Pioneers in the 21st Century
on 15 acres in Maine
My husband Don and I beat most people to the
recession. Ours began in 2004, when the dot-com bust finally hit home. We
had to make a choice. We could give up either our small condo in Portland or
our rustic cabin on 15 acres. Any sensible person would have chosen to sell
the cabin.
But neither of us could bear to part with the land.
Although we had assessed several times the possibility of fixing up the
cabin to live in it year-round and rejected it as impossible and
impractical, we did it anyway.
Don was doubtful. But I said that if he could kayak around an
island in Alaska by himself for a month, he could certainly survive a winter
in Maine in a homemade summer cabin. Besides, I said, we had a fallback. We
could always stay at his dad's house in Rockland while they were in Florida
for the winter.
We haven't had to resort to that escape yet. But we
have had adventures aplenty as we struggle to survive in a homemade cabin
deep in the woods with no well, no winter septic, and not a lot of money.
Right: Even if we plowed our 200 yards of driveway our car wouldn't make it up, so we park at the top of the drive and walk up and down. The walk is beautiful, but not always easy. When we get a big snowfall, Don trods up and down in his snowshoes, making a path for me and the sled that hauls in our drinking water, food and other supplies.
Don
hauls our dirty laundry up the hill to the top of the drive in a huge duffle
on a winter morning in 2007. The giant bag fills one 50-pound front-load
washer at the Laundromat. We pack up the laundry wet, haul it down the hill
on a modified sled, then hang it to dry in the loft above the woodstove.
Even
parking at the top of the drive, we still
have plenty of snow to shovel.
Sometimes
the plow dumps four or five feet of the white
stuff in front of our
cars.
