Hog Wild West

Aki is just filling in the finishing touches to her show at the gallery. Cold frame and our windows are full of anticipation of the harvest in the fall. Bees have new brood just about to hatch. They are busy feeding and they are strong.

From the stillness and quiet.

The spring has begun. The noise level rises as the lake ice recedes. The ice has just left. Now all the birds are back.

You can just make out a bear holler and the thumping of grouse in the bush over the cacophony of sounds coming from the small lake we live on.

There is so much life happening on these small lakes, ponds and wetlands here. It is magnificent, wondrous and precious to us. To anyone. Every child should experience this.

It does set the scene

but is not the point of this blog.

A few posts ago a question was posed to us.

“Hi. Really enjoying reading your blog, but I'm curious about something. What do you do about the wildlife? In other words, don't you worry about bears or wolves or larger predators killing off your chickens or, even worse, being a threat to you? How do you deal with bears and wolves? Aren't they attracted by the garden or the smells from your cooking? I'd really like to know how you handle that”.

A bear walks through our yard in the spring every few years. This winter we had four wolves running and playing on the lake. I was within 100 feet of one. It had no fear, my heart was racing, it had no intention of coming closer.

A young bald eagle attempted to take a chicken one spring. We chased it off. That was 3 years ago and it hasn’t come back. A pair of bald eagles live here. They stand on the tops of tall fir trees.
A weasel killed a couple of pullets last year. Opened their throats and drank their blood. It never came back. We suspect our dogs and cat were on it.

May 7th

He shows up at our place at 9 in the morning looking for 30 missing pigs. No greeting, straight to the point. “Have you seen my pigs?”.

A new neighbour, Brad moved his pigs onto an abandoned homestead about 1.25 kms away, unnervingly close since our closest neighbour until then had been a lone old timer 4 kms away. He doesn't live there just his pigs. We knew Brad’s parents, old timers. His father had been an old time leather artist. In fact he had shown Aki how to braid. They were a nice couple, he died a few years back, she is close to 90 and healthy.

June 20th 2011.
Called for lunch, I came around the corner of our cabin and was confronted by a 400 pound pig… A pig. No idea where it came from at the time. I was dumbfounded but also a bit excited about the prospect of having an easy hunt.

I remembered it must be a neighbour’s pig. What was it doing here?
I yelled at it and tried to get it to move on. It did not move. It just stared at me. Kai and Aki came out the door and we joined together in our hollers. As we bent over to pick rocks it began to move slowly toward the forest and disappeared.

After lunch I went back to work in the shop on the grinder.
With my headset on and leaning into the grinder I could hear yelling. With a start I looked to the door and caught sight of a herd of pigs running by. Three astride and 7 or 8 animals long. 20, 25 pigs.
For the rest of the day we defended our gardens, fruit trees, berry bushes and bees.
We learned that day that dogs have no effect on pigs, pigs don’t give up, even for a grain of rye seed. Breaking into our chicken runs for the seed.
The pigs divided into two fronts. Some 8 or ten half grown pigs, a sow and 3 or 4 adult pigs. The second herd was lead by a huge boar standing at least 4 feet. Then there were a few who seemed to wander between fronts.
We would drive one group off and start on the second and the first would come back. It looked as if we were going to loose a battle at some point. They were getting closer to the gardens. They could smell them I guess.
Kai grabbed his pellet gun and began to hunt them. They didn’t like that. He would hide. Wait and then within 15 feet hit their sides. With their thick skin the landed pellets seemed to have a slight smart pain but was enough to drive them off. So it seemed.

This could happen again. We realized the only reason they left was to get back before dark.
I hiked through the bush toward our new neighbour. All through the bush the pigs had been digging. This man had been ranging his pigs on Crown land. When I got to his place there was no sign of him or any kind of human dwelling. All the pigs were there, in a yard with no pen or fence just one strand of wire with no power running through it. I nailed a note to a post at his covered gated area in plain sight. Could not miss it.

Hi Brad.
Your pigs are trying to get into our gardens.
Could you take care of this please.
Regards,
Aki and Scott

No response
For a few days there was some chain sawing over there. The pigs didn’t come back.

September 16th (harvest)

The boar and 5 adults with a dozen or so smaller piglets.
They were our small apple trees, spent the whole day fighting off pigs. Everything was threatened, carrots, potatoes, cabbage, parsnips, fava beans… we grow enough food in our gardens to sustain ourselves all winter and into the next year. Jam from our berries, sauce from our apples, dried greens from broccoli and kale, sauerkraut and kimchi from cabbage and a full root cellar.
We begin to run out of food in June of the next year timed with the garden production for that next year.
That’s how we live. We spend our time growing our own vegetables and don’t eat a lot of meat.

