Living in the Shack

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.

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.

 

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.

The Mac

In 2017, Kelly and I moved back to Australia after almost ten fabulous years in Montana. We loved making a home in Billings, based in our humble house on Yellowstone Avenue. It was perfect for us, cosy in winter but big enough to welcome Mum on her visits and our kids when they boomeranged. Inviting our big, Irish family and friends for a celebration could be challenging in terms of space, but we snuggled in. We knew early on that we wanted to replace the deck on the house for backyard summer gatherings, and Kelly was excited to plant a garden, in true McCarthy tradition.

After I went to see the first Mamma Mia movie with Terry, Erin, Tera, Darcy and Christina, I came home and requested a courtyard like the one in the dancing scenes on the Greek Island. Over a number of years, Kelly transformed the backyard to something wonderful with some help and outsourcing at key points. Only one fingernail was harmed in cutting the awfully heavy flagstones!

The backyard became our favourite place to have a drink at the end of the day and served up some of the best food in Billings. We lovingly called it The Mac. “Want to have a drink at The Mac?” The Mac is now safely in the care of family, Kathleen, Casey and Gabe. Here’s a tribute to Kelly’s creation.

Sevilla!

The latest in adventure in my beautiful and blessed life has been a week in Seville, Spain.  I am aware that I am one of the lucky people from a first world country who can choose to chase a dream, this one of mine being a flamenco dance course in Andalusia where it all began. 

A little bit anxious about setting off without Kelly to a country where I do not speak the language, I endured the 21 hours of flights and lay-overs.  It was a little challenging to find my way around Barcelona airport, communicate, order food etc.  I checked the screens multiple times.  Although I couldn’t get wi-fi, I was pleased that my debit card worked in the ATM with no problems.  Being able to use an ATM card, having wi-fi in most places, email and skype etc is such a far cry from my first trip to Europe in 1988.  At that time my main form of contacting home was by letters which took two weeks.  Long distance calls were almost prohibitively expensive then.  This trip, I decided not to get a European cell phone for 100 Euros+ because I can call Kelly and Mum etc using skype on my laptop.

Enough of travel logistics.  What about Spain?  Well, Jose Carlos was a little late picking me up from the Seville airport, so it was very nice to meet him and be escorted to my apartment over the dance school.  Seville is hot in summer; most days are in the high 30s Celsius (around 100 Fahrenheit).  It’s fairly humid too.  That’s ok.  It’s like Darwin.  Having lived in the extremes of Darwin, Alice and now Billings, weather is usually irrelevant to me.  Just get the clothes and accommodation you need, adjust your outings and energy, and roll with it.  I love how Mediterranean cultures adapt so intelligently to their environment, compared to Australia in particular.  We’re getting better in Oz, but for so long we tried to pretend we were still in England or Ireland, planting green grass and building brick boxes.  I expected from living in Monaco that the buildings would have roof top terraces for the summer evenings, thick and well insulated walls, efficient use of space, and shutters facing the right way for morning sun and afternoon breezes.  What I have loved experiencing here is siesta.  It’s too hot to be out from 1 – 4 in the afternoon, so they don’t do it.  (As tourists with limited time, we make an exception, and that reminds us how smart the Sevillanos are to stay indoors.)  So then the businesses stay open till about 7:30.  The social life continues till well after midnight.  Hundreds and thousands of people sit out in the lovely, warm evenings, having dinner around 10, drinking and chatting till 1 or 2.  And they don’t work too hard.  When it’s getting towards siesta time, you might be ignored at a café.  Everyone is friendly, but they know what pace of life is sustainable.  The other lovely thing is the use of fans.  They work!  Most of the local women carry a fan, usually from the dollar store, to hasten the evaporation of perspiration and cool off.  

Air conditioning with water mist at a tapas bar

On the Alameda, more spray mist provides relief from the heat

Taller Flamenco (Flamenco Workshop) teaches flamenco dance, guitar and Spanish.  It’s a handful of rooms in three floors of a building nestled within the old part of Sevilla.  This city was built by the Romans, then conquered by the Islamic Moors around 700, and then reclaimed by the Christian Spanish about 1200.  The mix of cultures is fundamental the charm and style of Sevilla.   Three very friendly and helpful people run the office, and a host of teachers come in and out.  I am staying in the one apartment above the school, sharing it with a family from Hong Kong whose daughter (I gather) has been a long time student, now a graduate.  A gaggle of fellow students is generally housed with friends of the school.  My new, dear friend Jessica from San Francisco is staying with the wonderful Laura.  Just around the corner, Laura is about seventy and often hosts students from the school.  She mainly stays in, with regular visits from her children and grandchildren (many also called Laura).  Laura rolls her own cigarettes, gathers people, gives advice, and on Friday evenings can be found dressed up, her blue eyes shining, sitting in a terrace cafe on her street enjoying a drink with a grand-daughter.  

