In Which The Alaskans Arrive In Portugal
running their power tools, climbing like fools
There’s a line in the song Hey It’s Good To Be Back Home Again by John Denver, “it’s the little things that make a house, a home”. I’ve been thinking about that line lately. It’s weird to live in a place that is definitely home, but still not quite a proper house.
No matter how much we warn people about the state of the property we bought in Portugal, they are always surprised. It’s hard to imagine, I guess, just how much disrepair a place can fall into after not being lived in for forty plus years. We recently learned that the developer we bought the place from bought it from the bank, which repossessed it from a family. I guess that explains the amount of stuff left behind, boxes of magazines and piles of clothes and cabinets of dishes, a whole pool house full of expensive inflatable pool toys and sun umbrellas.
Were you prepared for the reality of it? I asked Linda, who came in March.
Linda was diplomatic. Everything is exactly the way you said it would be, she admitted. But somehow I didn’t expect it to be quite so…challenged.
To be fair, she visited during the worst spate of weather I’ve experienced here - a second winter, much wetter than the first, and featuring gale-force winds so often I became used to my weather app beeping at me that another evento de vento (wind event) was on the way. Sometimes the wind would push the rain into the kitchen. And by sometimes I mean, every time. Which was every day for about three weeks.
So it’s ironic that we’ve gotten things in a state of what feels to us like luxury - lights at night! hot water inside! charging up our phones without a generator! making food! chilled wine! a flushing toilet! - just in time for Tim and Kirsten to visit. Tim is the h’s brother, Kirsten is his wife, and they live in Alaska when they aren’t adventure guiding for shows like EcoChallenge, or paragliding or climbing or skiing in Patagonia or Morocco. They arrived last week fresh from heliski season in the mighty Chugach mountains of Alaska, where Kirsten is a heliski guide and Tim ice climbs.
They brought things no other guest has brought: rock climbing equipment, paragliders, headlamps, portable coffee makers. It’s a non-stop event when they are around. In the week they have been here they have already been rock climbing twice, hiked the town and the two adjoining towns, and tackled some heavy jobs around the property: weed whacking and pruning the limbs off of the trees in the back 40, managing burns, and just generally being helpful.
Yesterday evening Kirsten - who is often referred to by her friends and even her husband as Kremer - re-toured Brokedown Palace, having been jet lagged during the first tour. It’s hard to take the whole property in when you first see it; we have yet to figure out how to show it in a way that guests can remember what it was they just saw, and how to find it again.
I’m going to clean your bathroom, she announced. And without further ado she filled some buckets with hot soapy water and disappeared into the second story bathroom, a place I worked in for a week in our first few months here. Back then I hauled a lot of junk and broken tiles and trash out of the room, aiming to clean it, but the hauling took so much time, then I got distracted with other trash that needed hauling, and since we weren’t going to be using the room anytime soon I let it sit there stewing in its silent grime.
We’ve had twenty visitors in eight months, even though the property is still in quite a primitive state. We still sleep on a mattress on a floor in a tent in a house with no electricity on the second floor or the kitchen. We could buy a bed, but it would just have to be moved to another house while this one is plumbed, electrified, repaired and painted. So we stick with what has been working and it is plenty comfortable though it did get pretty cold in the winter as the house is not at all airtight. The h replaced the missing panes of glass in the windows, but most of the windows hang loosely in their casements. When the wind blows it makes a whistling sound as it slips through the cracks and roams the house. We bought a comforter and another wool blanket and the h put the fly on the tent and then it was warm enough to sleep without a hat on.
Only a few guests have been here with the benefit of electricity and indoor plumbing. We have tried to discourage people from coming but they say oh we’re okay with primitive! We even created a Google Doc to share, explaining how things are, like how you need a headlamp to look in your suitcase at night (which might by the way contain a centipede-looking thing, don’t kill it), and how you have to brush your teeth with hose water, how there’s no sink in the kitchen and most especially how you can’t leave food in your room or out on the counter, because you may attract a rat and if a rat came in and then attacked our orphan baby chicken that lives in a box in the living room you would never get a return invitation to Portugal.
