By Neal Wooten
I’ve often read posts on Facebook of people saying they want to live off the grid. I’m not talking about like on those TV shows where some celebrity installs solar panels and wind turbines and continues to live the same comfortable life; I mean like in a small cabin in the woods with no electricity or running water.
It’s a romantic notion I guess, to grow a garden for vegetables, hunt and fish for meat, chop wood for heat, and wash your clothes in the creek, but I don’t think people know how horrible that would be after living with modern conveniences. Some of the people I see posting this are the same ones who go crazy when they lose their cell phone signal for five minutes.
As for me, I want my grid. I need my grid. I have no illusions about it at all because I’ve been there, done that. When I was growing up, we often would go long periods of time without electricity, not because we lived in a remote cabin, but apparently because the power company expected the bill to be paid every single month. I know — crazy.
If you’ve never had to do your homework by the light of a kerosene lamp, you haven’t lived a full life. (Sarcasm) You could see every place in our house where we positioned our lamps because it turned the wall and ceiling black. And I shudder to think of how many episodes of Hee-Haw we missed during those times.
Our electric heaters would lie dormant as we relied solely on an Ashley wood-burning heater. This thing put out a lot of heat, but we had only one in the living room. I remember waking on school mornings, covered with about eight blankets and quilts, trying to work up the courage to jump up and make a mad dash to the living room without getting frostbite.
Coming home from school meant carrying four empty milk jugs down into the hollow to fill with water from a spring. It sure was awesome drinking water. As soon as I moved away to college, I realized how much I missed that water. But again, if you’ve never had to heat water atop a wood-burning heater to be able to take a bath, you don’t know what you’re missing.
So to all those wanting to move to a shack and live off the grid, I say go for it. Chop you some wood, grow you a garden, get you some chickens for fresh eggs, and live happily ever after. As long as I can pay my bills each month, however, I’ll just read about it on the internet.
