Letter From the Boiler Room Box 26, Carcross, Yukon Y0B 1B0 January 25, 1975 (Saturday) Dear friends, I owe some of you personal letters, which I will send with this, but I don't want to write some of the same things three or four times. As you can see, I'm using a stencil that someone else abandoned, and a better typewriter. It was heavy to carry all the way to the boiler room, but I hope worth it. Wagon in a winter wonderland, December 22, 1974 One friend told me not to become blasé about everyday matters, so I will describe several things in detail. The pace over the Christmas holidays was nice and slow. In fact, holidays ended up lasting for about 26 days, for reasons I will explain later. I got used to living with 15-25 people, doing odd work (bagging bread, vacuuming the library, 8 hr. boiler shifts), washing dishes, and cooking the odd meal. It was slow enough that we put energy into things such as cooking. We ate very well. One meal I cooked consisted of roast pork, with apple sauce and roast potatoes, salad and greens, fresh bread (home baked, of course), four beverages, I think, and cheesecake. (Actually, I cooked very little; just co-ordinated.) For the first time since I arrived, people lingered over meals. We'd just sit around and chat or joke, often for 30 minutes or more beyond eating time. Meals were up to 2 hours late, according to our usual schedule, but that was OK - there were only a few dozen people to notify. For almost 2 weeks after everyone had returned, the pace remained fairly relaxed. In fact, people are still lingering over meals. It sounds strange, as that's normal elsewhere; but it struck me as really strange to see six people sitting around a table, with all the food eaten and few dishes cleared. We have extended lunch hour; it is now 12:00 to 2:00, so that everyone has a chance to enjoy the out of doors. I felt so relaxed for awhile that I spent much of four days in the woodwork shop and my room constructing driftwood furnishings: a snowshoe, ski, hockey stick and paddle rack screwed on the wall (I have three pairs of snowshoes, so they had been taking up space), a boot and skate rack for the floor, and a wall-mounted bookcase based around a 20 inch by 5½ foot door with slats like a venetian blind. It looks like it might have been a shutter on a large window of a boat, or a small door, or half a typical TV swinging barroom door. The shores around here are just covered with drift lumber and sticks. Perhaps the details are unimportant; the feeling was great. I had collected the wood three months earlier and had not felt free for long enough to even start. My room gets extremely cluttered, which I interpret as a sign of a hectic lifestyle rather than innate messiness. When I cleared everything out to vacuum for the first time in months (6 cardboard boxes largely unpacked, boots, snowshoes, sleeping bags, etc.) I hadn't the heart to put anything back in without making places to put it all. The sense of accomplishment and the attractive results are nice, but it was nice to just be around and have kids drop in for a cup of hot chocolate. This never happened before because I didn't have a kettle and never made the time. And for awhile we had none of the activities that made evenings so busy before Christmas. (I remember one evening before Hallowe'en when we had about 5 regularly scheduled activities such as committee meetings and interest courses - of which there were 20 - plus about 4 special events, such as extra committee meetings, spook house decorating in the village, etc.) We have recommenced very few of the interest courses. Personally, however, I've found the pace very hectic recently. Part of it is that by Monday I'll have made three Whitehorse trips in 10 days, and they are always extremely busy. Usually you miss dinner, and get back just in time to grab a snack before something in the evening. The PR committee (which I co-ordinate) and the education committee are having some very long discussions, because we must make a lot of specific decisions about next year's program. Almost everything we do gets questioned. My committee is responsible for putting out 5 publications by the end of February. We've just finished the Community's first newsletter, which has been no more than an idea for a long long time. It turned out to be 14 pages and remarkably good for a first try. Having put out newsletters for at least 4 organizations in the last 10 years, I tended to assume that everyone understood what a newsletter was, but they didn't. Some people expected photographs, which are impossible with the reproduction equipment we have access to. But we pulled one together; it's well laid out, neat, and reasonably interesting. We mailed the first batch of 150 yesterday; they went to Whitehorse to avoid overloading the local post office. Someone loading the truck on the regular Friday trip put the box down on the ground, whereupon the dogs urinated on them. Someone commented that it could only happen at Carcross. Fortunately the damage was slight. Since people came back, only 2½ weeks ago, we have had some remarkably good times and some real tensions. The first night back (Tuesday) there was a great dance. I think lots of people were really happy to be back; for many this is home, in that they were not particularly happy with previous school, city, or personal situations. Last weekend there was another dance. Last night we had a really good cabaret in the gym, much better than a skit night in October. People had strung a string spider web from the ceiling to the lower walls (it fell down once) and set up groups of desks with four or five chairs; the tables were covered