Cabin Life, Chapter Seven

Phones

In the past, we have had a telephone in our cabin. A few close neighbors also have them. The section across the creek chose to not have Huge & Rude lay lines way back when, and now it isn’t possible.

Last summer it took about six calls to Huge & Rude to get the phone hooked up after the winter. Finding someone at that company who manages landlines in California was almost impossible. Then, they were completely stymied by the lack of a real address. I finally learned that we have an “AHN”, which stands for Alternate House Number. Eventually we got the phone reignited. (wrong word, but all that is coming to me right now.)

The price goes up every year, and once again, I decided to not pay $54/month for the 7-8 months that we aren’t there. Besides, when too many people get our number, I have to change it. On top of that, there is no answering machine (no electricity, remember?), so unless we happen to be in the cabin when someone calls, it isn’t a very reliable method of communicating. (People are used to INSTANT responses these days.)

This year it took three calls, and then I was assured that our phone would be reignited, with a new number, of course. (This was after Huge & Rude called me to say that the address on our work order was inadequate. . . sigh.)

Shortly after that reassurance, a local Huge & Rude service guy pulled into our driveway at home down the hill. (The local service guys are terrific.) He had a work order, but the address didn’t make sense. He came to tell me that he knows the phone is for Mineral King, that Huge & Rude doesn’t want small rural communities any more (as if we didn’t figure that out from the lack of service), and that he is required to drive up to the cabin. However, his truck is too big for the messed-up road. He gave me the cell phone numbers of all three local service guys and said to call when the big truck can get up the road.

COME ON! JUST FLIP A SWITCH IN AN OFFICE THE WAY YOU HAVE ALWAYS DONE IT!

Nope, can’t.

So, we plugged our phone into our neighbor’s phone jack because his phone sounds as if bacon is frying inside. And now we walk over there to make our calls.

NO, THERE IS NO CELL SERVICE IN MINERAL KING!

Trash Service

This year there is none. Haul it yourself. Do NOT use the Park Services can. It is forbidden. We used to have a dumpster for cabin trash, and the service truck came once a week. However, they are a bit like the huge and rude phone company in not wanting rural communities. In recent years, we rented a giant roll-off dumpster. And before that, Trail Guy hauled everyone’s garbage from Mineral King to Silver City in his Botmobile. Yep, moved the bags by hand into his pick-em-up truck, drove 3 miles down the bumpy road, and then flung them into Silver City’s roll-off. When we cabin folks got our own dumpster, he climbed in and rearranged the bags to make more room, so that it only had to be emptied about 3 or 4 times a summer. This is why I sometimes sent out an email to cabin folks begging them to double-bag so there is no leaky-leaky. In addition, there were no accommodations for recycling so if that was important to cabin folks, they needed to either stop buying so much packaged stuff or haul it home to their own recycling container.

You can see why everyone in Mineral King loves Trail Guy and brings him treats*. 

*(Red wine [cabernet], cashews, pistachios, beef jerky. . .in case you are interested, or feeling guilty, grateful, or generous)

Cabin Life, Chapter Six

Utilities: Water

There is no water company in Mineral King. Trail Guy and the Farmer keep water flowing to our neighborhood, with occasional help from other neighbors. I will skip the details, but let these photos tell you how scary it is this year.

We listen to hear it humming in our pipes, and when it gets quiet, we take a hike. “We”? Trail Guy takes a hike, and I stay at the cabin with a walkie-talkie to follow instructions about opening and closing various valves.

Hot water

Propane water heaters are the most normal part of cabin life’s necessities. Some people have tried to use the on-demand style, and after one winter, those things are toast. 

Sometimes the regular ones are also toast.

Trail Guy helps many neighbors with their water heaters when he can, and sometimes I go along, because sometimes other people’s bathrooms are kind of interesting.

I have no idea.

Eight Things Learned in July

Most of these fall under the category of Cowboy Logic, but it is fun to learn and see them in action.

