On the last night of winter break, the hot plate died. The light came on, but the water never heated up. Geoff tried to replace the bad wiring, but it fried on the first try. The house filled with burning-plastic smoke, so we unplugged the hot plate and stood back to evaluate the situation.

No big deal, you might think. It’s just a hot plate, you might think. I have a great appreciation for the importance of the hot plate in my life, but even I thought it was a minor inconvenience, an item easily replaced on the next trip to town.

Well.

I moved the big pot from the hot plate to the stove and got on with the dishes. I brushed my teeth and went to bed and pretty soon it was forty below.

Geoff gets up earlier than I do, so he gets the fire going in the morning and makes himself coffee while I sleep. When it is forty below, he thaws the fuel line to the monitor (thank goodness for backup heat – we do not have to worry about the house freezing while we are at school) with a heat gun and warms up the snowmachine, also with a heat gun. I know I need to get out of bed when I hear the heat guns.

So off we went to school and it was lovely to see the kids and begin to work on the school play and organize Gwich’in Wednesdays. It was also lovely to get home and sit down and recover. School can be a shock to the system after time off.

I made dinner – something something and mashed potatoes – and in the middle of boiling the potatoes, the propane waned to almost nothing.

Well.

No hot plate. No propane.

I stoked up the fire, and Geoff ran over to school to dig our coleman stove and the little green propane bottles out of storage. We set up a cutting board on our useless range-top and perched the camp stove there, its little bottle balanced on a plate behind it. We ate half-done potatoes that night.

Propane is much harder to replace than a bum hot plate. We have to get a bottle shipped in from Fairbanks, and the airline that performs that service has run out of bottles earmarked for Arctic. We’re still working on solving this problem.

There was no question of heating water for dishes and hand-washing on the camp stove. That’s usually a few gallons at a time, and the coleman stove isn’t meant for that kind of load. We’ve been using the wood stove to heat water since the beginning of January, which means getting a fire going straightaway after school or washing hands with cold water.

Rampaging around the forest destroying woodpecker habitat to heat my dishwater.

I miss the hot plate.

But it’s kinda cool, because we can just roll the sink-bowl-cart across the kitchen and shift the slop-bucket stool a little to the west and BOOM! We are all set up to use hot water from a new source. No plumbing needed, TimZ. I like having a modular kitchen.

Really, I love living in a dry cabin. If you do not have a toilet, you never have to clean a toilet. It was a little inconvenient when I had a stomach bug last week – having to bring in and assemble your frozen toilet every time you need it is pretty… crummy when you seem to need it every five minutes.

I wouldn’t trade it, though. There’s an economy of space that comes with dry living that I would hate to exchange for on-demand hot water and a flush. I never thought I would get there when I first came to Alaska, but I have been lucky to be surprised a thousand ways in these years.

I have been reading the blog of a new-to-Alaska teacher who is just beginning to be surprised by the million tiny adjustments of village life. I am enjoying it very much. If you have enjoyed my story, you may want to read hers. Check it out.

Home sweet lovely dry home.