with cheap paper, and came equipped with coloured pencils (for graffiti, doodling, or written conversation) and candles and trays of cookies, etc. One or two students acted as waiters. The acting was generally just good-natured nonsense - 2 girls doing a high-stepping dance to "Tea for Two", the Kitchen Committee with paper bags over their heads standing around the piano and singing the theme from Exodus, and so on. And people insisted on a dance when it was all over. Last fall, three of the students built a gorgeous log cabin in the woods, with beautiful interior decorating. I mentioned it in my Dec. 25 letter. On January 11 it burned to the ground. Presumably someone there in the afternoon left a blazing fire on departing. That disappointment has caused some tension. A week or so ago, our two parent member cooks stopped cooking as a protest against the lack of co-operation from the rest of us - the snack counter being left a mess every night so breakfast people have to clean up, people taking substantial quantities of food from the fridges (cheese, frozen juice, etc.), and so on. Obviously that has been a source of tension. The first few meals cooked by others were not too good. However, students taking Foods courses are now cooking most meals (under guidance of the cooks, who oversee purchasing and diet planning and health standards) and we're eating reasonably well. So maybe we'll all discover, as we did at Christmas, that we can co-operate to keep a big institutional kitchen running well. The other night, my Public Relations committee brought up a subject requiring long discussion at our regular Community meeting. There is considerable feeling that people here, when they are in Whitehorse, ignore the feelings of local people. Sometimes, apparently, they are overly loud, sometimes rude to business proprietors; people here get used to using language that much of the world considers dirty, and we do not know how to turn it off. And most of the people returning from holidays were billetted in Whitehorse for two or three days because of cold weather, and in some cases, apparently, were poor guests. So we're going through some of the struggles of a group that is fairly self-contained. We run the risk of becoming insular, and of giving normal polite treatment only to people from whom we need something. That's a self-awareness matter we must work on. This place is not Utopia. But I hope these problems and struggles lead to constructive changes in the individuals here. The weather has been beautiful. All through the holidays we had great winter weather. Sun dogs at sunrise in December (photo by Joanne Marks) My mother was here from Dec. 18 to Jan. 5 and a friend, Marion, from Dec. 26 till the same day. On Sunday night, the 29th, I went for a walk up to the log cabin with Marion. The air was still, and the ground and trees covered with fresh flaky snow. The sky was clear and the moon full; the temperature was the lowest yet, -11 F. What incredible beauty. From the hill one could see the village across the lake. Everything was still, quiet, and bright. Of course the snow squeaked underfoot. The next afternoon the temperature rose to 41 ABOVE! The rest of the holidays were generally nice. However at noon on Jan. 4 it was 30 below and getting colder. It was 40 below in Whitehorse. We have a rule against vehicles' operating below 30 below, so Marion had to cancel her flight back. There was no telling when people would get out. Such cold weather is an interesting experience. I did not find it unpleasant, but I've had a fair bit of theory and practice in dressing for the cold. By luck, the mother of one of the students drove her daughter out from Whitehorse the next day in her trusty Volvo, and my two visitors got a ride back in. I was told that if the sky cleared, the temperature would drop another 20 or 30 degrees. On Monday it did. What a gas! Everyone was stranded in Whitehorse, so obviously we didn't think about classes. People finally got back on Tuesday in chartered buses and we started classes three days late, on Thursday. We had trouble with the boilers for a week or so. One boiler just couldn't keep the steam pressure up high enough to cope with the chill, and there was difficulty getting the second functioning. I had never turned my radiator on; now when I wanted it, it wouldn't work. The radiators inside several entrances were frozen and had to be thawed with blowtorches. The window of one door shattered, so it was boarded up and the entrance sealed with blankets. We put blankets over the kitchen windows as well, to keep things more comfortable. The bakery ceased operation one day when the propane turned to jelly. Personally I found the whole thing exciting. One day I skied over to get the mail with another fellow, as it was too cold to drive. The sun was gradually lighting the sky the whole time we were out, 1½ hours. The ice fog is intriguing. You can't ski too vigourously, because apparently deep breathing can cause freezing of the lungs. The temperature on our return at 10:30 was 51 below. I found it a little difficult to keep my cheeks warm, but no trouble at all to keep warm overall. In fact, on reaching town, I had my parka wide open and my toque off - even my mitts briefly - so obviously I was generating considerable heat, but not enough to cause lung problems from too-hard breathing. This letter does not appear to be finished, but no additional pages of the original have been found. Written by a parent member to friends down South, it was typed on a stencil, to be duplicated using the Community's "Ditto machine". Remember the smell of methyl hydrate and that messy purple ink?