On Flat Lake Time

On Flat Lake Time

Copyright 2014 by Larry Taylor, Jr.

All rights reserved.

Photographs in this book are by the author unless otherwise noted, including the cover photograph of Bob Jent, who had just finished tying up Jake's canoe.

Published in the United States by Larry Taylor, Jr. at Smashwords

Cover design by Renee Barratt, thecovercounts.com

First Edition

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1 - Break-up

Chapter 2 - The Cabin

Chapter 3 - The Bottomless Chasm

Chapter 4 - Off the Road System

Chapter 5 - Installing Bamboo Floors

Chapter 6 - Wood Stove Inspection

Chapter 7 - The Search for a Pontoon Boat and Independence

Chapter 8 - Our Kayot

Chapter 9 - Moving from Eagle River Valley

Chapter 10 - Moving in

Chapter 11 - Fuel Oil

Chapter 12 - Phylis, the Skiff, and the Flat Lake Horse's Ass Award

Chapter 13 - Commuting in the Dark

Chapter 14 - Fog

Chapter 15 - Pre-Freeze-up

Chapter 16 - Home Guard

Chapter 17 - Freeze-up

Chapter 18 - Trying the Ice

Chapter 19 - Flat Lake North Shore Ice Road

Chapter 20 - Small World, and a Gift from Jim

Chapter 21 - Second Best Investment

Chapter 22 - Ice Puppy 112, an Attempt to Explain its Origin

Chapter 23 - Out of Sorts

Chapter 24 - Social Fabric

Chapter 25 - Burn Barrel

Chapter 26 - To the Lake

Chapter 27 - Places to Eat

Chapter 28 - The Shower and a Tablespoon of Seawater

Chapter 29 - The Stealth Pumper

Chapter 30 - First Cabin Guest

Chapter 31 - The Human Condition

Chapter 32 - Communications

Chapter 33 - The Call of the Wild

Chapter 34 - Flat Lake Gourmet Ski-In Picnic

Chapter 35 - The Next Flat Lake Gourmet Ski-In Picnic

Chapter 36 - Trucks on the Ice

Chapter 37 - Pulling Off the Ice

Chapter 38 - Waiting

Chapter 39 - Falling Through the Ice

Chapter 40 - Northern Lights over Flat Lake

Chapter 41 - Heartbreak Hotel

Chapter 42 - Larry Meets Jake

Chapter 43 - Aerial View

Chapter 44 - Spring, Dogs, and Mosquito Repellants

Chapter 45 - Catherine Comes Home!

Chapter 46 - Maeve Comes Home!

Chapter 47 - Mowing the Lawn

Chapter 48 - Didgeridoo

Chapter 49 - The Pontoon Leak

Chapter 50 - Cleo Weston

Chapter 51 - The Alaska Cadillac Café

Chapter 52 - The Trick with the Key

Chapter 53 - Adaptation

Chapter 54 - Barbara's Visit

Chapter 55 - Rebound from Depression

Chapter 56 - Black Spruce Are Serotonous

Chapter 57 - The Freezing of Lakes

Chapter 58 - Loons

Chapter 59 - Loon Nest

Chapter 60 - Loon Parties

Chapter 61 - Ghost Loon

Chapter 62 - Fall

Chapter 63 - Hoolighan, a Tree Bay'n Coon Hound

Chapter 64 - Power outage

Chapter 65 - Rain

Chapter 66 - A Sad Chapter

Chapter 67 - Haggard Falls through the Ice

Chapter 68 - Thanksgiving

Chapter 69 - The Name Game

Chapter 70 - Ice Cores

Chapter 71 - Ice Depth

Chapter 72 - Trucks through the Ice

Chapter 73 - The Second Christmas

Chapter 74 - Gated Community

Chapter 75 - Pressure Ridge

Chapter 76 - In the Dead of Winter

Chapter 77 - You Know It Got Cold When the Toilet's Frozen

Chapter 78 - The Future of the Lake

Chapter 79 - Exotic Species

Chapter 80 - The Northern Flying Squirrel

Chapter 81 - Rich and Glenda

Chapter 82 - Paddling the Skiff

Chapter 83 - Bonfires

Chapter 84 - The Commute from Flat Lake

Epilogue

Dedication

Out Takes

A Party of Loons

Back Page

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For Gail, who made it all possible.

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Picture 1. Maeve, Cat, and Gail Taylor at our dock on Flat Lake

Prologue

Beauty and interest surround me at the cabin. The stars are brilliant, the Northern Lights a wonder, and the peace here looking at the lake can be as in a dream. The life around us is a constant susurrus in the trees, punctuated by the plaintive wail of loons and the whistle of mallards' wings. On Flat Lake Time is the story of how my beautiful, resourceful wife, Gail, and I solved the many unforeseen problems encountered when we moved off the road system to a remote cabin on a lake in Big Lake, Alaska. It chronicles the adventurous lives of the Flat Lake home guard and the shift in perspective it takes to fully enjoy and look forward to the next challenge.

