Living Rural

Empathy For Rural

One thing my wife and I do every year is go to our cabin in the far reaches of Northern Minnesota during the summer. It’s in Superior National Forest on a wilderness lake near the Gunflint Trail. I have been coming up here for over fifty years. It used to be a week at a time but now we have rehabbed both cabins and stay from the end of June until roughly the end of September.

The town we go to is Grand Marais, MN. It’s a small town of roughly 1100 people. There are a couple of hardware stores, three grocery stores, and other small business establishments. It also has the best donut store in America.

Why there? My grandfather was a Minnesotan and he was in the USFS. He and his best buddy loved this lake we are on and he retired there for the summers. He wintered in St. Paul, MN. Both my grandparents passed at the age of 98, so there is something to being up there.

The scenery is beautiful. You can fly fish nearby (tell John Kass) and we fish for walleyes on our lake. The northern lights occasionally turn on in the evening. It’s a pretty special place for us both because of family and because of the natural beauty. If you are Irish, it’s like our auld sod. But, it’s rough country.

We see wildlife, often. Bears, moose, wolves, and other critters. We have two duck boxes and get clutches of new chicks every year. We get to watch them jump the day after they hatch. Fall is spectacular.

Our youngest daughter and her husband decided to get married up here during Covid, and on cue, everyone we wanted to hire to perform some small services for us canceled because of irrational Covid fear. At least the photographer showed and she was spectacular. We did everything else ourselves. (The food and wine was top-notch)

Living in Chicago, and now Las Vegas, I see two sides to the coin in the United States regarding the urban/rural divide. I think it made me uniquely positioned to understand Trump and where many of his supporters' ethos come from. For what it is worth, I have a fair amount of friends that are in the trades and they are almost unanimous in their support of Trump.

In a “we want it now” on-demand “Uber” society, rural is very much the antithesis of that. One thing I love to do is test tech innovation to see if it works in rural areas. Often, it doesn’t. Maybe this is the place cryptocurrency will eventually grab a hold.

Here is an example of one of the things you have to navigate when you live 3 hours from the closest metropolitan area-and by metropolitan area, I mean Duluth, MN which has 86k residents.

Rural people have to be self-reliant which taps into some of the things Trump espouses. Contractors are basically small businesspeople, eating what they kill. They work extremely hard, and their businesses are competitive. They “get” what Trump talks about too. Urban and highly educated people don’t. They don’t have empathy and don’t understand because they never experienced it. That’s why I had a big belly laugh when Facebook’s ($META) Mark Zuckerberg went off to milk cows in the hinterlands after the 2016 election. What a doofus.

Unfortunately, it’s the urban people like Zuckerberg who set national and state policies. They are out of touch. Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, or the Maryland crab coast aren’t “rural”. They pass tons of things and the bureaucrats regulate without even having a modicum of understanding about the actual costs and how it will affect people.

Often, city people will travel to the countryside but stay for a week. They experience the local flavors and see what they want to see. But, they really don’t “get” what it’s like to live there on a day-to-day basis.

Global warming fanatics won’t like this next paragraph. But, most global warming fanatics live in cities enjoying their bug-free life with air conditioning and heat. The cult is strong there. The only time their brow sweats is when they are yelling at Twitter.

We heat our cabins with wood that I find in the woods. Old Man Winter will bring down some maple and birch trees every single year. I walk through the woods and cut them up with my gas-powered Husqvarna chainsaw. I bring them back to my gas-powered log splitter, split them, and season them.

Firewood is pretty important to us. It’s like cash. You can never have too much. Crucial in May and September when it can be pretty cold. It’s also nice to have around to use in the SoloStove for outdoor fires in the summer. Electric is far too inefficient and expensive. Many people use propane up here but we wanted to be off propane so we didn’t have to deal with gas hookups.

