and throughout the area. [Stay tuned for more of a history of the lumber industry and methods in Willits, part of the Redwood Empire. I’ll also share soon the story of how I came to be the caretaker of this land and cabin.]

New Improved Hot Bath

I leave you now so I can take my bath, that labor-intensive chore, heating 12 pots of water on the woodstove (to save propane). I’m seeking the effect of those old tin tubs that had tops that folded down to retain heat. I’ve improvised a good system. Bungee cords provide the support (picture, left) with garbabe bags on top (picture right). This time I now can manage 4 inches of water in my sauna-fied bath;

nice!

Oh yeah….

Thoreau’s Thought for the Day:

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?

(From “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” in Walden)

#4 On Being off the Grid, in Town, Online and Eating Shrooms

Getting into Town The Winter Storm Advisory continues for elevations above 3000 feet. The cabin is at 2500 feet (I’ve learned to read elevations on Google Topo maps). I’ve been tricked before into thinking that with an extra 500 feet between me and the predicted show, I will be safe. Now I'm wary of what weather will arrive, but rain patters quietly in the relative warmth, and at 7 a.m., the birds are waking up. The day seems mild after all the snow, wind and torrential rain, so I can plan to go into town safely.

The radio plays with continued news of Japan cleaning up. A friend circulated a list (see at the bottom of this post) of how the Japanese have coped with their tribulation; it speaks loudly of how we cope with our own hardships in this country.

For me heading back to the land, I like to make fun of the small trials I face, the changes in lifestyle that strike me, as they did, too, when I once moved to Mexico and had the opportunity to travel and see what it is like to live in a house with a dirt floor where chickens wander into the kitchen and a visitor is plied with a plate of steaming beans, tortillas and spicy peppers.

Now I aim to share a few details of this change of life, of mind. I enjoy the challenges, including shoveling gravel onto the steep, slick, muddy spots on the dirt road out, my shovel ready in the car, so that I can be sure my little car won’t slide into the dirt bank.

Getting Online Since I don’t yet have satellite at the cabin, I have to go into town to get online. By now I’ve memorized the schedule at the town library where a long table hosts those of us coming in from the hinterlands to plug in our laptops (a bank of computers serves other).

I’ve begun to recognize some of the faces; we chat about the news we pull up on the war in Libya or we break into each other’s conversations. I’ve also gotten to know some of the characters who frequent the library, as characters do in all public libraries, refuge for the homeless everywhere. Someone you can’t miss in the Willits Library is the older white dude with two-foot long dredlocks who intermittently breaks into an intense pacing of the whole library, walking the inside perimeter as if getting his dose of exercise or walking off explosive energy. I aim to talk to him and discover his mission one day.

Funding cuts and national priorities being what they are, we can send missiles to other countries, but we can’t keep our libraries open (not to mention keep black and brown boys alive in Chicago and other urban areas, as an NPR story shared this week). So when the library is closed three days a week, I can still sit in its parking lot to get online, and I often do. But I also need the juice, so I have two cafes I can visit in order to plug in; I also have their closing hours memorized. In any case, dear readers, having gone from being online several hours a day, always ready to respond to your e-missives, my hours have been curtailed, and I don’t regret a minute of being forced to read a book instead of a blog (tee hee—stop reading this and pick up a book!).

The Cabin Electric A word today on electricity: I have mentioned I rely on solar energy, and I have lots to learn about how solar systems work. Ralph, the solar samurai, is a fount of knowledge and has even showed me a circuit board to help me get clear on amps and watts and volts. I have a meter reader in the cabin now that shows how many volts seem to be registered, from 10 to 16. I have a 12-volt system, relying on 4 car-batteries sitting on the deck in a little hut that store the photovoltaic energy that streams down the wires from 3 solar panels on the roof. Ralph is helping me plan an upgraded system so I can even run a low-amp vacuum cleaner and have more lights available. But for now, if my meter needle sinks to 12.5, I make sure to turn off any of my various electric lights or inverter, and instead resort to candles and kerosene.

