B005S8O7YE EBOK (35 page)

The next time I looked up, the stars were in a completely different configuration than when I had first arrived. My fingers were wrinkled, I was much too warm, and Joyce was undoubtedly keen to get back to her cabin.

I was just beginning to climb out when Rick pulled me back in.

R
ick and Che left early the next morning. I didn’t stay long enough to find out whether they bagged whatever it was they were hunting. On Monday afternoon I said goodbye to Joyce, loaded the kids and our gear into our sturdy Jeep Wagoneer, and drove back to Robie Creek. With Molly now in second grade and Levi in kindergarten, every weekday morning I walked the children up the hill to catch the yellow school bus to Idaho City, and every afternoon I waited at the top of the hill for their safe return. Back in the double-wide I admired the kids’ crayon drawings and Molly’s workbook pages with motherly love and supportive compliments. I attached their drawings to the refrigerator with magnets with a folksy kitchen theme that I’d found at a grocery store in Boise.

Toward the end of September, Rick Sorensen called to say that he was on his way to Boise. I invited him to visit me at Welcome Home. He arrived with John, a medium-sized tricolor canine of unknown origin. On a walk up Ashton Creek the next day Rick told me that he and his girlfriend were breaking up. He had worked out a deal with Scott Harris to fix up one of the old cabins at Burgdorf
in exchange for being allowed to live rent-free in that cabin over the winter. Then he asked if I would consider bringing Levi and Molly and spending the winter with him. It didn’t take me long to decide. I had already been thinking about a change of location, I liked Rick, and it would be an extraordinary adventure. The fact that we would be snowed in from November to April was less a deterrent than an incentive.

The next three years turned out to be an unparalleled learning experience for all four of us, though it’s fair to say that the memories my Larkey children have of that period are somewhat less pleasant than mine. They were young, and they missed their father. My forcing yet another Rick on them as the predominant male figure in their daily lives wasn’t easy for them. While I recall those three years as alternately peaceful, adventurous, frustrating, educational, challenging, and fun, my children would probably add “disempowering” to the list.

One thing it was not was boring.

With our ability to live at Burgdorf dependent on the whim of the owners, I became keenly aware of every moment as something to be fully experienced and treasured. Our stay could come to an end at any time, and when it did, it could never be replicated. That fall we continued to get our drinking water from the campground spigot. We filled several large containers and hauled them up the road to our cabin in a rusty red wagon with wobbly wheels. When there was too much snow on the ground for the wagon, we hauled the containers on a plastic sled using a rope of braided orange baling twine. Molly and Levi took turns pulling and riding on the plastic sled and another sled roughly the same vintage as Rosebud that we’d found in the old hotel. After the Forest Service drained the campground pipes for the winter, we chopped through the ice on the little creek that flowed through the campground and filled our containers directly from the creek with a large ladle. No one
ever camped upstream in the winter, so we figured the water was potable.

We washed our bodies, clothes, and dishes at the pool, though not all in the same water. We used biodegradable soap to wash ourselves at the lower end of the big pool. Then we rinsed off with a bucket below the pool. Our washing machine/automatic dishwasher was a huge round washtub that previous residents had placed beneath a vigorous stream of water that flowed continuously out of a large pipe at the lower end of the main pool.

We stacked our dirty dishes in a white five-gallon bucket that stood in the corner of our cabin. When the bucket was full, the next time we headed for the pool we brought the dirty dishes with us on a wagon or a sled, according to season. We put the dishes in the washtub below the pool, added biodegradable soap, scrubbed the dishes with a brush, then dumped the dirty water and put the dishes under a smaller pipe that bypassed the pool with clean water originating in one of the upper pools too hot for people to bathe in. By the time we’d finished washing ourselves, our geothermally heated gravity-powered automatic dishwasher had finished washing the dishes. We used a similar technique for laundry and squeezed excess water from the clothes using an ancient hand-cranked wringer in a shed next to the washtub. Then we hauled the wrung-out clothes back up to our cabin and hung them on a line above the stove to dry. It was astonishingly efficient considering that we had no electricity. We didn’t know the term then, but we were leaving a minimal carbon footprint.