We had two pellet guns. Both Kai and I hunted them, surprised them and finally they left… Only because it was the end of the day. There was some damage but not a lot. We considered ourselves lucky… had fended them off. For the next three days we harvested everything early. It had been a wet spring and summer so the harvest was ok. It could have been great.

As I said we had known his parents. I decided to visit his mother.
Kai and I drove as far as we could down Brad’s muddy road to leave him a note. Left a sign on a young aspen sapling we fell across his road. We stated he must deal with his pigs or we were going to.
Kai and I continued on, driving to his mother’s some 20kms away.
Good visit. We told her the story and asked if we could meet with him over some dinner if he wanted but definitely do something to keep his pigs away. She understood. She said she saw him two or three times a week and would tell him. I was sure after talking to his mother the issue would be resolved.

No response.

October 22
The pigs terrorized us again. We drove them off 3 times.
We were at the end of our patience.

Winter came. Lots of great sun.

February 16th
I was forging in the shop that morning. Between the hammer blows I could hear someone yelling “hello” in our yard.

When I looked I had no idea who it was. A guy about my age,50, going on about how his friend didn’t return his generator, he had no money, truck wouldn’t start and could he borrow a car battery. Then I realized it was our neighbour Brad.

I gave him the piece of my mind that had kept me up nights. He apologised, told us how hard his life was and said he had gotten rid of most of his pigs and was getting out of the pig business.
We invited him into our cabin, had a coffee and caught up on the neighbourhood gossip.
We lent him our backup battery and drove him to the road into his place. Didn’t want me to come in.
He returned the battery that afternoon

February 28th
Brad showed up again. Needed to borrow the battery again. I was not there. Aki lent it to him.
Three days later he returned it.

April 19th
Two adult pigs are on our road ready to come in. We hit them with a barrage of stones, sticks, pellets and drove them off. According to what Brad had told us the situation was going to end. We could deal with his two pigs.

April 20th

Four adults and 7 or 8 piglets. We are late this time. 8 o’clock in the morning! They have dug up two smaller apple trees, our asparagus patch, the freshly seeded lower garden, damaged the raspberry and blueberry bushes and dug up our lupins and irises. We fought them the rest of the day driving them off at the end of the day.

Now we’re pissed. We’ve given the guy the benefit of a doubt, chances, 5 strikes…we talked to his mother.

We have pictures. We’ve documented the events. How do you sue this guy? We’ll complain to forestry and conservation.

April 21st

Two adults and a piglet show up in the chicken run eating the rye seed. We seed the run, let the rye grow. We hit them again with a barrage of stones, sticks, pellets and drive them off.

April 22nd
Brad shows up at our door at 9 in the morning looking for pigs. I tell him how pissed we are, the damage his pigs have done and now we are going to the authorities. He apologizes and tells me of his hardships. He’s lost some piglets. He’s getting out of raising pigs. It won’t happen again.

April 24th
A truck races down our road. It’s Brad’s truck. Aki is in the sauna, Kai is in his room. It is 8:30 am.
I'm in the cabin.
He yells, he's cursing and sputtering accusing us of stealing his pigs. Tells me the police are on there way.
It was ugly. He says we shouldn’t be here. We’re city slickers (No idea what he is talking about). We’ve got to go.
He demands to look around.
I tell him he is out of line and to get off our property.
As he leaves he tells me if I wasn’t a cripple he’d beat the shit out of me and says he is going to do something.
I’ve a slight balance challenge, no big deal.
Just unnerving. We're dealing with a man who's a bit off balance. Psycopathic Like a drunken stuper.

Living in peace for 15 years in the bush. Since the old timer, 4 kms up the logging road moved away, our next closest neighbour is 9 kms away and then the next is 20 kms away. Now we are 1 km away from disaster.
,

So now the police have a new file.   

We have 36 acres surrounded by crown land. The pigs have been all  like excavating machines.
We figure, time and labour, his pigs have cost us $2,000.
So to answer the question about how we handle situations with wild animals.
We seem to be able to co-habitate with the wild animals around us. We let them pass through, maybe with a nudge. Never would we have thought pigs would be a problem. But of course it's the people who own them.

Life in the bush?

Seems a bit unreal.
                                   Later...

Aki and Scott

http://www.caribooblades.com/

Imagination

The snow melts. Leaving . Started tomato plants, spinach, onions are peeking , chickens are preparing soil in the green house.
Honey bees this year. Modified Warre hives. Just a little bit of honey. For us.

