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Friday, February 4, 2011 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM

Sandhill Crane, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, January 21, 2011
Sandhill Crane, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, January 21, 2011

As luck would have it

This was a brutal storm we're just coming out of and I got lucky. John Farr has a great post today at FarrFeed about his reaction to the crisis up in Taos when the natural gas supply went down and how he and his dear wife coped.

I was reading just yesterday about the wisdom of resilience; the wisdom of having simple, bulletproof, systems in place to deal with the unexpected loss of services and I was feeling pretty smug about my setup. Until I realized while reading John's article this morning that I'd have been in deep doodoo if the electric grid had gone down, that is.

I had enough propane and clothes on hand to keep reasonably warm and to cook but I doubt I could have kept my fresh water tank from freezing - the pump froze a couple of times as it was - without electricity from the grid.

It didn't dawn on me what the frozen pump really meant until it froze. All my water was in the fresh water tank and I had no way to get it out. I didn't even have a jug of water in the fridge! Yikes!

I managed to get the pump thawed, it didn't burst, and all was well. But without electricity from the grid, so I could point a portable electric heater at it, getting that pump running would have been a real challenge.

These system critical moments don't come 'round often enough to keep me fully alert to the state of my systems and the implications of their vulnerabilities. I need to make a few changes around here - I want my smug back.

Night camp

Site 10 - Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park, San Antonio NM

Sweet, Rich Hickory Milk

Hickory was another favorite. Rambling through the Southeast in the 1770s, the naturalist William Bartram observed Creek families storing a hundred bushels of hickory nuts at a time. "They pound them to pieces, and then cast them into boiling water, which, after passing through fine strainers, preserves the most oily part of the liquid" to make a thick milk, "as sweet as fresh cream, an ingredient in most of their cookery, especially hominy and corncakes." Years ago a friend and I were served hickory milk in rural Georgia by an eccentric backwoods artist named St. EOM who claimed Creek descent. Despite the unsanitary presentation, the milk was ambrosial - fragrantly nutty, delightfully heavy on the tongue, unlike anything I had encountered before.

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