I enjoyed the irony of learning about kerosene lamps coming into use into use in the late 1850s. One of my recent projects has been to delve into some amazing family documents stored in various archives, including the letters of Emily Bancroft, the first wife of my great-great-grandfather Hubert Howe Bancroft (a historian and book collector). In 1863 Emily wrote home, delighted, to her family in Buffalo, “Hubert and I sit by the table in the dining room by a kerosene lamp. You don’t know what a good light kerosene lamps give.” I can’t help but agree.

Eating off the Fat of the Land: Mushrooms One last note from recent weeks: The joy of getting to eat what the land produces with no intermediary forces, like finding a blackberry bush in the wild. For me, an exciting gift from the land has been wild mushrooms: chanterelles, coral, black mushrooms.


Long ago, I heard on the local radio station a report about a whole family that had ended up dead from eating mushrooms they shouldn’t have eaten. (Sorry, another terrifying story about dangers in the woods!) Well, the report’s message worked on me: don’t eat wild mushrooms if you aren’t absolutely sure what they are. So I have never bothered to even touch the mushrooms I’ve noticed growing all over these woods.


However, when mountain man Dan was here working on clearing some of the fallen trees and overgrown brush back in December, he said, “Did you know you have edible mushrooms here?” He introduced me to my own cornucopia. A patch of chanterelles were growing huge and abundant. Bruce, his friend and the owner of the Rumble Family landscaping company, quickly noted that I should not try to pick anything that I wasn’t sure about, but as for Dan, “He’s a mountain man from Ft. Bragg. He really knows his stuff.” Ft. Bragg being the coast, I presume that there are even more mushrooms there and all the more reason for a native of the coast, Dan, to know his edibles from his inedibles.

They were quick to add that I should not even touch a mushroom and then touch my face or eyes if I am not absolutely sure it is a good ‘shroom. But the chanterelles he cut for me were assuredly edible—and indeed very delicious once I cooked them, thick and chewy, into a mushroom sauce for my noodles that night.

The very next day I went into our one remaining bookstore, the Book Juggler, stuffed with used and barely used books, and found the perfect addition to my library: Mushrooming Without Fear in which we learn about gills, ridges and tubes. Rule #1: Never, never take a mushroom with gills. The book is written for idiots like me, repeating that key rule at least 10 times. Believe me, I’ve got the message.

However, cauliflower or coral mushrooms are “mavericks” that don’t have gills and are clearly recognizable. After seeing pictures of in the book, I remembered seeing them in a couple of places on the land. The next day, I hunted these down, got Dan’s code of approval, and made an awesome soup.

I have since learned a couple of key points from my mountain men friends: 1) cut with a knife to perpetuate the spores; 2) the mushrooms will grow back in the same place generally next year; 3) certain mushrooms appear at certain times of the year. Hence, Dan noted black mushrooms cropping up near tan oaks in February, pictured here.

And so my fettucine dinner of mushrooms called horn of plenty. How appropriate!



Japan: 10 Things to Learn


1. THE CALM: Not a single visual of chest-beating or wild grief. Sorrow itself has been elevated. 2. THE DIGNITY: Disciplined queues for water and groceries. Not a rough word or a crude gesture. 3. THE ABILITY: The incredible architects, for instance. Buildings swayed but didn't fall. 4. THE GRACE: People bought only what they needed for the present, so everybody could get something. 5. THE ORDER: No looting in shops. No honking and no overtaking on the roads. Just understanding. 6. THE SACRIFICE: Fifty workers stayed back to pump sea water in the N-reactors. How will they ever be repaid? 7. THE TENDERNESS: Restaurants cut prices. An unguarded ATM is left alone. The strong cared for the weak. 8. THE TRAINING: The old and the children, everyone knew exactly what to do. And they did just that. 9. THE MEDIA: They showed magnificent restraint in the bulletins. No silly reporters. Only calm reportage. 10. THE CONSCIENCE: When the power went off in a store, people put things back on the shelves and left quietly.

