Off-grid is one of those loaded words that often comes with a lot of baggage. It is often associated with very remote country, wilderness a long ways from civilization and it’s power lines. People think Alaska or Montana, not up a driveway, off a country road in Upstate NY. People think everything must be do-it-yourself, that there is a willful ignorance and avoidance of permits and following the state building code — which exists primarily to protect the owners and occupants in the structure they live in and the environment it resides within.
The thing is it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a fair amount of affordable rural property on the border of deep rural in Upstate NY without going deep rural. Deep rural, a concept a dairyman once told me about, is the land beyond ordinary commuting distance to a large metropolitan area. There is rural property, some fairly remote and some just offset from other residences by terrain and farmland that doesn’t have neighbors right up to you. Maybe not wilderness, but also not suburban. Having a house offset from the road and not hooked to power poles doesn’t requires wilderness, it just requires determination and some thought by prospective home builders and their future owners.
Maybe its better to call it a solar house or green living. Even a cabin suggests something that isn’t primarily residential, and is excessively primitive like you might live in the bush of Alaska or during hunting season. Of course, green living is a misnomer, because if anything the long commute is likely to bolster your carbon footprint, to say nothing of waste production in form of quickly junked automobiles. But certainly using solar and wood as your primary household energy sources, has some green virtues. But I’m not considering anything too far out there or unconventional — still want running water, hot showers, and flush toilets, if only to appease town officials to expedite permitting. Plus I’m a professional who needs to be able to be clean before work, and I don’t want to get sick from contaminated water, like I did as a child from my parent’s shallow well, which was unfortunately down-gradient from septic leach field. I’m glad such a set up would not be permitted these days, as a little child I could have died from drinking bacteria-contaminated water — in rural Upstate New York in the 1980s.
Do American building and health codes encourage wastefulness and consumerism? To a certain extent yes, though by far they are about protecting your own well-being. You can and should build greener, but also respect what professionals have determined, and what the codes require to ensure your own health and well being, while minimizing pollution and safety risks from the place you seek to call home.
Not hiking today as I want to get to camp and get set up before the wind picks up later and the chance of lake effect snow showers blowing west becomes too great.
Just a little more, go to the bathroom, then north I will head. ⬆️Taking the Northway rather then NY 30 as it’s likely to be snow free and your farther east so less chance of Lake Effect. I need to stop on the way up north to get more bananas 🍌 and more importantly milk. 🐮 I actually might be fine without bananas but I need milk for the coffee. Then I also need fuel as I have less then a 1/4 tank left.
Tomorrow honestly looks like the best day for hiking and riding, 🚲 so that is likely what I will spend the balance of tomorrow doing. Sunday looks cold and snowy but I will probably spend that day in camp. Monday I’ll break camp, hopefully without too much shoveling deep snow and ice, then head south. Supposed to not be so snowy on Monday, I’m thinking I’ll do some of the short hikes around Warrensburg and then drive home in the evening.
I got my 10 November borrows out on Hoopla 📚 along with a bunch of other books and audio books on Libby. Looking forward to having a lot of good listens and reads while I’m up north. While I usually wait to the last day of the month to get my monthly reads, I figure I may not have cell service until December 1st on Monday when I come home, and then I’ll have ten books/audio books to enjoy both at camp and the next 3 weeks. Then I can either get more books on Hoopla from my December borrows or Libby. I kind of feel guilty getting all these Hoopla borrows, realizing now that the library pays $1 to $3 per book you borrow to the publisher, but then again I do pay a lot in taxes 💰 and I do enjoy the reads. It’s actually not a terrible deal for the local library, as it’s likely cheaper to just rent the books that are rarely read compared to popular titles where it’s cheaper to get a number of licenses for people to read the individual book.
It will be great to be off the grid for a few days. 🔕 Things are too crazy 🤪 in America and I want time to read 📖 and think in the beauty and cold of the winter Adirondacks. There is so much to be upset about these days but it will be remote without even a FM radio. 📻 But the cold ❄️ and quiet will feel great.