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Picture 2. A river otter leading the way out along the north shore.

Chapter 1 - Break-up

The day Don fell through the ice was a Saturday. He had told me when we marooned ourselves at our cabins that Wednesday (to wait for the ice to go out) that he thought we'd be out by the next Wednesday. That gave me a gauge for finishing the bedroom library, my break-up project. While I was painting the bookshelves bright white, I began planning the shelving and hangers for our walk-in closet.

Don had suggested spreading wood stove ashes on the ice to help it melt around our dock. I did this both at our dock where the ice ramp, insulated until now for a snowmachine ramp by Styrofoam blocks, remained the final section to melt, and at Blaylock’s dock where the section that had been insulated by the snow berm was still solid. On Tuesday evening I finished my work for the day around 8 PM and went down to the dock to check on the thaw. The ice was still eight inches thick at the end of the dock but had significant cracks in it, so I decided to give our aluminum skiff a little ice breaking practice.

The skiff was floating at the dock. A few days earlier the ice was solid under the skiff, which had been insulating it from the sun and rain. I had slid it back off the ice into the water and put ashes on that raised area, so now the ice there was pretty rotten. I started the outboard, put it in forward, and let it idle. I went to the stern and let the bow ride up on the ice in a likely spot, and then walked forward, rocking the skiff back and forth until it caused the ice to crack more and, finally, spread into separate flows. The hardest part to get through was the snowmachine ramp. Because of this experience I would learn to leave the skiff on the other side of the ice ramp during breakup so I wouldn’t have to cross the ramp to get out.

It was slow and beautiful work watching the ice sheets move in vast masses as I forced the skiff through. It took me an hour to get 200 feet to Don and Marcia’s dock. Don (who had survived falling through the ice, but more about that later) didn’t have his skiff in the water yet, so I called it a day and went home to make dinner. It was 9:30 or 10 PM by then and still light out, a relief from the dark of winter.

The next day was hot. I worked all day painting the bookshelves and then started on the closet hangers and shelves. In the late afternoon I called Gail (who had stayed at Cousin Susan's so she could teach). I told her I was going to try to get to the landing. Then I went out in the skiff again. I had heard some ice crunching activity over at Don’s and their skiff was gone when I got there, so he and Marcia were breaking ice ahead of me. Their passage through one area of thick ice left behind a serpentine trail of ice needles eight inches long floating on their sides.

I got a good view of each cabin as I worked my way along the shore following their trail. About half a mile along I met Don and Marcia working their way back through the broken ice. They told me they’d made it to the landing, but that I should watch out for the shallow bottom when I got to the creek beyond Moose Flats. I told them I was going to run into Big Lake for some chocolate ice cream to celebrate getting out. It took me 45 minutes to get to the landing, normally a five minute boat ride.

After the drive around the lakeshore into the Town of Big Lake I saw Jeff Ross at Steve’s Food Boy. He was surprised we’d gotten out already since the south shore, where he lives, still had solid ice. The whole lake was still covered with ice; it was only the narrow reach we had broken along the shore that was passable and he wouldn’t be able to see that from his side of the lake. It's common to think others share your own situation. Though we were learning a lot about the egocentricities of others through their inability to understand many elements of our roadless access situation on Flat Lake, we could see we were still subject to our own misconceptions when our very close neighbors lapsed slightly in this regard as well. Jeff is an adaptable sort, though, and broadened his worldview quickly. We saw each other at the landing a little later and he took his hovercraft along the north shore to help break ice. It took me an hour to get back to the cabin with my ice cream, mainly because I followed a long lead Jeff had opened up that turned into solid ice and had to break my way over closer to shore again.

That was Wednesday, just as Don had predicted. I had been holed up for one week while the ice broke up. On Thursday, Gail came back after work and helped me break through shifted ice back to the cabin. I had finished the library and the closet poles and straightened up the place nicely for her and we were very happy to see each other.

The next weekend the ice had gone out all the way on Flat Lake. I met Bert and Bonnie Bailey soon after that, while we were still using the skiff exclusively. They had been on Flat Lake for some time but had just retired and were moving here full time. I remember I met them at the landing on Mother’s Day because they had a bunch of flowering plants from a Mother’s Day sale that they were loading into their skiff. They live on the north shore, too, in a cabin with an airplane on floats at the dock. I introduced myself and Bert said,

"Oh! You’re the guy who went out to get chocolate ice cream to celebrate breakup."

I said I was, and he said,

"You must be a regular Flat Laker ‘cause that’s the sort of thing they’d do."

