Trials and tribulations

You are more resourceful than you think you are.

That’s the one piece of wisdom we’ve centered on in the year since we’ve moved to rural Harney County. Sure, we knew we’d be giving up some conveniences when we left town, but we didn’t realize how much we’d have to rely on our own ingenuity and physical labor. So let’s focus on the unglamorous part of living in a locale so remote people rarely find it on the first try, even with directions. Here’s our top 5 list of things you can’t do in this rural place we call home:

You can’t:

1. Drive to the grocery store to pick up a gallon of milk when you run out. Trips to town are planned in advance and come with an extensive to-do list. There will be at least five stops at varying locations, but the gas station, post office and grocery story are permanent stops you will make every time. And lately, so is the Dairy Queen drive-thru.
2. Go out for Mexican (or Chinese or pizza or input your favorite kind of take out here) at the end of a long week or when you don’t feel like cooking. If you don’t make it, you don’t eat it. There is no corner espresso stand for a quick caffeine jolt in the afternoon. You are your own Starbucks.
3. Simply hire someone to fix something if it breaks. We found this out the hard way with a backed-up septic system. We had the tank pumped when we moved in, but the problem quickly returned. The only reputable plumber in town had recently had surgery and couldn’t drive. We researched the problem online and dug up the tank and the drainfield ourselves. Willow roots some 30 feet from the nearest tree had totally obstructed the perforated drain pipe. We knew it could be bad but we hadn’t expected to find THAT!  We pinpointed the problem, rented a power auger and blasted the darn tree roots out of the way so that the toilet would quit backing up on us.
4. Count on the roads to be passable. One afternoon we were going to watch a football game with the in-laws and it had rained so much the day before that the gravel road was muddy enough to stop us in our tracks. After 6 miles of worrying about getting stuck, we turned around and headed back home.
5. Always rely on your vehicle to start. We have had a terrible time with mice and packrats chewing wires under the hood of our truck. So far they have sampled the wires to the crankshaft position sensor twice (?!) and several spark plug wires. The pests have managed to thwart us three times so far, rendering our truck useless in the driveway. We’ve tried traps and keeping the hood up to discourage them from getting in there, but so far it’s the rodents 3, Browns 0. If anyone has any constructive suggestions for us, we’d love to hear them.

So those are a few of the frustrations we’ve dealt with in the last year. Sometimes after we fix something, instead of patting ourselves on the back, we look around warily and wonder what is going to break next. And I’m sure this is only the tip of the ice berg. We haven’t even had a bad snowstorm yet. Even so the positives clearly still outweigh the negatives for us so far. So as not to dwell on the negative, stay tuned for our top 5 list of things we love about living the rural life.