Cabin Life, Chapter Seven

Phones

In the past, we have had a telephone in our cabin. A few close neighbors also have them. The section across the creek chose to not have Huge & Rude lay lines way back when, and now it isn’t possible.

Last summer it took about six calls to Huge & Rude to get the phone hooked up after the winter. Finding someone at that company who manages landlines in California was almost impossible. Then, they were completely stymied by the lack of a real address. I finally learned that we have an “AHN”, which stands for Alternate House Number. Eventually we got the phone reignited. (wrong word, but all that is coming to me right now.)

The price goes up every year, and once again, I decided to not pay $54/month for the 7-8 months that we aren’t there. Besides, when too many people get our number, I have to change it. On top of that, there is no answering machine (no electricity, remember?), so unless we happen to be in the cabin when someone calls, it isn’t a very reliable method of communicating. (People are used to INSTANT responses these days.)

This year it took three calls, and then I was assured that our phone would be reignited, with a new number, of course. (This was after Huge & Rude called me to say that the address on our work order was inadequate. . . sigh.)

Shortly after that reassurance, a local Huge & Rude service guy pulled into our driveway at home down the hill. (The local service guys are terrific.) He had a work order, but the address didn’t make sense. He came to tell me that he knows the phone is for Mineral King, that Huge & Rude doesn’t want small rural communities any more (as if we didn’t figure that out from the lack of service), and that he is required to drive up to the cabin. However, his truck is too big for the messed-up road. He gave me the cell phone numbers of all three local service guys and said to call when the big truck can get up the road.

COME ON! JUST FLIP A SWITCH IN AN OFFICE THE WAY YOU HAVE ALWAYS DONE IT!

Nope, can’t.

So, we plugged our phone into our neighbor’s phone jack because his phone sounds as if bacon is frying inside. And now we walk over there to make our calls.

NO, THERE IS NO CELL SERVICE IN MINERAL KING!

Trash Service

This year there is none. Haul it yourself. Do NOT use the Park Services can. It is forbidden. We used to have a dumpster for cabin trash, and the service truck came once a week. However, they are a bit like the huge and rude phone company in not wanting rural communities. In recent years, we rented a giant roll-off dumpster. And before that, Trail Guy hauled everyone’s garbage from Mineral King to Silver City in his Botmobile. Yep, moved the bags by hand into his pick-em-up truck, drove 3 miles down the bumpy road, and then flung them into Silver City’s roll-off. When we cabin folks got our own dumpster, he climbed in and rearranged the bags to make more room, so that it only had to be emptied about 3 or 4 times a summer. This is why I sometimes sent out an email to cabin folks begging them to double-bag so there is no leaky-leaky. In addition, there were no accommodations for recycling so if that was important to cabin folks, they needed to either stop buying so much packaged stuff or haul it home to their own recycling container.

You can see why everyone in Mineral King loves Trail Guy and brings him treats*. 

*(Red wine [cabernet], cashews, pistachios, beef jerky. . .in case you are interested, or feeling guilty, grateful, or generous)

Cabin Life, Chapter Six

Utilities: Water

There is no water company in Mineral King. Trail Guy and the Farmer keep water flowing to our neighborhood, with occasional help from other neighbors. I will skip the details, but let these photos tell you how scary it is this year.

We listen to hear it humming in our pipes, and when it gets quiet, we take a hike. “We”? Trail Guy takes a hike, and I stay at the cabin with a walkie-talkie to follow instructions about opening and closing various valves.

Hot water

Propane water heaters are the most normal part of cabin life’s necessities. Some people have tried to use the on-demand style, and after one winter, those things are toast. 

Sometimes the regular ones are also toast.

Trail Guy helps many neighbors with their water heaters when he can, and sometimes I go along, because sometimes other people’s bathrooms are kind of interesting.

I have no idea.

Cabin Life, Chapter Five

Utilities: electricity

Since there is no electricity in Mineral King (unless one uses a generator or is some sort of a solar genius), you might be wondering about some basics of life.