#3 Lessons Coming Fast and Hard

Channeling Frida Kahlo
Besides launching a life in the woods, I’ve been launching my life on the stage as Frida Kahlo, storming local schools and other associations as part of the Women’s History Project in Willits, organized by the local American Association of University Women, a group of women who make things happen in small and large ways. Judi Berdis has been producing the shows, getting Frida into classrooms from elementary school to high schools during the month of March.

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was a Mexican artist, the wife of Diego Rivera, a woman who suffered 30 surgeries in her lifetime due to a horrendous bus accident that broke her back in three places after she was impaled by a metal pole; her right leg was broken in 11 places, and that was not the end of the damage. She is an exemplar of persistence, imagination, courage, and alegria or joy.

These presentations have been amazing for me, and I sense intriguing to many of the kids whose attention Frida mostly manages to keep. She had a rapt audience of 350 kids sitting on their butts attentively for almost an hour, looking at Frida’s self-portraits and talking to her about what they saw in her paintings and what they thought about the art, not to mention the kids telling Frida about the artists in their own families.


Frida has come into my life, through my life, in just the right way at the right time. She was a woman who suffered in various ways over much of her life, not only from the bus accident but also from polio at age six, resulting in isolation and disfigurement of her leg (and subsequent bullying), to the 26 years of surgeries and often excruciating physical pain after the horrendous bus accident, to the even more grave “accident,” as Frida called it, of Diego's repeated affairs. And yet Frida found ways to experience joy, to be productive, to connect with people despite her frequent isolation and illness. So when I get to tell kids (of all ages) about how to learn from Kahlo’s determination, from her self-exploration, from her vision of connectedness, I only reinforce those lessons for myself.

I spend about half an hour a day preparing Frida’s Tehuana costume, not as much time as she spent, but something considerably more than throwing on my jeans and boots. There’s the sweat pants under the long skirt with the white lace trim I hand sewed on; the colorful huipil embroidered on velvet; the elaborate adornments of earrings, bracelets, necklaces, and headdress; and of course, Kim now doing make up (gasp!) to provide Frida’s flying unibrow and bright red lips. Sometimes I end up changing part of the costume in the car, or Frida goes into the library or restaurant under wraps and comes out Kim. Actor on the fly…

Getting into Hot Water

When my hot water went out, I thought it was bad timing since I particularly wanted to be cleaned up for my performances, especially after a messy afternoon trailing through the mud or hauling wood (I forgot to mention that often arduous chore in relation to the joys of woodstoving). Why I fail to get hot water explains my next Dufus of the Woods Award. I did know I needed to turn off the water before leaving the cabin for a few days. And I did turn it off. I also knew one should drain the pipes before leaving. But that I didn’t do—at least the one pipe that burst the second time I left. In my absence, there was a freeze and a copper pipe split open under the house, connecting to the hot water heater. Oh dear.

Now I’ve learned more about my water-on-demand tank than I ever knew before, such as it was built to operate inside. Therefore, the little wood box surrounding it all these years has never really been adequate. Well, yeah! The mouse nest made of yellow insulation that had started melting on top of the burner was a pretty obvious indication of inadequate protection of the machine. But it endured with the cabin for 20 years. Jeff of Jeff’s Gas and Applicance who’s taken care of the heater's temperamental nature said he’s seen these Aquastar water heaters in even worse condition. But now its time had come—with a little help from me as well as the mice.

You ever see one of those films about people taking baths when someone has to pour the water into some kind of tub? You don’t want to be the person hauling water in those scenes. Filling a tub can take a lot of water, especially if you are hand carrying the vats from the woodstove. Sure, I could heat up water on the propane range, but I have the woodstove cookin’ anyhow, so I’m not wasting the propane.

New Friends, The Hot Bath and the Angry Tick

On Monday, Judi (the Frida-performance organizer), Frida and I visited the classroom of Ann Maglinte, herself a former actor for Willits' Women’s History Month (including the first female doctor Elizabeth Blackwell), and Alan Rosen, a videographer. Over a yummy Mexican lunch together with them, I was settling into the company of these interesting new friends when Judi mentioned that I was doing some renovations to the cabin. I laughed about how some of the changes are in the nick of time, including getting a new hot water system since mine is out.

