Home Improvement

I find cobwebs in every corner.  Mice droppings litter the dresser drawers.  Except for the varmints no one has lived in the cabin for three seasons.  The air is chilly and lifeless.  Dark blue curtains drape over the windows, but the sunlight pierces through the cracks in the walls.  A thick layer of dust coats the hardwood floors, and dried grasses and crumbled stones are embedded into two magenta oval rugs.

There is an undressed bed in the corner.  A lamp sits on a desk with a wobbly leg.  A tiny black woodstove with a cylindrical chimney pokes through the ceiling.  Behind the stove, a white fan blackened with ash stands abandoned and unplugged.

I plop my bags onto the bed and find a broom and dustpan and start cleaning the place.  The best part of moving is making the nest comfortable and customized.  I take the rugs outside and drape them over the front porch railing and beat them with a stick I found on the ground.  An afternoon breeze rolls through and fills my nostrils with the scent of pine needles and horse manure wafted up from the corrals.

 

I fill up my water bottle and grab a handful of abrasive paper towels from the bathroom and douse them in hand sanitizer to disinfect my drawers of the stale defecations of mice who needed the warmth of the dresser to survive the harsh Wyoming winter.  I sprinkle the water onto the floor and step on piles of paper towels and skate clean streaks through the dust until the hardwood looks polished.  I push the bed toward the fireplace and shimmy the bulky dresser beneath the window and push the desk into the corner.

 

I unpack my bag and devise a way to fit all my clothes into three small drawers.  I have to double-fold my shirts so they take up less surface area.  I stuff my shower supplies into a drawstring sack and leave it in the top drawer along with a Ziploc bag of my electronic chargers and medicine.  To save space I jammed ibuprofen, anti-diarrheal tablets and lozenges in one container like a grab-bag of candies.  I wipe off the top of the dresser and stack my books against the wall.  The cabin is coming together and gaining civility.  An hour ago it felt abandoned, but now it is a place you could almost respect.

I meet the personnel manager at the supply cabin, where she hands me my bedding, a box of Idaho energy logs, a book of matches, and firestarter discs.  She gives me a set of instructions on how to light a fire, and she tells me I only need to prop three logs up like a tripod with a quarter chunk of firestarter underneath.  I lug all this back to the cabin and put the sheets on the bed.  The blanket is soft and green, and everything is surprisingly clean.  I place the box of logs onto a gray bench with peeled paint.  I educate myself about the wood burning stove. 

I shovel out the ashes and dump them into a bucket.  I break the firestarter into little pieces and place one chunk inside and then surround with a teepee-like structure of logs that look like plump CDs.  I strike the match against the strip on the back of the book but the flame quickly dies.  I try again and again and again until I burn my thumb and think that I should eventually buy a butane lighter with a long stem.  Finally the firestarter catches and a cone of blue starts devouring the flaky edges of wood and smoke rises through the gap between the logs. 

The instructions tell me there are two adjustable handles on the pipe that open and close the damper.  If the handles are parallel to the pipe, the damper is open and the fire will burn quickly, but if you turn the handles the latch will close and better retain the heat.  I experimented with this until smoke started filling the cabin, so I walked outside to see if the chimney was puffing.  I cut off the oxygen supply, so the fire died and only gray wisps remained.  I opened the windows and resolved to figure this out later.

I built the log structure again before bed.  I put on sweatpants, thick socks, and a thermal jacket and fell asleep to the sound of licking flames that petered out in less than an hour.  The personnel manager told me I had to feed the fire throughout the night.  I woke up in complete darkness and turned on my flashlight to repeat the process again only to wake up shivering yet reluctant to emerge from under the covers.  Before that night, I didn’t think it was possible to be that cold during June in the northern hemisphere.

A week passes, and I overhear the porter talking about how cold it was last night.  The porter filled his stove with a box and a half of logs.  His cabin got so hot that he opened all the windows slept over the covers and in his underwear but still sweated throughout the night.  The fire burned so intensely the woodstove glowed orange like lava.

 

Later that night I shovel out the ashes from the woodstove and array six logs at the base and pile two firestarter discs at the intersections and light them on fire.  I maneuver around the flames and build a tent of logs around the burning firestarters.  Then I throw in the set of instructions that the personnel manager gave me on the first day.  When I close the hatch, the fire swells and roars as it feasts upon the fuel.  The heat quickly emanates from the black metal and spreads throughout the cabin.  I take my socks off and kick the covers away.  I experimented with the fire to rid myself of shivering nights, and now my situation improves.  This lifestyle is ripe with opportunities to adapt.  Even small victories make a huge difference.

To warm me up in the morning and spark my mind alert, Erin got me a coffeemaker and a bag of Seattle’s Best from a store in the nearest town.  I had been drinking the diluted brown liquid mislabeled as coffee from the employee dining room, where all our meals are served.  The drink tastes like hot water with a hint of powdered coffee substitute, the caffeinated version of artificial sugar. 

A real brew from a twenty dollar BLACK&DECKER is a major boost.  The nearest café is a forty minute drive.  The nearest Starbucks is three hours away.  Aside from my laptop, the coffeemaker quickly became my most valued possession.  If someone were to steal it, I would be very disappointed.  If someone were to rob me at home and leave with only my coffeemaker, I wouldn’t care at all.  I would just buy a new one from the Target down the street.  But I am relatively stranded at Roosevelt, and so possessions of convenience take on a new meaning when supercenters are largely inaccessible. 