There are unexpected charms to life in the rough; standing in the carport brushing my teeth with the hose in my hand and noticing the fireflies lighting up the night all around me, I felt like the little kid I once was, and sometimes still am. Climbing the ancient steps to the cottage always feels like an event to me, like I am walking into the past and the future at the same time. The sight of a proud hen with her new peep bubbling and cheeping around her feathery bottom makes my heart happy.
But generally speaking it’s not always easy to live like this and everyone has to work together to make sure if it can’t be maximally comfortable for anyone, it can at least be minimally uncomfortable for everyone. I don’t mind because each day we get a little closer to living a life with all the conveniences, like running water, indoors. Until then, on hot days we will leave the front door propped open, resigned to the fact that the chickens will walk in and out at will.
The quinta/guest house is the closest to move-in condition. There are two units - upper and lower. The lower unit is now electrified. The days the appliances arrived were red-letter days; before the refrigerator, we had to shop every day, having no way to keep things cold. When one of our workers had a birthday we hiked up to the store and bought some ice, and cooled some mini beers down in a soft-sided cooler all day to have before they took off to go home.
Before the dishwasher arrived I knelt in the carport each morning with kneepads strapped on, two buckets of hot water, and washed the dishes, putting the full plastic dishpans in the courtyard to dry. Once a month we’d strap on the big blue IKEA bags and hike up a mile to the grocery store where there is a small laundromat, with three washers and three dryers (though usually one or two were not in service).
We have electricity in three rooms in Brokedown Palace - the h installed a very long extension cord that stretches from the quinta, down the quinta road, through the carport, up past the kitchen garden, under the door to the mudroom, and down the hall into the entryway, where it plugs into a charging station he has rigged on a stainless metal shelving unit. Now the dining room, entryway and guest room all have lamp light at night; the rest of the house is lit with a series of twenty four rechargeable lights. My first task every morning is to collect up these lights and plug them in to charge during the day, so we can have light in the kitchen, pantry, stairway and bathroom at night. We could always wear headlamps, but sometimes it’s nice to be in your house making tea or sitting on the couch without an aparelho strapped to your head.
To take a shower you can go to the quinta and have a nice hot shower indoors - this is still a very exciting sentence to type. Before the indoor shower we had - and still have - an on-demand propane-powered hot water shower in the carport. This is fine in the summer, but during the winter, it was challenging, especially if it was windy. And before the shower was installed, there was the hose. If you couldn’t bear the thought of cold water, you could turn on the generator, heat water up in the kettle, then put the hot water in two different buckets, mixing it with cold until you had two lukewarm buckets of water to wash and rinse with.
To cook, we head over to the quinta where we do not yet have a sink but do have some counter space, an air fryer and an induction burner; these plus the propane grill mean we can cook which we do often. Tim is a good cook, so we decided why not take advantage of his and Kirsten’s skill, labor and bonhomie and have everyone we’ve met in Portugal come over for barbecue shrimp and what bounty we can harvest from the garden. That will be Sunday. Wish us luck, because we didn’t really think it through that well. Maybe not, the h said; yes, let’s! I said. That was it, that was the conversation and now it’s a train a rollin, our first party in Portugal.
As I sit here Alphonse has entered through the front door, walked through the living room, looked Jake over, then headed over to Princess Leia’s food bowl. She stands off to the side, yelling about fairness. Even as I lift Alphonse off the floor into my arms he stretches his neck for one more bite. He stays slim, Alphonse does, and I can’t figure this out because he is always around getting extras.
I guess in a place like this you get your steps in. Even on a relatively relaxed day with just the usual chores, I walk about five miles a day, and climb a couple of hundred steps. I’m in the habit of carrying work gloves, snippers and a garbage bag with me; there is always an errant weed to be pulled or a piece of broken glass to be harvested. I have been collecting keys since I got here, and have more than 50 now. Someday I will make a mosaic table top of all the broken bits of tile and colored glass and keys I have found.
I like how every visitor has left things behind - little gifts that have become part of the daily landscape. Gayle gave us cute refrigerator magnets that hold the art Tiago’s kids drew for us at Easter. Kim got us a dishtowel with a rooster. Hannah knitted me a warm hat. Agatha left us with a pot holder with a skull design. Herb’s mom bought me a ceramic dish that holds my keys and change. Linda brought us a Scrabble Game and raincoats, even Jake. Paul left a set of golf clubs.