Judi reported, “I called Kim last night, and she told me she’d just enjoyed a bath in 3 inches of water.”

Now I had to giggle at myself as I recounted my newest invention of a top for my bathtub to create more warmth from the little water that I do have steaming up around me. I could barely talk as I giggled over the bungee cords I’d attached to the top of my claw foot tub and then the plastic bags and towels that together all formed a top to the tub. My companions laughed heartily.

It turns out that Ann lives not far from me, at the other end of the dirt road about 3 miles away. She shared her story about moving to the country from San Jose with her husband twenty years ago and what it was like confronting the absolute darkness and the wild critters, including bears.

“There are no bears where we live!” I retorted vociferously.

“Yes there are too!” They all laughed at me and my continued protestations. Alan even reported that his wife had seen a bear in the moutains where they live south of town.

I finally acknowledged, “I thought the worst of the critters I would encounter was a tick—and in fact, despite my hot bath last night, I still got a tick bite.”

“How big was it?” Judi immediately asked.

“Tiny.” I pinched my fingers to indicate.

“It’s the small ones that carry Lyme disease.”

Seriously! Well, I’ve heard enough about Lyme disease (being an illness that purportedly can rob someone of their vital energies) that I didn’t want to get it. Then Ann asked about “the bullseye,” the round red rash that indicates it’s a Lyme tick that bit you. Hm. I pulled up my shirt in the restaurant no less—it was just on my belly, relax! “Oh you should have that checked out today,” she suggested.

So now that they have put the fear of Lyme disease into me, I decided to take their collective advice and go the medical clinic that afternoon to have it checked. For better or for worse, I got a prescription for Doxcycicline, with the idea that I have just been liberated into a new self, a new life, and the last thing I want to do is be held back my an energy-sucking disease.

Now my tick bite is rather swollen and itchy, but I like to think of it as one more wound in the battle to come to terms with country living. A little suffering in contrast to what Frida experienced, from the lack of hot water to a ferocious tick bit—I am still grateful.

#2 First Thing First: Heat in Winter

I wake up at 3 am regularly; that seems to be about when my fire is buring low--or has gone out entirely. And the difference is huge between a pile of thick, red-hot coals as big as apples on which to place a log that will fire up immediately, versus a measly few raspberries that need paper and kindling and a little more tending to get roaring again.

In the world of entrepreneurship, you hear of the distinction between Fire Starters and Fire Tenders: those who are only good for getting a business going, versus those who excel at keeping it going. To hell with that distinction in the woods! You better be damn good at both.

And, alas, I am merely mediocre where it really counts: keeping the fire going.

I can say, to my credit, that I have come far at getting it going. The woodstove has a glass front, which is lovely, even enthralling, for watching the fire on a cold rainy day (see previous post). However, it's not very wide, so stuffing the logs in can be tricky. I admit that back in December I burned myself frequently just trying to wrestle a log onto the fire. My fingers and wrists looked like I was into self-abuse. Only slightly.

I do pride myself at the one-match method: getting lots of New York Times newspapers as a foundation, twigs from the yard piled on top, and then some small branch pieces and a log on top. One match and it's a-blazing. On yeah, got that down.

However, I should mention that once or twice (okay, three or four times) I nearly smoked myself out of the cabin before I learned how to manage the air flow: There's a handle underneath--I finally cleaned off the base, saw an L, and eventually realized that L stands for Low, while the H I then located stands for High, referring to air flowing into the stove (and what was that Ph.D. for?). The flue also has a contraption that is vertical or horizontal, allowing more airflow (I knew that already, duh!). So putting it all together, if I get the air flowing in the stove and up the stovepipe before I open the door, the smoke in the stove will float up and not into the room. (We didn't have "Commonsense Woodstove Operation" in my graduate program, see.)

