On cold dark nights there is always flies to tie and painting

 

On cold dark nights there is always flies to tie and painting.

During the polar vortex the world becomes small and simple. Back-and-forth into town for off-season work, filling the truck up with gas, a few errands. There’s no anxiety about heavy or deep snow falls.

In the yard my beaten path leads from the cabin door to the outhouse and woodshed and truck and waterwell. Once a week I turn on the portable generator (which cranks slow and long) to pump 25 gallons of water into the plastic buckets that I carry and keep inside the cabin. While the generator is running I charge my 12-volt batteries a little.

In the dark mornings the truck cranks slow and long. One morning it was completely dead and I charged it with the portable generator.

Inside where I love to be when it is cold we are toasty. At least mostly toasty. The plywood floor is very cold, but I have a beaver rug and a deer hide rug strategically placed. It’s very cold in the corners. Hoarfrost covers most of the windowpanes, and I cannot read the outdoor thermometer. There are drafts, drafts from small holes in the cabin – one for running the solar panel wires in and out, one opposite for running the gas line in and out. The door – a slab of lumber closed with a latch – drafts all around itself.

Photo courtesy of James Egan

I read Dickens (“Little Dorrit”) because I love to read Dickens, and it seems right to read Dickens in the long dark evening during the cold winter.

Sometimes I paint at the table. I am developing my own style: watercolor effects with watercolor techniques using acrylic paints. For someone as self-critical as myself, it feels odd to say that I succeed more than I fail at the painting.

When the table is not overtaken by painting, it is taken over by fly-tying. The fly-tiers’ fly in the past five years has been the Intruder, which is a large, long articulated fly made of fur, marabou feathers, ostrich feather fibers, chicken hackle and tinsel. That will be a steelhead fly. Also a steelhead fly is my saltwater shrimp (the steelhead being a Pacific Ocean salmonid originally. Also flies made of strips of dyed rabbit hide, and flies that look like trout eggs or minnows.

The cabin is small – only 13’ x 17’ inside, and very crowded with the woodstove and gas range and bed and table and chairs. With shelves and foodstuffs and a gun rack and chests and a small wardrobe. Once every ten days there is laundry hanging inside to dry. In the winter there are things that cannot be left outside, such as varnishes or decoy or camouflage paints, battery operated power tools, or seeds and roots or tubers for the spring.

Well, during the vortex, now that I consider again and start to write, life does not seem small and simple. I look around the cabin and it expands and things complicate. If I stepped outside now, in the dark, tonight would be the same vast void as any other time of year. Tomorrow when the sun is high, the blue sky will be high and in the woods one can see for 50 or 100 yards or more with the trees bare and the ground cover flattened.

“Small is beautiful,” E F Schumacher proclaimed. Small is great, I reply.