The only furniture we have is garden seating from Ikea, supplementing what was already here - four leather chairs, two leather couches. Everything we own is in containers ready to ship; ‘til then we will make do with what we can find. There isn’t much in the way of decor - a beautiful mosaic vase that was a gift from our AirBnB hosts here in Belas; a kitschy ceramic hen I bought in celebration of my SEF meeting going smoothly - I came away with a receipt for my card, and a promise it would be in the mail in one or two weeks. I knew I shouldn’t have bought that hen, that doing anything celebratory til the final step - the card in my hand - was well and truly over was tempting destiny to toy with me and sure enough, five weeks later the ceramic hen floats on the surface of the raw wood coffee table, smirking, while I am still waiting for my card.
As Kremer worked in the bathroom there was much thumping and the sound of water rushing through the pipes; occasionally she would appear with her sleeves rolled up, headlamp strapped on with buckets of dirty water to empty and refill, and questions: do you have a step stool? another pair of rubber gloves? more sponges?
Six hours later she appeared a final time. I’m finished, she announced. It was past midnight, so I resisted looking at it by headlamp, preferring to see it in the glory of the morning light. This morning I went in and found a sparkling bathroom, the beautiful tile walls scrubbed clean, all the old broken fixtures removed (when did she carry that toilet down 20 steps and all the way to the dumpster?) This second floor bathroom is like a suite of rooms; on the left is the tub and shower room, on the right is a room containing the toilet and the sink, in the middle is a short hallway with space for linen storage. There is a recessed window well, the windows are by some miracle all intact. The shower and sink rooms are gorgeously tiled from floor to ceiling, in perfect condition. The equally beautiful tile in the short connecting hallway has been chipped away by long ago thieves, who left just enough tiles to see the pattern clearly, leaving a pain like a scar where they are missing.
Where before the room had given off a dank, dirty, depressing air, it is now bright and flooded with light, the tiles glowing in blues and yellows. The air is fresher, somehow lifted. It is not just clean but whole - all things broken and battered have been hauled away. It is now a room not of bad things done to it but one of possibility. For the first time we noticed the unique floor tiles. It’s one of those bathrooms a whole family can linger in without crowding each other, everyone able to close the door on personal business while other business could be accomplished by others.
I can’t thank you enough! I tell her when she wakes.
Oh sure, she says. We wanted to help you with things that make it nicer to be here.
These Alaskans know all about making a home nest more cozy even without the conveniences of electricity and running water. Their tiny house in Chickaloon Alaska is only twelve square feet, the top floor a loft bed where a rack holds a few hanging clothes. Downstairs, every need can be met by moving no more than two feet; a kitchen with a ‘sink’ that drains into a big Home Depot bucket, and must be emptied regularly. Next to it a camp stove, on a a long counter that holds dishes, spices, pans, utensils. I have sat many times on the stool at the countertop, noticing how every square inch has a nail or a hook, not an inch wasted, every inch well-utilized. The room is lit by a wall-mounted gas lantern that casts a cozy yellow glow, and heated with a wood burning stove that warms the entire space.
The walls are covered with art works from good friends. There is a bookshelf in the corner with comfortable seating for reading. The books are by and about climbers and extreme skiers. Kremer - who is herself an extreme skiing champion - is also a wonderful writer and artist and I am always begging her to write her memoir. I have every confidence it will be a bestseller; she is a unique star in the Alaskan firmament. She has worked with some legendary people and is legendary herself in the rarefied air of the Alaskan heliskiing community.
My h sometimes breathes that air; as did his business partner Alex. After launching a number of companies together and just before his 43rd birthday Alex learned he was dying of esophageal cancer. He had very little time to put together a bucket list; one of the items was heliskiing with the h.
We always said we’d do it when we sold a company, said Alex. Tim and Kremer hastily helped the h put together Alex’s last, best ski outing with Valdez Heliski Guides.
There is a picture from that trip, Alex looking out over his knees at a vista of surreal steep mountains draped in snow. The h is the taker of the picture, sitting behind Alex, his presence there an absence.
