Mountain Musings: On Maintenance

Mountain Musings – A guest column by Dottie Simmons who lives in eastern Humboldt County describes life at her rural homestead:

Mountain Musings long Dottie Simmons

We often comment on how this homestead life is a ‘High Maintenance Lifestyle’. You cannot live like this in a remote rural area unless you are adaptable and self-reliant. While community is a big part of it, much of the time, and on a daily basis, everything that needs upkeep depends on you.

We are fortunate that there are two of us and, while getting along in years, we are both capable and between us cover a wide spectrum of skills. AND that we keep a supply of spare parts on hand!

At any rate, the maintenance often is far from the general day-to-day upkeep of food and shelter, water and power, animals and humans. And even the smallest thing can set off a domino effect of repairs and tasks. For instance…

During the wind and rain of this past week a branch broke off an oak tree and landed on our deer fence. It tugged on the fence about 20 feet from a big gate and pulled *just enough* to angle the gate support *just enough* to loosen where the gate latches *just enough* for a critter to nose it open. I noticed it while walking the dogs and doing morning rounds. Gate was opened inward, but no unexpected animals were anywhere within the fenced area I could see.

A short time later, when trying to leave to attend an event our electronic gate would not open.  Upon inspection we saw the control box and antenna that receives the signal to open it were catty-wumpus on the post they were mounted on. That’s odd. As if something had tried to climb the post or? My partner, master of all things electronic, straightened it out and got it to open so I went and tried to leave again… and it would not open. He went back up, got it to open and I left.

He busied himself sawing up the fallen branch and removing it from the fence and straightening the brace and gate (Yay! More dry oak firewood!), and when I got back… the gate wouldn’t open. Not from the keypad not from the remote. Finally I got it to open when I was right up to it.

So back up to the gate controls and a wider inspection of what was happening.

Apparently a deer had been the critter that came in after the branch loosened the gate. It wandered up the hill and found itself inside the fence. Something must have spooked it as, instead of going back down towards the open gate (and our house, cars, dogs, etc) it decided it had to escape from that corner and in the process of figuring out how to get over the 8 foot fence tore out the wire connecting the antenna to the control box and knocked the bricks off the battery box and pulled everything crooked. It seems to have found a vantage point on a steep part of the hill where it could jump over the section of fence on the downhill part, leaving some tufts of hair behind. Our little Black-tail Deer must be part Gazelle!

What we WERE going to do that day will wait for tomorrow… by the time all the repairs were done and the wood was cut and loaded in the trailer there was no time for other projects. So often we suffer from ‘Red Queen Syndrome’ here.

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” – Lewis Carroll, ‘Through The Looking Glass

Some days it really feels like that. We are just glad it isn’t every day!