THE RETIREMENT YEARS
WINTER GAMES:
As I mentioned before, we didn’t retire in order to go fishing, travel the world or lounge on the beach. We just wanted more time to work on our own projects. I liked to call it Empire Building. Three seasons of the year, we worked our tails off because we were weird that way. Winter, on the other hand…
After the first year of interior finishing, we generally didn’t do much work during the winter. There were always standard maintenance tasks: splitting and restocking firewood, keeping the stove going, cooking and baking, melting snow (before we had a well), clearing the driveway with our homemade drag plow, cleaning the solar panels and shoveling snow off of things that couldn’t take the weight. We learned this lesson after our fiberglass greenhouse collapsed. Fiberglass isn't very good at bouncing back from adversity.
The rest of our energy was mostly taken up with cross-country skiing, snowshoeing or just hiking, dependent on the snow depth and quality. We’d usually take backpacks so we could remove our skis and lash them to the packs when we hit rough going or crossed sunny hillsides where the snow was sometimes melted. Trying to descend into a ravine, cross a creek, then climb up the other side through fallen logs and brush – all while wearing skis – is not fun. Those were minor obstacles, though. When the snow was deep and sparkling, when could see all the way to Canada without sight or sound of other humans, life was good.
Sometimes we’d stop on a snow-free south slope, make a fire, and have a hot drink or soup. We also carried Snickers bars in our packs because one of us (me) would invariably start whining that exhaustion and starvation were imminent if sugar and chocolate weren’t administered.
After returning home, we’d eat ridiculous quantities of food and collapse with a book by the fire. Tough life.
Winter was pretty much our vacation time.
Every few weeks or so, we went to town. This was generally an epic event that involved driving our 4WD van with heavy-duty chains on all 4 tires down the mountain, removing the chains, driving to town for supplies (and sometimes laundry), then putting the chains back on to grind our way back up the mountain. These tire chains were nothing like the cute little things you put on your car. They were more like logging chains, heavy and cleated. Putting them on took about half an hour of working together; removing them maybe about 15 minutes. We needed chains even more in spring when the snow began to melt during the day and freeze up at night, bringing the sheer drop-offs into acute focus as we crawled down the mountain. No guardrails* on this road.
*DH refers to guardrails as ‘interfering with natural selection’.
Sometimes we walked to the nearest tiny town instead. The trip was 7 miles each way, and the town offered a post office and a little general store complete with pay phone (if you’re under 25, you may need to look this up).
They also sold beer, which presents a dilemma when you’re carrying everything in a pack. Just how badly do you want that beer? How often are you going to stop on the way back to “lighten the load”?
One year, when I had caved in to begging and actually agreed to take on a long-distance accounting client, I needed to pick up some time-constrained paperwork at the post office. For some reason we couldn’t make the drive that day, so DH skied down the first 4 miles to pavement, ditched his skis, walked 3 miles to the post office, then 3 miles back to his skis and 4 miles back up the hill. He made the deadline for me, but he was pretty tired. I couldn’t have kept up with that pace (too much terror on the steep downhill; too much whining on the steep uphill), so I stayed home with the dogs.
Another winter entertainment was feeding wildlife so we could spy on them. We knew a butcher in town who would give us beef tallow for free with the understanding that we weren’t going to eat it ourselves (hear that, brute?). We would fasten big chunks of it onto trees or posts, then have a ball watching the woodpeckers and weasels feast. The weasels would always try to pull the whole chunk off and abscond with it. Unfortunately, I only seem to have a photo of a weasel’s tail. I fail at photos.