We're at a cusp, Aki and I. This winter was the best ever.

The struggle. Lying on the lake in the soft snow. Thinking.

Winter

We do live in a unique area. In the bush, a couple of kms off a logging road.Complete isolation except for the odd plane or two yet we can journey into Williams Lake for our mail.

It is simple. If it isn't we are doing something wrong.

We plant potatoes in three different patches. Something will probably fail. Frost, hail, bad seed, bugs, mice, moose. We are not the only ones in the bush that like garden fresh vegetables. We`ve done a lot of experimenting. Some great failures. We are dependent on our gardens so we learn.

Plants are amazing. When we've thought they were mortally wounded they`ve come back, almost every time.
What doesn`t kill them (us) will make them (us) stronger in most cases.

After 14 years every sauna we`ve had, somewhere around 1000, has been rejuvenating. Personal hygiene and r&r or when things get tough is when we take a sauna. Aki is making one now. Beautiful sunny day...



For us it has been a process of living with what we need.
Rather than start with everything before we moved in here, we started with nothing and have added little.

It is our fourteenth winter. Most of the catastrophes you can think of have happend. The major ones like death, severe illnesses and accidents haven't. Crop failures, food spoilage, injuries, flooding, vehicle breakdowns etc... have.
Aki and I are heathier and stronger, not to mention more resolute in our convictions than ever. We have a 7 yr old who is thriving. Home schooling, chess and being raised in the forest.


In the past few years on our blog I've described the simple way we've lived with solar power. For 9 years we lived without a computer and internet connection. With a little of today`s technology, like a computer connected to the internet by satellite, and a small cash flow life in the bush is easier.

I suppose it's not for everyone.

Aki and Scott

http://www.caribooblades.com/

Smoke in Our Skies

It's been a spring and summer of sunshine, hot, dry and fires. In the last month smoke from forest fires blocked out the late afternoon sun for a couple of weeks. A forest fire just south of us was 53,000 hectares big. Very high ground water levels. The mosquitoes were extreme and lasted an extra month into August - still a few around.

For Aki, Kai and I it has meant a great harvest. This winter holds a palette of sun dried tomatoes, dried broccoli, cauliflower, broad beans, peas,herbs and kale. Aki is canning pesto, hot pepper jelly, Saskatoon jam etc, etc... .

Every knife and tool we've made this year has been produced with just solar power. We work with the Sun. The Sun basically dictates what we do, how and what we eat, what time we go to sleep, when we wake up, how many movies we watch and in the deep, dark winter, how many emails we can write. We'd much rather be guided by the sun than by Exxon or Shell.
We've been harping about solar power for 15 years to anyone who would listen. Not many were listening but a few were watching. To us it is mind baffling that everyone hasn't a panel or two. We all know the sun.
Today, silicon, which makes up roughly half the cost of making of most solar electric panels, has dropped from $400/kg to $70/kg in one year..... and the silicon Baron's are still making money. Kind of sounds like the oil companies. Right now you can get Sharp panels for 2/3 of what they were a year ago. .


At the time when we moved here we invaded Iraq. Now we're occupying Afghanistan. Sure is a disgraceful situation we find ourselves in. All for a pipeline. All for oil.

Anyone can.
Running your shop on solar electric power is easy. With this system we've run our cabin and shop for 13 years. We started with one panel, 2 batteries and an inverter.
We are 100% solar powered from the end of March until the end of September now. March and October are good for sun energy just not unlimited. We work full time making edged tools. Our power needs decline until December 21st, by the end of February we have the power we need from the sun again. It's December and January when we slow down and burn candles in the evening. If you're connected to a grid there is no fluctuation. We tried to keep up the production for these dark months only to fall behind and get stressed. This year we'll snow shoe, think more, and play more music.

We designed and installed our system. It was fairly easy.
We went with 6 volt golf cart batteries. They are tough (We've frozen them solid and they have come back). These batteries are inexpensive and easy to replace although we haven't had to. 8 batteries and they are all in good shape. Twice a year I'll clean them with baking soda and water, then top off each cell with distilled water.
We've seen people spend lots of money on batteries. You don't have to, tough golf cart batteries are the way to go, especially for a shop. If you live within a grid you don't need batteries.

We have 390 watts of panel. 2 are BP and one is made by Sharp, a 20 amp regulator and we have a 2,500 watt (with a surge of 3,500) inverter we bought at Canadian Tire.

We built a manual tracker. Three panels, framed, on top of a 20 foot steel pole set cemented into the ground. As we work we turn the panels to face the sun.
This has increased our power by 35%.
The tracker put us at the level of power we are satisfied with and gave us a very good ground.--- An excellent ground is really important. Ground your inverter, batteries and panels.

