Visions and Revisions

Back in June, Kim and I were riding the subway to Manhattan with my parents when I mentioned that I'd looked at housing listings on Craigslist and discovered that I could rent a "dry cabin" for $350-600/month. I asked my Dad, did "dry" indicate a sound roof, a prohibition of alcohol, or a lack of running water?

Obviously, the latter. And immediately ensued a robust round of heckling about Amelia and her dry cabin. Trips to the outhouse in subzero temperatures and sticking to the toilet seat! Stumbling home once a week to wash the laundry--and maybe her hair! Moose loitering on the doorstep! Marrying a mountain man and never being heard from again!

I'm pretty sure the reason for all this ribbing was the fact that they knew that, faced with a choice between an apartment in town with a hot shower, a flushing toilet, and two roommates, or having a whole cabin to myself and heating my wash water on the stove, I would take the dry cabin in an instant. And so I have. I am renting a beautiful two-story log cabin on a hillside above the Chena River Valley (where Fairbanks is situated), about six miles from town, twelves miles from my parents' place.

There are actually several thousand dry cabins clustered around the north side of Fairbanks--most of them inhabited by students attending UAF. The prevailing attitude seems to be that the young possess enough elasticity (or insanity) for dry living. (And if you spend most of your day on campus, and don't mind living in one of the smaller or uglier cabins, dry living can be really easy on the pocketbook.) The cabins are variously owned, variously built, variously sized, variously furnished, variously priced (though almost entirely heated by the same means; wood-burning heat drives the insurance into the stratosphere, because of the risk of fire). Around here, if you have a bit of money to invest you don't bother with the stock market; you buy some land, build one to a dozen dry cabins, and rent them out to students. Craigslist is full of them. I encountered this one by the grace of the gods of The Alaskan Way, when my parents mentioned my search to their real estate agent, who just happened to know of a cabin recently refurbished. I loved it instantly, and the "landlords" were pretty easy to bully into letting me live here.

The dirt road in front of my house is called Little Fox Trail, and just to give an example of the nature of my surroundings, I first saw this place on the ninth of September and only today I found out what the house's address really is. (Turns out I don't yet have a mailbox; the fuel company delivered my winter's supply of oil, and my address was on the bill.) The area is actually pretty well populated for Alaska, but because people around here don't concern themselves too much about the size or quality of their "lawn," and instead leave the trees and weeds thriving around their building sites, everyone lives in his own wilderness. Dad swears I will see moose under this particular tree outside my "living room" window. Sitting in the outhouse I am more likely to be interrupted by a snowshoe hare than a human being. Cell phone reception is uneven; I can usually make and receive calls without trouble, but they are dropped frequently. Because I am situated pretty well up on the hillside I won't have to suffer the notorious Fairbanks ice fog, however; by all accounts hillfolk enjoy winter temperatures some 15-20 degrees warmer than the town dwellers, so isolation (and I use the term advisedly, since I don't feel isolated) can lay claim to a few practical compensations.

My cabin, as I said, has two floors: the kitchen/dining room on the first floor, and a full sleeping loft above. ("Full" means the floor stretches clear to all four walls and the pitched roof reaches a good seven feet at its peak; a "half" loft is a crawl space with a mattress.) It is sturdy and well insulated, though you may be sure that I'll be chinking the shit out of some of the siding as draughts make themselves more evident. I can boast all of the conveniences of your average first world home, meaning electricity and everything that can run off of it, lights, refrigerator, four-burner range and oven (the latter carted over from the unfinished second cabin on the property at my special request), microwave, sink with a drain pipe that leads outside (no slop buckets), and a Toyo heater fed by a 300-gallon oil tank. (No internet yet, but we'll see.) My outhouse sits at the back of the house, facing into the woods, and it is new, and sturdy, and clean. Special bonus: five doghouses occupy my "yard," left by the former tenants who seem to have kept a sled team. (I am enormously tempted to get a dog.) Add to these native charms the fact that I am living here, with all of my books, arty crap, and innate good taste, plus the furniture and kitchen implements that my parents pressed me to carry away, and the result is a supremely comfortable habitation. This is a nice cabin, ladies and gentlemen.

Dry living is something I'm still sorting out. So far it's a bit of a cross between car camping--because you have as much "gear" as your heart could desire, and then some--and backpacking on the beach--because there are no spigots and you have to tote all of your water. Possibly I will find the fact of an outside toilet more burdensome as the temperatures drop into the negative numbers, but presently it's the least challenging aspect of dry living. The wind never seems to blow, and I have a nice warm styrofoam plank to sit on. My outhouse smells a helluva lot better than the bathroom at 21-R frequently did. And I am well equipped with hand sanitizer, so Kim can rest assured that I will not die of dysentery. Washing my person so far also proves pretty straightforward. Soap and hot water are not required in quantity for this exercise, and stripping down in an oil-heated cabin is a far cry from shivering through one's morning ablutions in the open air. I can shower at my parents' house whenever my hair becomes unbearable, and since I don't yet have a job there's no fuss about how frequently that happens.

No, the hardest part of dry living so far seems to be washing the goddam dishes, because I have spent so long swilling bakeware in gratuitous quantities of hot water. Were I content to eat Annie's macaroni and cheese out of the pot for the next year, there wouldn't be a problem, but come on. I will cook my six-course banquet from scratch and eat it too. Part of the difficulty is that my waterworks are still operating out of two one-gallon milk jugs and a Nalgene, which I feel obliged to fill every day. Seeing all of the available wash and drinking water sitting before one's eyes is a sobering experience that promotes extreme frugality. (Consider that the average toilet uses a good three to five gallons of water to do a flush.) How to wash and rinse the dishes--thoroughly enough that I can consent to eat from them again--without using the whole supply? I learn as I go. A little more precipitation--in any form--and I could set up a rain/melt bucket for wash purposes, but interior Alaska is a subarctic desert. Gives a whole new meaning to "dry" living. Most dry dwellers acquire several five-gallon blue containers, like those for gasoline, and fill them once a week at the water stations available around town. No scrimping necessary, except perhaps in the name of the inconvenience of immediately renewing one's water supply. (An aside: because the ground water in some areas contains unwholesome levels of arsenic, entire communities have to import their drinking water. Dry living isn't that much of a leap.) I'm reluctant to use my carefully hoarded supply of Food and Warmth tokens for buying empty plastic jugs, so I'm planning to collect an army of milk containers, but that will take a few weeks. Until then I cringe inwardly every time I pour out another measure of water. Baby steps.