Base Camp, Bradford, Maine four months after our epic 12,000-mile roadtrip to Alaska and tour of the Yukon, Canadian Northern Rockies, and 15 states and six provinces. Upon our return we immediately sold the RV and bought 223-acres of woodland in Bradford (where we’d been staying when we weren’t wandering). And here we are, another winter in Maine in a tiny off-grid cabin with no firewood ahead and no road in.
Ruby-Sue ran away six days before Christmas. She had only been with us a few months. Our cabin is a mile from anything in all directions. She came from a puppy mill in Ohio, seized as part of a bust with about 100 dogs of varying ages. She’d been one of the mothers with endless litters of puppies in her four-years there in poor living conditions. With no loving hooman touch or understanding of even the simplest of commands, she was a shaky, nervous, downright terrified mess. There was no chance anyone would be able to catch her.
With little experience in the Great Outdoors and a new to our home, we didn’t have much hope for her safe return. I yelled until I was horse and whistled until my lips were too cold to form the right shape. I used a wilderness survival whistle after that. On the third night it was 4°F with 20MPH wind gusts. We’d given up on finding her alive. There was no way to track her in the wood even though there was snow. There had been a storm the day before she went missing, and the plops of snow from the trees were the same size as her paw prints and frozen over. She could simply walk atop the frozen crust.
Thankfully, I’d posted photos of her all over local Facebook groups and called the animal control officer in both Bradford and Charleston, so my information was out there. Hundreds of people shared the posts. When I received a message on the fourth day, it seemed like a cruel joke at first. Ruby-Sure had been spotted six-miles away and was in the process of being captured.
I crammed by PJs into my snow pants and just about sprang into my boots. We hopped on the snowmobile and zipped out to the main road just as the ACO I’d spoken with two days before pulled up with Ruby-Sue. She had been on her way to church when she spotted a man trying to catch Ruby-Sue as she ran up the centerline of the road. A third vehicle stopped and recognized Ruby-Sue. She is the one who’d found me on Facebook.
I balled my eyes out at the kind woman who brought her back. I hadn’t cried like that for years. Then when she want to leave I embraced her again and ugly-cried and snotted shamelessly. All three of us were in disbelief.
Our chonky fluff-nugget was worryingly thin, matted with burdocks and raspberry brambles, and missing chunks of fur on her hind legs.
She was perfectly fine being stuffed in my jacket for the ride back in. It was her fist time in the snowsled. She didn’t care. She did care about her food dish.
We have renamed our little “Christmas Miracle” Ruby-Sue Walkabout. She emerged from the wilderness of Maine a different dog. The missing fur is mostly likely from freezing to the ground at night while she somehow hid from the many hungry creature of the vast wooded area we live in. We have seen red fox, grey fox, fisher, and bear on camera. At least bear are denned up this time of year. She is a hot mess from the terrible haircut required to get all the junk out of her thick fur coat.
Kevin has been cutting wood here and there to get a few days ahead at a time. It’s not exactly premium seasoned hardwood. Most of it has mushrooms growing on it and was naturally-fallen by wind and time. The rest is green softwood that takes forever to catch even when laid on a thick bed of hot coals and mixed with dry(er) wood. We only cut trees that lean over the roadway or block the sun from drying out the mud come spring. A few nights ago Kevin noticed that a chunk of wood drying by the wood stove was glowing green.
Our firewood was full of bioluminescence mycelium or “foxfire”.
I haven’t had much time for enjoying nature like I once had. My last two walks along the bank of the brook have been in the dark on Fridays after work. At least the sun has risen by the time I pull out of the field and onto the road at 7:00AM now.
Our 20-year-old son has been staying with us for the past coupe of months. He was booted from college for academic failure last year, then kicked out of my parents’ house two months ago, and forced to live with us and see our rustic lifestyle full time. Let’s just say he has a newfound passion for college and is moving back into the dorm this weekend. Which is good, because I’m not sure how much longer we can live this way. There is very little privacy and space here.
We are a mile from any road. We use with a snowmobile or four-wheeler with chains to get in and out, depending on the snow cover. The last week has been dry and never got above freezing. I have been fortunate enough to drive my car to our front door—okay, our only door in our humble one-room cabin.
Water is something you don’t think about until it becomes difficult to get.
Our water for showers and dishes comes from a brook. I’m fortunate enough to have an understanding employer that is good with me filling potable water jugs at work. We do have a hot water tank, but the water needs to be brought inside in buckets and pumped up into two barrels in the loft over our bed when we shut down our summer system to keep it from freezing.
In the summer we use a ram pump system and don’t have a fuss with it much. It utilizes the drop of little waterfalls and gravity to fill a tank 600-feet up a 21-foot incline to fill a 300-gallon tank with enough head pressure to push the water up to the barrels that are well above the water level of the stream only 100-feet from the cabin. Kevin truly can fix, fabricate, or engineer anything. But this time of year, he has to chop through ice with an axe to fill buckets and drag them in on a sled. It’s a step up from heating water on the wood stove and pouring it into solar shower bags last winter.
This cozy cabin now has a full kitchen complete with stainless steel appliances completely solar-powered. We have two full sets of kitchen cabinets we bought from an apartment complex that was remodeling. They are full functional, but ugly. I’m back and forth about what color to paint them. We have a stove that came with a broken door and needed to be switched from natural gas to propane—only to find out the oven requires the power the whole time it’s on. What is the point in having a GAS range if the thing needs power to run the oven?
I hand-dug a new grey water system by the camp before installing a washer and a sink. The washer was half the price and only a year old. It matches my set perfectly. Kevin’s mother had remodeled her kitchen, so we snoinched the sink and bought a new faucet to match. Just before leaving on our trip last June, we’d finally found the right fridge at a great price with a few scratches and dents on clearance at Lowes. It took a while to find a matching microwave. When we got it home the turntable didn’t fit and the guy ghosted me when I told him he gave me the wrong one. I currently have a bowl lid over the turny-thing. Oh well.
Anyhow, it’s really coming together. Now we just need to box in the remainder of the porch to build a walk-in wardrobe, find a deal on flooring, upgrade the shower from the current 32×32″ stall, and instal the composing toilet. The town finally issued us a physical address by having a septic survey done. We didn’t meet the cutoff for getting sand and gravel in.
We had a friend come with heavy equipment to dig for gravel, but didn’t find any. Now there are just a bunch of text holes surrounded by small demolished trees and a pit. When the sand dump truck came, they got stuck in the road and said they wouldn’t come back. Maybe we can get some delivered while there’s no snow and the ground is frozen.
I have a place I go for lunch once a week. When I look out the window at the little Maine city, I can’t help but daydream of all the amazing things we saw. Sometimes when I daydream about it, I wonder if maybe I had remembered the beauty wrong, somehow embellished and romanticized it in my mind.