Trick is to work with the sun when it is out. We don't think of it as storing power. Use power when it is there in the sky.
At night we use stored power for light, music, watching movies, and small amp tools.

If you have a steady wind, a wind generator is the way to go.

It's quite amazing once you begin... A different way of seeing. It feels like a breakthrough. Life on another level. Being responsible for your own power instead of being forced to be part of the crime. We are all, in this part of the world, part of a crime.

Questions like, "what do you do when the sun's not out", or statements like, "solar panels are made by oil energy" seem true enough in an all or nothing way. When the sun's not out we relax. The real cost to the environment of a panel is paid off in as little as 5 years. Life is saved. Solar electric panels are guaranteed for 25 years.

Electric cars are a boondoggle unless you plug into the sun. Electric anything, otherwise your plugging into oil, coal and nuclear reactors.

Living with the sun as the source of power, growing your own food, taking time to think, taking only what you need and most of all being empathetic, not psychopathic.

http://www.caribooblades.com/

Entitlement

We both grew up on middle class streets in Canadian cities during the 60's and 70's. Gas was 35 cents a gallon. Electricity was almost free. Water was free.
During that time I watched my father convert our whole backyard into a garden with fruit trees. After reinsulating the roof and upgrading the windows, he plumbed in an 80 gallon preheating tank beside the furnace which received cold city water before entering the hot water tank, put a wood stove in the basement and plumbed it into the central heat, cut and dug a small root cellar off the basement. Our house was an average looking house on a city block but way more efficient. That was 40 years ago. If he was still alive he'd have at least a solar array on the roof and a heat pump in the cellar.


Following that patriarchal line, he was doing what his father and mother did. They did what my great grandparents had taught them. My great, great grandparents were pioneers and they did what they had to do to survive in a rugged environment.
The environment cannot be denied. All lines do lead to the same... survival. Our environment is everything.


Like so many boys of my generation, I didn't get to know my father because he died young. Heart attack. Doing all kinds of stuff for the environment and feeding everybody he could...didn't take care of himself. He was 56. Aki's dad died of stomach cancer when he was 47. Looking for a better life for their children, Aki's parents brought the family over from Japan in the 60's. The only "ethnic" family in their suburban neighbourhood. Aki was one of three Japanese-Canadians in her high school of 1200 students.

Shaking off our sense of entitlement.
By the second year we knew we were onto something but still a long way off. Now 16 years later we're still settling in and are just plain sad that more people aren't living this way. It is simple. Working with nature. More healthy physical work. Breathing fresh air, drinking fresh water. We grow all our own  vegetables, keep bees and keep chickens for meat and eggs. We know the organic farmers who raise the pork we savour over winter.

There are people doing this in the cities. Small , large backyards and container vegetable gardens...

for healthy food.

Eating fresh food, drinking fresh water and breathing fresh air, of course, is possible in the cities.


Nancy and Rosa's gardens in the lower mainland.

We initially came here for the same reasons that anyone would have.

We separated the compressor and condenser from the backside of our freezer, carefully bending the copper tubing so that it is away from the freezer.  Our Sears freezer is a bad design. Heating while you're trying to freeze. So much of this society is designed with the assumption of entitlement to cheap, unlimited and uninterrrupted power and resources. Separating just the motor will make a big difference. We throw a duvet over the freezer when it's not on.. Huge difference. We haven't had a fridge for 13 years. Between the freezer, pantry and root cellar we don't need one. We don't have a basement but our pantry floor is not insulated. From September until May the bottom shelf in the pantry keeps things cool. The root cellar always keeps things cool. An old sixty gallon water tank thermal cycling through our wood cook stove is like having a second wood heater and supplies us with hot water. A small green house off the south wall of our small house heats up for vented heat into the house, and supplies greens earlier and later in the season for us. For our power we've 416 watts of panel, a 30 amp controller, 8 - 6 volt heavy deep cycle batteries and a 1750 inverter. With cable, wire and connections, $3000 Canadian for everything.  A second 12 volt system for the water pump, a couple kitchen lights, pantry light and music we have 2 - 12 volt deep cycle batteries charged by a 50 watt panel, no contoller. This system is almost 17 and working fine. One battery is 17 the other is 12 years old. Maintainance is key.  These systems have paid for themselves at least 4 or 5 times.
The newest stat I've read is that the real cost of a solar panel operating in ideal circumstances is paid for in 5 years of operation financially and environmentally. In the city there is the huge advantage of being able to tie directly into the grid, eliminating the need for batteries. So many possibilities.

