chapter 24
Pa fell and had to go to Williams Lake to the hospital. He’d chipped a bit of bone off his fused elbow. On the way in, Father Coffin who was taking him in didn’t figure he’d make it so called the ambulance. He [Ginty’s father] doesn’t remember this. He was suffering from shock. He is okay now.
Ma figures I should look after her. She’s phoned twice—offers me her house etc. . . . Just thinking about her and all the unpleasantness make my neck glands swell up. If I’d been a teenager in this day and age she’d have been hauled into court for child abuse. So I declined her “things” with thanks. After being told for years she never wanted me in the first place it is rather comical that I don’t want her in the last place. She suggested I put Paw in the military hospital and look after her! We should just put her in Essondale where she should have been years ago . . .
When Paw goes, I’m going to avoid my brother, too. I just can’t see bothering with them . . .
Coyotes got over forty of my chooks including five broody hens. Eglet, the matriarch of the flock, was one. She, Cacklia & Noirene hatched about the same time. Noirene got snatched one morning—her thirteen chicks were peeping mournfully so Eglet came clucking and took over the orphans along with her eleven. The next day Cacklia’s ten were orphans so Eglet took over those too. She was really busy clucking, scratching, spreading herself to cover “her” chicks and then she got done in. Now eleven are left. Even Zaza got eaten.
—Extracts from letters
from Ginty to Hilda Thomas
There was plywood on some of the windows, which made the living room dark, and the plastic that covered it flapped in the wind. No matter how short of money I was, I could not stand living with that for much longer. If I had known what the flood would do to me I could have measured the windows during the brief time I had been at home before I was helicoptered out and then bought them when I went to town with Mort. Once I knew I had to go to Nimpo, however, I had not been able to leave the phone even for the ten-minute walk up to the upper place. Now I was able to make the measurements and order the rest of the living area windows. I used up a precious day to go to Williams Lake to pick them up. What a joy it was to install them and finally have the bay window complete. The outer room still had plywood on two of the three windows and the upstairs was completely boarded in but at least downstairs I could now enjoy the sun and the moon and the view.
Once again I was living in a mess. Piles of lumber filled the floor space, and sawdust and shavings littered the rough plywood floor no matter how much it was swept at the end of the day. The back door was half a metre above ground and I leaned an old plank against it so I could wheelbarrow firewood right inside. I constructed a make-do plywood kitchen bench with shelves to put dishes on, and dog food and other supplies were stored in what I hoped would eventually be a bathroom. I built kennels and a temporary workbench in the outer room.
A priority was to contact the techs who would move the satellite internet dish. I had the phone in the new house but had to go down to the cabin every day to use the internet. The people from Williams Lake who had installed the dish in the first place did not usually come out this way any more. A man who lived in Anahim Lake now performed this service. He was not answering his phone, however; besides, with the long drive around the barrier to Tatla and back again, his road time would be just as much as for anyone coming from Williams Lake. When I could not raise the local man I phoned to town again. They had certainly heard of the flooding and were pleased to garner my news. They took pity on me and said they would try and come in about ten days’ time. I already had the equipment so there would be no charge for that but the installation would be $250 and road time would be $500. A couple of days before they were supposed to come, the local man called: he had been out of the province visiting sick relatives. He balked a bit at the thought of the bypass but agreed to come. Unbelievably, the highway was suddenly opened the day before he was due. Single lane traffic would be controlled with a pilot car for quite a while but what a difference it made to me. Not only would I have to pay much less for the satellite installer but now I could go to Nimpo for water. I had found a source in Tatla Lake, an outside tap behind the trailer that the pastor of the church lived in, and it looked fine—until I put it in a white mug or clear glass. Then you could see all the little brown floaters. They looked like shreds of moss. I immediately started boiling the water for internal use but this seemed to precipitate the floaters and they looked much worse. The pendulum insisted the water was safe, and it tasted not too bad, but drinking it required some fortitude.
