Visions and Revisions

Finally I have fixed the comic links on the right-hand side. Probably nobody noticed but my website (not this blog, the website) quietly expired towards the middle of September, and took the image links with it. Oh well. I kept a copy all the code that Paul so laboriously wrought, so if I want to set up shop again in future I can do so, but I just wasn't making use of that site, so it didn't seem worth the cost of renewing my subscription.

The excellent Clay, with his bifurcated beard and apparently infinite knowledge of how things in the house work (from loft ladders to Toyo heaters) duly showed up, discovered a LEAK in the connection between the tiny furnace--the furnace what runs by burning things--and the 300 gallons of raw oily fuel standing on spindly steel legs just outside my front door......tightened a valve, and departed, all in five minutes. With instructions to call him if the problem continued, because then he would simply take the whole thing apart and reset the valve using a new piece of copper. As soon as he'd left I found a puddle of oil in the tray under the heater, in the corner nearest Scout's litterbox, which had evidently leaked from the valve and collected. Dad and I cleaned that up, set some papers down to absorb any oil that continued to drip, and left the Toyo overnight. Checking back the next day it was all clear, so I have moved back into my cabin. An energetic round of breadmaking drove out the oily reek, so we are a happy household once again.

I think I have a part time job, too. There's been a sign posted at a cafe near my parents' house--the Alaska Coffee Roasting Company--for well on three weeks, advertising for bakers and baristas. On a whim I printed off a copy of my [K.M. Self-Approved] resume and handed it to the counterperson as I was leaving with my latte. Two hours later the store manager called to set up an interview; the following morning at 11am the kitchen manager walked me through the maze of refrigerators and industrial mixers, and asked when I could start. I've never gotten a job so quickly in my life. It's enough to make me suspect I may have strayed into the Overqualified Zone.

Supposedly I'd only be working two or three days a week, shifts start at 5am, and pay starts at $9/hour (the cost of living in Alaska is not so much lower than Boston that that is a living wage). So I wouldn't go so far as to call this job a commitment. A fling, maybe. (Other people have interpersonal relationships, I have jobs.) But may I direct your attention to the wood-fired oven? Looks like that could be great fun. They make all sorts of things that I've never baked in my "professional" guise: cheesecakes, empanadas, flatbreads, quiche. A fine chance to learn something new. Plus I will not have to double as a barista when the front counter is short-staffed, I get to lurk in the kitchen and stir the tuna salad.

Of course nobody from the company has contacted me since Tuesday when I was interviewed, but they gave me a copy of the baker's manual so I assume they were pretty serious about hiring me.

Dad and I spent a good three days ferrying my belongings from my parents' house out to Little Fox as September drew to a close, and I officially took possession of the cabin on October 1st. "Taking possession," to those of you who don't know, means bringing the cat out. A little background here: Scout is a bold soul and a good traveler. She doesn't like to be touched by strangers, but she is not afraid of their presence. She doesn't run and hide when we arrive in a new place. The three weeks we spent in the hotel were a breeze; the space was a little smaller than she was used to, but she had a rollicking good time harassing Morgan and being her usual catty self. She was instantly in love with Mom and Dad's new house because it was HUGE, full of hidey-holes and catwalks for her to examine, and smelled like Irish Wolfhound. For all the trouble that Scout's health has caused me, she has a delightfully flexible personality.

So I was a little dismayed when, an hour into unpacking at the new cabin, I found her bundled into a catloaf on my bed in the loft. And there she stayed. She wouldn't come down except to eat and use the litter box, and that very reluctantly. I thought at first that she was cold, because my house runs a good eight degrees cooler than my parents', and the loft is colder still because the heater is on the main floor. But if that was the case why wouldn't she come downstairs where it was warmer? And why did she perk right up the minute that (at her insistence, and against my better judgment) I let her outside to explore?

Maybe she just didn't like my cabin.

I relayed all of this to my parents over the course of two days' phonecalls. My dad drove out on Friday so that I could go to the bank, and immediately commented that my house smelled very strongly of oil. No denying the truth of that statement, for sure. But it had smelled that way since the day they installed the Toyo. Our house in Germany smelled faintly but distinctly of oil; that's just what happens when you're heating your house that way. In smaller quarters, naturally the smell would be stronger, right? I figured I was just being a wuss and would have to get used to the odor. But coupled with my report of peculiar Scout's behavior, Dad was concerned enough to take the CO monitor out of my parents' house and loan it to me.

Meanwhile Scout is still tucked into herself on my bed. I notice she's a little glassy-eyed. Maybe she's ill.

Mom appeared yesterday to take me shopping (understand that the destination of most of these trips is not as important as the fact of my driving there; must practice). She gave me a big hug and told me I stink like oil. I take a big sniff of my clothes and find that she's right. My whole house stinks like oil. We bundle Scout into her carrier, since a "playdate" had been planned with Morgan (the cats bonded over their stint of cohabitation), and head to my parents' house to drop her off. She perks up immediately. Letting her out at Mom and Dad's house, she bounds out like a crazy thing to make sure the food is in the same place it was three days ago. She and Morgan make noises like thundering elephants as they chase around the upper story.

Hm.