We went a little watt heavy as far as panel:battery ratio. During the dark months of January and December when the batteries get low repeatedly I'll sometimes disconnect 2 of the batteries to make it easier to break down the batteries' resistance to accept a charge. I found that reading a bit about batteries and 12 v (DC) was a good thing. From March until September power is not an issue here. We run our cabin and a small shop without any sacrifice. Working with the sun is the key.  We really live by the sun. For a couple of years it was an adjustment living off grid... now we wouldn`t live any other way.

Nancy Brignall and George Rammell's web sites, http://www3.telus.net/4.
Mike Edwareds and Rosa Quintana, www.rosaquintanalillo.com and http://mikeedwardsart.com
Together they're changing their neighbourhoods. Sites of art and rejuvenation.

Our site,

http://www.caribooblades.com/

We humans excel at adjusting, adjusting, adapting - until we almost completely forget how we used to do things... Forget what we've done, forget what we're doing. Forget where we're going.
Aki and Scott                        

 www.caribooblades.com

* It's an updated blog.

Don Quixote

Aki is reading Don Quixote. Every day or so she gives Kai and I an update on Don's exploits.

Reminds me a bit of Notes From the Underground by Dostoevsky in the way that you almost want to close your eyes before it happens again. Before Quixote attacks again, donning his barber's basin. Before the underground man delves deeper into the depths of human despair and humiliation.

 Two stories more opposite to each other.



Our shop in the evening.

Thinking one's onto something when everyone else thinks you're insane.

A tragic folly? Interesting to consider these two stories from our little spot in the bush, with no curtains on our windows. Here we are thinking we are perfectly sane...

We are 43 dozen eggs ahead of ourselves.

Most winters our chickens take it easy and almost come to a halt in egg production.

During one of the cold spells, one of the chickens decided to go out for a stroll, found a nice spot under our work truck, and found herself frozen to the ground. That evening when we went to close up the coop we discovered we were missing one, went looking but couldn't find her. The next morning (-26 C) Kai found her under the truck, clucking softly. It took several buckets of warm water and an evening in a box infront of the woodstove, but she seems to have recovered completely.

We are eating a lot of eggs.

The temperatures of Winters past.

Some Chilcotin neighbours say 30 years ago it would hold at -40 C for weeks and dip to -50, -60 some nights.

I found that the wood stove door became a regular workbench for me.

The beast that plows our road.

We don't feel insane but are still trying to understand the point.

http://www.caribooblades.com/

Just put in our seed order for the spring. Hope springs eternal.

Reflection

With freezing rain soaking the foot of snow on the ground we are .....“slushed in”.

Trees are falling over from the weight of ice.

I was 36 and Aki was 32. Until then life had been easy. Both coming from middle class families. I had a career in film, Aki as an artist. We knew we could do anything we wanted, how lucky we had been to be born on the planet in the situations we were in.

We both had the same yearning to live the way we live now.

We loaded up the school bus and moved into the bush in the spring of 1997. When the money ran out that fall the camping trip was over. That is when our survival started.

We had our first roast rabbit feast at about this time 12 years ago by candle light and accompanied by our rosehip-bearberry-rice wine.
We had 7 snares, a squirrel pole and 2 bird traps set.
Two chickens, one laying. We kept them at night in an apple box on the porch of our cabin.
Iraq was refusing U.S. weapons inspectors.


Moose everywhere. Wolves were close.
Lots of clear nights. The moon was so bright it was hard to sleep. Aurora Borealis.
The sauna was one of our first projects . We took lots of saunas that winter. Saunas and homemade wine got us through a few winters.

Rabbits - we ate rabbits, rabbit stew, rabbit curry, teriyaki rabbit, hare soup, roast hare.
By the end of the winter we could snare rabbits very effectively. For some reason rabbits seem to want to be caught, we just have to help them a bit.

We skied on the lake, snowshoed, read, painted and wrote. Drank lots of home made wine, hauled water from the lake, hauled and melted snow, cut and split wood, hunted for our food and thought about what we had got ourselves away from. No idea, at the time, where we were heading except that we were tasting freedom…. Just ahead of us. We would run into its dulcet smell, stop to savor its taste and it would disappear.

Sounds like a good time but there were some rough spots.
We both got “fall down couldn’t get back up sick”. It was between -30 and -40 for two weeks. Truck wouldn’t start. Everything was freezing.

One day it went to zero degrees, sun came out. El Nino had kicked in. Within a week or two we were outside in our t-shirts.

Determined we were.

I = E x R and P = E x I

www.caribooblades.com