Let’s start with cooking. Lots of cabins have propane stoves, a few have propane/wood stoves, and we have a wood stove without a propane section. We also have small propane burner for quicker cooking when we don’t want to wait for the fire or heat the place.

Good thing I like to split wood. (Trail Guy makes it easy by providing smaller chunks for me.)

What about refrigerators? They come in propane. Ours isn’t top-notch (does that surprise you??) and in warmer temperatures it becomes more of an icebox with a good freezer on top.  So, we supplement with ice made in our freezer (or a neighbor’s) and sometimes we supplement with snow.

(HEY, SHUT THE REFRIGERATOR DOOR!!)

Those propane refrigerators have lots of troubles, beginning with the fact that the easy strike start-up device ALWAYS breaks first, and then it takes a gymnast to reach around the back with a match while someone else holds in the button, usually with a tool because it is really hard to push the button.

But that’s okay, because life is slower at the cabin.

Wait! What about light??

Again, propane.

Almost everything requires matches, and “Strike Anywhere” matches have become rare. (We call them “1 in 3s” because it takes 3 matches to get one that will actually light.) Lots of people use those plastic things that resemble curling irons with hard-to-press switches; I think they are called “lighters”, but the handle is longer than smokers’ types. And I bet they have a tiny internal propane canister. But plastic, ugh. So cheap, so unreliable, and so disposable, probably made in China. Sigh.

Cabin Life, Chapter Four

Gardening

What do we do at the cabin?

Sometimes I garden.

Gardening at a mountain cabin? What are you talking about??

When I first married into the cabin, I admired some bearded iris across the creek at another cabin.

Then, I transplanted some from our real house to the cabin.

We have had one bloom; it was in July, 2017. (Only took me 15 minutes to find that date. . . the photo was so unremarkable that it got deleted awhile ago.)

A neighbor has a lush front yard, and she graciously allows me to transplant things, which sometimes survive.

A trick is to keep the transplants watered, and to mark them so that people don’t just assume it is basic forest floor, free for unstructured trampling.

We have lots of currant bushes in the area, and they get full of dead branches. My theory about this is that the bushes will thrive and grow if the old stuff is cleared away. Sometimes I wonder if, when I pull out the dead stuff, the shrub is thinking, “HEY! I was eating that!”

It is possible that I have too much thinking time.

When the fire crews were clearing brush in an arbitrary manner during the fall of 2021, they made these very neat rows of their prunings. Random hacking, organized stacking. They won’t be returning to haul these piles away, so I am now using them when I do my own clearing.

Sometimes I rake, sometimes I use the large magnet on a pole to gather nails in a nearby driveway. (That’s another story, a long one.) 

And sometimes I wander around, wishing that I knew when and how to transplant things from God’s garden.

 

 

Cabin Life, Chapter Three

 

Puttering

What does one do in a place without electricity, internet, cell phones, or even a working landline? (“Working” being the important word, since we no longer have a phone but rely on our neighbor’s intermittent line.)

An aspect of cabin living at a slower pace is the concept of puttering. Puttering is aimlessly doing a bit of this, a bit of that.

Sometimes I just start polishing our wood stove.

 Sometimes I rearrange the collection of peculiar found items and pretty rocks.

Occasionally I wander around with my camera, looking for new angles and ways the sunshine hits things.

Recently I was curious about the various temperatures of all the flowing water. So, we walked around with a thermometer and recorded the temperatures, then played a guessing game with neighbors as to which was the coldest, and which was the warmest*.

Easily entertained, yeppers.

*Warmest: Chihuahua; Coldest: Spring Creek

Cabin Life, Chapter Two

Slower Pace

What in the world do people do at a rustic cabin up a difficult road in a place without electricity?

We slow down. We sleep more—go to bed earlier, sleep later (the sun doesn’t hit the cabin until around 8:30 a.m.), and some of us take naps. Could be the elevation, could be that it is cooler and there isn’t a great need to get up early to beat the heat.