So then Urban Girl needs to learn about kinds of wood and how they burn. Who knew? Now I know that a certain kind of oak, cut in pie slabs (whadeva you call it), will burn fast, and is great for getting the fire started (still don't know the names for this stuff--someone inform me!-- but it's in a specific pile brought by the woodcutter back in December when I arrived and had NO wood set int for the winter, but that's a different story). (By the way, that oak was meant for kindling, but I'm not great with the ax yet--scared myself when the axhead hit my rubber clogs, no damage done, but I decided to wait for a lesson from a mountain man or woman before making my own kindling with the ax. Stay tuned for my ax wielding report.)

Then there is the "Doug fir" (yeah, you see me sling the nickname, huh?) which seems to be the next level up on burning slower and hotter, and finally the rounds of hard tan oak or even madrone that burn the slowest and hottest.

So the trick is to get a good bed of coals going before you tuck yourself in, then place a mammoth round log on top (at just the right angle not to burn oneself on the now really hot woodstove door opening). Tamp down the flue and let that sucker burn slowly all night, so you don't even have to wake up at 3 am to start a whole new fire. Sometimes I've achieved that goal and wake up in a still warm cabin at 6 am feeling accomplished. Sometimes I just settle for a fat log of oak--but you know what happens to it by 3 am.

On the topic of heat and stoves, I now report on Urban Girl learning about and fearing a fire in the stovepipe. Some friends of friends had their whole cabin burn down 'cause a fire started in the stove pipe: the creosote attaches to the pipe and self-ignites. Okay, so I won't put you through too much fear for your friend. After all, I know about knocking the stovepipe to get the creosote to fall and not build up. And I've talked to Dennis the Soot Master who is going to come get it cleaned one day soon.

When I called Dennis, he said, "Oh I remember that stovepipe--the really dangerous one for me to clean, hanging off the little roof next to it?"

"Yeah, that's the one. When can you come?"

"Well, it's winter. Normally you want to be sure your stovepipe is cleaned before winter. I have a lot of folks waiting in line. Is it smoking or anything? If not, it's not really urgent."

"No, it's not smoking--" if I don't open the door precipitously. "But, when I get a fire started, I hear the creosote in the pipe kind of tinkling and it sounds like it's falling down. Is that a bad sign?"

"Huh." Notice his non-committal response. "Well, let me tell you, I'm gonna try to get up there as soon as I can. Maybe another week or two."

Really, I'm not trying to worry you. I just want you to know that life in the woods has its challenges. I used to work in schools where kids brought guns in their backpacks. Once on a warm Saturday morning I was in my classroom in the high school in Richmond; I'd accidentally set off the alarm when I got to the school. Suddenly, I hear a voice outside my door calling, "Who's there?" and a gun pointing into the open door. A gun pointing at me didn't really scare me, to be honest. (It was the police answering the alarm I'd set off.) But that windstorm with the mere idea of a tree falling on me: now that's scary. A stovepipe fire: that's scary.

On the other hand, anyone who knows me has heard me complain in recent years of being burned out by piles of papers as a teacher. So whatever little struggles I'm coping with now, including learning to burn the right kinds of wood so I don't have to wake up at 3 am to keep Cholo and me warm, I am only too happy to figure out.

Next time: The joys of heating your hot water on the wood stove for a hot bath

#1 Welcome to the Woods

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. …. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to rout all that was not life..."
Henry David Thoreau,
Walden or Life in the Woods




Sunday, March 20, 2011 The Vernal Equinox

The Wind Storm
The wind thundered throughout the night and with it my imagination. As if hitting the little cabin on the ridge at a 90 degree angle, rain came pelting through the cracks in the window despite the folded newspaper that prevented some of the cold air from whistling through. Now water seeped down the raw pine panneled wall over my head; the window at the sink was not faring much better, but at least the water dripped onto the linoleum counter below.

All I could think about was the trees leaning over the cabin, three of them tan oaks. My neighbor said of the trees fallen along her driveway, “You know we have sudden oak death here.” Well, now I know. I even plan to have those trees cut down, but the tree guy can’t make it until next week. A new mountain man friend, Bruce, examined one of the offending oaks and said, “Looks like disease to me.”

