A Movable Fire Comes to Rest

Published in The Christian Science Monitor

            We moved to Whitney April 14. April 15, I went to work taking care of the ranch. I started a large garden, and I began to make our old, ramshackle house more livable.

            Laura learned to use wood stoves for cooking and heating.

            To Laura, our new situation seemed both exciting and strangely primitive, cause for gratitude that our needs were met by this new job and cause for some uncertainty about where our lives were headed. She gave up electricity, a washing machine and drier. She traded cold and hot water from faucets for a hand-operated pump that delivered cold water only, too sulfurous to drink, so we had to bring in our drinking water.

            She traded an indoor bathroom for an outhouse far behind the house. She traded having friends a short walk away for having friends thirteen miles away.

            Spring gave way to summer, and the days heated up. We welcomed the fire in the cookstove during the cold, early mornings, but when we fed it wood too long after sunup, and when we fired it up to cook dinner, it heated the house too hot.

            I built a ring of rocks in the front yard. I found a piece of flat steel and spanned the rocks with it. I built a fire under the steel, and we had a surface to cook on and to heat water on.

            The cooking fire in the front yard seemed to be an renewal of the good old days when I worked in the forests, camped out, and cooked over a campfire. I enjoyed building the fireplace, and I enjoyed using it.

            At first, I built the fire, heated the water and did most of the cooking, to show Laura it could be done and to show her how to do it. Soon, however, irrigating meadows, repairing fences, and building the garden used most of my time.

            Laura heated water and cooked over the fire in the front yard. On cold mornings, she was too cold on the side away from the fire. She was too hot on the side toward the fire on hot afternoons. She suffered dusty wind. Wind blew smoke in her face. Wind blew ashes in her face. Dirt and ashes blew into our food.

            She carried heavy containers of water out from the kitchen and then discovered something else needed to be brought out, and then something else again. Juniper and Amanda helped willingly, but they were small then, and much of what Laura needed was too high for them to reach or too heavy for them to carry.

            Laura moved the fire back into the kitchen stove, heat up the house or no. I opened my mouth to further extol the joys and advantages of cooking outdoors, but I shut it again before I said anything.

            Laura had made radical changes. She wasn't happy with every sudden change in the way we lived, but she met the challenges. She helped build a good home, and she surrounded all of us with love. She participated willingly in seeking workable ways to live, but the challenge of an outdoor fire carried the changes one step too far.

            Hot afternoons when we needed to cook or heat water, we built a fire in the cookstove, opened all the windows, let the house heat up, and went right on living.

            Eventually, we found a propane-fired hot plate, but meanwhile, we celebrated heat. We celebrated the cool evenings that always came to Whitney Valley, and we celebrated the moment when cool air began to flow in open windows and dilute the afternoon heat that filled our small house.