It’s nice how word gets around here. That’s what community is. You pay attention to your neighbors because they might do something interesting.

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Picture 3. View of the lake from the living room

Chapter 2 - The Cabin

Our lives have changed so much since the day Gail and Maeve, our oldest daughter, found our cabin on Flat Lake. I don’t remember what I had been doing earlier that day. At the end of it, though, I was lying in the bath soaking my back to relieve my splinting muscles. Gail and Maeve had gone out to Craig Johnson’s cabin on Flat Lake with Carol Eichinger, Gail’s best friend, and their good friend Lucy Pullen. The ladies returned from their trip and Gail rushed into the bathroom and started telling me about a cabin they had found. She and Maeve, who was visiting from Boston for the wedding of Craig and Carol’s daughter Jess, had been canoeing and had seen a sheaf of Cabin for Sale notices posted on a tree at the water’s edge. They got out to look, and Gail told me about her keen interest and their investigation into whether the cabin had a bathroom or laundry, how many bedrooms it had, and what it looked like peeking through the windows. I knew right there, lying in the bath until the water started to cool, that we had already made the decision to buy this cabin off the road system, accessible only by boat, in the wilds of Alaska.

That was at the end of June 2003. We called the listed realtor, Shannon Parberry, and arranged to be picked up at the Flat Lake landing in her pontoon boat to inspect the cabin. The boat ride took five minutes, straight across the lake. The land had a floating dock tied to two round metal piling driven into the bank. A ramp connected the dock with the shore. The anchoring piling extended twelve feet above the shore end of the ramp with a wooden beam connecting the tops of the piling, making an arch over the ramp. There was a red light at the end of the dock to help guide boaters in at night (there was no appreciable night this time of year, but there would be). There were purple iris on the shore at the water’s edge and an expanse of well-mown lawn sloping up to the cabin and its outbuildings, a workshop, greenhouse, and woodshed.

There was bear scat near the path up to the cabin that made me wonder if the local bear objected to the interest being shown, and a big deck at the front of the cabin. The cabin was very cute, red with white trim. It had a one story, flat roofed room in the front with two large windows looking out over the deck, past birch trees, over the lawn to the dock and lake. Inside the cabin, moving toward the back, the front view room widened into a two story room open to a steeply pitched roof, with an arctic entry on the left and stairs going up from the entry door. This high ceilinged room included the dining room, and had an overhead catwalk running from the loft bedroom at the top of the stairs to another catwalk along large windows that followed the roofline at the front of the cabin, making them into the shape of right triangles. Through them you could look out over the flat roof through the birch trees at the lake. Back on the main floor, moving back from the dining area, was a chef’s (a euphemism for one person) kitchen with a walk-in pantry, the door to a bathroom, and a window over the sink looking out on the greenhouse. Further back was the doorway to a bedroom that was the entire thirty-foot width of the cabin with views of birch trees rising together with a wide path winding about 200 feet up the hill behind the cabin.

The seller had bought the property only the year before, without consulting his wife. If there was a Darwin Award for removing oneself from the population of cabin owners anywhere, this guy had won. They had, consequently, spent little time here, and had been treating it like a cabin, but not a home. The floors were still plywood, and, though it was nicely paneled in knotty pine, it remained roughed-in with no trim, just as they had bought it.

I knew from my cooling-bath experience that we were already committed, and I was quite pleased. I had told Gail some time ago that I would be happy to move wherever she chose. After meeting in Ketchikan, living in Fairbanks, and raising Maeve and her little sister Catherine in Sitka and Eagle River, Gail had been moving where it suited me so far. Now it was her turn.

We had been looking for a place on the water forever, it seemed. In Sitka, during our first year of marriage, we came very close to buying a little log cabin on piling over the ocean, right behind the Kettleson Memorial Library. We wound up designing and building our own log house in Sitka, on a hill overlooking Swan Lake and the ocean, surrounded by woods for the girls to play in.

We moved to Eagle River when Maeve and Catherine were in eighth and fifth grade, respectively. Being near water was not as important to us as being near the school we wanted for the girls. Our favorite walk then was about half a mile down to a stream where our golden retriever, Copper and the girls played and dammed the stream to make a knee-high swimming hole. After Maeve and Catherine graduated from high school, went to college, and moved away, we started thinking about a place on the water again. A few years ago I had traveled to Ketchikan when Gail’s mother, Cleo Weston, told us that a house on Pennock Island was up for sale.

Growing up in Ketchikan, Alaska, on Revillagigedo Island Gail had always wanted to live near the water. The Pennock property was roadless with a beautiful rocky beach, surrounded by the Southeastern rain forest, views of soaring eagles, and the entire city of Ketchikan across the channel a five minute (in good weather) boat ride away. We were committed, even though Ketchikan’s economy had been deteriorating since the closure of the Ketchikan Pulp Company, but another bidder was able to afford more of a down payment and won out. This was an acceptable loss. Gail and I would have had to find work in Ketchikan to make it affordable. Gail could probably have found a teaching job, but there was little other good paying year-round work.

