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July 26, 2009

The Behr Family Compound

Here's the fourth and final post on this year's Alaskan adventures. Perhaps I should have started with the photos below, to give you a sense of place. But I skipped straight to the exciting stuff and now am left with the more mundane material. Without further delay:

This is the "old house", where Robbi and her family lived when they first came to Coffee Point 32 summers ago when Robbi was 18 months old and her siblings 4 and 6, respectively.

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The house, basically a wood frame with corrugated tin siding, was even smaller then. The garage you see on the right hand side has been added since the early days. Today the old house is used for storage (tools, nonperishable foods, motor oil, etc.) This is the part that used to be the kitchen.

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Here's our propane-powered freezer.

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Here's the part that used to be the living room. We use it now to hang wet gloves between fishing periods.

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Here's the back room of the old house. The shelves that now hold food used to be the bunks where Robbi and her siblings slept.

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Here's the garage of the old house, where we hang our wet rain gear to dry.

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And on the wall opposite, vegetable storage.

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By contrast, here is the "new house", more than ten years old at this point, but a pointed upgrade on many fronts.

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Here's the view from the back.

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And here's the back deck (notice the enormous pile of old rope).

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Inside the new house, we have everything we need.

A place to eat.

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A place to cook.

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And a hanging slab of bacon.

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What else is there?

Another major building is the Kumajo, another barn of sorts, where we hang our nets over the winter.

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The second story is a living space where guests sometimes stay.

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Here's our water tower. We pump water from a natural spring up into this tower, which then supplies water for various purposes (washing trucks, washing fish, washing boots, etc).

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And here's a house that belongs to our neighbor Vern, who was living on the land when Robbi's parents bought it. Vern now lives in a bigger house not far away, but this house remains.

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I think some scholar of architecture should study it.

Here is the "detached palace", a small structure nestled in the alders where Robbi and I used to sleep before Alden got born and ruined our fun by needing to be in a warmish room.

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Here are our storage containers. Take a close look. These are the containers that sit on the back of tractor trailers. We use them because they are bear-proof. Grizzlies have no problem bashing through the plywood walls of our other buildings. Fortunately, they are seldom motivated to do so.

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We store various things in our containers: lumber, tires, some food, etc. Over the winter, we store our 4-wheelers in them.

Here's the net rack, where we can place nets for mending or cleaning.

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And here's our pile of old buoys. Why do we save old buoys? you ask. Why not save them, I counter? There's no way to throw them away, and who knows when an old buoy might come in handy. This is the philosophy that governs all things on Coffee Point: save everything for a rainy day.

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Here's the view of the bay from the pile of old buoys.

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And here is the gray truck.

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What's that you say? That truck is not gray? Oh, but you are mistaken. Robbi once told me to look for something that she had left "by the gray truck." I looked to no avail and came back to tell her that there was no gray truck. Robbi got frustrated, stomped over to this truck, and found the object in question. I was rudely accused of not being a good looker. When I countered that this truck was not gray, Robbi would have none of it. Turns out this truck used to be gray, perhaps 20 years ago, long before the ravages of rust took hold. But in Robbi's mind, the truck is still gray. Apparently, she was persuaded by this label that the truck would not rust.

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A closer look.

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Perhaps the folks at Zeibart also think this truck is still gray.

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I know the truth.

Back, though, to my point about not being able to throw anything away up there. In a normal place, the gray truck would have been put out of its misery long ago. Up here, trucks sit where they die forever. Eventually they are harvested for a usable part. (It must be confessed that the gray truck does still, technically, run, but that when its ignition is turned, a fireball shoots out of the engine block.)

There are other things sitting around waiting for the end of days.

This boat.

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These outboards.

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This snowmobile.

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Here are two of our three working four-wheelers. My dream is to some day live on enough acres in Vermont to justify owning one of these, but Robbi says she knows I'll break every one of my bones.

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Here are the propane tanks that run our hot water heater and wall-mounted furnace unit.

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Here is the garden Seiko grew in a pickup truck bed liner.

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Here is our fuel depot.

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We use a hand pump to get the gas from the barrels into the various vehicles.

Here is our generator.

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Whenever we run it, we charge the various car batteries that power basic functions around the compound (one runs the pump that makes water run from the spigot in the kitchen; another runs our VHF radio unit).

The tour is almost over. I've run out of pictures to show. But I've saved for last one of the most picturesque (and important) buildings on the compound. Here's the outhouse. The board blocking the path means it's occupied at present.

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And here is Iggy who, in a rare act of courage and agility, managed to catch a ground squirrel one sunny day on the tundra. I made her put it down, which irked her, but ever since that moment, she has been a new dog. Confident, cheerful, and happy to lie for hours in the Alaskan sunshine just waiting for another opportunity to chase.

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Posted by bogenamp at July 26, 2009 04:36 PM