We run into one of Mom's coworkers at the hardware store. He and his wife have both spent time living in dry cabins (it's a kind of rite of passage, right along with one's first winter in the Interior). I tell him that my Toyo is putting off a really heavy oil smell, and is this normal? He and his wife inform me very seriously that it is not at all normal, and something must be amiss in the setup of the stove. Do I have renter's insurance?

No I don't have renter's insurance. And you want to know the sad truth, I haven't even signed a lease, or a renter's agreement, or anything. People around here operate on the gentlemen's agreement, it seems, and for something as important as renting a house it goes sorely against the grain with me, especially in light of all the difficulties that Si and I had with the landlord in Massachusetts. But I've been trying not to be uptight about the lease, or the legalities of my residence. This is Alaska! People look out for one another. If there's a problem the landlord will get it fixed.

Except one landlord (they are business partners) is in New Zealand until mid-December. The other is in Canada until the 14th. My "substitute" landlord is the carpenter who built my loft ladder, a good buddy of theirs. And it's the weekend.

So I have called him. I have also gone out to the cabin long enough to turn off the Toyo, grab my toothbrush, and beat a retreat. Scout and I will be sleeping on my parents' couch until further notice.

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.

While I was in New York in mid-July to help Mom and Dad with their packout, being hungry for any and all information on my impending new home, I devoured Lonely Planet's travel guide for Alaska in two days. What it had to say about Fairbanks was not encouraging:

It may not be pretty, but Fairbanks is certainly evocative--and the key is the people. While Fairbanks and its surrounding areas do have some interesting sights and activities --from paddling the mighty Chena River through the bordering-on-bleak downtown area, to heading out to remote hot springs--it's really the frontiersman persona of the locals that makes it a worthwhile stop.

Here you have back-to-landers, businesspeople and bureaucrats, gun-toting conspiracy-theorists and freaked-out survivalists, professors and hygienically challenged students at Alaska's flagship university and, last but not least, the rugged individuals who chose to build their own cabin and grow their own food, living their lives on their own terms 'out there' in log-cabin communities like Fox, Manley, and Ester. It's a place where some escape the strictures of society, never to be found again.

But unfortunately for visitors, the landscape here is simply not as dramatic as other spots in the state. Sure, you have views of the Alaska Range to the south and the White Mountains to the north. But the area around here is hot and buggy in the summer, and freezing cold in the winter, a slightly wrinkled hill country covered with the soft fuzz of birch, spruce, arctic meadows and the occasional granite dome. [...]

A spread-out maze of strip malls, snaking rivers and bleak storefronts, [the city of Fairbanks] holds very little attraction for the independent traveler. [...]

The best part of Fairbanks is generally leaving Fairbanks.

And it's all 100% true. This is the seediest damn town I've ever been to in my life, even counting Wichita Falls.

Fairbanks was founded, very practically, by a trader, when the Chena River grew too shallow for his boat to travel any further. Accordingly, since its inception Fairbanks operated as a trading post for prospectors (the Fort Knox gold mine, about 40 km from town, still produces the shiny stuff in the hundreds of thousands of grams per year), trappers, and homesteaders throughout the Interior.

And Fairbanks still operates as a trading post. Many people come to town every couple of months, buy their supplies, and promptly leave again. The general stores have been replaced with a Wal-Mart, the saloons gave way to McDonald's, and the shiny, standard-issue exteriors of Big Box Highway contrast depressingly with the peeling, dun-colored structures that predate the 1967 flood. The city itself is appallingly ugly; people who inhabit the surrounding hills refer to it appropriately as Bareflanks. It's very nearly impossible to walk anywhere--what with a complete absence of town planning and plenty of room for expansion, the city sprawls over nearly 33 square miles, and walking simply takes too long--which means that even A. Lohrenz has been lately found behind the wheel of a car. (Juddering through stoplights and crawling along at what seems to a confirmed pedestrian a whopping 50 mph, but nonetheless driving.)

The average personally-owned vehicle is approximately the size of a whale and consumes a gallon of gasoline every ten feet. People have more firearms than children. Dress code for every venue, from an art gallery to a Italian restaurant, is muddy Carharrts and a flannel shirt. The front yard of most houses sports a couple of dead cars slowly becoming one with the land (one place was cultivating flowers in the bed of a pickup), heaps of scrap lumber, broken-down household appliances wearing proud coats of rust, children's bicycles, that thing that uncle Joey picked up and the transfer station two Christmases ago, and several barking dogs (at least one dog per firearm, but that is an estimate).

One major tourist attraction ("major" here referring to the percentage of tour buses that stop here, not the total number of tour buses) is a little clearing where people can touch and have their picture taken with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Another is Alaskaland, a tiny "amusement park" built around several dozen salvaged original storefronts, a grounded sternwheeler, and a railcar that President Coolidge once traveled in. (Walking through it reminded me irresistibly of that scene in Shrek when they first enter DuLac. "Where is everybody?")

Sarah Palin is a local hero. (There are comic books!)

The city has a freaking curling club.

And yet, right now I can't think of anyplace I would rather be.


Note: this photo was taken on September 9th. Two weeks later there was an inch of snow on the ground.