crow – Page 46 – As The Crow Flies

laser light show in the cabin.

My son came for Thanksgiving weekend. He brought with him a small hand held powerful laser. Outside we looked at the stars and pointed at them with the laser. Inside he wrote his name with the laser while I took a picture using a 10 second shutter speed.

hermit goes to town.

helpful advice

Shelter

My current tent is a Six Moon Designs Lunar Solo. It weighs 23 oz (652 grams) with the light weight floor option. You can use a trekking pole with it or buy the optional 1.8 oz ( 51grams) pole. It sets up fast, and offers a lot of room- enough for 2 in an emergency. Things I look for in a tent: covered porch so I can lay in my bag and cook dinner out of the rain, fast set up, full bug protection, and light weight. This tent offers all of these things. Mesh comes up the sides so that even though it is a single wall tent , places where you might touch the walls are double wall. It comes in gray and green. Grey is the best color, I think, for not being seen.

It comes unseamed sealed. To seam seal your tent, go to the hardware store and buy some mineral spirits , some clear silicone caulking, and a cheap brush. Mix the silicon caulking and the mineral sprits in a small can and paint on the seams.

It takes 6 stakes, I bought orange titanium stakes from backpackinglight.com. All six stakes, together, weigh 1.30 ounces (37 grams) Don’t buy stakes that aren’t a bright color they are just too easy to lose. I carefully count them as I pull them out and put them in a pocket in my pack.

All totaled tent+ seam sealing+ stakes+ pole+ stuff sack= 27ounces (765 grams)

I open my umbrella in it to poof out the back wall a little more.

For wiping the walls of a tent which on some days can become wet I carry a small viscose camp towel which is sort of like a very thin sponge; it works a lot better than a bandanna and of course doubles as a towel.

Six Moon Designs has other other lightweight shelter options, also you might want to check out Henry Shires Tarp Tents.

For world travel I also bring a Long Road Travel Tent. I have found lots of wonderful places (and some not so wonderful) to stay at that were really cheap but they might have huge cockroaches or rats in them and I can’t sleep when surrounded by huge cockroaches and rats. Cockroaches and rats don’t hurt you but ticks, lice, mosquitoes, and spiders can kill you. This travel tent is free standing and fits on a single sized bed. It has a breathable nylon floor that extends up the sides so nothing can bite you where you might touch the sides. I can stay anywhere with this tent, just zip myself up and rest easy. It weighs 1.9 lbs (.86 kg)

In my cabin…

Wind blown rain.

Trail food- Pasta with Thai peanut sauce.

Put water and pasta in pot, cover with lid or foil
heat to boiling or near boiling.
When water reaches boiling or near boiling turn off stove let pasta cook on it’s own.
When pasta is done, pour excess water into your nalgene bottle.
Add peanut butter, garlic powder, dried crushed red peppers and some of the hot water from your Nalgene bottle to pasta. ( You can get the crushed red peppers in little packets at the pizza parlor.)
keep stirring and add more hot water if necessary.
Add a packet of chicken or tuna, if you like.
Use remaining hot water, if there is any, to make your after dinner hot beverage. Always drink your pasta water.

Icy road

Even though the days are warm (40 F, 4 C) and most of the snow has melted, there are still thick patches of ice on the road. I think they will be there until spring. I only left my cabin twice in 4 months last winter but this is what I learned about driving a small rear wheel drive pickup on the ice:

Carry weight in the back of your pickup: sand is the best thing to be carring because you can sprinkle it on the road for extra traction if needed but anything will work. Try to keep the weight over your back wheels.
If you have to go down a steep icy hill, get a set of chains for the front of your pickup, also. I like Les Schwab chains. They have cables where you hook them and chains for the actual traction. They come with a big plastic mat that has pictures and directions on how to put them on that you can kneel on while you are putting them on. You can buy them in the winter and if you don’t use them they will buy them back from you in the spring. There is also a video on their site of how to put them on.
Bring 4 composite roofing shingles to put under your tires in case you get into a situation that you need the extra traction.
Bring a shovel in case you get stuck in a snow bank and need to dig out the tires.
When going up the big steep hill I put it in first gear at the bottom and never let up on the gas until I get to the top. When going down the steep hill I put it in first gear and give it no gas and as little brake as I can.

Why I hate the Multnomah County Library.

I like going to the library. If I will be in a town for more than a month; I call myself a resident and get a card. At one time in my life I had books checked out from 5 different library systems.

The worse library system that I have ever encountered is the Multnomah County Library. Those surly librarians were always annoyed with me for some reason. When I was a kid, the children’s librarian was always scolding me for not being carful enough when using the big dictionary. She would run over and say, “We have to be very careful with this; it is very fragile.�? Why would anyone buy a fragile dictionary to begin with and then to add stupidity on top of impracticability, put it in the children’s library?

As I got older I ventured out of the children’s library. When I brought my books to the check out they would say” these are adult books you need to get permission to check them out. Go to the big desk.” Most of my life, checking out books at the downtown library required going, for one reason or another, to that big desk. As I remember it was this large room with soaring ceilings and a very high counter like a judge’s pulpit and there I would have to plead my case as to why they should let me check out books. Sometimes they wouldn’t let me. Most of the times I was sent there was because of overdue library fines.

The exorbitant library fines were hard when it was just me; a good chunk of my babysitting money would go to the library, but when I had a child they became crushing. It doesn’t take very long to read a children’s book so we would have to get quite a few children’s book at a time to keep us in reading material very long. Since life gets busy when you are a single parent working 60 hours a week sometimes the books wouldn’t get returned on time. Often the fines exceeded the price of the item I had checked out. At one point I just started buying books instead of going to the library, saying, “It’s justs cheaper, this way.”

