Sunday, April 22, 2007

My Work: City Mice Part 3

We moved in November.

Snow on the ground and the worst month of the year for solar power production. We all lived in one room amidst boxes stacked head high and arranged to provide a narrow path from the door to the two beds. The radio telephone specifically designed for remote locations that looked perfect in the brochures didn’t work properly for six months.

The power system was hopelessly inadequate for two adults and two teenagers, so we often carried kerosene lanterns and candles around that first dark, cold winter. My computer wouldn’t work. Weeks of calls to help desks and a parade of technicians couldn’t fix it. The only heat in the house was from an ancient wood furnace in the basement. The only time I was warm was when I was first in the bath, and we all had to take turns because we didn’t have enough power to run the water pump very often.

We had a propane stove that worked well and a propane refrigerator that dropped its freezer door every time the fridge door was opened or closed. We cut our own firewood, froze around the tree that first Christmas morning, put plastic on all the upstairs windows, and told each other what fun we were having. I escaped for two or three days a week to Toronto, writing enough to bankroll our relapse into the nineteenth century, but Susan and Conor and Charlotte were country mice all the time. While I had a chance to take long showers and leave as many lights on as I wanted, they soldiered on. I winced every time Susan called me, wondering what else had broken down this time.

In that first year, our country dream resembled a nightmare and every one of us gave up at least once. I drove four kilometers to the neighbor’s telephone with my new laptop computer so I could communicate with my clients. Susan took care of the house, the kids chopped wood and huddled around the kitchen vents above the furnace to do their homework.

By February, Susan and I were able to move to our own bedroom and Conor to his. Charlotte raised her arms in the air and shouted with glee, “Hooray, my parents are moving out of my room.” We skied and sledded and walked on our own land. We saw bear and coyote and deer and osprey. And we slowly made some headway.

I had a three-page single-spaced list of essential projects and some were getting completed. A kitchen wood stove helped take the frost off the inside of the windows, then we installed a propane boiler with hot water piped throughout the house. No more getting up at four a.m. to stoke the furnace, or worrying about leaving the house with a fire going.

Next was the power system. Solar power requires panels to generate DC electricity, batteries to store it, and an inverter to turn the DC power into the more common AC current we all use. Renovations and construction were powered by a propane generator, but we couldn’t keep the house batteries charged well enough. We added more panels and a new inverter with a powerful battery charger that ran off the generator. We were fine on sunny days, and on cloudy days our generator could now power the house.

Eventually we replaced every major system: heating, septic tank and drainfield, new well, refrigerator, windows, water tank and water heater, but we never would have made it without our neighbor. Ray let us install one end of our radio telephone at his place, and was always there with encouragement good cheer, and expertise. He is a mechanic of genius. Anything he can’t fix, he can build from scratch better than the original. He sold us a good truck with a new Lincoln engine, fixed the tractor and snowblower, kept our cars running, and was always willing to help with the generator, water pump, or chain saw.

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