We linger over coffee, usually while listening to the radio. (Remember those?)

The old wood stove provides heat until the sunshine hits; then the cabin doors get opened to the outside.

This stove is now history, because the oven didn’t work, and one time it tried to kill us. But that’s a digression, one I might share with you later.

In summary, at the cabin, we slow down. Or, as Trail Guy has often said, “We contemplate matters of consequence.”

Cabin Life, Chapter One

 

How I Got a Cabin

Welcome to Cabin Life, my way of staying in touch during this odd summer of Mineral King being closed to the public and my accidental stepping into a sabbatical (or something akin to it.)

Thirty-eight years ago I met Trail Guy. In a rash moment of bald honesty, I said, “I’d kill for a cabin in Mineral King”.

He replied, “There is another way”. (Maybe he said “better” or even “easier”.)

We got married the following year (in Mineral King, of course), and nobody has gotten killed.

This was all pre internet, pre personal computers, pre continual connectivity. (The first summer of marriage, we got a landline at the cabin, since we were living in two different places. Fancy.)

Nowadays (isn’t that a classic Old People word?) we live in an era of total convenience, instant gratification, continual connectedness, and complete comfort. 

So why do people go to a rustic shack up a terrible road to spend time without conveniences, ultra-comfort, electricity, cell phones, or the internet? What in the world do people do??

This series, called “Cabin Life”, will give you a glimpse, maybe a few answers to those questions, or maybe just more questions.

 

Just Thinking… and Getting a New Idea

 

 

(Not my front porch)

While at the cabin for a short week I did some thinking about the blog. After fifteen years of continual posting, it is hard to shut down the ideas. It is hard to think about just stopping. It is hard to have ideas that would be rude to share, since Mineral King isn’t open to the public this summer.

Many ideas were flying around my overactive mind: nope, not that; nope, not that one either; nope, better not write that. (“Nope” is the opposite of “yeppers” in my peculiar vernacular.)

Then it came to me that I could write a series about cabin life. I have a lot of experience and thoughts about cabin communities and living simply in a cabin in the mountains. Maybe you, O Gentle Reader (doesn’t that sound quaint?), would be interested in an inside look?

I wouldn’t be talking about the trails, the water, the flowers, the quiet, the beauty, although that would slip in simply due to the location. The goal would be to show you what in the world we do with our time “up the hill”, as almost all people in almost all mountain communities refer to their cabin places.

The posts won’t be five days a week, because there is no internet, electricity, cell service, or even a reliable landline available where I will be spending a great deal of time. If you comment, it might be a few days before I “approve” the comment so that it shows. But at least you’d know I haven’t quit blogging, and you might enjoy a new topic.

Sinkhole on the Mineral King Road

 

Yeah, yeah, I know I said it was rude to talk about Mineral King when it is closed to the public. HOWEVER, something happened that added to the reasons for the closure, and it is so interesting that I decided to break radio silence to show you.

The night before we headed up the hill, we got a call from a cabin neighbor about a giant sinkhole on the road. He said it was very narrow to get past, and quite deep.

We left the house around 7 a.m., and stopped by the maintenance barn to talk to the trail crew (who are all in the front country waiting for a some young peregrine falcons to vacate their nest so the crew can blow up the giant boulder above Lookout Point). The crew was available, so we headed up to the sinkhole.

First stop was at the backhoe, conveniently parked less than a mile below the sinkhole. Road Guy (formerly known as Trail Guy) changed into working clothes, and I followed him in the Botmobile to a wide spot in the road below the hole.

Holy guacamole, (Hole-y guacamole?) that is deep, and as reported, very very narrow to pass by.

The trail crew guys are very strong, and knowledgeable about moving rocks around in a non-random manner.

See the tiny pile of smaller rocks in the bottom of the photo? I schlepped any rock I could find to the guys, because it was fun to “help”. Masonry is a fabulous skill, one I might try in my next life.

