Spring 2013: I'm back!

It's been a long time since I posted on this blog, and here it is spring 2013 already.

A lot has changed on Raspberry Island the past year and a half. The biggest change came last summer, when we had the local power company run a line run out to the island. They laid the cable on the lake bed, trenched it onto shore on either end, and voila! We now are on the grid.

Our small set of solar panels had provided enough electricity for our household needs -- lights, CD player, internet, microwave, hair dryer, TV, and so on -- but it wasn't robust enough to power our trip hammers in the blacksmith shop or run an electric kiln, or even heat a chicken waterer in winter. Now, not only do we have plenty of power, we also have baseboard heating in the "shops" (the blacksmith shop, the clay studio, and the woodshop), and we can flip a switch to turn on lights out there. It's sort of weird now, to sometimes see light in the clay studio at night. It's like living in town!

Another change was the addition of the woodshop. This is a 1904 log building that used to be the teacher's house a few miles south of Cromwell, Minnesota. The owners were going to burn it down to make space for a garden, so Gary and some friends came to the rescue and dismantled it last winter, and moved it out to the island. Last summer Gary reassembled it near our house, and it's now his long-awaited woodshop. It's the nicest log building we've found so far:  the logs are cedar and they were all in good shape. We ordered linseed oil paint from Sweden and painted it Falun red, its original color.



Before all of this activity, though, we spent a few months in early summer 2012 fighting the worst flooding that's hit this area since 1950. It was caused by heavy rains in early June which, combined with the flooding on the Mississippi River (normally an outlet for our lake), resulted in a 6-foot rise in lake level. This photo was taken in our front yard, about 30 feet from our house. The dock is pulled up as far as it will go; we had to climb a ladder to get up onto it. The floodwater stayed for about six weeks, and when it finally subsided we had lost most of our birch trees, our cedar trees, our apple trees, a few large basswood trees which simply tipped over in the softened earth, and our vegetable garden (which I had just finished planting). We were lucky the water didn't reach as high the house -- just a few more inches and it would have -- but I now understand how awful a flood is, even if it doesn't ruin your house. We did have water in our cellar, so had to run our generator 24 hours a day to pump it out, but no damage was done.

Another big change: we now have a septic system! We have a state-of-the art peat-based system, and not one but two bathrooms in the house, complete with flush toilets! We might be getting more guests now, the ones who refused to come visit us when all we had were outhouses.  :-)

And, we now have two engaging and funny cats, Olive and Siili. They've complicated our lives a little, but we haven't laughed so much in years, so they're worth a few minor complications. Here they are checking out the washing machine, the first time they saw it in use.

                                                                     *     *     *

It's April 21st, 2013 today, and ice-out hasn't even started yet, which is unusual. A couple of days ago 18 inches of snow fell, much to our dismay. It blew and drifted all the next day, making even snowmobiling treacherous. Gary tried, and ended up stuck in a snowdrift up to his waist.

Last year, the ice was out by March 30th, which was about 3 weeks earlier than usual. In normal years, we're able to leave the island by boat, rowing between ice floes, by the third week of April. This year, we're still able to snowmobile on the lake during the third week of April, and if the snow weren't so deep, people would still be driving their cars out to their fishing holes. The ice around the shoreline, always the first to melt, hasn't even begun to soften yet. Once the snow melts on top of the ice, it takes about two weeks for the ice to go out.

The latest recorded ice-out on Big Sandy Lake was May 4, 1996. It's now April 21st, and no sign of melting. I'm predicting that we'll have some ice on the lake for fishing opener this year, on May 11th. Now that it's later in the season and the sun is hotter, maybe the ice will go more quickly when it starts to go. We shall see!