Going to Town With Grace
Two Girls Getting Ready to Head Back into Camp #grace
Grace Riding Rucksack
A necessary evil of off-grid living is going out into civilization for supplies…and laundry. Normally I wait until my clothes open the front door for me, greet me, and get me a cup of coffee before its time to load up and take it all into the laundromat; but this week, it made sense to make use of the time in town and haul what laundry had been generated thus far in with us.
The issue this year is grace. She is too little to leave behind in her kennel for such a long day. The older dogs have the run of the house, but grace, with her chewing and doll-size bladder, needs to be interned in a kennel for the duration, so we try to make the duration short.
It’s not like the other dogs don’t have problems being left behind, but we can work around those issues – namely eating anything that can be masticated (sometimes optional) and swallowed, including eggs – although they tend to merely break the eggs and leave the refuse on the floor in clear rejection which I wholly understand.
We like to think we remain one step ahead of them. We take knobs off the stove, barricade cupboards with chairs and water barrels. We case the joint before leaving, backing out the front door, casting looks from one end of the table all the way down the length of the counter, while muttering the mantra ‘You have to be smarter than the dog. You have to be smarter than the dog”. Sometimes we come home, and there is chaos from one end of the cabin to the other, and it is clear that we were not.
One such afternoon we returned from a sled ride to the contents of our “refrigerator cupboard” strewn from the open cupboard door through the living room and up on the furniture and blankets. Apparently, the dogs, shifty characters that they can be, had observed that we were using the drafty cold lower level cupboard as a refrigerator. Our cheese and coffee creamer, bacon, eggs, and leftovers sat in two opened cardboard boxes next to a square housing that was built around the pipes that left the kitchen sink in the cabin and disappeared through the floor. Except they didn’t disappear. You could peer down into the square where the pipes receded and see that it was open to the outside – making it perfect refrigeration. The only drawback was that, occasionally, there would be a raccoon sitting at the bottom of the square housing beside the pipes, peering angrily back when the flashlight was shown down, his irritation and frustration at not being able to squeeze through the narrow passage clearly my fault which he snarlingly let me know. It was always so alarming when a raccoon appeared and began scolding me with vehemence and no respect. I would back hurriedly out of the cupboard, switching the flashlight off, feeling like I had just had an uncomfortable exchange with the neighbors in the hall.
The raccoons lived under the camp, and every night it was akin to living in an apartment above tenants who are embroiled in an intensely toxic relationship. They would snarl and scream at each other and wrestle while we laid staring sleeplessly up at the dark wall that was the ceiling, occasionally, in the beginning at least, pounding on the floor and yelling obscenities at them. It had absolutely no effect. My old Doberman, with her bones full of cancer, would lay on the bed at my feet, her head erect, ears pointed at the ceiling until they quieted. We didn’t get a lot of sleep. The raccoons, much to their bad attitude-laden chagrin, were safely barred from entry into our “refrigerator.” The dogs not so much. They had to be outsmarted after they bested us, nonchalantly opening the cupboard in our absence and eating several pounds of grated cheese, bacon, and butter, making it necessary to go back out for supplies sooner than intended.
Today I carefully barricade the cupboard doors, make sure the ketchup is put away, likewise the vitamins, toothpaste, and mouthwash, and then I dig out the oversized rucksack that bummed around New York City with me last fall, and that will make the journey to India with me in the spring. Norman holds it open, and Gracee searches my face in that quizzical look she has as I lower her feet first into the rucksack and synch it loosely so that just her head peeks out. I swing it on frontwards and sit down on the machine, gently revving it a couple of times to get her accustomed to the sound. There are deer in the yard. They look up and continue to chew in a mildly curious way. Norman takes off first, and I take a few extra moments to ease Gracee into this adventure. She squirms slightly and then settles in as I edge into the tracks that the Norman has left, glancing over my shoulder to make sure the dogsled is still following me…. because occasionally things happen. As I leave the yard, the deer make a grand show of scattering in great leaps, tails up like flags, but they stop just barely off the trail and watch Gracee, and I go by under the blue of the morning sky.
Norman hauls a jet sled with plastic totes for the supplies we will buy. On the return trip into camp, they will be preoccupied with the weight of everything on our list that we have to haul back in, plus the clean laundry. But in their emptiness, the cartons bob and peck against the rubber bungees that crisscross over their tops and strain to take flight at every turn and mogul. And Gracee takes it all in, giving little glances up at me that show the sliver of tiny moons at the corners of her eyes as she peers up at me.
She is not a fan of my helmet and pops up out of the rucksack from time to time to worriedly search the window of its protective shell. I flip up the tinted shield, and she stretches up like a genie in a bottle and descends on my nose, coating it with a barrage of wet relieved kisses…which then freeze on my nostrils in the rush of wind as we tool along the trail, covering the 13 miles between the Kingdom of Seboomook and Pittston Farm where our trucks are parked. From the farm, we will take the 20-mile road into Rockwood to catch pavement, marveling to each other at the fate that has us inevitably meet whatever log trucks we are going to meet at the worst possible corners, the worst possible knolls where the road crowns in the curve making it hard to take a wider berth to allow for the log trucks to pass without sliding off into the ditch. We have 4-wheel drive and wenches with chains. As the passenger, it is thrilling to come around the corner nose to nose with one of those huge grills, sometimes topped with a bulldog, leading a load of tree-length logs out of the woods. As the driver, I find it terrifying. Gracee and I are the passengers today, so we settle in for the adventure only to have Gracee, already exhausted from the excitement of her first snowmobile ride, snoring and unconscious in my lap in the first mile.
It always takes longer in town than I expect. By the time we get back to the farm, unload all of the supplies onto the dog sled and into the totes, and bungee them shut, it is well past dark and snowing. Gracee slides into the rucksack like a pro, except this time, her little head disappears down into the pack out of the frigid rushing air and snow. She pops up every now and again, and I flip up the shield and sing her a song as my lips freeze in the wind, and the words become sluggish and thick in the cold. She watches my face with her ears bobbing on the air currents as we fly along, and then she pulls herself back into the pack out of the wind.
Something there is that remembers to be grateful in moments like these and to sink into it for memory’s sake. And I do just that – I take it all in the cold night, the yard full of deer waiting back at camp to be fed, the feel of the wind hurling tiny spears of frozen water at my face as I belt out, “You are My Sunshine” to a little head that is attached to a little being that has enough trust in me to climb into a rucksack and sit quietly at my chest.