City walls construct by the Moors

Inside the Alcazar palace

Exquisite gardens of the Alcazar

The magnificent cathedral includes a bell tower that was originally the minaret of the Moors' mosque

The city, featuring the bull fighting arena

I had a two hour beginners’ flamenco class each morning with Carmen, an excellent teacher.  We worked on a sample, short flamenco dance but didn’t get it finished.  Mainly we learned about the posture, strength, balance, and attitude of flamenco which took a lot of practice and will take much more.  Our little sample flamenco dance is an alegria, one of the few upbeat, happy styles of flamenco.  Many more are beautifully sorrowful and intense.  The beat of alegria and similar flamenco styles uses 12 counts (rather than 4/4).  We learned to count it as 1 2, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 – made more challenging for me because we counted in Spanish.  After warming up, we would practice the variety of hand movements and intricate footwork.  When we’d had all the dance and choreography we could reasonably take in, we could hear explanations about the timing, history, clothing, accessories, and musicians associated with flamenco.  I think I understood about 70% of what Carmen was saying, and occasionally asked for a translation.  It was lovely to have the Spanish wash over me.  My understanding of French certainly helped.  After that we would practice our ‘compas,’ foot stamping and hand clapping in delightful rhythms around the music. 

In the afternoons I studied beginners’ Spanish with Carmela for an hour and a half.  She spoke only in Spanish, and the other students already had some language.  It was the perfect level for me, with my Spanish phrase book, the 10 Pimsleur lessons I did on the Ipod and my familiarity with verbs, vocabulary etc from French.  Now I realize what Enrique Iglesias was telling me all those times he sang ‘Bailamos’ – “Let’s dance.”  Altogether, I have only scratched the surface of Spanish language and flamenco dance, but it has been so rewarding and so much fun.  My only regret is that I cannot continue studying flamenco dance in Billings. 

On Monday evenings, Taller Flamenco holds a ‘meeting’ (drinks) at a favorite bar in the neighborhood, Coral de Esquibel.  Such a simple idea allowed students to make friends with whom we could visit the sites and hang out in the evenings.  We ended up with a kind of ‘Noah’s Ark’: 2 Aussies, 2 Americans. 2 French, 2 Dutch, 2 Filipinos (some of these categories overlapping)… I loved the fact that around our table every evening we would be switching between Spanish, English and French, everyone able to understand plenty.  Before coming, I had reservations about being too old for this kind of class, and I certainly was a good decade or more older that the other students, but I was still very welcome and definitely ok with the dancing.  Yeah, and I found out that at 45 I can still have fun and stay out dancing in a club until 5:00 AM when required.  Meeting Jessica, a fellow American teacher, lover of dance and good food, made this week perfect for me.  I have been profoundly impressed with the set of young people I met this week.  They are so confident, multi-lingual, open to new experiences, good with money and people, fun-loving … It gives me more optimism for the future of our world.  

My beautiful dance partners, Jessica and Louise

Such great food... jamon (cured ham)

chorizo - delicioso

Jamon hanging in a cafe

I got to see some authentic flamenco, in Triana, the gypsy neighborhood across the river from the old city.  It seemed to be a family, with male singers and guitarists, and a woman (mum) dancing.  Such power and beauty in music and dance!  For 3 Euros we got the performance and a free drink.  It seemed more like these people were living their culture and welcoming tourists along for the ride rather than trying to make a profit. 

My last night was sublime.  We met at the Coral and enjoyed the usual conversation.  At the table next to us were some fun loving locals jamming with a guitar.  Two of the guys in our group also had a guitar.  We joined tables and listened to flamenco classics, as well as singing along to Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan and John Mayer.  Being Sunday night, we were eventually asked to have last drinks, and then moved to the Alameda, a pedestrian mall, where we danced and sang some more.  One old guy tried to teach me the Sevillanas, the folk version of flamenco.  One or both of us had drunk too much to allow much success, but it was brilliant fun. 

The Summer of Mum

Now that I have been back at school for two weeks, I'm looking back at the summer and it seems like such an expanse of time, this luxurious three month vacation.  I went to Florida for an inspiring teaching conference at the start of the vacation.  It was Darwin-hot there.  From the air conditioned coach on the way to conference centre, I looked out over the swamps and wondered about alligators.  Some other time, when Kelly and I go on our "World Tour of 'Merica", we'll check them out.  Sinead gave me a wonderful book, "Their Eyes Were Watching God" set in the Everglades around 1900 and it got me dreaming of Florida - not Disneyland and touristy beaches, but warm wilderness and southern food Florida. 

At the end of the holidays I went to another conference to upgrade my tech skills, so now I'm creating my first website (gotta love google for dummies) and loving google docs.  As a delightful contrast, when I was leaving Skyview High School, the location, three proghorn antelope were lazing on the lawn.  Nice!