  1. When diverting flowing water from a trail, go to the highest point of trouble first; then look for the first best place to send it down to its correct channel. 
  2. When repairing a sinkhole in a road, put boulders in first and fit them together as close as possible; keep adding rocks of progressively smaller sizes, and put the dirt in last. Also, be sure to have a backhoe and an operator handy.
  3. Baby peregrine falcons could get blown out of their nests by the concussion if you explode a boulder nearby. But the real reason for not using explosives near a nest is that drilling the rock is the most upsetting sound to them.
  4. This Irish saying tickled my funnybone: “May those that love us, love us, and for those that don’t love us, may God turn their hearts, and if he can’t turn their hearts, may he turn their ankles so we know them by their limping.”
  5. Ever heard of a “tulipiere“? A friend told me about them. They are special vases, invented in Holland in the 1600s for holding tulips, which were considered expensive status symbols. (The tulips, not the vases). It is pronounced, er, never mind. Can’t write it correctly.
  6. When your radiator disintegrates, it is best to not be on a steep road on a hot day, but if the road is closed, everyone who shows up will be a friend. (No photos of Fernando disabled on the side of the road nor as he was being towed away; he is repaired now.) 
  7. Every heard of “24 7 Day”? It is July 24, which is 7/24 or flipped, 24-7. This has been turned into a day of appreciation for first responders, and many stop-and-rob stores honor people that day who have badges or are wearing uniforms of first responders. (“honor”– maybe they get free coffee)
  8. When you have a skittish cat with a booboo (nope, not showing a photo of Tucker with a fat face) who cannot be captured in a carrier or a box, it is good to find a traveling veterinarian and to have a large bank balance. (THANK YOU, DR. McCONE, 559-942-1101)

Thus we conclude a month of some difficult circumstances, new experiences, and random pieces of trivial information, (but no talk of hiking in Mineral King when it is closed to the public.)

P.S. Anyone know of a Honda or Toyota (no Civics, Elements, or Tercels) for sale with less than 100,000 miles and a manual transmission?? I am ready.

Cabin Life, Chapter Five

Utilities: electricity

Since there is no electricity in Mineral King (unless one uses a generator or is some sort of a solar genius), you might be wondering about some basics of life.

Let’s start with cooking. Lots of cabins have propane stoves, a few have propane/wood stoves, and we have a wood stove without a propane section. We also have small propane burner for quicker cooking when we don’t want to wait for the fire or heat the place.

Good thing I like to split wood. (Trail Guy makes it easy by providing smaller chunks for me.)

What about refrigerators? They come in propane. Ours isn’t top-notch (does that surprise you??) and in warmer temperatures it becomes more of an icebox with a good freezer on top.  So, we supplement with ice made in our freezer (or a neighbor’s) and sometimes we supplement with snow.

(HEY, SHUT THE REFRIGERATOR DOOR!!)

Those propane refrigerators have lots of troubles, beginning with the fact that the easy strike start-up device ALWAYS breaks first, and then it takes a gymnast to reach around the back with a match while someone else holds in the button, usually with a tool because it is really hard to push the button.

But that’s okay, because life is slower at the cabin.

Wait! What about light??

Again, propane.

Almost everything requires matches, and “Strike Anywhere” matches have become rare. (We call them “1 in 3s” because it takes 3 matches to get one that will actually light.) Lots of people use those plastic things that resemble curling irons with hard-to-press switches; I think they are called “lighters”, but the handle is longer than smokers’ types. And I bet they have a tiny internal propane canister. But plastic, ugh. So cheap, so unreliable, and so disposable, probably made in China. Sigh.

Cabin Life, Chapter Four

Gardening

What do we do at the cabin?

Sometimes I garden.

Gardening at a mountain cabin? What are you talking about??

When I first married into the cabin, I admired some bearded iris across the creek at another cabin.

Then, I transplanted some from our real house to the cabin.

We have had one bloom; it was in July, 2017. (Only took me 15 minutes to find that date. . . the photo was so unremarkable that it got deleted awhile ago.)

A neighbor has a lush front yard, and she graciously allows me to transplant things, which sometimes survive.

A trick is to keep the transplants watered, and to mark them so that people don’t just assume it is basic forest floor, free for unstructured trampling.

We have lots of currant bushes in the area, and they get full of dead branches. My theory about this is that the bushes will thrive and grow if the old stuff is cleared away. Sometimes I wonder if, when I pull out the dead stuff, the shrub is thinking, “HEY! I was eating that!”

It is possible that I have too much thinking time.

