A Long Winter

I feel like I've been in hibernation since the end of August and I'm just starting to wake up.  I suppose I have been.  Which would explain my absence from this blog.  There's been so much snow on the ground that we couldn't walk anywhere except the plowed areas.  And the daylight hours seemed especially short this winter.  Winter was definitely a time for inside activity and I appreciated that for the first month or so.  But after awhile, hibernation got old. This, our second winter in Maine, was one of the snowiest and coldest on record for the area.  According to Weatherstreet.com, we still have about two feet of snow on the ground.  And it snowed for most of the day yesterday.  Meanwhile, friends on Facebook are posting pictures of spring in more temperate regions, with blossoms on trees, bulbs sprouting out of the ground, and green grass.   So I've been asking myself, what the hell are we doing here?

Yes, I know the reasons that we chose this area: low property values that allowed us to buy a house and land to homestead on, sufficient water, proximity to my family, natural beauty, blah, blah, blah.  But seriously, after several months of winter, a year of living here, and some additional experience homesteading over the summer--my perspective has shifted.

I'm itching for some new experiences and the reflection they inspire, some cultural variety, being around people with an openness to change and new ways of thinking and doing things, and the landscapes of the southwest. 

And my attitudes about homesteading in my own case have changed.  I see the value of being able to do things like grow and raise much of your own food, generate your own energy and water, etc. etc., but I see now there's a big difference between being able to do those things and doing them year after year when it's not necessary and not necessarily the most environmentally, economically, and personally sound thing to do.  I want to have access to garden space, and space to be able to raise livestock, I want to be able to grow food and preserve it, I want to be able to heat our own home and generate enough water for ourselves and our garden and animals.  This is about ready access to resources, such as land, water, knowledge, and skills.

But this is different from growing a garden every year to supply all our vegetables; preserving all its produce; taking care of animals year round and butchering them; hauling trees out of the woods and cutting and chopping them up; and purchasing all the technology that would make us independent of the grid.  Doing these things now and year after year is not necessarily the best choice for us.

I'm not persuaded, for example, that growing and canning our own tomatoes is the most environmentally or economically or physically sound choice.  A lot of resources go into growing and canning tomatoes on an individual family scale.  Consider just some of the resources involved over the past year:  Someone had to come in and brush cut our field with a tractor-pulled machine; then he came back and roughly roto-tilled the soil.  We bought fence posts and fencing, compost (that was delivered to our house in a gasoline powered dump truck), lime, tools for working the soil, seeds, seed trays, electric heat mats (and the electricity to heat them), materials and tools to make benches for seedlings, canning jars and lids, a food mill, lemon juice, canning salt, a canner and canning utensils, a stove to can on, electricity to run the stove during canning, electricity to run the pump for water to clean and can the tomatoes. There were multiple drives in the car to the hardware store as well as multiple deliveries by UPS.  Sure, some of these resources were one-time investments or investments that were used for other purposes as well, and their contribution to the expense of growing and canning tomatoes would be considerably less if distributed over the life time.  But still, is it necessarily the case that me growing my own tomato plants and canning them is better for the earth than massive tomato farms and factories that can employ the efficiencies of scale to grow, preserve, and distribute tomatoes for many people?  And I don't buy the argument that homegrown and preserved tomatoes are necessarily better for me than the canned tomatoes I buy in the store.  I have yet to see scientific evidence rather than personal opinion that this is the case.  And I can't detect a taste difference in the canned tomatoes.

There's also my labor to consider as a cost of producing the tomatoes.  I'll leave aside the monetary value of that labor and its contribution to the cost of the tomatoes since that's not really relevant to my calculations--it's not as if I'm turning down paid hours to produce the tomatoes.  But that labor had other costs.  Sometimes growing the tomatoes and canning them was pleasurable.  Sometimes it was not.  The work of the garden and the canning was difficult for me. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen during the heat of the summer in quite a bit of pain from standing and feeling frustrated and unhappy because I felt like I had to can the tomatoes even though I was hot and in pain.   I spent hours reading about chronic pain management because I was at my breaking point:  I wasn't sure how to deal with the pain that resulted from the work. I meditated, did yoga, and wrote to deal with the pain.*  I took extra naps.  I went to bed very early.  Still, I was grumpy.  I was agitated and depressed because chronic pain eats away at you and your view of yourself and the world.  And I was distressed because I repeatedly came up against my physical and psychological limits trying to do simple activities like weeding, standing, bending to pick things up, and carrying things.

I don't like sharing these things about myself, somehow I feel like they reveal a weakness of character, but they need to be part of an honest evaluation of the value of homesteading for me.  I have several chronic illnesses, I'm retired early due to disability, and I need to admit that some basic activities of homesteading are either debilitating or simply impossible for me. 

So all this changes my attitude about homesteading.  Again, I think the capacity to homestead is essential.  But actually homesteading, year after year, for me, is not essential and not necessarily the best investment of my money or my physical and psychological resources.  And I don't, at this point, believe that it's necessarily the best choice for the natural world. 