Our cabin was heated with wood. At night we lit candles and kerosene lamps with glass chimneys and read by the light of a Coleman lantern. Levi and Molly slept in the loft in sleeping bags. Rick and I slept in a bed in the main part of the cabin under flannel sheets, several layers of wool blankets, and a buffalo robe that Rick had used in his teepee. We acquired a cat to keep the
mice (and by extension, their droppings) under control. We also acquired another dog, a Lab-shepherd mix. In a tip of the hat to Rick’s Norwegian ancestry we named him Thor and pronounced it “Tor.” John and Thor kept the cat under control and the cat kept the mice under control. We didn’t have to worry about cars, so our pets were free to chase each other in a safe, open environment. The remaining residents at Welcome Home took care of my horses. Rick’s horses wintered in a town called Cascade at a lower elevation than mile-high Burgdorf with its short grazing season. We kept a couple of goats in the barn for milk. Milking goats twice a day is considered a chore, but I found it satisfying to perform this service both to the goats and to the half of my family that drank the milk. While Rick and I liked goat milk, my children emphatically did not.

We had no phone, no two-way radio, and, in 1978, no email. We communicated with the rest of the world by ski-mail. Visitors on cross-country skis brought our mail, and we sent messages and mail out with them or other skiers. Sometimes a neighbor would snowmobile in and pick up or deliver supplies. We kept up with current events through a radio powered by two alternate twelve-volt car batteries that our neighbor periodically charged for us. In some ways our life at Burgdorf was complicated, but in other ways it was simple. Living this way brought everything down to basics.

Let me see. Was there anything I could add that might make it even better?

What about another job?

Our isolation left me no choice but to homeschool the children. At first I had tried to work with the Idaho City public school and send assignments back and forth, but mail delivery was too erratic. Then I inquired at the McCall elementary school, where one of the teachers suggested I sign up for homeschooling. The Calvert School offered an accredited program used by American
diplomats abroad and other families who either needed or chose to teach their children at home. Developed and refined by respected educators, Calvert’s curriculum had been proven worthy over time and was flexible enough to allow for sporadic mail.

It was mostly I who taught Levi and Molly during the three school years we lived at Burgdorf. The curriculum included the three R’s, which I had always thought of as a child’s first lesson in misspelling: reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic. It also included music, mythology, and mycology as well as astronomy, biology, geography, history, French, and Spanish. The books they sent captured not only my children’s interest but also my own. After we had covered the required course materials on a given day I allowed the kids’ questions to expand the discussion. Often Rick chimed in with his own knowledge and opinions.

I loved teaching. My original career plan had been to teach, but until I homeschooled my own children I’d had no idea how enriching it could be. We were all thirsty for information, and together we drank it in. I believed then, and still believe, that the most important thing a teacher can convey to his or her students is a love of learning. Though difficult to test, a pupil’s love of learning is the key to mastery of any subject. I saw and encouraged that in my own two pupils, and I was confident that they were receiving a high-quality, if somewhat unconventional education.

Calvert’s curriculum was designed to be taught for three hours every weekday morning for 180 days. This would leave afternoons free for activities such as helping out on the family farm or doing other chores. In our family, afternoon activities included skiing or swimming, which we put under the heading of physical education. When I saw that Molly and Levi were learning so much so quickly that they were reluctant to end the school day, we began doubling up on lessons. Sometimes we covered two sessions in a day by including a break for lunch and then another hour or two of study
before P.E. On this schedule we were able to complete the work of an entire school year by March. And though we were physically isolated, we learned a lot from the people from various parts of the world who came to Burgdorf and shared stories with us around a stove in someone’s cabin or at the pool. This gave the children a much broader perspective than they might have received from a more traditional school experience.

