We traded cold tempuratures for beautiful days. For the last three months I’ve woken to grey. Grey skies, grey air, grey skin, and grey trees. The grey got into everything. Usually I spend a lot of time outside in the winter regardless of weather. There is always wood to be chopped, and there are always limbs to be warmed by the movement. But this year the Beard has taken over the wood schlepping and chopping duties (for those of you just signing in, it’s because I’m pregnant), and I’m sure in part that there’s a vitamin D deficiency cohorting with the grey.
Now the weather has gotten frigid, but the skies have turned a brilliant blue. Snow would complete the scene, but it’s far too cold for white frosting now. I am ready for hibernation. But instead I’m damned by my species to remain awake through the cold. I usually enjoy the change of pace that a good tuck-in-for-the-winter can bring. There are books to read and movies to watch and 90s point-and-click adventure games to play and down blankets to heap on top of chilly limbs. The sound of a new log catching fire in the wood stove is the soundtrack, the sound of a neighbor’s axe hitting the chopping block the beat.
But having been “tucked in” since the beginning of the pregnancy (morning sickness, ugh), I’m ready for winter activities to give way to something warmer, to something involving warm sunlight and movement. I’m tired of reading, of watching movies, of browsing the internet. The sauna is my salvation. Once a week I go for four hours to remind my body what it is capable of without the watermelon tacked to my front in the heated pool and to steam my limbs, an exorcism by air and water.
Since it’s gotten cold, we’ve been sleeping longer, and it has become harder and harder to get out of bed. Who wants to leave the warm folds of a down blanket for such a cold day? Though we remembered to turn the water in them off on time this year, the toilets are both currently stopped by bits of ice somewhere in the pipes, and now a walk to the bathroom takes me further and longer. It is the glory season of the chamber pot.
But the weather is another reason that I can’t wait for the baby to hurry up and arrive already: once she’s here I’ll have new grounds to appreciate being tucked in, a new relationship to develop and someone fascinating to spend hours in bed cuddling with and getting to know/staring at/relearning everything I know with. And relatively, it won’t be long until winter really does give way to spring.
Demons exorcised by steam and just enough energy left to attempt to think positively, I turn to music for a good mood while the doldrums last. This song is my current magic spell. Do you have a good mood album or song that gets your feet tapping and the corners of your mouth heading north? For the love of cod, share it in the comments if you do. The long ninja approach will not conquer this winter’s doldrums, but a virtaul army might have a chance.
The temperatures have entered a month-long limbo contest. Alaska’s probably winning (or Siberia or Antarctica), but Mainz seems out to beat her personal record. Everything in our kitchens is frozen: the water, the dish soap, the carrots, the onions, your hands as you try to empty a bag of pasta into boiling water. The cooking oil has all gone solid. There is no need to use a refrigerator. In fact, the refrigerator in the Beard’s kitchen (we have separate kitchens at the moment because he wants to be in a communal kitchen and I don’t) turned itself off after the first night of minus double digit temperatures.
I am ready for hibernation.
“I think I’ll just sleep until I go into labor,” I told the Beard yesterday morning from beneath my favorite down blanket. If only I was a bear. Or a hedgehog. Or a skunk.
I had almost forgotten what it was like. The frozen water. The biting chill in the air. The layers of clothing. The intensity with which the wood stove must be fed in order to keep the Wagen warm when winter finally decides to show its frosty locks.
In preparation we’d turned off the water in the bathroom Wagen (during the winter we use the “flush with a bucket of water” method rather than risk burst piping), and I’d even remembered to move the two packages of hair dye in my Wagen to the sleeping Wagen. (Purchased for the orgy of chemical use which will ensue post Peanut landing. By which I mean, the single beer I will drink and the dye I will use on my hair. Wooo, bring on the poisons! Haha. Sounds a lot less appealing when I put it that way, doesn’t it?)
But, being out of practice with the concept of winter after a mild three months of fall-like “winter” I forgot about the bottles of water on my counter and the milk on my stoop. Oops. This morning I laughed when I saw my favorite glass bottle spouting ice. And frowned when I saw that the glass had cracked in several places all the same. Damn.