Off to camp in the great frigid north! To see how this goes. It will be great!
The false warning on my phone said on it screen, false in the sense that any snow we get in Delmar won’t stick or make the roads slick as it’s 39 degrees out. I got home from my parents house around 6 PM, took in a deep breath of air, tasted the silage, the cows at Preska’s Dairy must have gotten their Thanksgiving Dinner.
I was fun seeing the family all together for Thanksgiving Dinner, my sister, brother-in-law, nephew and neice, mom and dad. 👨👨👦 Who knows if we will ever have another get together like this again. Mom and Dad insisted on doing all the cooking, though more then a few ingredients were store-bought pre-made but the different dishes they made were over two dozen. 🍽️ I eat modestly, but it helped that I had a bunch of pea soup before heading over, so my stomach was pretty full – and I skipped desert in part because of paper plates, but also because I felt full and didn’t reveal in the idea of all junk in apple pie or ice cream after all fats and salts in Thanksgiving dinner.
It was nice, as you just never know how long this all will last. ⌛ Old age and ultimately death seem impossibly far off until it happens. Time is like that. I know from watching the passing of John Wolcott, and before then Frank Skartados. I dumped my compost bucket full of two weeks of scraps in my parents pile, 🍏 and walked past the old goat barn and shed full of junk, dreamed what it would be like if I some day took over the operation. It’s not much land, but I could see adding solar, livestock, garden, have fires within reason but nothing too stinky or nasty, it’s New York and a residential neighborhoods. ☀️ 🐐 I don’t know if I really want it, but I doubt my sister wants it with her house and family in Saratoga, and I got to live somewhere, even if I’d to eventually want to move out to the wilderness, in an open carry state with relaxed burn laws and no near neighbors. 🔥
Getting home, I decided to crack open a beer and smoke some weed. 🍻 Not like me to do at home, but I used Thanksgiving as an excuse. I kind of wanted to clear my mind. Ithought it it would make me more creative ont he blog, and I have most of the stuff done needed for tonight. 💼 And I had a lot to think about, with this potentially being one of the last full family get together, not that anyone wait such a word. Got my clothes unpacked after washing at my parents house, even though in my stupidity I was there longer then expected 👚 as I forgot to turn on the washing machine. Water containers are full and loaded, as is my camera, snow shovel, road salt and other essentials. I checked the oil yesterday, fixed the license plate light, and other things. I also plan to shortly start packing the clothes, but I’ll wait for morning to do pots and pans as I might use them for cooking in the morning. Same thing with my other personal gear.
Truth is I am a bit concerned about the winter storm 🌨️ and Lake Effect that keeps on the models. 3-5 inches isn’t a deal breaker, even with a few inches of snow on the ground with my big jacked up truck. And indeed some forecasts show less. I am planning on camping near a state highway, and I have a snow shovel and salt, axe and saw, and despite being in the remote Adirondack wilderness, I should be fine once I’m up to camp. Little worried about snow squals driving up, but I’ll get there early, and set up, so if necessary I can drive slow or abandoned the trip if there is too much snow already on the ground, or the roads. Come Sunday, the way I look at iot’s not the first snowstorm I’ve camped in, and if it’s windy, 🌬️ it might be a cold and less then pleasant night, but come Monday the state highway should be cleared with the road salt and it should be a fine ride home, especially with temperatures at or above freezing. If the forecast gets dramatically worse for Sunday, I’ll come home on Saturday after hiking and biking, but I’d rather camp through the snow storm. I certainly don’t want to be on the roads on Sunday.
It will be good to be away from it all. I don’t think I’ll have cell service up there, 📱 and I don’t have a radio except in my truck. But I have podcasts, audio books, and Youtube videos to listen to up at camp. I’m trying to stay off Facebook to no more then 30 minutes a day, I intentionally set that limit so to force myself to read and think more. Even if it’s just thumbing through news and other magazines on Libby or Hoopla, I think it’s far less brain 🧠 rot then Facebook causes. Even reading the NY Times at unhealthy levels, is far better then social media. Doesn’t make me so angry or want to start a flame war in the comments. ✊ Got to control my anger at the shit our country is going through. Likewise, I think watching YouTube videos on things like homesteading or farming – especially full length ones – or even technical topics such as programming or how things work, 📺 is far less bad for my mind then what social media has become. I may make this a permanent habit to limit my Facebook use to less then 30 minutes a day.
