Chapter Thirteen
With no television, we tuned in to the weather. Not the weather report; I mean the actual weather. I needed to know what to wear to the barn to milk the goats in the morning, or which boots the children should put on to sled down the driveway behind our cabin, though the latter probably didn’t matter since the boots inevitably came off.
Cross-country skiwear decisions were less difficult. We’d simply put on lots of layers and remove or add them according to need. However, with wax-based cross-country skis, determining which wax to use was particularly challenging. We had a shoebox with tins of wax ranging from white through shades of blue and green to yellow and red. There was also something called klister, literally meaning “paste” in Norwegian. Its use often resulted in snow sticking to our skis in huge clumps. I prayed that conditions wouldn’t require the use of klister. In order to select the right wax, not only did we need to know the weather, but we needed to know the difference between fresh, old, warm, or cold snow and snow with high or low water content. And we needed to know how quickly the conditions for which we had just waxed would be obsolete as soon as we skied out of the shade into the sun.
Above our kitchen table was a horizontal picture window approximately five feet by three that offered a view of Burgdorf Meadow, the mountains around it, and the sky. Having already spent some years in the backcountry, Rick was astonishingly accurate in predicting the weather, which included, in the winter of 1978–79, sunny and cold, sunny and colder, thick soft flakes of snow, sleet, and, during one particularly windy blizzard, snowing sideways. Usually when it was cloudy or snowing the temperature rose to just below freezing, around 31°F. Rick explained that this was because the cloud cover kept the warmth of the earth from rising above the clouds. On clear nights the temperature plummeted to somewhere between –10° and –25°F, but after the sun came up it rose to double digits above zero. The lowest temperature during my three winters at Burgdorf was –45°F, a temperature that is exactly the same number in both Fahrenheit and Celsius. Temperatures between –20° and –45°F were a frequent occurrence in late December and January. But not every day in January was cold. Every year we enjoyed a few days of Chinooks—warm winds that, in contrast with 45 below, made me feel as if I were in Hawaii.
With our road vehicles parked at a friend’s house in McCall, we kept a couple of snowmobiles at Burgdorf in case of emergency. Sometimes I rode into town for supplies and to call friends and family. I always felt more secure scheduling such trips to coincide with those of our neighbor who lived six miles away and could fix anything mechanical with little more than duct tape and a wire hanger. Toward the end of one such trip, while I was waiting in town for my neighbor to finish the last of his errands, I decided to call a friend in L.A. who had expressed concern about my decision to move to the backcountry. After all I had been through with Rick Evers, she was afraid that I had jumped into a different kind of insanity. As I stood in a phone booth and dialed the number, I watched the lights coming on around Payette Lake as the short winter day began to give way to the long night.
I was as glad to hear my friend’s voice as she was to hear mine. After responding to my question about what was going on in her life, she asked how I was doing. Shifting from one foot to the other in the increasingly cold phone booth, I enumerated all the things I was doing and how much I was enjoying them until I ran out of steam. My friend paused and then spoke.
“You hike up to an outhouse first thing in the morning, then you haul your family’s drinking water from the creek. No matter how cold it is, you go to the barn every morning to milk the goats, and do it again at night. You chop wood, tan hides, mend clothes, grind wheat by hand, bake your own bread, teach your children, and last week you, Rick, and the kids skied twelve miles round trip to visit Rick’s brother.”
“I love doing all those things,” I said. “They make so much more sense than driving up and down the Canyon to bring one kid to this friend’s house and another kid to that after-school activity, or shopping for clothes and furniture, or for that matter buying overpriced groceries wrapped in plastic.”
“I just don’t get it. You could be dining at the finest restaurants, drinking champagne, eating caviar, taking limos, and going to movie premieres. Instead you’re performing tasks that any woman in her right mind who could afford it would be asking her ‘people’ to do. Why would you want to give that up?”
I’d heard variations on that question from other friends and read similar questions in letters from fans who missed seeing me on tour. The way most of them put it was, “Why have you dropped out?” I might have answered, “I thought I dropped in,” but that wasn’t the answer they were looking for.
Why had I “dropped out”?
Because when I said I wanted to get back to the land, I meant it. Notwithstanding a local saying that there were only two seasons in Idaho—winter and the Fourth of July—there were in fact four seasons, each of which brought me great pleasure. I loved living within earshot of a creek in a forest with a view of mountains and meadows. And I was grateful to wake up every morning hundreds of miles away from the fast lane.
Obviously, it was easier for me economically than for many natives of my adopted state. I had a dependable source of income, and though I had chosen to be where I was, I could leave at any time. Indeed, I did leave frequently for work and to spend time with my Goffin daughters. And though I was perfectly comfortable living without electricity and other modern paraphernalia, I was glad to have the occasional use of telephones, tape recorders, electricity, penicillin, and modern medical and industrial conveniences that had been unavailable before the twentieth century. But Burgdorf was affording my children and me a rare opportunity to live as close as we could get in modern times to a basic, down-to-earth way of life.
I wanted to say all that and more, but it was getting really cold in the phone booth.
Instead I said, “I’m okay. Really, I am.”
Just then I heard my neighbor approaching on his snow machine. He was hauling a cargo sled with our groceries and other items under a tarp.
“That’s my ride. I have to go.”
“Okay,” she said. “I just want to say two more things: I love you, and I can’t believe you’re not writing songs or playing music at all.”
Tears came to my eyes as we said goodbye. I hung up the phone, stepped out of the booth, put on my helmet, and climbed onto the back of my neighbor’s snow machine. Then, with a cloud of smoke and the distinctive sound of an accelerating two-stroke engine, we were off.