Little House on the Prairie

...more like little house in the mountains...

It seems every day I have people asking me, "What is like to live in the mountains where you have to haul water and heat with firewood?"

What is like? It is hard work. In the winter, we have more work to do because of all the snow. Last winter, we had over 10 feet of snow. This winter, it's looking like we'll have more. Knowing this, would you believe that we clear that snow without a plow or tractor? We rely on snow shovels and our 40 year old snow blower. I used to do most the snow clearing myself, I'm not afraid of a little hard work, it's actually quite satisfying. This year, however, in my "delicate condition", clearing snow is...well...not advised, thought I still do it.

While we have snow to clear, we still have to haul our water and heat with firewood. The first thing people think of is "You don't have running water?!" Well, I'm not going to say whether or not we have running water, let's just say, we've learned to adapt. The next thing people ask is "How do you haul your water?" Carry buckets to the lake of coarse! Well, it's a bit larger than a bucket. Our "bucket" looks like a big round bottle. We fill it up a number of times and dump it into our holding tank.

Then there is the issue of heating with firewood. In the summer, we don't need it obviously. Summers are spent cutting and gathering the firewood. Every weekend we spend pulling trees out that have fallen or died and we haul them up to the "wood shed" where it awaits being split and stacked. Late summer and fall we are usually splitting and stacking. And yes, I do split wood myself, I'm quite handy with an ax. Once the wood is split and stacked, we bring it in daily to feed the wood stove. The house we are in is poorly insulated, so we go through a massive amount of wood in one winter. Usually by spring, we've used it all, but we still need wood because winters last a good 8 months here. So in spring, we're hauling and splitting more wood.

That's not even the tip of the iceberg, there's more. Up here on our mountain, there are no luxuries such as high speed internet or cable. Sure, I suppose we could get a satellite, but for what purpose? There is really nothing worthwhile on the tv anymore. "Then how do you entertain yourself?" Hasn't anyone ever heard of board games anymore? How about cards? Chickens are actually quite entertaining. Who needs an XBox and a million channels of nothing?

Overall, living the "Little House on the Prairie" life is very simple. It's hard but satisfying work, but simple. Now, just imagine if more people could survive like that!