The isolation and lack of manmade entertainment changes the way I view my home life.  Real coffee at home is just another part of the day that closely resembles the day that came before it.  However, when the wind blows through the cracks in the walls and silkworms dangle under the doorframe and I wake up in the middle of the night and use a flashlight to check for animals while I pee into the high grasses behind my cabin, real coffee is a gift because I do not associate it with this world——a land that seems disassociated from the eastern part of the country.  

     

Before coming to Yellowstone, I checked the weather and was surprised to see forecasts of snow in early June, so I packed coats and Underarmour gear, but I was not prepared for the blazing heat that made me forget the cold nights and released swarms of mosquitoes into the dry valley.  The temperature shot up into the nineties and sometimes peaked around one hundred degrees.  I went for a car ride with a friend, and the metal from the seatbelt scalded my hand.  My cabin is shaded by trees, but there’s a row of bunkhouses that bake in the sun.  Even under the shade of the roof, I’ve heard the temperatures inside reach triple digits.  There is nowhere to escape the heat, and undressing to the bare minimum can only offer so much relief.

I forgot about the fan hiding behind the woodstove until I needed it.  Someone must have left it here the previous season, and the disuse was visible.  I plugged it in and twisted the knob expecting nothing to happen, but when the blades cut through the air I found the way to regulate the temperature above primitive standards.  I grabbed a bottle of cleaning product, an unnerving shade of yellow, and sprayed and wiped the base until the blackness lifted and showed white plastic.  I folded the paper towel and wiped the rims clean of gunk so I wouldn’t blow unbreathable detritus into the air.

I rearranged the furniture to better situate the fan.  I was using an extra chair as a nightstand, but I set the fan on the chair so the cool air could blow above my waist.  I retrieved five boxes of logs from the resupply cabin and stacked them between the wall and the bed.  I topped that with an empty box and stuffed my phone charger and glasses inside my makeshift nightstand.

 

I bought a National Geographic map that depicts trails of the Tower and Canyon areas of Yellowstone and placed that above the desk.  Then I stole a Rand McNally roadmap of Wyoming that a guest left on the table in the restaurant, and I hung that above the free maps of Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks.  When Erin went to Bozeman, Montana with a few friends, she brought me Discovery Map of the town, and I hung that up, too.  I want the walls to give the impression that an explorer lives here.  The maps make me think of Lewis and Clark, treasure hunters, and fur trappers that ventured into the west like it was a foreign land not belonging to the rest of the states that already had names.

      

I bought a roll of duct tape and patched up the holes to keep out the wind and the spiders and the silkworms.  When I visited Jackson Hole, a tourist hub south of the Tetons, I bought the state flag, a red, white, and blue banner that features a giant bison with a shaggy beard and the seal of Wyoming.  In order to hang the flag roughly ten feet off the ground, I had to stack five boxes of logs onto a chair.  I ripped two loose nails from the wall.  One was bent at a ninety degree angle.  While I stabilized myself on my makeshift ladder, I pounded in the crooked nails with a heavy Hydro Flask water bottle.  I hooked the rings of the flag over the nails and duct taped the bottom corners.

To top everything off and make the place look homey, I strung white Christmas lights around the room and over the A-frame beams.  The highest beam is probably fifteen feet off the ground.  I used my makeshift ladder again and untwisted a wire clotheshanger and bent it until it curved like a quarter moon.  I poked the clotheshanger into an opening of the braided wire of lights and fed the wire up and over the beam until I could grab it from the other side.  Then I pulled the lights down and removed the clotheshanger and duct-taped the string against the walls in the corners.  I coiled the lights around the beam that stretches across the room.

The cabin has come a long way since day one.  I can hardly remember the bare walls.  Now everything is decorated and highly functional, but the additions make me wonder if this is what adapting means.  I made my living space more comfortable and suitable to my needs.  Or does adapting mean dealing with whatever you are given and growing to accept things the way they are? 

When I first moved into the cabin, I spent most of my free time reading in bed and cleaning the place.  I oddly enjoyed making my bed and sweeping the floors free of wood flakes.  As I accrued more possessions, the number of chores increased as well.  Now I have to clean out the coffeemaker and replenish the grounds and refill the gallon jug of water.  If a bulb goes out on the Christmas lights, I have to replace it.  However, the cabin is so small, and there is so much time and still so little to do.

 

On a small scale, though, my home improvement projects solidified my belief that simplicity and a low maintenance place makes a person feel richer than if he had lived in a mansion.  Sometimes, when I make a fire, I rip up the cardboard boxes that house the logs, and I toss the pieces onto the flames and watch them disintegrate.  I like watching the paper shrivel up while tiny orange embers dissolve the matter like a colony of termites gnawing into a fallen tree and creating a noticeable absence where there used to be something.  Back at home where a thermostat adjusts the temperature, I do not have this option, and even if I did I may consider it a waste of time because there are many more options I could choose to divert my attention. 

I still watch the destruction of the flames, but I also watch the TV shows that my brother sent me.  I asked him to send me Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Wire so I could better occupy the rainy days.  I don’t binge watch like I would at home, and my options here are severely limited since I don’t have a TV or any reception.  I only watch an episode or two at night on my laptop before going to bed as a means to wind down after a shift.  When you deprive yourself of the things that usually surround you, you recognize your desires.  You can learn to live without them, and you can simultaneously learn to accept your preference to live with them.  I might live in a cabin in a remote wilderness, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want the comforts of home.