Small home in the valley

While most of my adult life I pondered, planned and ate up anything I could find on simple living,  the closest I could get was living semi-rural, in a smaller city, or even in a renovated cabin on a lake, but always still being a member of the rat race and piling on the bills rather than getting any closer to what I really wanted out of life.  In fact I kept pushing myself farther from achieving any of it while just adding to the baggage to be dragged around on every move, which seemed to happen about every year and a half.  After a few attempts I finally did leave the upper midwest in '96 for Alaska, and even though I did dump some of the baggage, that rat race was still following along until the summer of 2000 when fate really stepped in and started changing things around.

To put it mildly, there are two big stumbling blocks for those wanting to evolve to a more simple life, one being land, and the other trying to figure out how one can exist without all that we have grown up to believe are necessities.  There of course are others, like money, bills, responsibilities, companionship or lack of, fear to follow dreams or set out on them by ourselves, or leaving what is familiar for that which in our minds is only the absence of those things, and maybe just as much, what others think or don't allow us to do.  We've also been so trained as to want everything right away, and or scared to take a leap, and perhaps we do forget that a journey can be taken one step at a time and just have patience and perseverance.

In any event, that summer I suddenly found myself living in a 16 X 24 cabin in the goldstream valley north of Fairbanks without running water or electricity and by the end of September it would be just me there.  Even though I had long thought about such things, it really was a culture shock that I hadn't expected at the time and some things did take me some adjustment time.  While I did have the electricity turned on and installed an oil heater as winter was coming on, the one thing that really hit me and stuck was that running water was a luxury rather than the necessity that a generation or two has taught us to be.

I was only in that cabin through the end of January, when I needed to move to another, and for all that the place lacked, and what it was in dire need of, the new place never did measure up despite being brand new, having more space due to a half loft, and an outhouse which the other place did not have.  Perhaps hardships can endear us to a place, but in all honesty, there was a lot of good there and lessons learned.  11 1/2 years later I am still living in a dry cabin, though with many improvements over the last two places.