In another effort to live on the water, Maeve and I had looked for a place on the ocean in Homer and in Anchor Point, both on the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage. Nothing was available in Homer, not even vacant property on the water. In Anchor Point there was property available, but after our house-building adventure in Sitka I didn’t think Gail would want to participate once more. I was still considering Anchor Point when Gail and Maeve found our Flat Lake cabin.

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Picture 4. Ron Adler, Cleo Weston, Shannon Parberry, Harold Soule, Susan Weston, and on the deck, Maeve and Gail Taylor

Chapter 3 - The Bottomless Chasm

We knew we were moving to Flat Lake, but we had to get some approvals first. We talked to Maeve, who lived in Boston. She was very concerned that she would advise us to do something that we would come to regret. We had faith and moved on to Catherine, who was in the Peace Corps living in Africa. Catter was very excited for us! Seeing us move from the second house they had known was of some concern for both of our daughters.

Next we talked to Cousins Susan and Ron, who had recently moved to Eagle River from Ketchikan, and invited them to Flat Lake to check out the cabin. Gail’s Mother, Cleo, was visiting us from Ketchikan, and Maeve was here again from Boston, this time with her work on what the US Fish and Wildlife Service called a detail, a time out from her regular job to take a temporary position, in Kodiak. Shannon took us all to the cabin. Cleo was able to get on and off Shannon’s pontoon boat easily.

We had a picnic on the deck of the cabin. Cleo says her inability to leap around out here with the agility she used to have is enough to make a preacher curse, a phrase she says her father had used. It was warm. We sat in the shade of the birch trees, looked out over the water, and watched Maeve swim. With the call of loons added to everything, life somehow seemed more vital here than at our Eagle River home.

That trip we got the sense everyone understood our interest in moving to Flat Lake. Ron and Susan said we could stay in their spare bedroom whenever we needed to. That was nice of them. For me, the commute was going to be 70 miles each way. Driving the back road from the Flat Lake landing into Big Lake took twenty minutes itself because of all of the tight curves following the shoreline. In good weather it was an hour and a half one way all the way to my office. We knew we’d appreciate their offer, especially in the coming fall during freeze-up when we wouldn’t be able to get across to the cabin. We hoped that wouldn’t last long. There would also certainly be other times when we could avail ourselves of their offer, during heavy snowstorms or when we wanted to go to the symphony or a lecture or other show at the Performing Arts Center in Anchorage and didn’t want to make the long drive late at night.

Gail’s nephew, Weston weighed in for the rest of the Ketchikan relatives with an ethereal photograph he concocted using an image of Gail and me standing on our future dock surrounded by images he inserted of mountain cliffs, hanging glaciers, and a castle on a mountain top:

Picture 5. Well, Gail, it’s still a little close to town, but if we put the guest room by the bottomless chasm…

My side of the family was excited about the move. My sister Barbara was concerned about how we were going to get back and forth during the coming freeze-up. My bother Charlie drew a diagram for a cable suspension system for us to use to move our household goods over to the cabin.

That visit to the cabin with Maeve, Cleo, Ron, and Susan made up our minds. We made an offer the next week, and it was accepted. We put our Eagle River house up for sale the following week and found a full price buyer at our open house. Then it took all summer for the paperwork on both places to be completed.

Next we did an unofficial cabin inspection. Craig Johnson came over and tried out the Toyo furnaces. There are two of them, one in the front rooms and one in the bedroom. The bedroom also has a wood stove. The Toyo furnaces just had to be turned on. They burn fuel oil and there was enough in the fuel tank to try them out, though it was warm enough out not to need them running. There is a view port in the front of the Toyo through which you can see the flame burning. It’s a nice clear blue flame, showing efficient fuel combustion, none of the unburned particles glowing white or yellow that would indicate inefficient combustion. We checked out the well water pressure tank in the crawl space and turned on the breaker for the electric hot water tank down there as well, and found that the water began to heat up.

On our next trip out with the official inspector, Shannon wasn’t available so she arranged to have Bob Belman pick us up in his pontoon boat. Bob and Jean Belman had sold Craig his cabin. They had bought another cabin on Mud (Mirror) Lake, which is connected to Flat Lake by a man made channel, so they were right nearby. Theirs was a smaller boat than Shannon’s, all glassed in, and got up on step quickly. After Bob dropped us off, we went up to the cabin and found the doors locked! We didn’t have a key yet because we had not closed, so I called Shannon on my cell phone and found out the reception only worked in one spot on the deck. I put a chair