The Frozen Northwoods

Northwoods Journal

Friday, January 24, 2014

Mark and I left home at 5:15 a.m., headed north for the Sno*Drift Rally Race weekend.  I had tried to talk Mark out of coming, he’s been ill with the flu and I have been battling some form of colitis for nearly 6 weeks now.  When I saw the forecast for this weekend, braving the frozen tundra with no central heat or running water really didn’t seem like a good idea!  But Mark was not to be dissuaded, so off we set to come north.

We arrived at our place just before 10 a.m.  Traffic was light and thankfully road conditions weren’t bad.  Along the way I got to enjoy a stunning sunrise and then a bald eagle flew parallel to M33 just south of Rose City.  It was zero degrees in the trailer when we arrived and not a whole lot warmer on the outside.  There is a good 16 to 18 inches of snow on the ground so no way we were getting in our driveway since we don’t have it plowed.  There’s no point in paying big bucks for someone to plow every time it snows since we only come up once in the dead of winter.

Our snowed-in driveway.

Mark lit the wood burner and we turned on the two radiant heaters then lugged all our stuff in from the road on a plastic toboggan.  We had just gotten things unpacked and the temperature had risen a whopping 20 degrees when our son-in-law and his friend arrived.  Pete didn’t want to leave his Jeep out on the road so managed to plow and heave his way into the end of the driveway.  We thought for sure he was going to get stuck the way his tires were throwing snow, but he didn’t.  It’s a Jeep thing!!

The snowy view from our porch.

The guys just had time to drag all their things in and bundle up in all their cold-weather gear before it was time to head out to the high school where the rally cars were on display starting at noon.  The temperature inside had reached 40 degrees when they left.  I kept feeding the wood burner then pulled my glider rocker up close, covered up with a couple of quilts and stuck my nose in a book, cozy as a bug in a rug!

A cozy fire.

Before we left at Thanksgiving time we had filled about 15 gallon jugs about 3/4^th full of water and we’ve found if you put the frozen jugs in some water atop the wood burner, they thaw out quite quickly, so I’ve been doing that and also melting snow to use for flushing the toilet.  The wind has been blowing strong all day and some light snow is falling.  The guys will be gone until late as they hoped to make it to three stages of the race, all of them over in the Lewiston area.  Hopefully they don’t get too cold or drink too much!

After I finished the book I had been reading, I broke open a brand new jigsaw puzzle.  It’s “Birds of the Backyard” so a perfect subject matter for me!  The radio kept me company.  When I tired of the puzzle I worked some mind games in the puzzle book.  Before dark I ran out and put the FJ in our neighbor’s drive that is plowed.  There were logging trucks going up and down the road and I was concerned they wouldn’t see the FJ on the road in the dark!  We can’t afford to have it get crashed into!

The guys arrived home just after 9 p.m.  Mark said there weren’t as many spectators at the viewing areas.  I bet the arctic cold winter we are having has kept some people away, plus the fact that the two big names in rally racing aren’t in the race this year.  They were all wiped out from their early morning, then walking through the cold to the viewing areas all afternoon so mostly they just unbundled themselves and fell into bed.  They plan to get an early start in the morning.