On September 1st, 2017, Kelly and I moved out of our house and into our off-the-grid shack 20 minutes south of Billings. The shack has variously been called The Ranch, the Vench House (our nephews’ attempt to pronounce ‘ranch’, we think), Blue Creek and The Love Shack. As there are natural springs throughout the 40 acres and as our hearts are equally divided between our Australian and American roots, we officially named the shack Alice Springs, complete with a beautiful sign made by our artist friend, Mike Turley.
The Alice Springs shack became our getaway and family camping spot when we moved back to Billings in 2008. We often headed out there at the end of a busy week to rejuvenate and rest in the beautiful countryside. Disconnecting from wifi allowed us to reconnect more fully with each other in conversation, while typically enjoying delicious food. I sometimes brought my guitar to sing a few folky songs, and more often brought our portable speakers to blast a favourite playlist from one of our Ipods. When I was struggling through writing my dissertation, I experienced absolute relief from dancing like a whirling dervish or a Woodstock hippy around the table after dinner. So with all these good vibes established, Kelly and I looked forward to spending two or three months at the shack before leaving Montana and heading Down Under.
Staying in the shack for more than a couple of nights required planning, especially as both of us still had part-time work and needed to turn up to a university or business meeting not looking and smelling like some feral hillbilly. We moved some of our furniture and things into the shack to make it more livable, but still simple. Kelly invested in a small set of solar panels and used two car batteries to store energy. This meant a few cables and a small, messy cluster sitting in one of the window ledges; nothing high tech, but a good opportunity to practice with renewables. We operated light bulbs, a fan, charged phones and laptops. My request was to be able to iron a shirt and straighten my hair so that I could present as something other than that feral hillbilly. I soon learned that irons (for clothes and hair) use a ridiculous amount of energy and would drain the system. There were two sunny days when the meter gauge maxed out and I could selfishly drain all the energy for my girlish needs. Plan B was doing my hair and ironing at the home of friends and family whenever we went for dinner. Our gym membership also became much more useful because of access to hot running water and electricity!
It was still warm when we moved to the shack in September and was snowing by the time Kelly left in November. God bless Mike Peterson, the guy who built the shack and sold it to us, for insulating the walls with hay bales. By opening windows up to the the cool evenings, we never got too hot. I learned a tip from Sinead, our daughter who is travelling in an RV with her partner Jack, and created removable window shades from silver insulation material, which also kept the shack cool. Kelly had stored enough firewood to see us through, and when the weather cooled down we got more efficient at using the wood stove donated by brother Mick. A cooler and daily ice was necessary for the first couple of weeks, but soon enough we could leave anything needing refrigeration in the uninsulated garage. The water we hauled came from family faucets. We got to joking that we weren’t living off the grid so much as living off our family :) If we were to live at the shack for longer, we would put up rain gutters and a cistern, but we did catch a good amount of rainwater in buckets for washing. Our gas four burner cooktop worked a treat.
In our little bathroom, we already had a composting toilet. We took “Bali baths”, meaning we used a bucket of warm water to soap up and a cup to ladle and rinse off.
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| Sinead and Kelly during her visit to stay with us at Alice Springs
We ate so very well at the shack! In readiness for a life without refrigeration, Kelly had canned tomatoes, curries, beans and more before we moved in. Plus the fall harvest kept coming with a bumper crop from our garden in town for salads and veggies. As you can see, we had so much garden goodness. We also used some freezer space at Mom and Dad’s for the meat we still had.
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Between the bbq, gas stove top and even the top of the wood burning stove, we had great cooking options, but no oven...or so I thought. I returned home from a trip to town one day and found the following ingenious contraption sitting on the outdoor table.
I recognized this immediately as the handiwork of Kelly, the intrepid mountain man. This was his answer to the problem of a leftover burrito that needed reheating. He googled ‘solar oven’ and found that a foil lined box in the sun could reliably heat his burrito to dam near 120˚F. Note the fancy additional features of a doorknob to hold the oven open and the meat thermometer at the front for additional accuracy. For some unexplained reason, the solar oven migrated to the burn pile just a few days later.
Years earlier, when talking about our move to Montana, we dreamed about building a house at Blue Creek. Off the grid and a round house, inspired by Native American tipis and the teaching that life is a circle. Realizing that the cost of such a dwelling would be a burden and limit our ability to travel, we opted happily for a house in town. While we were living in the shack, our friend Mike Turley asked if he could build a sweat lodge on the property, and we loved the idea. Mike and some of his young relatives put the willow branches up and began holding sweats there soon after. So we have a round house after all, a reminder that it is always good to dream, while remaining flexible and open to the benevolent forces of the universe.
Most days we would take a walk with our dog Cinnamon over the little creek, which had dried up by late summer, and up the hill. We got to know many of the deer trails and different parts of the land much better, although I still have so much to learn from the land. In October, we found yucca plants flowering on the ridge facing the shack, but the deer munched them down pretty quickly.
Wild roses also bloomed up the hillside, and as fall progressed, we harvested the rose hips to make a delicious tea. It seemed like the bright red rose hips were deliberately drawing our attention and generously offering their vitamin C to boost our health as the weather cooled down.
Earlier in the year, on the summer solstice, Kelly climbed the hill at dawn to find where the sun rose and marked out the centre and spokes of a medicine wheel he plans to put on the top of the hill. Initially, I was confused about his desire to do this. I mean, yes, we are both deeply respectful of Indigenous culture and have been adopted by Crow and Cheyenne friends, but we ourselves are white Irish Australian/Americans. Then Kelly explained to me that the last time I landed in hospital (late April 2017), while he was praying for me, he kept the worry at bay by visualizing and calculating the mathematical dimensions of a medicine wheel. When I escaped a surgery and recovered, he felt called to put a medicine wheel on the hill at Blue Creek. It’s a work in progress. In our daily walks up the hill, we often visited the place. At the central point sits a resilient old sagebrush; we call him Tjilpi, old man, another cross reference to our Australian roots.
So, our Alice Springs shack experience was a rejuvenating hiatus for Kelly, Cinnamon and me, a perfect way to transition between an enriching decade in Montana and the unknown but openly embraced next chapter in Australia. Our months there left us with a desire to do more towards living sustainably and a desire to spend more time in that beautiful place.