It became a community event. People drove up from Silver City and walked down from West Mineral King (also known as Faculty Flat, a mile below the end of the road). One of the guys helped me gather rocks; I pointed out the ones that were too big for me and he obliged.

See that skinny little dude? Very, very strong.

This is Hengst Peak, just to give you an idea of where this road failure was located. We call the area “the Bluffs”, which is above High Bridge.

These guys were very specific about their rock placements. Biggest ones first, and they actually slammed some of them with a sledge hammer to shape them to fit. The idea is as few gaps as possible. Eventually when I brought rocks my instructions were simply to toss them here or there. Finally, the dirt that Road Guy kept bringing went in to bring the hole back up to the level of the road.

See? All fixed. The culvert is plugged, which may be the reason the hole appeared. It is the reason that water is still going over the road.

And those yellow barriers read “CLOSED FOR CLEANING”. Sometimes a crew just has to make do with whatever is available.

Road Guy returned the backhoe, I picked him up, and then he went back and forth over the site with the Botmobile to pack the dirt. 

Fantastic teamwork, incredible timing of available men with excellent skills.

A Trip to Oregon

 

There is a little bit of important Mineral King news at the bottom of this post.

People say that Oregon is green for a reason, but most of my visits have been sunny. This trip was no exception.

It almost causes me physical pain to leave home, but somehow I was able to pull it off. This is about 15 miles from home, looking through the windshield, remembering Lot’s wife and facing forward, looking ahead to the future, trying to be brave about all I was leaving behind. (A trip is a temporary situation, Central California Artist.)

The great Central Valley of California is so beautiful when the air is clear.

This is heading to Reading. Or perhaps, hedding to Redding.

Once past Redding, Mt. Shasta is visible. Anyone out there remember Shasta soda? The logo on the cans looked just like Mt. Shasta. (Duh.)

Truck Village is always something to look forward to. It is near Weed. (Don’t get your knickers in a twist–ABNER WEED was a man’s name!)

There was a long traffic jam before Weed, and I just didn’t want to stop, so I pushed through to Yreka, stopped for gas, and still felt alert. (Ice cream for dinner helped.) I called my sister to ask how long it would take to get to her place from there. The answer was 4-1/2 hours. Remembering that it was the day with the most daylight of the entire year, and I was heading north, I decided to push on. So, a day of 13 hours of driving, almost two books on CDs, some tunes, a little talk radio, some thinking, some praying, 3 or 4 stops for gas (it is expensive everywhere), some snacking (but I refused to pay $4.49 for a “sharing” size of M&Ms—ARE YOU KIDDING ME??), and no night of poor sleep in some motel with the sounds of traffic, car doors, and strangers banging around with suitcases.

Sister and I did lots of walking. It is a thrill to see the beautiful yards (NO DEER! NO DROUGHT!) with many plants I’ve never seen in bloom.

We also went to a couple of estate sales. This one took the cake.

We visited an arboretum and had fun with a plant identification app on the phone (Picture This, free if you can see the almost invisible “CANCEL” in the upper right corner of the screen each time you open it.)

I attended a celebration of life service for a friend who used to live in Three Rivers. This photo was taken through the window of the pick-’em-up truck (Fernando stayed home) while crossing the Columbia River on the border of Oregon and Washington. That’s Mt. Hood. It looks like Shasta, because that’s just how it is with those volcanoes. 

We also took an afternoon excursion to McMinnville to a store that specializes in olive oil and balsamic vinegars. I lost control. Phenomenal stuff. (I don’t need no stinkin’ Trader Joe’s!)

To be continued tomorrow. . . 

About Mineral King: (CABIN FOLKS, PAY ATTENTION!), the gate code has been changed. CALL AN MKDA BOARD DIRECTOR FOR THE NEW COMBINATION. IT CANNOT BE GIVEN OUT VIA EMAIL, VOICEMAIL OR TEXT.