The other thing you learn when you are rural is you can’t pick up the phone and just call someone and schedule work or labor, even skilled labor. Especially skilled labor. It’s in high demand. We wind up doing a lot of things ourselves and we have to learn as we go which means you have to have a high tolerance for the mistakes you will inevitably make. Sometimes, I have to do things a few times to get it right.

Every year it is something and this year it was a wood-burning stove. As my neighbor down the way remarked to me, “You don’t have to invent projects or things to do up here. It’s always something.”

One of our cabins had a sixty-year-old cast iron Franklin stove. It finally started to fall apart. We knew it was coming. Things wear out. The same stove in the other cabin wore out a long time ago and it was replaced with a small efficient wood burner that didn’t have as pretty of a fire, but it heated the place quickly. Here is a photo of it when we were rehabbing that cabin, heretofore referred to as Cabin #1.

How do you buy a new wood burner when you are in a rural town where not one store carries wood burners?

We do have one gig fiber internet to our door. In the rehabs, we added electricity, internet, and dug wells for on-demand water. We searched. The closest place to buy a new wood burner was Duluth. We ordered one. It is a Quadrafire Discovery 1 and here is a photo of it. We took the old wood burner and put it in the smaller cabin, heretofore referred to as Cabin #2.

This is the point where all the problems started and you learn. The first problem is the existing stove pipes wouldn’t automatically hook up to the new stove, nor would the pipe in the other cabin hook up to that stove.

We tried calling a local chimney sweep who hooks up stoves, but he wasn’t too keen on helping us. What he really wanted to do was replace the entire stack from the stovepipe to the chimney outside. That probably would run us quite a bit of money, and the chimneys are both almost brand new. He did give us some tips which were helpful.

We were on our own, unless we wanted to spend LOTS of money, and we knew we would have to do all of this ourselves. Besides, part of the charm of this place is doing it yourself. My entire extended family has worked on this place on their own for years. It’s part of the deal.

The original person that installed the old stoves had a heart attack a few years ago and died. Hard to communicate with him now. In small towns, if some specialized labor person passes, they are often irreplaceable, or the local knowledge they had isn’t passed along to the person that replaces them.

I hauled the new woodburner up here in a rented U-Haul trailer. A forklift driver put it in. I got it out and onto a dolly by myself. I paid two guys $200 to take it into the cabin, move the old woodburner to the other cabin, and take the Franklin stove away.

Now to hook them up.

We went to the local hardware store to see if they had the stuff we needed. No dice. Then, we called the place that sold us the stove. It turns out, there are two dominant brands of stove pipe, DuraVent, and Selkirk. Who knew? DuraVent is US-made, and Selkirk is Canada made. DuraVent also owns Selkirk, but DuraVent pipe is not compatible with Selkirk. It’s like putting Chevy parts in a Ford.

No wood-burning stove outfit carries Selkirk in Duluth. They only carry DuraVent and using the process of elimination and some crafty detective work, we figured out our chimney systems are Selkirk.

Welcome to the walled garden of Selkirk!

After doing some research, we decided to do double walled stove pipe. It builds up less creosote, and it has a better draw so less smoke when you are starting your fire. The old pipe in Cabin #1 was single-walled and we did have a problem with smoke.

Menards carries Selkirk but doesn’t stock it and didn’t even inventory one part we needed. We found an online retailer, Northland Express but they charged double what anyone else charged. I checked with Lowe’s($LOWE), a three-hour one-way drive in Hibbing, but they don’t carry it either.

On a lark, I checked Amazon ($AMZN). We ordered kayaks from Amazon and order quite a lot through their website. It’s amazing they deliver here. They had almost everything I was looking for at half the price and, could get it here faster with free delivery. There was one part I couldn’t get, so I had to order from super expensive and premium Northland Express.

When it all comes, we will have to hook up both woodburners and test them to see if it all works. The downside is while we wait we had to cover up the chimney vents on the inside of the cabin with tin foil. The mosquitoes were flying down the open chimney to attack. It will be nice to have them both sealed up and working.