Nature's First Invitation

Make a personal investment in the woods.

It doesn’t have to be a vast tract of woods.

You don’t have to move to the woods to experience it.

We must admit, however, that moving to the woods suits our personal dispositions much better than the other modes of living we’ve known. It would be extremely difficult for us to return to what we often referred to as living in the ruburbs.

Ruburbs?

The area just out past the suburbs full of lookalike houses.

The area that was once, in my memory, the rural farmlands separated by overgrown fencerows and large woodlots where I wandered for miles around with a well-worn hand-me-down .22 single shot. The property owners didn’t mind. It was a way of life for us. That way of life is sadly gone. That area is gone. Replaced now with a hodgepodge of small acreages with huge houses and lawns.

Any woodlot will do.

You don’t have to own it.

You just need to be able to get on it.

Preferably with the owner’s permission if the woodlot is privately owned. There’s also Municipal, State, and Federal lands that offer opportunities for folks to invest themselves. These latter three may very well have an assortment of restrictions that users need to be aware of and pay attention to. Making fires and messing with the habitat can, for good reasons, be sticky issues. Respect the restrictions.

Every woodlot, even a small one on the edge of town, has something to offer. Even if it is only for educational and photographic purposes. Especially when the woodlot has been left undisturbed as a natural area long enough that the natural elements of nature have had an opportunity to prevail against the ravages of human progress. That’s the way it is with nature.

Nature, given the opportunity, will reclaim itself from the effects of the dozer, excavator, and plow. It’s amazing how that works.

Use the natural world but don’t abuse it. Draw from it without devastating it. Learn to co-exist with nature rather than striving to conquer it.

I think, at this stage of human development, that this is probably one of the hardest lessons that any of us humans can learn. The reality that the natural world is an ally to be cared for can’t be overplayed or overstated. The natural world, after all, has supplied human beings with all the essentials for life on every continent for the entire existence of humanity.

So much of life today involves constant hustle and bustle … hurry up and get it done … day in and day out. That pace has a way of following us when we exit the concrete sidewalks and paved streets and wander into the woods. We go into the woods in a hurry. We move around in the woods in a hurry. Then we leave the woods in a hurry to go back to the hurry that we went to the woods to escape.

We, as a result of hurrying, miss a lot. There is a lot that we fail to observe. There is a lot that we fail to experience. We miss and fail that lot because nature’s first invitation was left unanswered.

Nature’s first invitation?

It is something that seems unnatural and unproductive to us at first. Once we get onto it … once we realize that it is perfectly natural … once we tune ourselves to its wavelength … it’s hard to turn the dial to any other station.

Slow down.

Heating The Cabin

Winter is an odd duck this far south.

It comes to us in short bursts. Kind of like touching the trigger on a fully automatic weapon to produce a 3-Round burst.

Our cold bursts, what we call our cold snaps, generally last 3 days. A short spray of days.

The wind blew briskly out of the North yesterday and the daytime temperature topped out at 50 degrees. The mercury thickened to the freezing mark last night. They are talking about lower 20’s for the bottom numbers in our area tonight.

These numbers don’t sound like hard winter weather for folks in the cold snow country where once it’s cold it stays cold. Shirli and I have both lived in the cold snow country and have experienced acclimating to the steady cold winter temperatures. 

There is no acclimating to winter here. We can be walking around in shorts, T’s, and flops on Tuesday. On Thursday we can be layering on everything we’ve got to stave off the cold. On most days, during our winter months, the daytime and nighttime temperatures fall somewhere between the two extremes.

The wind blows cold out of the North with its frigid 3-Day bursts. It warms up to nice springlike weather. It rains. Then here comes the cold air. Repeat. Again and again. This is winter in Lower Alabama.

Our primary source of heat in the cabin is an oil filled radiating heater. We don’t have a lot of space to heat and, apart from the cold snaps, the thing does a good job of creating an atmosphere that is warm enough for our temperature preference. The primary downside to it is that it takes time for it to heat the oil so it is far from something that can be considered an instant heat source. Another downside to it is that it does not put off enough heat to keep the cabin at a comfortable temperature for us during these cold snaps.

Most nights, except during these cold snaps, we run it on either low or medium to keep the frost off our noses. Last night was the first time we ran it on high overnight. The cabin stayed comfortable enough that it wasn’t a shocking experience for us to crawl out from under the down filled comforter this morning to fire up the Big Buddy and get the coffee going.

We ordered the adapter hose and the wall plug transformer for the Big Buddy. The hose allows us to attach the heater to a tank outside the cabin. The transformer allows us to plug it into an electrical outlet. The outside tank saves quite a chunk of dollars when compared to fueling the heater with the 1 Pound disposable canisters. The transformer gets us away from having to use batteries to run the fan on the heater.

We also bought a Carbon Monoxide Detector to add to our sense of physical safety using this propane burner as supplemental heat inside our small cabin.

