March 2011
Day 11
Yesterday, I had my first shower in ten days. It felt like the warmth of a thousand sunny afternoons seeping into my bones. Though I’d generally been lucky with the weather, it had still ranged from early summer sun to driving bitter rain. I’d dodged into town to use the shower of someone I knew, […]
Day 8
I thought that I’d put up the last three poles yesterday. Not only had I escaped any dreaded back-tweaking, I’d also managed to not delimb myself while delimbing some of the surrounding trees with the chainsaw. Idiotic really, the way I climbed up onto some of those rotten branches, forgetting to warm up the saw […]
Day 6
In this day and age, there’s more to homesteading than simply knocking up a cabin and kicking back with a moonshine martini. There’s connectivity to consider. Yes, an Internet connection is as important, if not more so, to those who might want to be off-grid but still of-this-world. The key, unless you want to spend […]
Day 4
A proud day, I’ve erected my first two poles. I’m building pole construction vs. regular framing. All the foundations and structural supports for the cabin – floor to roof – rest on 9 to 12 vertical poles at eight-foot intervals, instead of say a concrete slab. Wood left in its natural round form is almost […]
Day 2
Sitting up in the branches of a tree on the building site, I can see mounds of land off in the distance across the water. They would be Alaska. So that would be northish, making my main sun to my back. Day Two, on-island. Yesterday, I’d arrived and just unpacked, slept, unpacked some more. I […]
Day T-1
The first day of spring and in a couple days I’ll begin building my cabin. I still need to make my final connection to get across Hecate Strait and am waiting for the 11pm sailing from Prince Rupert. After about a year of preparation, packing to leave Vancouver was an unholy mess. I’d had fantasies […]