When the fire crews were clearing brush in an arbitrary manner during the fall of 2021, they made these very neat rows of their prunings. Random hacking, organized stacking. They won’t be returning to haul these piles away, so I am now using them when I do my own clearing.

Sometimes I rake, sometimes I use the large magnet on a pole to gather nails in a nearby driveway. (That’s another story, a long one.) 

And sometimes I wander around, wishing that I knew when and how to transplant things from God’s garden.

 

 

Cabin Life, Chapter Three

 

Puttering

What does one do in a place without electricity, internet, cell phones, or even a working landline? (“Working” being the important word, since we no longer have a phone but rely on our neighbor’s intermittent line.)

An aspect of cabin living at a slower pace is the concept of puttering. Puttering is aimlessly doing a bit of this, a bit of that.

Sometimes I just start polishing our wood stove.

 Sometimes I rearrange the collection of peculiar found items and pretty rocks.

Occasionally I wander around with my camera, looking for new angles and ways the sunshine hits things.

Recently I was curious about the various temperatures of all the flowing water. So, we walked around with a thermometer and recorded the temperatures, then played a guessing game with neighbors as to which was the coldest, and which was the warmest*.

Easily entertained, yeppers.

*Warmest: Chihuahua; Coldest: Spring Creek

Drawings: Finished and Begun…

… both drawn for fun, while I cowered in the studio with the air conditioner roaring. 

First, Slim’s Grandson is finished.

Second, Samson is begun.

The beginnings are always rougher looking than the finishes.

 

Cabin Life, Chapter Two

Slower Pace

What in the world do people do at a rustic cabin up a difficult road in a place without electricity?

We slow down. We sleep more—go to bed earlier, sleep later (the sun doesn’t hit the cabin until around 8:30 a.m.), and some of us take naps. Could be the elevation, could be that it is cooler and there isn’t a great need to get up early to beat the heat.

We linger over coffee, usually while listening to the radio. (Remember those?)

The old wood stove provides heat until the sunshine hits; then the cabin doors get opened to the outside.

This stove is now history, because the oven didn’t work, and one time it tried to kill us. But that’s a digression, one I might share with you later.

In summary, at the cabin, we slow down. Or, as Trail Guy has often said, “We contemplate matters of consequence.”

Cabin Life, Chapter One

 

How I Got a Cabin

Welcome to Cabin Life, my way of staying in touch during this odd summer of Mineral King being closed to the public and my accidental stepping into a sabbatical (or something akin to it.)

Thirty-eight years ago I met Trail Guy. In a rash moment of bald honesty, I said, “I’d kill for a cabin in Mineral King”.

He replied, “There is another way”. (Maybe he said “better” or even “easier”.)

We got married the following year (in Mineral King, of course), and nobody has gotten killed.

This was all pre internet, pre personal computers, pre continual connectivity. (The first summer of marriage, we got a landline at the cabin, since we were living in two different places. Fancy.)

Nowadays (isn’t that a classic Old People word?) we live in an era of total convenience, instant gratification, continual connectedness, and complete comfort. 

So why do people go to a rustic shack up a terrible road to spend time without conveniences, ultra-comfort, electricity, cell phones, or the internet? What in the world do people do??

This series, called “Cabin Life”, will give you a glimpse, maybe a few answers to those questions, or maybe just more questions.

 

Drawing for Fun

 

Because I earn a living with art, I rarely draw just for fun. This is not a bad thing, it is just the way it is. 

A few weeks ago, Trail Guy and I were visiting with a packer for the Park. He is quite interesting to look at. The sun was shining perfectly on his shirt, and his hat looked imminently drawable (no excess straw weavings like so many hats have). Besides, I have avoided portraits for a long time, and with the current lack of real work, this might be a good opportunity to try faces again. (Hey, maybe I AM on sabbatical for learning!!)

Without him knowing, I took his photo. Later I converted it to black & white, because this helps me be sure it isn’t the color in a photo that is creating the interest.

Then one hot afternoon, I sat in the studio with the A/C roaring, listened to a few Mike Rowe The Way I Heard It podcasts, and did this.

The background will take some thought, because in reality, it is busy and messy. 

It doesn’t matter. There is no deadline, nor is there payment awaiting at the end of the job. That’s why I call this “drawing for fun”.  And as far as portraiture, there is precious little face that is visible in this picture.