There, we lived in a big apartment and lived off the canned veggies I put up before leaving Washington. Unless we could have lived on snow, the thing was a bust as far as self-sufficiency went. The four hours of daylight in winter was interesting but not something I cared to repeat. I don't like to complain, but sixty below zero was really too cold.
Some years and two more children later, we lived in Southeast Alaska. He taught school in Hoonah, a Tlingit (pronounced, inexplicably, Klinkit) fishing village on Chichagof Island. To this day I cannot eat fresh salmon or halibut, which we ate four times a week. I still love King Crab, which was a big treat up there.
Even though I spent two winters in Alaska and therefore am a genuine Sourdough, Alaska wasn't for me. The joke there was a Sourdough was someone who was sour on Alaska but didn't have the dough to get out.
Years later, I was a single mom when I found a better way to live off the land. I bought a farm in Missouri. Before long I married again. We raised chickens, bees and dairy goats and had an enormous garden. It was truly a land of milk and honey. My husband was raised on a farm in Iowa and had the kids and I baling hay and straw for the goats. It was all a tremendous amount of work.
He and I had parted company before the flood filled the house with water to the tops of the doors.
Self-sufficiency eludes me here, but a person could live on the deer that currently are leaving deep tracks in the Remote Garden. There are wild turkeys in the woods. If a person could develop a taste for raccoon they could turn the tables on those destructive varmints.
There are big catfish in the river. A neighbor stopped by to show me this one he got on a trot line a few days ago.
When I was little, my Grandma Belle grew strawberries for us "lil choldrun," so that's what I do. My granddaughter Molly picked the last of this season's crop when she was up for a visit last week. She helped me make ice cream in the Donvier ice cream maker.
Sometimes, I am able to grow enough of a few veggies to last a year. I've made plenty of peach, grape and strawberry jams. Now, there are eggs from the hen. This year, there will be apples, pears and peaches from the trees. I still am eating hickory nuts from the huge harvest in 2010.
Black-caps do well here. I have tamed some of the wild things out behind the workshop. Last year, the hungry raccoons broke down the canes and didn't leave me any of the tasty wild raspberries. This year, the coon hound has roused himself to chase them off. Just starting to ripen, the berries are bigger and juicier than ever.
What can I say? Some of us love the idea of foraging. We eat dock leaves in early spring and lamb's quarter in summer. We garden and enjoy canning and dehydrating food. We never will be truly self-sufficient or really be living off the land, but when we snack on black-caps, we think we are.