The two liters of milk I had on the stoop hadn’t exploded (guess I should be thankful that I’ve been too tired to get to the farmer’s market to buy my beloved brown bottles of raw cow juice—they definitely would have exploded), but even balanced between the wall and the very edge of the wood stove it took several hours before I had enough liquid to pour into my oatmeal. Lesson learned, winter, lesson learned.
long live the wood stove
Though winter weather always comes as a bit of a shock to me, I was excited to cook on the wood stove again. Sure, I could have cooked on it earlier in the season, but when it gets really cold, the stove tends to, more often, be consistently hot enough to use for food preparation. I filled a small pot with a package of frozen spinach, a package of gnocchi, and a little water. After about forty-five minutes the extra water was gone and everything was warm and ready. The final touch was a splash of milk and a package of gorgonzola cheese crumbled into the mix, and wa-la, wood stove gnocchi with a gorgonzola sauce. I’m eating it right now. And thinking that maybe I should start wearing a bib.
Is winter still playing at mild where you are? Or is the cold weather hitting everywhere simultaneously?
The sun is shining and it is hailing, and any minute now I’m expecting a rider of the apocalypse to show up to try to sell me a magazine subscription.
On New Year’s Eve over 3,000 red-winged blackbirds fell from the sky in Beebe, Arkansas. Scientists have since reported that the event was probably caused by collisions that occurred as the result of fireworks, that similar events aren’t all that uncommon, and that there’s nothing apocalyptic about 3,000 black birds falling from the sky at one time. Certifiably apocalyptic or not, the imagery certainly matches the mood that the ludicrously unseasonal weather we’ve been having has me in.
The mild weather has certainly made the winter easier to handle. There is less wood stove tending to do, and there are fewer layers to be put on in the morning. But it remains strange none-the-less. I am bracing myself for the worst—and expecting that it will rear it’s frozen head in the exact moment when I’m expecting the weather to turn toward spring. It is a confusing state of affairs, and I wonder how the plants will fare. Humans (and, I assume, many other mammals) can adapt fairly quickly when it comes to getting-by survival, but what happens if all the things we’ve learned to eat die away from under our feet? I don’t want to end up living in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Meanwhile, I’ve been neglecting my Wagen. Poor, lonely, little trash house has become the loading dock for my dirty dishes, clutter, and an enormous pile of baby paraphernalia. I bring a load of things in, and I take a snack out. But the weather is so warm that the cooking oil is still fluid, and I can cook a meal with the door open and without feeling cold. Unfortunately it is also so warm that the dirty dishes are molding before I get around to washing them. Damn it.
Did I mention that I am excited to get this baby out and to get my body back? Oooh am I ever. So excited that the thought of jogging makes me giddy. Of running to catch buses. Of being able to keep pace with whoever I am walking with. I’m even looking forward to being able to carry dish-washing water to my Wagen whenever the urge to scrub strikes me.
Having recently read the entire Game of Thrones series by George R.R. Martin, I constantly have the Stark family motto running through my head. “Winter is coming.” Or is it?
The moment that snow starts falling my head fills with cheesey songs about snow from lifetimes past. Christmas songs, songs I’ve sung in choirs—they all begin to play on repeat (or the tiny chunks of them I can still remember) on cue with a coating of white.
Snow and wet winters always propel my appreciation for warm, comfortable, water-proof winter shoes into over drive. What luxury! What comfort! If industrial civilization ever really does collapse, I’ll be the one looting at the shoe store. (Afterwards you’ll probably be able to find me at the seed store. And then maybe the outdoor supply store, if it hasn’t been picked clean by then.)
It feels like I take the same set of pictures every year after the first snow, but with so many Wägen are in new places and so many readers I thought, what the hell, I’ll post a few more.
The view from our bedside window:
I dug out my winter boots for the first time this season, and headed outside—this is the view from the door:
My Wagen:
Our neighbor across the way:
Our sleeping Wagen where I spend almost all of my time these days:
December has been unseasonably, almost disturbingly mild this year. There have been a handful of cold days and colder nights (as well as a day of hail), but for the most part it’s been days of gray and nights of light frost. I haven’t even started wearing a second layer of pants. Yet this winter feels harder than any other Bauwagen winter that’s come before it.
I don’t miss dial heat. When I sleep in apartments and houses, I am struck by how dry the air is and tend to wake with cotton throat and mouth. I like chopping wood, starting fires, and listening to the crackling of the wood stove. It can be inconvenient—say, when you want to be gone for more than three or four hours but come back to a warm abode or get home late and would much rather fall into bed then spend an hour getting the fire roaring—but there is something comforting and beautiful about the whole process that makes the pros worth all the cons I could come up with.