Anyhow!  It's been delightful to have Mum living with us.  She's made herself a routine consisting of, amongst other things, aquarobics, walking the dog, unloading the dishwasher and familiarizing herself with the plethora of pharmaceutical advertisements on cable tv :)  We've taken a couple of trips, but it's been pretty laid back, which is how we like it.

Walking Cinnamon in Pioneer Park

We took a day trip up to the Pryor Mountains to see the wild horse herd amongst the awesome beauty of Montana.

Looking for directions

Mum, Cinnamon and I

The wild horse herd was broken into small family groups, with little foals in most groups.  Kelly noticed that the stallions were pretty bruised and beat up, each one having fought for his 'ladies'.

Bighorn Canyon from the Pryors

Kelly and I have both had projects around the house and yard.  I painted a couple of rooms in the house and was pretty happy with the development of my faux painting technique.  Kelly planted a vegetable garden, and I jumped in his slipstream with watering and weeding ... but the abundant rain and our reluctance to spray anything on the garden made it so that the weeds got the better of me.  Once I could confidently find the food, I made a truce with the weeds.  We've had a bumper crop of tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, squash, pumpkin, beans, snow peas, peppers and jalapenos.  The problem with growing a lot of food is that then you have to eat it, can (preserve) it or give it away.  Our oversupply issue has been compounded by Kelly's 'buy in bulk' compulsion because when we went to Glacier National Park and Flathead Lake, he couldn't resist buying two big boxes of the cherries in season. There's a Montanan joke with a lot of truth to it that you should never leave your car doors unlocked at this time of the year.  If you do, you'll come back to find zucchini on the back seat.  Seriously, I'm loving this agrarian life in spite of my always dirty fingernails.  We also get corn from Kelly's Mom and Dad.  Although I'm making my share of mistakes, Kelly and I have been canning a range of things: tomatoes, pickled cucumbers, cherry pie filling, jam, bbq sauce, baked beans.

As a result of my infatuation with the "Mamma Mia" movie, I decreed last year that our back yard would turn into a paved courtyard festooned with coloured lanterns, ready for dancing parties and ABBA lip-syncing.  See how that works?  I have a vision.  Kelly gets a plan ... and several weekends of strenuous labour.  Montana's weather condition and quarry supplies differ slightly from those of the Greek Islands, so there have been some compromises.  So far Kelly, his brother, Dad, and friend Kenny have achieved a pergola (to be draped with grape vines next year), two garden boxes made of wood rather than stone (to be filled with herbs, aforementioned grape vines and anything else that catches our fancy) and the removal of all the weed ridden lawn/soil in an area of 800 square feet.  I have undertaken the arduous task of shopping for coloured paper lanterns.  You're welcome.

Stay tuned for completed photos of the Mamma Mia courtyard.

Back to that trip to Flathead Lake and Glacier where we bought an annual supply of cherries ... We really wanted to take Mum to Glacier National Park since she loved Yellowstone so much when she came over during the fall in our first year living here.  Sinead and her boyfriend Jacob were able to come with us, which added to the fun.  Kelly got us a cabin on Flathead Lake for a couple of nights, which is a marvel in itself.  It is home country to the Salish and Kootenai tribes who have the Flathead Reservation.  Also it's famous cherry growing country.  In the afternoons when we were down at the Lake for a swim, we saw Mexican farm workers there having a swim, and the next morning they were all at work selling us cherries.  Grandma on the cash register, mums sorting the cherries, dads and uncles picking and carting.

While staying at the cabin, we drank a special toast to our dear departed friend, Ronny Reinhardt.  On the same weekend in Melbourne, Australia, a gig was happening to launch a final cd of music Ronny worked on in the last year of his life.  Cheers, Ronny.

I love the exponential spelling of the Salish and Kootenai

Mum at McDonald Creek in Glacier National Park.

Sinead and I 

Old Jackson, one of the last remaining glaciers

A big horned sheep confronts a mountain goat

The last hoorah for Mum and I before school was going out to Crow Fair at Crow Agency on the reservation.  It's only an hour away, and we made two trips out there, one for the parade on Friday  and one for the powwow dancing on Saturday.  Crow Fair goes for most of a week and is promoted as the biggest gathering of Northern Plains Indians.  I can believe it.  It's also known at the teepee capital of the world.  

There are hundreds of teepees set up along the river and winding streets/paths of the camp.

In the backgound is the honor guard including all the military and veterans in uniform.  They carry the US flag and their tribal flags as proud warriors. 

I have a lot to learn about the different types of dancers.  Some of them wear fluffy, round hats made of feathers. 

The dancing and gift giving goes for hours.  Dancers are numbered, as winners are judged in each category.  The last dance Mum and I saw was a father - daughter dance.  Old chiefs danced with their grown daughters, young men with their tiny princesses.  It was so beautiful.  Mum confessed on the way home that the whole thing made her a bit teary.  I wasn't surprised at all; it does that to me too.