We moved away from the Multnomah county library and started going to the Forest Grove library where they didn’t have fines and the librarian is happy that you came in to get some books.

My son came up with this theory about librarians: There are two kinds of librarians: (1) those that see themselves as keepers of knowledge and(2) those that think of themselves as educators of the community.

The keepers of knowledge don’t want you to check out any books they just want to have them all there still in the same condition as when they bought them… Those librarians are never happy when you come in to take “their�? books and I think if they could, would like all the books under glass and locked up.

Then there are the librarians that see themselves as educators of the community and those librarians see books as tools that need to be used to be of any use. They are happy when you come in and happy to see you leave with a bunch of books.

We eventually moved back to Portland, right away the fines started piling up. (Now the library had videos and the late fee for a video was a dollar a day!) But we always paid them before they would let us check out more books. But then the Multnomah County Library started giving their accounts to a collection agency. This is not for unreturned library books this is for books that were returned late. My son moved away to Florida and went to buy a house. When he applied for a loan, his credit report had a ding on it from the Multnomah County Library. Even the loan officer was surprised to find that someone’s credit rating had been hurt from overdue library fines.

I have since moved away, myself. Yet once when driving through town I stopped to use the Internet, as I have done in dozens of libraries across the country. The librarian said the internet is only for people with a Multnomah County library card. Since library cards don’t expire, I said I have one but I don’t have it with me. She looked me up in the computer, turned to me and with a look and a voice most often found on police officers and Nazis said, “You know, you have 97 dollars in fines”.

Washing without soap

I don’t like using much soap to wash my dishes or me because without copious amounts of hot water, a soapy residue stays on, so, I have been using baking soda when I have a greasy pan to wash and sometimes I use it to wash my hair as well, as I learned to do from this Mother Earth News article. The baking soda acts as the alkali and the grease in the pan or the oil in my hair acts as the fat, put them together and you have soap. It has been working really well until I ran out of baking soda. Lye (the alkali that soap is usually made with) is made from wood ash so I tried washing a greasy pan using hot water and ashes from my wood stove, and it worked great.

Backwoods carpet cleaning

I used a pan of hot water (no soap) and a scrub brush and the rug looks a lot better. Last year I tried cleaning my rug in the snow as told to me in this Mother Earth News article but it wasn’t a complete sucess and dragging my dirty rug out into the brilliant snow and sunshine made it look that much more dingier.

Ponderosa Pine needles cause abortion… and prevent scurvy.

From http://stripe.colorado.edu/~mitton/ponderosa%20pine.htm:Pine needles have been used to produce abortions in many societies, for a long time. Dioscorides and Pliny the Elder, physicians writing almost 2,000 years ago, both reported that snow on Ponderosa pine consumption of pine needles caused abortion. American Indians, including the Arapaho, independently acquired and used the same knowledge. During harsh circumstances, a pregnancy had a low probability of producing a healthy child and it endangered the life of the mother; a tea of ponderosa needles was used to produce an abortion.

From the site http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Environment/CulRes/conifers.htm: Ponderosa pine needles and branches may cause abortions and stillbirths in pregnant cows browsing them, and a tea of needles is reputed to cause miscarriages in pregnant women (Turner et al., 1980).

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine : “A tea made by steeping young, green pine needles in boiling water (known as “strunt” in Sweden) is high in vitamins A and C.�?

Seems like the perfect famine tea, causes abortion and prevents scurvy.

Peace Pilgrim

The Peace Pilgrim walked away. She left all off her stuff and walked. For thirty years she walked, walking until offered shelter; fasting until offered food. She never asked for anything. She only brought the clothes she was wearing, a comb, and her message: “This is the way of peace: Overcome evil with good, and falsehood with truth, and hatred with love.”

Her friends put together a website and a book: Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words. At the website you can read most of the book online or ask that a hard copy be sent to you. There is an hour long documentary to download, interviews and a 2006 calendar to download.

The peace pilgrim pamphlet called the “The steps to inner peace�? can be read at and is offered in 8 different languages on the web site, as well. You can also request a hard copy be sent to you.

Rose hips

I’m interested in foraging for my own food because I don’t think we can ever be free or even adults as long as we have to ask someone else to supply us with food. I don’t want to grow my own food so much as I want to find wild food growing around me that is edible. To be able to forage for my own food seems like taking a step away from this man made and contrived world where everyone, no matter how little substance they get from it, feel that they have a vested intrest in seeing it continue, and taking a step towards a life of my own creation.

From Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia and the Inland Northwest: Rose hips are high in vitamin C, as well as providing calcium, vitamin A and phoshorus. They are eaten by coyotes, bears and other wildlife. Harvest from anytime after the first freeze to spring.

From Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide:
Harvest and preparation: Remove dried flower parts from top of hips, then split open and remove the seeds and eat the rest. Dry whole or halved cleaned fruits for later use( soak overnight in warm water) or finely grate or grind dried hips to yield a slightly fragrant powder rich in Vitamin C and essential minerals. Sprinkle on hot breadfast cereals or use to make hot tea.

Another source of information I found, a website called “Native foods- rose hips“, said to boil the whole berries until they split, about 10- 15 minutes, drink the tea and then eat the berries alone or in soups and stews. I was wondering about the high temperatures destroying the vitamins. Since they stay on the bush all winter and fresh food is rare in winter why not just eat them raw? No one seems to recommend eating the seeds but I imagine the coyotes and bear eat them.