But I should amend the first sentence of that last paragraph—I don’t miss dial heat until I am sick, especially if I am sick when the Beard is away or has to work a lot. Then I sometimes think, Well wouldn’t it be nice to just lay in a consistently warm room that remains consistently warm without any effort from me?! Especially now that pregnancy has temporarily rendered me pretty useless, physically. (All women who go through this alone get superhero status in my eyes. Especially those who live in any way off-grid.)
This morning I was feeling a little resentful toward the wood stove as I was stuffing it with newspaper and kindling. When I’m sick I want nothing more than to lay in bed all day being brought tea and snacks. I don’t want to have to put on a jacket and go outside, let alone carry or chop firewood. But this morning I stopped myself mid-grumble and examined my logic. There is no reason why heating my home should involve zero effort. The dial heating involves effort too, but from a lot of people that I simply never have to see at work. And there is no reason to think that somehow carrying some wood, chopping some wood, and leaving the windows open for twenty minutes while I get things started (our wood stove tends to smoke a bit while you’re getting it lit) is going to make me sicker. Sure, it’s incredibly unpleasant when I’ve got an achy sickness or can’t do much besides lay in bed and moan, but still. It’s not going to kill me, so I might as well stop feeling resentful about it. As soon as I thought it I felt a lot more cheerful about lighting the morning’s fire.
Meanwhile, I’m sure things will stop feeling so hard once I’m healthy again. (And being done with pregnancy and recovered from the birth is going to help a lot too, but by then spring will be starting to poke a toe through the door.) My lack of energy and a wood pile that, in my estimation, is dwindling far too quickly have kept me out of trash house (aka the kitchen Wagen aka my Wagen, crap I need to pick a name for it and stick with it) for the last couple of weeks. The thought of having to light and tend two wood stoves has been too overwhelming. And what if we run out of wood!?!!! (You can never have too much fire wood or dried food, I say. But I am a hoarder like that. If we run out of wood we’ll just buy some off of a Platz-mate with fire wood to spare. Yet for some reason, I still feel worried when I look in the wood shed.) I miss spending time in my own little space, but I suppose avoiding it isn’t so bad either: after all, all that’s waiting for me in there right now are unwashed dishes and baby-paraphernalia chaos.
And there you have it. In hopes of providing a balanced picture of the ups and downs of living in a tiny dwelling in an intentional community, a not-so-romantic perspective on winter-time life.
Several times I’ve written day in the life posts—one of the purposes of this blog being to depict what it’s like to live in a tiny caravan in an intentional community—and several times you’ve responded with enthusiasm. (If you missed it, you can read another “day in the life” post here.) So I thought I’d write another. The details of life are different during every day, but they are even more diverse seasonally. And especially now, with the added challenge of being pregnant. So, here you are, a pregnant winter-y day in the life of Click Clack Gorilla…
one day in november
As I empty out the wood stove’s ash drawer in the bushes outside of my Bauwagen, I imagine archeologists of the future reconstructing our lives here from these little piles of ash, from the bits of plastic and debris that so quickly become compacted in the dirt. But archeologists will probably never excavate the remains of our little community. One day the university will force us to move (our land is hot real estate for them, and they make threats about once a year), and then they will remove all of the dirt here to put in the foundation of their latest Borg ship. And so it goes.
Tempuratures have been dropping, and it’s chilly when morning finds the Beard and I in our sleeping Wagen. I wake up hungry and try to ignore my growling stomach for as long as possible so as to steal a few more minutes cuddled beneath the blankets I dumpster dived across the street. But my growling stomach and the cramps in my legs (the latest prego-symptom, only happens when I lay down for too long) drive me into the crisp air sooner than I would like. Some mornings I manage to stay in bed reading for hours. But these days I would need a breakfast delivery service and a masseuse to make it possible. I dress quickly in the chill, reminding myself that chilly though it may feel in here, it is still much colder outside.
Outside I can see my breath, and I waddle between Wägen putting together breakfast: to my Wagen for the bowl full of oats and chopped apple, to one of the tiny kitchen Wägen for the raw milk to pour over them, and then into the house where I retreat whenever I need a warm place to collect the energy to light my own wood stove. People drift in and out as I eat: the day’s vokü cooks arrive with backpacks full of produce for the lunch menu, Platz-mates wander by looking for a fresh cup of coffee. I am gone by the time the first vokü guests arrive to begin filling the house up with cigarette smoke and backpacks.