I had two volunteers by the time the satellite was installed. They were a couple from England. I did not find them easy people to like. They did not smile when I greeted them as they drove into the yard in their beater of a car but gave off an air of superiority, as if whatever I presented to them would be beneath their dignity. The were both extremely tall. Their hairstyles were identical—long tangles of felted lumps that were not what I had come to expect from dreadlocks but that simply stuck out in a matted mess. The male volunteer could be distinguished by his beard.
They moved around in a languid manner and were usually slow to get started but I have to say they worked well enough when they decided to make the effort. The man told me he could use a chainsaw and I noticed that he spent a lot of time taking it apart and cleaning it, but when I wanted to use it the teeth were so blunt I wondered if he had got the chain in the wrong way round. When I snapped at him about it he turned soulful eyes toward me and said he didn’t know how to sharpen it. In Europe, it seems, no one maintains their saws themselves; they all take them along to a sharpener. But why did he not tell me he couldn’t do it? I was frantic to get stuff done before I went away and had no patience with this kind of idiocy. Tools would be left out at night to get rained on or frosted and I had to explain jobs in every detail: they did not have a good notion of how things worked. For instance, they did not at first fill the woodshed to the top as they thought I might not be able to reach. Had they never heard of a ladder? Did they really think I had designed a space that was not going to be filled? I had originally hoped that they would look after my dogs when I was away but I now wondered if that was going to work.
For all that, they were a help. They moved the ugly, heavy heater stove from the cabin to the house, sawed stovepipe lengths to fit, swept the chimney, walled in the woodshed, hauled vanloads of cut wood from where it had been stacked near the pond, and filled the woodshed. They placed insulation between the joists at the tops of the walls in the basement and built a pretty decent set of steps down there. And they helped move the solar power system from one place to the other.
The only artifact of any interest that I have found on either property is a set of heavy wagon wheels attached to a solid tongue. They had apparently been built extra sturdily because they were designed for hauling logs. They were sitting in a grove of small aspens; several had grown up through the open spaces in the tongue. Old rotten grass was axle high and I wasn’t sure if the wheels would hang together when I cut the grass away. But I chopped out a couple of trees, hacked the wheels free and, amazingly, the whole thing rolled forward with ease. Ben and Nathaniel were working with me then and I still had the old green pickup. We manhandled the heavy wheels onto it and drove them to the upper place. I thought they would make an ideal stand for my two solar panels.
When I first had solar power, all I needed, it seemed, were batteries, panels, an inverter and the wires that joined them. Several advisors had recommended adding a charge monitor to make sure the batteries were not overcharged and a battery status monitor that was supposed to tell me how much power the batteries had, and these had been installed in the cabin. They were attached to fuses and shunts (don’t ask me what they are; I left them joined to their various bits). I drew a diagram and carefully took apart the equipment in the cabin. I also drew little sketches of the backs of the solar panels and the way the wires joined them. Each panel was a different make and had a different attachment for the wires.
While the volunteers constructed the frame that would support the solar panels on the wagon wheels I reassembled the various components inside. I was pretty sure I had got them right. Then I unrolled the new cable to the panels—and found that, in the move, a little junction box had been pulled off one of them. Without it, the sketch I had drawn relating to that particular panel was useless. If the panels were linked the wrong way round, the whole system might blow. I searched the van and scoured the ground near the cabin where the panels had stood but there was no sign of it. I wired the panel I knew to be correct; for many years I had used only one panel anyway. The batteries had been fully charged before I moved them and the battery status monitor continued to read “Full” so I assumed that everything must be working properly. I had been warned never to let the battery level on the monitor go below 65 percent.
That night we used the new, low-power, twelve-volt lights that Bert the electrician had installed. There were still piles of lumber and half-built projects all over the place but the dull yellow glow at the flick of a switch made it seem as though the house was beginning to come together. The next day the lights had not been on long before they dimmed. The weather had been dull but the monitor still read “Full.” The inverter lights, two little domes one on top of the other, indicated subnormal power. Both should be green but the top one was flickering to orange.
The satellite internet installer came—that at least went without a hitch—so I was able to google the company that made the panel I was having problems with and found that some of their panels had the positive link on the left and some had them on the right. There were apparently + and - signs on the wires. I searched and searched: there were absolutely no marks of any kind. They must have been on the gizmo that had been lost. I wired everything together and hoped for the best. I checked the battery status monitor: it registered “Full.” I was a little bit surprised as the weather had been dull and I would have expected a small reduction by now.