We generally fire it up in the evening long enough to raise the cabin temperature to our comfort preference and again in the morning after we awake. I’m not sure how long the first two small canisters lasted before the heater flamed out this morning. They lasted longer than I thought they would and, after using the heater a good number of times since it arrived on the delivery truck, got us through the coldest part of the morning this morning.

The propane heater has three temperature settings. Low, medium, and high.

Low and medium heat utilizes only the left panel. High utilizes both panels.

We’ve kicked it up on high only a couple times. Those times have been in the evening when we returned after a day without any heat going in the cabin. The low setting, as a supplement to the oil filled radiator, is generally adequate for our needs here.

We picked up the propane cylinder today while out and about taking care of a few things. It’s handy how gas stations and dollar stores provide these. Purchase one for the purchase price. Bring it back 

when it’s empty and for 2/5^th of the purchase cost exchange it for a refill. The convenience of it (my personal opinion here) far outweighs the hassle of hauling the tank somewhere to have it refilled. We will, at some point before this first one runs out, purchase a second tank to have in reserve.

We are kind of out here. It wouldn’t do to have a tank run empty at 4 in the morning with nothing open locally to exchange it.

Yes.

We are, more often than not, both awake, drinking coffee, and watching for the break of day.

Attaching the hose is a simple deal. One end screws onto the bottle outside the cabin. The other end attaches to the heater with a quick-connect coupler.

It is only necessary to drill one hole in the floor.

Me?

Two.

My first attempt was off-center of a floor joist.

The cabin sits on piers and, considering the floor is not insulated, the floor is cold.

The next cabin improvement project will involve skirting the cabin. Skirting will greatly improve the cold floor situation.

The Rhythm Of Nature's Seasons

It’s not that we were unaware of it.

We were completely aware of it.

It was, in fact, one of the motivations involved in our quest to remove ourselves from it.

It, now that we have successfully relocated into this far corner of the local geography, is far more noticeable every time we engage the ignition and make the drive. It, at least for the time being, is something of an inconvenient necessity that has a termination date on the 2017 calendar that now graces the front of the refrigerator here at the cabin.

Being able to manage it, rather than it managing us, is a major milestone along the highway of our life-adventure. That termination date is associated with the 2017 calendar event where both parties involved in this adventure will officially be Old Fogies drawing our Social Security pennies.

Old Fogey?

It’s interesting how the definition came to be.

It came out of France describing fierce battered soldiers.

We find that to be an apt description of the two of us. We’ll wear the Service Medal, and our battle scars, proudly.

It?

All the harried fast paced craziness that, to us anyway, are symptoms of the modern social insanity that is epidemic in modern culture.

Others can make of it what they will.

Our ambition is not to change the minds of people or to point out the correctness or wrongness of how anyone chooses to go about life. We have simply chosen to divorce ourselves from it and have, over the course of these past few years, taken the careful and calculated steps to insure our successful transition to a simpler, more self-reliant, and far more sustainable lifestyle that is more in tune with the changing rhythm of Nature’s Seasons.

The effects of these seasonal rhythms are all positive. They have a way, when we are attentive to them, of centering us in reality. We slow down. Anxieties that take a toll on our minds and the whole of our human psyche have a way of evaporating. We are able to focus on simply being without having to contend with all the social commotion inherent within it.

We often say that life is good up here in these woods. We mean it with a lot more meaning than most grasp in the saying.

We have not completely removed our carbon footprint. Our carbon footprint has, however, been dramatically reduced in the major downsizing and we do feel good about the reduction. Being earth conscious and earth friendly is definitely an aspect that motivates us.

Perhaps, at some point, necessity will deem it necessary for us to make do without the grid for an extended period of time. How long the necessity will last has numerous answers depending upon the differing scenarios that potentially present themselves. Considering the possible scenarios and doing something to secure one’s health and welfare in their event does not necessarily make one a paranoid doomsday fanatic.

It never ceases to amaze us how woefully unprepared most people are when it comes to the simplest short-term scenarios. Something as simple as a 3-Day power outage is a major crisis for a lot of people regardless how many storms they’ve been through. Let a hurricane or tropical storm warning be issued and the store shelves are emptied in a hurry. A weeklong event, for most people, constitutes a dire survival situation without ever leaving the place that should, for all practical purposes, offer the necessities of life for periods of time much longer than a week.

We are … with our collection of human powered tools, collection of cast iron cookware, acquired skills, personal stores, woodland resources, and the 100 Watt Solar Set-Up … off grid capable.

It took some careful doing, time, and dedication to task to get to this point.

All of our eggs are not in the off grid survival basket though. We utilize the conveniences that are available whether the conveniences are electrically or gasoline powered. That generator is a lot of peace of mind and the assurance of functioning air-conditioning when the next hurricane or serious storm shuts down the flow of electrical current. The generator will, in fact, supply all of our electrical needs provided we are thoughtful about it.

It started raining overnight. It is raining now and supposed to be with us all day.

The rain does mean that some outside projects will have to be placed on hold. 

So what do we do with an all day rain? 

Listening to it pattering on the roof of the cabin is a good thing to do with it.