Then I trudge to my Wagen where I have been putting off doing the dishes for days. I stuff crumpled newspaper and kindling into the wood stove, and light it with a match. It’s a sweet little oven with good air flow, and soon it’s crackling merrily while I put on fingerless gloves and clear off the counter to make room for me to do dishes and lay them out to dry. Then I put off doing them for a few more hours while I write blogs and e-mails and put a load of laundry into the new machine in the house. Slowly, it gets warm enough for me to consider taking off my jacket inside.
I’ve been unmotivated lately, feeling the first grip of winter doldrums wrapping around my limbs. But I have so much time right now! I remind myself. And I’m not using it in ways that will make me happy about it later, I frown. So I sit down, and I make a list of things I’d like to accomplish between now and February (baby arrival date). 1. Read as many books on the to-read shelf as possible. 2. Continue writing the au pairing series for autoposting on the blog for the first months of baby. 3. Work draft on the history of our cultural obsession with throwing things away into an article, and pitch it to a few magazines. (I haven’t been feeling the trash book lately, so I have been thinking I would rather try to work some of the best parts of it into articles and call it a day. That way I can abandon the project without feeling like I’ve given it up. Besides, a bunch of good articles are just as likely to lead to a book should the muse find me afterall.) 4. Compile and layout issue two of the Click Clack Gorilla zine.
No matter what the season, I always spend a good part of any day sitting at my little table and staring at my books. It’s a meditation of sorts. I let my mind wander, process past events, hatch schemes, plot projects, compose sentences, and think about how fantastic that shelf will look once I finally get all the books I still have in America onto it. Then I take another look at my to-do list and take the throw rugs outside to air out while I sweep ash and fire wood dust and leaves out the front door.
It is four o’clock before I finally force myself to take care of the dirty dishes. Doing dishes has become complicated. I can no longer carry a full tub of water to my Wagen from the faucet in the house. So instead I carry several loads of dishes into the house and wash them there. Then, finally, I fill my wash tub to about a quarter and use that to wash the little that remains. Everything seems to take longer these days, every activity requires more rest afterwards. I feel like I’m doing chores in slow motion, and I write detailed to-do lists so as to have small things to cross off, so that I can feel like I’m getting something done. Sweep, take out compost, and rinse out milk bottles have all become seperate bullet points instead of the over-arching “clean up kitchen” that might have stood on one of my to-do lists seven months ago. The baby kicks on and off throughout the day, and I sing “You Are My Sunshine” and “I Send My Love to You” to my stomach. Bonnie Prince Billy makes lovely winter soundtrack music.
By this time the sleeping Wagen has reached a lovely sauna-like tempurature (where the Beard has already lit the wood stove and spent the afternoon playing the fiddle) and the drying laundry hanging from the ceiling has made the air appropriately damp. We eat dinner sitting in bed (a big salad and baked camembert cheese with jam) and play Simon the Sorcerer 2 (point and click adventure games are a favorite winter pastime of ours—last year we played Monkey Island and Full Throttle is next on the list). At 7 o’clock I waddle over the the other Wagenplatz where we eat eggs with mustard sauce with cold feet around a big table in their communal kitchen. There are already three kids living there, and we joke about the little gang they are going to form once they all get a bit older. After a bit of chatting and a lot of baby gurgling, I waddle back to our Wagenplatz through cold, fresh air where I fall into bed next to the Beard and quickly fall asleep.
The first time I heard about Slab City, California was on a blog post at Birds Before the Storm earlier this week. Magpie had been out to visit what apparently is the closest thing America has to a Wagenplatz and had taken some lovely photos of the squatted desert caravan community. It looked pretty neat.
The second time I heard about Slab City was today, when spacebook told me that a dude I went to high school with had been found dead in the hot springs there. “Thirty-year old Karl Weikel had been submerged under the water for approximately 14 hours while others unknowingly soaked in the hot springs right over him,” reports this article. “The cause of the death is yet unknown, but an autopsy is scheduled for today. Karl was reportedly on drugs and alcohol when he went into the hot springs Friday night.
“However, he had also been the target of several beatings a couple nights before,” the article continues. “No two people seem to have the same version of that night’s events, but it’s rumored the attempt to burn some one out of their trailer is related to the altercations. Because of the beatings he received, the sheriff suspects foul play might have been involved in Karl’s death.”