Back to the long winter and the things I'm itching for.  Couple this with my re-evaluation of homesteading.  And out comes the idea, not an altogether new one for me, that it would be great to get an rv and live on public lands (boondock) in warmer areas during the cold parts of the year.  Back when I was living in the suburbs, this was a choice I was wrestling with: homestead or go live in the wild as simply as possible while traveling occasionally from one wild area to another.    M. and I went with homesteading in part because (speaking for myself) it seemed less terrifying and was closer to what I knew about and could imagine doing.  Boondocking seemed a little too radical. 

I've noticed though that over time, if you think about something that seems radical, and think out all the details and the ins and outs and arguments pro and con, it begins to appear less radical.  This transformation happened to me with homeschooling and then unschooling my son, getting divorced, leaving my career, moving off-grid to New Mexico, and buying a homestead in and moving to Maine. 

I've been reading blogs of people who have adopted this lifestyle and getting a sense of what their daily experiences are like. They also provide descriptions of and advice about the practical matters associated with rv-ing and boondocking. 

So here's the tentative plan M. and I have been discussing.  Pay off our remaining debt.  Get a cheap vehicle that we could sleep and haul necessities (dog, clothes, cameras, computers, a few cooking utensils, etc.) in.    When the weather starts to get cold, say, the end of October, drain the pipes and turn off the boiler in the house, lock up, visit family, drive to warmer lands, stay mostly on public land or stealth camp as necessary, write and photograph and (for M.) work online, return when the snow is gone toward the end of April.  Then, for the summer, enjoy the low humidity and gentle warmth of Maine.  Garden within physical limitations.  

I'm a list and weigh the advantages and disadvantages kind of person.  I'm not going to do that here right now, but I do want to mention one big advantage:  we wouldn't have to heat this house--which is damn expensive.  We have two forms of heat:  an ancient hot water boiler and a woodstove.  The boiler heats our hot water and is a backup to our wood heat--the hot water is distributed in pipes throughout the house.  In the winter, our bill for that is in the neighborhood of $200-$300 per month, so on the low end, that's $1200 for November through April.  Additionally, so far this winter, we've burned about 5 1/2 cords of wood.  This year, dry wood was $150 cord, delivered, for a total of $900.  Assume we heat from November through April.  That's $150 per month for wood.  We had probably two weeks worth of days where it was so cold that we had to use a portable heater in the laundry room--that cost us about $100.  Plus we've had multiple repairs because of the cold weather:  our septic system stopped working in March while temperatures hovered around zero.  It needed to be located and pumped.  It was under three or four feet of snow at the time.  Only some of that cost was due to cold weather (the locating and plowing and digging out).  But I'd say about $200 of the $500 we paid was due to pumping needing to happen in the winter.  Our boiler was cranky and needed several visits by the repairman (more than $200) that were not covered by the annual maintenance contract (which is in itself over $200/year).  Our pipes froze and burst in and under the laundry room and needed repairs (another $100).  We had to invest in a snow blower (over a few hundred dollars) and a roof rake--over several years, this will prove to be more affordable than having someone plow our driveway every time we get a few inches of snow ($35 a pop).  I'll leave out the costs that will be spread out over many years of buying the wood stove and getting a new liner installed in our chimney--which came to over $2500 in total.  Also, I'll leave out the fact that our boiler is past due for replacement--during our last inspection, we were warned that it's leaking fumes from old and worn seals and that these fumes will make their way up to our living area.  Replacing that boiler or its alternative will probably cost us over $10,000.

So let's set some limits and just say we spent about $3,000 dollars to heat our house and hot water, clear our driveway and reduce snow on our roof, and remove snow from our septic tank this winter.  Don't forget the labor of stacking and hauling firewood, cleaning ashes from the wood stove, and feeding the stove day and night.  I'm not bitching here, I love our wood stove and I love winter, too, in limited amounts.

But that $3000 could be better spent on things other than keeping our house warm, providing us with hot running water, and clearing our driveway.  We could be camped out in the desert or next to the ocean, going for walks in new places, taking pictures of sunsets and nifty rock formations and exotic vegetation, with a fabulous mix of solitude and meeting new and interesting people. We could be eating green chile and sopapillas! 

It's these thoughts that are helping me make it through the winter.  February and the beginning of March were rough.  Many times I found myself wondering, "Why do anything?"  That question, why do x, is pretty much always there in my thoughts, but it's generally coupled with a strong sense of curiosity about one thing or another or ten.  The curiosity and desire to know and learn are what drive me.  But this winter that curiosity and desire deserted me at times, despite repeated efforts to jump start it through online courses, reading, exercise, meditation, pod casts, writing and talking, healthy eating, efforts to get involved in social activities and volunteering through enrolling in a new Master Gardener class, exercises in appreciation, and continued use of anti-depressants. 

I've been sitting in this chair next to the wood stove for too long, writing this.  Time to get up and move my body around.  I'll try to write here more often in the coming days. 


*If you are dealing with chronic pain and illness, I highly recommend The Chronic Illness Workbook: Strategies and Solutions for Taking Back Your Life by Patricia A. Fennell.  You can read an excerpt of it here: http://solvecfs.org/the-four-phases-of-chronic-illness/.