And that night the lights died again. The power input light on the inverter wavered to red. I rechecked my wiring. Everything seemed to be in the proper place. I phoned and emailed Dave Neads in the Precipice, Bert the electrician and the man who had sold me the equipment in the first place. The solar power guru said I must have blown the whole system when I moved it over. He gave me some tips and I tried them all out, but the lights would die out within a few minutes. We were back to candles and flashlights—a real nuisance when trying to find anything in the muddle of building supplies and boxes.
During the day, as long as the sun gleamed a bit on the panels, the inverter lights would stay green. After dark the system would quickly die. The battery status monitor continued to register “Full.” All I could think of was that the batteries were no longer holding a charge. They were only four years old: they are supposed to last eight or nine years. I had suspected for a while that one of them was not operating properly as the liquid level would be below the top of the plates after I had left it for four months while going into the mountains. The other three were always fine and the mountain batteries were happy to sit for eight months without attention, even during the winter cold.
I could have got batteries from Williams Lake but I would have had to go into town to fetch them as not many carriers will handle them. I didn’t want to waste the time. The volunteers, fortunately, enjoyed candles. They would have used them even if electricity had been available. I would be leaving them my old laptop so they could do email but I told them that they probably wouldn’t be able to use it unless the sun was shining on the panels. This wouldn’t bother them as they were late risers (I like to check my email in the dark in the morning so I don’t cut into the working hours of the day). Failing all else, they had the phone or could drive to Bean Out West at Nimpo Lake and use the wireless internet there. The frustrating thing was not really knowing what was wrong. And all this extra messing about was taking so much time.
Then I got a message from Moose Head Ranch. The owners were back again and were worried about the trees in their yard that were buried in sand. Could my volunteers come down and give them a hand? They would pay them a small wage. On the one hand I was frantic to get work done and felt I could ill afford to let them go. On the other I was glad to have some time away from them. Personally, I thought that the Moose Heads’ trees, which were mostly cottonwoods and inured to flooding, would survive pretty well, but the volunteers would no doubt be glad of a bit of extra cash.
The volunteers had moved from the trailer into the cabin. I didn’t begrudge them the accommodation while they were working elsewhere. They had their own vehicle so could drive to work. I was a bit put out, though, when they came looking for food. I did not see why, when I was so desperately busy and the volunteers were working for somebody else and earning money, I should have to cook for them. I was surprised that the Moose Heads did not feed them. That is what is usually done in a sparsely populated place like this. I let them take what food they wanted down to the cabin but I was not going to do the extra work of preparing it.
I made a mail and water run to Nimpo. I was expecting boxes of books to come to the post office, and they arrived just a couple of days before I had to leave for the book tour. I called into the Moose Heads’ yard on my way back. The volunteers were hand-digging out around the trees, gently brushing the dirt away until they could see dark soil or grass. The rest of the yard was bedlam. Jan Petrie, from the little sawmill, was as happy as Larry sitting on one Cat, the owner of the place on another. The roar of machinery was deafening. They were digging up to a metre of sand out of the yard, putting it in a dump truck and taking it up to the highway. By a stroke of luck, the material was of a perfect consistency for road repair, so the Moose Heads were selling it to Interior Roads who were using it to fill in the holes that the river had made. What goes around comes around. At least the Moose Heads were able to glean some money to pay for the tremendous damage to their yard.
I heard at Nimpo that Interior Roads were “putting the river back where it belonged.” I was pretty skeptical about that. True, the edges of the river were now lined with big boulders, which would be much harder to wash away than the original silt and gravel, but the river had completely changed course in the bush and would have all sorts of new forces when next it flooded. The first indication that those thousands of expensive machinery hours to “fix” the road had been ill planned came during the first week in December.