I didn’t know Karl particularly well, hadn’t seen him since graduation back in double ought, but I still remember him clearly. He was the class clown, he was in a lot of my classes, and if my memory hasn’t been completely distorted by all the years of whiskey, he was part of the AP Bio trip our class took to the Virgin Islands where we had a pretty ruckus good time. (Can you fucking believe that my high school had a bi-annual trip to the Virgin Islands associated with the AP Bio class? High fives for Mrs. Peterson for organizing that, where ever she might be.)
If I was in the United States right now I would go to my mom’s house, dig out a bunch of old photos and post a few in a little nod to his memory from across the sea. I don’t know if we would have gotten along today, but he was someone I would have liked to run into again sometime. Last I had heard, he seemed to have become a pretty interesting fellow. Either way, I hope that however he went, it wasn’t in a lot of pain.
A birth on the horizon, a death in my graduating class—it’s launched me into a philosophical mood. Death is almost always a sad event, particuarly for those close to the deceased. And yet, I always think to myself, it’s “the next adventure,” as Gandalf says in Lord of the Rings. It’s an innate part of life, a confirmation of the connectedness of everything and everyone as we are returned to the earth that fed the plants and animals that sustained us.
So it seems like an appropriate moment to share one of the newer Black Diamond songs with you, Around My Grave Sing Songs of Joy. It’s become my favorite song of ours, and it’s about thinking about death in a less “it’s the end of the world” and in a more “cyclical, intensely sad, yet intrinsic to our very lives” sort of way. Unfortunately, we haven’t recorded it yet. So instead I’ll share the lyrics and raise a glass to Mr. Weikel. Hope you enjoyed your thirty years, Karl.
around my grave, sing songs of joy // black diamond express train to hell 2011
Blackbird, fly so high. But lay my bones deep in the ground, lay my bones deep in the ground.
Hey little brown bird, blood red chest, dead girl lying, crimson lips.
When I die don’t say no prayers, cause there ain’t no heaven, and there ain’t no hell…just sing.
Elderberry summer wine, berries’ blood will course through mine.
When I’m gone don’t shed no tears, just raise your glass, your fist, your voice…and sing.
Maple maple, sugar tree, branch above and root beneath.
When I die my cradle be, between rock and root I’ll sleep…and sing.
No, your eyes do not deceive you. That wagon is fucking HUGE. And manuevering it through the tight spaces it had to fit through to get from A to B involved creativity of the kind that always makes me proud to be part of a network of such brilliant mad scientists.
It started out here:
No one was really sure if the tractor would be able to handle pulling it. It worked when we shimmied it into that spot the first time (this particular ship has only been on our Wagenplatz for about a year), but since then it has been filled with boxes and over a pallet full of wood briquettes. Despite the weight the tractor managed it (though a handful of people had to stand on the back of the tractor to keep it from bucking).
Within a couple of minutes it was out of its former parking spot:
And on its way to getting stuck in the extremely tight channel it needed to sail down:
(And here it is stuck there as seen from the other side, taken from about where my front door used to be.)
That’s when things got complicated. The first problem was that the tractor was on the wrong side of the wagon to be of any use. After some measuring, chain sawing, and a good deal of moving of wood, we cleared a path for the tractor so that it could drive between wagon sides. Because after a number of attempts it became clear that all we could do was try to push it’s ass-end the arms length we needed it to move to fit in the new space.
The second problem was that pushing and pulling weren’t doing a damn thing. That’s where the mad scientists came in with a brilliantly insane idea. We would put down some big sheets of metal and cover them with oil. Then we would push the back axle onto the oily metal (making sliding possible as it hadn’t been on the dirt) and then we would push the ass end with the tractor. It sounded totally ridiculous. And it worked.
Now it’s parked snugly in my old spot, making my wagon look like it was the size of a peanut, directly across from where the Beard and I’s sleeping wagon still stands. And because we didn’t actually need to move a wagon out of the way to get it in there (as we had thought we would), there are only two more wagons left to go in wagon dominos before we can move our sleeping wagon into its new, much quieter spot. !!!!!!!!!!
Want to read more about moving tiny houses? Check out these posts:
On Monday a reader named Dave requested a few full shots of our tractor. So here you go, Dave. Enjoy.
This is the vehicle that we use to pull the trailers around, as well as what we just used this morning to haul a bunch of tree bits off to the tree bits trash on the back of (in a tractor trailer of course).
