Day 22: Still Stranded

Today is day 22 of being stranded out here. For the past 4 days, we've watched the moat around the island grow, with temperatures above freezing every day. It barely dropped below freezing even at night, and mostly didn't freeze at all.

It's now December 17th, and we've been here three full weeks, since November 26th -- with a brief exit by Gary on December 4th for provisions.

A frosty moat, at last

We had an all-day snowfall yesterday, which won't help matters, as it will insulate the ice and keep it from freezing as quickly. Things are looking up, though: last night,  temperatures dropped to 19, and we already have a 1/2" of ice on the "moat water"! A couple more nights in the single digits might do the trick, and we can return to the real world and resume normal life.

We're still doing fine! I ran out of box wine the other night, but our milk supply is holding out nicely, and we're still making our way through the pantry and freezer, eating things we should have eaten long ago. We've both been out in the pottery studio a lot lately: Gary is making platters, and I'm decorating them with sgraffito designs, mainly crows.

Our solar panels supply us with plenty of electricity here in the house, but our bank of storage batteries (eight of them, 130 pounds each) is starting to show its age. They say these batteries last ten years, and our ten-year old batteries are starting to fail right on schedule, unfortunately. Gary's been busy lately researching ways to limp along with our current ones (no pun intended) until we can get them replaced.

Battery replacement will be no small feat, as they're located in our cellar. When we installed them, we didn't yet have a floor over the cellar, so were able to drop them into place from above. Now, we'll have to not only remove the old ones via our ladder steps, we'll have to bring the new ones down the steps as well. I'm hoping that battery technology has improved in the past ten years, and the new ones won't be as heavy.

The building du jour is the north sauna. This is a combination of two buildings: an old savu sauna (smoke sauna) that was originally built in 1878 on the banks of the Cat River, east of Menagha, Minnesota. Gary dismantled it and brought the logs to the island around 2006. He finished the inside with cedar paneling, rather than leave it as a smoke sauna, as we knew we likely would get more use of out it as a regular sauna. We bought a wood-fired sauna stove from a company in Tower, Minnesota.

The changing room in front is made from logs that were originally part of a two-story family home east of Underwood, Minnesota, near Fort Juelson. It was built by a Norwegian family, the Birge's, in 1879, of tamarack, poplar, and oak. Gary and I dismantled the house in 2008, which was a major effort: the exterior was covered in siding, and the interior was covered in lath and plaster, all of which needed to be removed and hauled away before we could get to the logs.

With great effort, Gary moved the logs to the "mainland"near the island, where they sat until winter 2009. By that time, Gary was undergoing cancer treatment and was unable to move them. Three of our friends, Lowell LaBerge, Rod Jones, and Marv Fulton, took it upon themselves to move all of the logs -- and there were a LOT of them -- to the island while Gary was unable to. We'll never forget that act of extreme kindness!