With some misgivings I left the volunteers with my dogs and set off to promote A Wilderness Dweller’s Cookbook. I phoned the volunteers several times while I was away to make sure they had not burned my house down (I never had this concern with my other housesitters) but everything was always fine. Toward the end of my tour they told me they had the opportunity of a cheap flight to England and wanted to leave a few days before I could get home. We arranged to meet in 108 Mile House where they could bring me the dogs.
I tried calling the volunteers the night before I was due to meet them. There was no answer. Perhaps they were out for a farewell dinner with the Moose Heads, who were difficult to reach by phone, always providing they were home in the first place. I called my own number again the following morning, long before the volunteers were likely to get out of bed, but still no reply. Why had they not called me? Then I found out that I had given them the wrong phone number for Patricia’s house. Amid the frantic preparations for leaving, I had left them an old office number of hers. I had told them to meet me at the 108 gas station. Nobody was there. I drove across the road to the supermarket and there was their car, and nearby were my two scruffy dogs on their ropes. The volunteers, it appeared, had bailed out of Ginty Creek a day earlier than expected. Jan Petrie had called them and told them that the highway was flooding again. It had been mild and, although the ground was covered with snow, the river had come up a bit and was piling against the flimsy barrier constructed on the highway opposite Moose Head Ranch. So little rain and already the road was flooding. Machines were brought along and an extra bit of bank was piled beside the river but it didn’t look as though it would hold during a real flood. It would be interesting to see what would happen during the spring runoff.
A decent root cellar in my basement had been high on the to-do list for the fall but because of the floods there had been no time. I was not quite sure if the temperature in the basement would stay above freezing. I was a little concerned that, if the house was empty for very long, the organic potatoes (from the Precipice) and a few home-canned goods I had managed to put up might freeze. I figured that if the volunteers put them on the mattress and wrapped them in the down comforter and blankets they might survive.
There had not been enough snow to warrant ploughing the road and I arrived home before dark. The volunteers had piled various items on one of the mattresses and dutifully covered them with the bedding, but the home-canned fruit and potatoes were sitting unprotected in the room. The items they had deemed important were the electronics: the computer, the modems and the inverter. These freeze on a regular basis and they have never given me any bother. I just make sure they are thoroughly warmed up to get rid of any condensation before I use them. Fortunately, it had been comparatively mild (about -12°C outside) and daily sunshine had meant that the interior of the house had stayed above freezing.
The place was filthy. True, it was not the easiest place to clean, having rough plywood counters and floor, but soot and candle grease were caked on everything. Pots had never been washed on the outside—some had food caked on the inside as well. But the dogs were happy and healthy and it had been a lot easier for both me and them to have someone look after them at home.
The building mess was depressing, and I was to make a lot more before I could live with it, even though I was resigned to virtually camping in the unfinished house until I could sell the mountain business, whenever that might be. An advantage of moving into a home at this stage, however, is that it is easy to change one’s mind. So I dropped the computer table a few centimetres, made the seat under the southwest window narrower, and so on. I had bought four new batteries while down at the coast, taking a gamble that they would solve my power problem, and they did. The battery monitor still read “Full” no matter what was in them but I had now learned to look at the second figure that comes up on the screen, which represented the volts stored in the battery. Ideally it should be 12.6 or more; sometimes it was over 14. I must never let it go below 11.6. I wished I had understood enough to check this figure before.
On December 20 I drove along the highway and picked out a small spruce growing below the phone line. Brushers were scheduled to cut all the vegetation out of there in the spring so I felt no guilt at taking the tree. I set it up in the corner of my new house and decorated it with all the bits and pieces I have collected over the years. It was a special solstice celebration for me: not only was I now living in the absolute last house I will ever build but also it was the night of a full moon, with a full eclipse to boot. That has not happened on the winter solstice for five hundred years.
The weather stayed dreary, as it had done since September. In many places it was too cloudy to see anything at all but at Ginty Creek the blurry outline of the moon shone dimly through the overcast. Unlike my friends who stayed up to try and see this once-in-a-half-millennium event, which peaked at around two in the morning, I did not have to keep dragging on a coat and trudging outside. I lay in my toasty warm bed and watched the moon change shape as it slowly moved across the skylight in my bay window.
I move into my new house.