Although I took some liberties with the recommended schedule, I was scrupulous about the rules when it came to learning and testing. I made sure that I taught every last detail of the required material. More to the point, I made sure that my pupils
learned
every last detail of the required material. I conducted the tests according to Calvert’s rules as strictly as if my children’s lives depended on it, which, in many important ways, they did. Perhaps the best evidence that homeschooling wasn’t deleterious to my children is that Molly graduated cum laude from Columbia University, and several years later Levi earned a Ph.D. from the University of Texas. My older female relatives would have enjoyed hearing me introduce my son as “
Doctor
Larkey.”

I may or may not have been a good teacher, but my pupils were fantastic learners.

W
ith no television, we tuned in to the weather. Not the weather
report
; I mean the actual weather. I needed to know what to wear to the barn to milk the goats in the morning, or which boots the children should put on to sled down the driveway behind our cabin, though the latter probably didn’t matter since the boots inevitably came off.

Cross-country skiwear decisions were less difficult. We’d simply put on lots of layers and remove or add them according to need. However, with wax-based cross-country skis, determining which wax to use was particularly challenging. We had a shoebox with tins of wax ranging from white through shades of blue and green to yellow and red. There was also something called klister, literally meaning “paste” in Norwegian. Its use often resulted in snow sticking to our skis in huge clumps. I
prayed
that conditions wouldn’t require the use of klister. In order to select the right wax, not only did we need to know the weather, but we needed to know the difference between fresh, old, warm, or cold snow and snow with high or low water content. And we needed to know how quickly the conditions for which we had just waxed would be obsolete as soon as we skied out of the shade into the sun.

Above our kitchen table was a horizontal picture window approximately five feet by three that offered a view of Burgdorf Meadow, the mountains around it, and the sky. Having already spent some years in the backcountry, Rick was astonishingly accurate in predicting the weather, which included, in the winter of 1978–79, sunny and cold, sunny and colder, thick soft flakes of snow, sleet, and, during one particularly windy blizzard, snowing sideways. Usually when it was cloudy or snowing the temperature rose to just below freezing, around 31°F. Rick explained that this was because the cloud cover kept the warmth of the earth from rising above the clouds. On clear nights the temperature plummeted to somewhere between –10° and –25°F, but after the sun came up it rose to double digits above zero. The lowest temperature during my three winters at Burgdorf was –45°F, a temperature that is exactly the same number in both Fahrenheit and Celsius. Temperatures between –20° and –45°F were a frequent occurrence in late December and January. But not every day in January was cold. Every year we enjoyed a few days of Chinooks—warm winds that, in contrast with 45 below, made me feel as if I were in Hawaii.

With our road vehicles parked at a friend’s house in McCall, we kept a couple of snowmobiles at Burgdorf in case of emergency. Sometimes I rode into town for supplies and to call friends and family. I always felt more secure scheduling such trips to coincide with those of our neighbor who lived six miles away and could fix anything mechanical with little more than duct tape and a wire hanger. Toward the end of one such trip, while I was waiting in town for my neighbor to finish the last of his errands, I decided to call a friend in L.A. who had expressed concern about my decision to move to the backcountry. After all I had been through with Rick Evers, she was afraid that I had jumped into a different kind of insanity. As I stood in a phone booth and dialed the number, I watched the lights coming on around Payette Lake as the short winter day began to give way to the long night.

I was as glad to hear my friend’s voice as she was to hear mine. After responding to my question about what was going on in her life, she asked how I was doing. Shifting from one foot to the other in the increasingly cold phone booth, I enumerated all the things I was doing and how much I was enjoying them until I ran out of steam. My friend paused and then spoke.

“You hike up to an outhouse first thing in the morning, then you haul your family’s drinking water from the creek. No matter how cold it is, you go to the barn every morning to milk the goats, and do it again at night. You chop wood, tan hides, mend clothes, grind wheat by hand, bake your own bread, teach your children, and last week you, Rick, and the kids skied twelve miles round trip to visit Rick’s brother.”