Cry Me a River

Water for drinking and wash has been so far the most burdensome task at the Hollow, which means we have learned to get by being dehydrated and not smelling particularly well.

We have plenty of water around camp, in the form of the leechy frogpond and the many streams that leak cleanly into methane-aromaed mudbogs.  Either of these could be filtered, boiled, and perfectly potable, but given that they’re all located downhill from the living grounds at Cooter Hollow, the situation is gravitationally working against us.  And so, the winter was spent hauling our own water up the hill on foot, on our backs in a makeshift device comprised of a seven-gallon plastic tank strapped to the frame of an old military backpack.

Seven gallons of water on one’s back is not light stuff, much as you might think otherwise.  Don’t believe me?  Go buy seven gallons of milk and call me when you’re covered in it.

But it worked well, for the most part, and we developed steel-solid asses and those little back muscles that usually only appear on yoga yuppies.  However, when atop snowshoes and through a storm with visibility provided by headlamp and freezing to death prevented only by a thousand pairs of gloves, it was not the friendliest few months.  And we live in one of those places that sees a lot of snow.  Every day.  For months.  Many many months, that go on for about a hundred days each by my calendar, that kick our asses with their endlessness.  But we didn’t die of dehydration, as far as I know.

For a while, it seemed every trip to town was met with ostensibly quaint remarks from the locals on how mild the winter was, when there was Jackie-o nothing at all mild about heaving water this way.

Now, this winter there was at least one day a week when I felt like moving here was the worst decision we’ve ever made, but I can’t think of specific triggers that set me off.  Except this one.

This was a particularly long day that ended with a snowstorm of the fat, heavy kind that just adds twenty pounds to your already burdened heft, the kind that serves as quicksand to snowshoes.  If you’ve never lived in a part of the world where snowshoes are absolutely necessary, nor the places where you might encounter quicksand, then the appropriate metaphor for you might have to do with swimming through jell-o, which I hear saner people can relate to.

So there I am, trying my damnedest to slog up the hill, and finding that on this night, it was nowhere near good enough.  The steps were wet and sloggish, and I managed to take about twenty of them before I collapsed, back first, into the snowbank, feet buckled under me in a snowshoe entanglement.

Beached, with water holding me down, the morbidly obese snow keeping me there, and the snowshoes making sure I didn’t go anywhere.  I writhed and wriggled for a split second, and then reached some sort of zen calm with the tipped turtles I resembled.

I wasn’t budging, and thought it’d be as good of a death story as any, that maybe my body would turn up a thousand years later, after we’d wrecked the earth and all our evidence of being here, when civilization would have rebuilt itself to discover the evolutionary right turn left by me, the mountaintop species who carried their sundries on their back.  Maybe by then they’d have invented a better death story than “too lazy to upright herself on a snowy night.” Maybe my body would, by that time, be so badly preserved that they’d assumed I died in hand-to-hand combat, or maybe it’d be the snowshoes perceived as the weapon.

The ideas were getting more fantastical as my lips blued, but the calm of freezing to death never happened—eventually, I got too cold and found my way back to my feet and up the hill.  And our water situation now is considerably better:  we still tote it up in the jug, filling it where-ever we can get our mitts on a spigot, but it’s hauled up in the Muddood now, and poured into a 20-gallon holding tank for washwater, with a separate 6-gallon jug to house drinking water.  Which means we generally have enough to drink.  Except that leads to the problem of peeing, which is another day’s issue.

And just wait until I tell you how I water my garden.  It involves the frog-pond, leeches and all, and an aquarium pump.  There’s no shortage of suckage.  You’ll love it.