This is what I want to be thinking about, at the end, Alex told the h, turning to look at the vista the h had just captured. I find this so profound I want to blow the picture up to enormous proportions, so that the viewer is put in the frame that contains Alex’s knees and feet in the foreground of that vast snowy field of Alaskan mountaintops. I hope at the end that’s what happened for him; I hope at the end he lay in his bed in total recall, maybe feeling a chill like snow creeping in but not caring because its heaven he’s looking at.
Kremer’s life is full of people like Alex, extraordinary skiers and climbers and guides but also, simply amazing people. Mountain people like Tim and Kirsten tend to be special - skillful, generous, compassionate, helpful, present. The man that performed their (Tim and Kirsten’s) marriage ceremony on a rock next to Fish Lake in Chickaloon Alaska flew in from France that same day. The client they guided on a Denali summit attempt, a woman who lost a leg in Afghanistan, was there, a fresh tattoo of a woman’s face in brilliant hues of green and blue. Startled at the beauty I bent to admire the ink before realizing she was the client they’d been telling me about, the rock climbing amputee. It is hard to describe the stunning effect of raising your eyes from the tattoo to see her startlingly beautiful face. So much pain behind her blonde smile; so much grit.
And they all love Kremer and Tim like I love Kremer and Tim. To know them is to love them. They are strong and steady and capable, and always helpful, reliable and fun.
With two more high level workers around here, things are getting done easier and faster. The cottage is now husked out, cleared of the old mattress, the piles of pink insulation, jumbled beams on the floor with huge rusty nails sticking out of them. The rotten interior walls have been removed and the roof tiles have been removed while nearby all the brush from the upper fruit orchard - what we nominally call the P orchard because it contains pears, persimmons, pomegranates and passion fruits - is burning.
But it’s not just the big jobs the Alaskans help with - they excel, especially, at all the little jobs, the things that make every day run a little more like a well-oiled machine. They make morning coffee, squeeze fresh orange juice, wipe the counters, load the dishwasher, sweep the floor. They help with the water chores which is bigger than it sounds - having other people fill up buckets of water and carry them up the steps to the bathroom, or carry dishpans of dirty dishes the hundred yards to the dishwasher at the quinta makes a difference. I don’t mind doing these things but when someone else is helping out then I can do *other* things including writing, including the final edit of my first book which will be out this summer, The Jake of Everything, which is the story of a girl and her dog on an adventure, the first of many for the girl, the last of all for her dog.
As I write this Jake snoozes on the couch in the living room, very much alive, one ear cocked and waiting to hear the magic words (treat, walk, swim). This June he will turn thirteen. He is much the same as he was as a puppy, his coat a nice 79% cocoa, though now his paws and beautiful golden-eyed chocolate face are heavily dusted with silver. Getting him over here on the first and only airplane trip of his life was the most stressful part of the move to Portugal, but Jake sailed through every stage with flying colors. He still loves his walks and rambles and swimming, especially if there is something to be retrieved in the water, then brought back, then retrieved again. And again. Despite the mania for swimming he is calm, thoughtful, a lover of all food, a friend to all people. He has regular stops in the village, people who come out of their shops to greet him and have the kind of discussion familiar to all dog lovers who regularly talk to dogs.
In the distance is the sound of a chainsaw. The smell of smoke drifts down from the cottage and filters through the open doors of the entryway. It’s a cool, overcast day, with a heavy mist in the air, a day perfect for burning. Four people working at the highest, most visible part of the property is attracting attention. The cottage is in full view of anyone passing by. As no one has lived in it for forty years, the cleanup is a newsworthy event, as evidenced by the number of people stopping at the foot of the driveway to watch the work at the top of the steep double staircase.
The roosters are all sitting down today. They are really liking the wood chips that now cover the forest floor of the Secret Garden. Today I walked outside and found five of the Italian gang, plus Justin Bieberoo just sitting with their rumps snuggled into the chips. They didn’t even bother to get up as I passed them with a bowl, hunting for eggs, and a bag for any trash I found. Though Tiago and Paulo hauled out 90% of the detritus they found in the garden, there is still a couple of garbage bags worth of stuff down by the wall. Just today I found six empty liquor bottles buried in the dirt beneath a bush. The trash most typical in the US - Coke cans, Starbucks coffee cups and lids - is nonexistent here, though it’s not uncommon to see cigarette butts on the street.