So in the middle of the night, I’m calculating the chances that the saturated ground and the disease and the wind and the lean won’t all combine just now to bring that tree down or its companions onto the brittle little wooden shelter that my dog, Cholo, and I are loving. My imagination being what it is, I can’t help but play out the consequences: It would be bad enough to have the tree crush the roof and then the roof tumble down, but I also have to imagine the window on the wood stove bursting open in the crash, coals from my lovely hot fire shooting forth, and the kerosene lamp now knocked over and bursting into flames.

Sorry, friends, to lay this fiery image on you, but such is life in the woods for a relative neophyte learning to beware of dangers we don’t face in the urban environment. When Bruce came to look at the area that I wanted him and his landscaping company to clear around the cabin, he shook his head and indicated, “I’d’a had those down a long time ago.” In fact, several other new acquaintances who’ve come to do some work on the land as I prepare for renovations ahead wondered aloud about my letting so many trees grow up so high and threaten the safety of my home. Indeed, this little tree hugger is a city girl! One of many ironies to appreciate in this story: Only an urban tree hugger keeps her forest too close to her forest nest.

Throughout the night, the wind shuddered through the cabin on its stilt foundations, tossing pine cones and branches onto the deck, moving the deck furniture audibly on my little Titanic. I decided that I would either survive or not, but I needed to sleep. I’ve been doing some reading on Buddhism and Zen in particular, thanks to my solar samurai friend Ralph; at 3 a.m. I had just copied out a passage from Diasetz Suzuki's book Zen and Japanese Culture on a cherished 17th century text on the samurai, The Hagakure:

The book emphasizes very much the samurai’s readiness to give his life away at any moment, for it states that no great work has ever been accomplished without going mad—that is, when expressed in modern terms, without breaking through the ordinary level of consciousness and letting loose the hidden powers lying further below. … When the unconscious is tapped, it rises above individual limitations” (p. 70).

In the interest of my readiness to give away my life at any moment and sleepy despite the crashing noises about me, I put in my earplugs and slept well, surviving another night in the woods. I awoke to the fog-infused and snow-crested mountains peeking behind the redwoods in the hoary yard below the cabin to the east. Such beauty, this blanket of snow surrounding me! Well worth a little confrontation with the elements outside and within. Meanwhile, the irony did not escape me that it was the first day of spring. and I’m snowed in.

Sharing My Journey

Now I will shed some light on the impetus for this adventure in the woods. In my mid-night imagining of my own demise, I thought I could at least chronicle aspects of this sometimes ridiculous journey as a woman in mid-life change (accompanied by some crisis) returns to the woods the way so many of her baby-boomer cohort did 25 years ago. Many of those back-to-landers have since moves into town to seek comforts of middle age. I too seek a few more comforts in my funky cabin in the woods, hence a battery of renovations ahead, such as fulfilling my "bourgeois" need for an indoor bathroom.

Even renovated, the cabin will still be “off the grid,” relying on solar power and a woodstove for light and heat, not to mention a composting toilet. As for electricity and hot water, they are basic elements of modern life that I have come to appreciate in more ways than one, not only because I now have little electricity during a very wet winter with an old and rudimentary solar system and no hot running water, but also because the recent tsunami in Japan leaves me with morning and evening NPR stories that make me shudder for all the homeless refugees living in tents in the snow in Japan. I may get snowed in but at least I have a woodstove and shelter of my own; I have food from the local farmer’s market that is still safe from the effects of radiation. I am well--in fact, never better--and grateful.

The process of making this cabin into a more livable environment is taking a few months. I will share some of my adventures in returning to a simpler life. Whether I can help others simply live by living more simply myself is yet to be determined, but I plan to live out the maxim to the utmost that I have often tried to embody. However, let me not kid myself about the material complexity of my heretofore opportunity-rich, jet-setting, stuff–laden, overly-educated life! Still, we can keep trying to achieve our own best selves, n’est-ce pas? If Cholo could learn to swim at age 10, then we really can teach old dogs new tricks. Born in the Year of the Dog, I am a wolf seeking her pack in the wild. Here she goes….