Why the hell did it have to happen, except for the ego of the nation’s president? The National Guardsman could have been safely home in West Virginia, there is no crisis in Washington DC exception the delusions of one man who sits the nation’s highest office. Of course, similar things could have been said about other war mongering presidents, such as Lyndon Johnson or George W. Bush. Maybe not delusions in the strictest sense, but certainly motivated reason.
War messes with people’s minds, especially those who are sent overseas to fight and kill. Murdering your fellow citizen, even for what is called a just cause, is anti-human, it messes with your brain, accepting terrible things are normal and neccessary. We can only think that Afghan Veteran who worked with the US in fighting the Taliban, not only was a person of great valour but had his sense of good and evil warped the evil of war. Who knows what he was thinking, but he had to be horrified as many Americans seeing the National Guard marching on our streets, as seeing the Taliban march on the streets of Afghanistan. A confused hero brought back in flashbacks to a troubled land, as our own country is very troubled by our current nation’s leaders.
Let us not forget how unnecessary the war on Afghanistan really was – or at least the extent we fought it for over two decades – at the cost of thousands of American lives. Maybe we needed to shutdown and disrupt or at least reduce the threat of Al Queada attacks, as September 11th was horrific, but we took many more lives then were necessary, and fought far more of an extensive war when we should have been mission-driven, and in and out quickly without the war lingering on for decades. The National Guardsman who were likely fatally injured in DC, weren’t even born when the War in Afghanistan started, they would have had no idea that a quarter century later they would end up as victims, in the most horrible string of events.
The National Guard primarily provides assistance in times of natural disaster, along with other disasters such as the pandemic or on the off-chance America was attacked or significant civil disorder exists on our streets. They aren’t local police forces, though previous presidents have sent them overseas to support combat troops, as they became stretched thin with the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. But with those wars now in our nation’s past, who would have thought some young and women, stepping up to serve their communities would land up in the path of a bullet in Washington DC from a deranged Afghanistan Veteran?
There aren’t a lot of good choices for people who want to live in rural or small town communites. Even with a trade or an advanced degree, people don’t have a lot of money in much of Appalachia to hire you. At this writing, we don’t know where the young man or women hailed from, but if it’s like most of West Virginia, it’s likely a poor and remote hollar, a rag-tag farm or homestead, or a dialopated old coal-mining village. All with few job prospects, and even fewer jobs that pay a wage able to produce anything beyond poverty living. The National Guard seemed like a good way to make some money, support your community. Appalachia often suffers terrible tragies from floods and other disasters, and it’s National Guard who steps in to help those in dire need. Maybe the Guardsman saw hope in Trump’s message of rural pride, a change and hope of breaking the cycles of rural poverty, when all seemed so hopeless. But because of choice of foolish man in White House, it all had to play out very differently.
I often romanticize rural life, the simple, natural life of farmer and homesteaders. Or the great beauty that places like West Virginia really are. It’s an amazing place if you love outdoor activities. But that ignores how tough life really in Appalachia or having a life closely tied to the land more generally – where it’s mining coal, cutting timber, or raise beef cattle. But there are only a handful of jobs in those industries, which themselves are deeply competitive with poor wages, and for most people they don’t even have an opportunity to sustain themselves doing that. There are auxiliary jobs that support a community, but those jobs such as retail clerks or nursing, aren’t exactly well paid or plentiful either. It’s just tough all around.
And the deaths in such a rural community just hit harder, as small towns there are fewer people, and connections are much stronger, as you are more likely to run into a person and their family members. It’s just tragic for all involved, except maybe for the President, who got us into this mess and is the most responsible person for the shooting and the pain that will be inflicted on these close-nit small towns.