Tim and Kirsten are talking about going on a climbing trip to the north where there are some basalt climbs Tim wants to check out. They will be looking for a place to launch their paragliders; I hope they find a way to take pictures or videos of their views of the Portuguese land and sea from the top of the Portuguese sky. After they leave Portugal they may head to Morocco to climb. They will leave Belas having made the most of their time, in that way of Alaskans - fixing and cleaning things, burning and climbing things, having made new friends and flown off old cliffs.
Jake sleeps with them at the start of each night, climbing the stairs to our tent around three. In the morning when Tim emerges from their room to make coffee, Jake barks with joy. They walk him around the property as the chickens are fed, they haul recycling to the bins, go to the churrasqueria for barbecue, and once went for a hike and came back with two pastries and four chairs, bringing my found chair collection to ten.
One of the buildings on the property will make an excellent free-standing conference room, able to fit up to thirty people, sitting right next to where the jacaranda garden will be. It is my goal that not a single chair in this room will be purchased by me - they must all be found chairs, which I will paint purple. We will line one wall inside with all of the old mirrors we’ve found, spotted with age and wavy in places.
While everyone was chainsawing and burning and hauling I made lunch - curried breaded cauliflower, blackened broccoli, with a mushroom and leek salad. The leeks were the first from our garden, massive things that will also require more recipes.
The mist turned to a fine rain by late afternoon. The h and I stood at the end of the quinta road where it joins with the driveway and I listed all the improvements we could see from that vantage point: the repairs to the calcadas and walls, the garage doors fixed and painted; the grapes draped in arbors, the apple and quince and olive trees pruned; the Secret Garden tamed and trimmed and shaped; the horta with its rows of potatoes and raised boxes, its greenhouse and tomato and bean plots; the now-wide open cottage steps, the rotten wall removed; the gates at the foot of the driveway that now open smoothly for people and cars; the new mailbox; the restored lamps that border the gates leading up the front steps; the concrete flower boxes and front gardens bursting with color; the bleached white coral of the koi pond sparkling dry and clean; the palm trees defrocked of dead palms and climbing ivy, the campo emptied of debris, the low shed raised and cleaned and ready to house the good wood from trees and limbs pruned and chopped from around the property and now chainsawed into regular lengths.
That’s just what can be seen from that one spot on the property. The amount of work that lay behind all that, before all that, that’s been completed in addition to all that, is almost mind-boggling. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t helped do it.
Do you really think we are? I asked Tim, after the first tour was over, after Kirsten called us bananas.
Only a little, Tim said. It’s a different life than theirs, for sure - they are always off to this or that destination to climb a crack in a cliff or a waterfall of ice, or ski down some powder line only three other humans have skied. And though they are more connected to the natural world than almost anyone I know, in fact held constantly in its grasp, they leave a light footprint on the land itself. They have a tiny house and a yurt, only recently electrifying one and equipping it with an indoor shower and toilet. They live in the kinds of places that can be closed up for months at a time during the depths of the Alaskan winter, when their properties are buried under literal tons of snow, the only way to access via snow machines.
Whereas we have moved onto a property that must be repaired and restored and then nursed and maintained like a giant baby with four mouths, the kind of place they say you are tied to, which for us is okay, was kind of the whole point in fact.
We walked up to the fruit orchard where the h showed me the third new door that has been installed to keep the chickens out of all cultivation areas. It looks great. All of the fruit trees show fantastic growth especially the tangerine we thought was dead on arrival but the h nursed back to life. The soft rain made a halo of droplets in the fine hairs at the tops of our heads. I uplit the orange tree, the h pointed out. After nightfall I went out to see it, and it looks cinematic, the orange color of the oranges visible even in the dark. They are bitter oranges, and we won’t be making orangeade out of oranges the way you make lemonade out of life’s lemons as we already have more lemons than we know what to do with, courtesy of neighbor Alberto. Bitter oranges are only good for making marmalade, which will do just fine.
Wow, you know such interesting people living big lives! Adventure Inc. Including you and your husband in that club. What an amazing amount of work you have done, making this place your home.
Good luck with your prawn barbecue & harvest table feast tomorrow!