Inever would have imagined that seven years after we got married, Erika and I would be shoehorning ourselves and the kids - Molly, nearly 3, and Jack, nearly three months - into a 200-square-foot cabin in southwestern Manitoba for a whole year.
Last November, my cousin wrote me a letter and asked how I ever persuaded Erika to do this with me. Actually, it was her idea. Neither of us is an adventuresome, outdoorsy type. Ever since I was a kid, I have always preferred staying inside with pencils and paper rather than being outside with trees and bugs.
This morning, when I stepped out on the deck just after sunrise and was greeted by the sweet scents of fresh rain, hawthorn, lilac and chokecherry blossoms and a chorus of robins, blackbirds, crows, sparrows, finches and mourning doves, I thought the same thing I have thought
every day for the past 11½ months: I can't believe we live here. Sometimes it's an aching complaint, sometimes a hearty cheer; usually it's a bit of both.
I grew up on a farm in Alberta and Erika grew up on the property where the cabin is, but both of us had been away from rural living for nearly 15 years. Before our move to the cabin, we had spent five years in Vancouver. I attended Regent College and Erika worked as a nurse at Vancouver General Hospital.
We lived in East Vancouver, known for its ethnic and cultural diversity, one-of-a-kind restaurants and pot smokers and hand drummers in the playground. We moved to Kola, Man., a 3½-hour drive west of Winnipeg, population 50 - mostly conservative Mennonites and German immigrants.
The little cabin is beautiful. Erika's dad finished it about 10 years ago, built it all himself, including the fireplace made of Tyndall stone and fieldstone near the back of the room. It's tiny, but Erika set up an excellent little kitchen, and we've squeezed in a rocking chair, a desk, two bookshelves, a dresser, a big toy box, a bench and a table, which hasn't left much room for Jack to learn to crawl or for Molly to dance. The four of us sleep in a tiny loft.
It's a beautiful, cozy place, but it is primitive. No indoor plumbing and an extension cord worth of electricity, enough for a two-burner hot plate, a 1.25-cubic-foot fridge and a radio/CD player.
There's an outhouse about 20 metres out into the trees to the west, which seemed an awfully long way when the wind chill bottomed out one night in January at -60 C. A cistern provides water for washing and we haul our drinking water from town. We've burned nearly 1,000 candles, and my father-in-law and I have cut more than four cords of wood, all by hand. Woodcutting gets my vote for the most satisfying physical labour a body can do.
One of our reasons for coming here was to get closer to our food. Erika and I are part of a generation that's almost entirely disconnected from growing anything that goes into our mouths, and lately that's been making us nervous. We moved here in July, so we missed out on last year's planting, but my in-laws' garden was on its way.
Last fall, Erika and I canned applesauce, dill pickles, tomatoes, salsa, rhubarb sauce, saskatoon jam, plum jam, chokecherry jelly and wild raspberry jam. We froze apple slices, corn, rhubarb, saskatoons, apple juice and chokecherry juice, and we dug up about 200 kilos of potatoes from my in-laws' garden.
This spring, we tapped a handful of the Manitoba maples that grow around the yard and turned 170 litres of sap into a dozen or so jars of rich, golden syrup.
Besides fresh fruit and vegetables from the garden - the 100-metre diet - I've hand milled wheat from the neighbours to make flour. Our eggs come from chickens owned by an older couple in Kola, our farmer sausage from a local man who smokes his own meat, and I've made homemade mozzarella a few times.
We are trying most of these things for the first time - growing, harvesting, preserving - but we did fine. We've managed to float by on minimal income.
Some of our reasons for coming here were a bit more abstract: we wanted to live a spartan existence to try to distinguish more clearly between our wants and our needs; to "fast" from convenience to help deepen our appreciation for what we have; to force ourselves to be more conscious of our consumption and waste.
Erika and I both want to learn to live well, which is never an easy thing, especially now, in our culture of endless consumption and global environmental degradation. Neither of us are radical enough for all-out, John Seymour-style self-sufficiency, nor are we preparing for some big post-oil social implosion that forces everyone back to primitive ways of living. Our year in the cabin is a kind of experiment.
But what does a year away mean for the years to come? What practices do we take with us to the city? Maybe we should dig an outhouse behind our apartment, or plow the front lawn or the boulevard and plant crops of potatoes and corn. I'm tempted to plan a movies/books/music binge, having been almost entirely disconnected from a year's worth of new releases. But part of the reason for coming here was to detangle my life from the pressure of knowing what's new and cool. How will we reintegrate? I don't know.
It has been a rich time - one of the hardest and best years of my life - and I will miss this place terribly. But I'm breathing a sigh of relief knowing that it's nearly over.
Kurt Armstrong lives in Kola, Man.
