Wednesday, December 9, 2009

The end of any relationship is almost always a sad moment. But when the separation is the end of a dream, and the abandonment by a partner, the effects are even more difficult. I am the one abandoned after 15 years, but the dream was that of my partner, of raising goats and sheep and making cheese, and her decision has a logic that evades my scrutiny, and that of my friends.
However interesting, that story will have to wait, for my focus is going to be on where her flight has left me: 58 years old, two years clean from colon cancer, an arthritic knee, and now living by myself again on 140 acres of land in an isolated hollow with patchy cell phone reception and no neighbors within a mile.
In my mid-forties I had lived in the hollow for eight years in a 16 x 20 cabin without running water. My first book, In Search of the Wild, documented those ambitious years, and I knew even then that I had to try my Thoreauvian experiment or it might never happen.
Now, after six years of living with my partner in a small log house we had had built, a dwelling that used solar power and possessed the basic amenities, I was back to living in the hollow by myself, a daunting prospect.
Of course, I could sell the property and move into an easier place. My old house, an A-frame on North Fork Road, was available for a reasonable price, but I didn’t want to leave the hollow yet. Our plan, after my cancer and knee problems, had been to stay in the hollow for another four or five years, during which we would find the perfect land for maintaining a few animals and building a new and larger house. That plan was gone with her inexplicable departure and her purchase of an expensive house in downtown Blacksburg. She offered to give me the log house if I would just pay off her mortgage, but I wanted her to get her fair share and so after taking on her mortgage I signed a note to pay her a very substantial amount of money when I finally sold the hollow. It means I am heavily in debt but it seemed the right thing to do. Now my new journey begins.
After bidding my partner goodbye and good luck on November 13—I let her stay with me for almost two months while she closed on her house—I headed down to Charlotte so I wouldn’t be there while she was packing up and moving her stuff. As I drove, a number of fears began to arise, and I was glad my main fear was the kayak trip I was heading to at the new U. S. National Whitewater Center. I have never been a very good kayaker, but at 58 my muscle tone was diminished and my confidence much less than it had been forty years ago, when I started taking on Freight Train Rapids on the Contoocook in New Hampshire.
During the summer I had run Montana’s Stillwater in my inflatable Aire Force, a boat that could handle up to class IV water, and then ten miles of the McKenzie in Oregon. In my earlier days I would run by myself, and I encountered a number of tricky situations. Now I paid for a raft trip and paddled my boat near one of the rafts just in case I got in trouble.
The week before I had visited the Whitewater Center for the first time and been quite impressed. It was no Disney ride, and I had my usual mixture of excitement and trepidation. When I got there I was nervous—a number of people were watching—but after making my first run, everything went well. The other kayakers were helpful and I ran the class III section seven times before they shifted the water to the class IV run. I was exhausted and had to jump in the back of my truck (where I have a bed) and nap for an hour before I could do anything else. I was clearly 58.
With the kayaking over, my fears about living alone in the hollow reemerged. I was not especially worried about the lack of human contact. After all, I had lived in my cabin for eight years and I enjoyed the solitude. However, for the past six years I had a partner with me, and she was usually there when I had to run the farm tractor when it snowed or when I had to use the chainsaw to cut a tree that had fallen across the road, almost a half mile stretch where my cell phone didn’t work at all. If I got in trouble with the tractor (any farmer will tell you how dangerous a tractor can be) or the chain saw, there would be no one to help me and no way to contact anyone. Fortunately, I can drive the tractor very slowly, thus greatly reducing the possibility of an accident even if it leaves me out in the snow for a longer period, and I do have Stihl Kevlar chain saw pants and gloves. There is one sewn up slash in those pants where I slipped once and without the Kevlar would have suffered a deep gash in my thigh. The Kevlar fibers stopped the blade before it touched my skin. Now I would have to be even more careful with the saw.
The other concerns of the hollow didn’t bother me too much. My arthritic knee made it difficult to garden, something I had done extensively in my eight years in the cabin, but now I could get by with a few spinach plants and a tomato or two. I had spent hundreds of hours helping my partner clear and maintain a large garden plot with a small orchard, but with my knee I would have to abandon the garden and hope that the orchard would just need a little work.
Keeping the solar electric system working correctly was also a major responsibility. When we had the system installed, at a cost of $20,000, the fellow who did the work was not an expert, but I didn’t learn this until I brought in Bryan Walsh from Solar Connection. Bryan knew his stuff and quickly pointed out the faults of the present system of 16 solar panels, a 5000 watt inverter and a set of 16 batteries. His biggest concern was that I had not been equalizing the batteries (getting them up all up to around 1270 on a hydrometer) and they were almost shot after 4 short years. He thought there was another year left in them if I treated them properly. Since we were deep in a hollow, it was almost impossible to equalize the batteries with sunlight alone, so I spent many hours using the Honda 6500 watt gas generator trying to get the batteries equalized. I did my best but last year we had to replace the batteries with a new set of eight at a cost of $8,000.
When they arrived I followed Bryan’s instructions completely, but green or new batteries have to be broken in slowly and I was never able to get them all charged up completely. I spent a number of anxious nights worrying about whether I was ruining them. This was one of the things I now had to worry about by myself.
In the past, my partner had helped me check the water level, but now I had to do that on my own and it was a much slower process. A couple of weeks ago I decided to try to equalize the batteries again (something that should be done every few months or so) and I did finally get them fully charged after running the generator for perhaps 30 hours, about 20 gallon of gas. Obviously burning that much gas is much less environmentally friendly, but with proper use the batteries could last 15 to 20 years and that was my goal. It will be much easier in the spring, fall and especially summer, where the extra sunlight will greatly lessen the generator use.

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