Foraging for Food

You’ve seen our unique living quarters and the beautiful property we’re inhabiting during our two-month stint at Koviashuvik Local Living School. But what do we do here?

Monday through Friday our family greets the morning with the other residents here and discusses the tasks for the day. Usually our teacher Chris guides us through a bit of weather forecasting by reading the signs of the sky before sharing an appropriate plan. The majority of what we do is specific to the season.

On our first week here, we went for a leaf harvest. That’s right, we traveled to neighboring properties to rake up leaves and load them into a pickup truck. 

By stomping the leaves down after each tarp full, we could get half a ton of leaves in the rigged truck bed before taking them back to a leaf composting pile at Koviashuvik. And then we repeated. Evidently, these leaves will be used as a soil amendment to the gardens in the Spring as they are rich in nutrients found only deep in the soil where the trees’ roots can reach.

Over the course of several other days, we foraged for and processed one of the staple foods for winter residents here: acorns.

Acorns are a rich protein and fat source that can be turned into flour through a process of drying, cracking, water-separating, leaching, grinding, and sifting.

Cracking.

Water-separating.

Sifting.

We’ve learned here that food can be acquired for very little money provided you’re willing to invest the time into the process. Garden food fits that category too. Some foods like potatoes grow, harvest, and store relatively easily.

Potato harvesting.

Other foods like beans take a bit more work to grow, train, pick, thresh, winnow, and dry before they’re ready for storage.

Picking beans.

Threshing in grain sacks.

Similar to feelings we had when living with our host family in Guatemala, we’re appreciating how much goes into basic food needs. The emphasis at Koviashuvik is local. It’s hard to get much more local than the acorns falling at our feet. What a gift from the oak!

Koviashuvik Local Living School

The "gnome home" we wrote about in our last post caught the interest of many of our readers. It is one of many components of the place we are living during October and November. Up to this point, we've referred to the property as a homestead, but more specifically it is called Koviashuvik Local Living School.

Koviashuvik is an Inuit word loosely meaning a time and place of joy. Our hosts are Chris and Ashirah Knapp who bought this rural, wooded Maine parcel years ago and have gradually transformed it into a property that supports their family of four, teaches occasional day-students, and feeds and houses apprentices throughout the year.

Chris teaches a home school class flanked by his children Owen (7) and Bonnie Bee (5).

Ashirah poses with her daughter.

The Knapp family lives in a tiny home (less than 500 sq ft) they built with wood they exclusively harvested from their property.

This off-grid home has enough solar power to run a few CFL lightbulbs each evening and charge some batteries in rechargeable devices. Drinking water is carried in with a yoke from a nearby spring 10 gallons (80 lbs) at a time. Wash water is collected from what the clouds release. Heat, cooking, and clothes-drying are all courtesy of the wood stove.

Storage crops like root vegetables, cabbages, and apples chill out in the stand-alone root cellar all the way into June when the cache finally disappears.

A passive-solar greenhouse provides nutritional, fresh greens for the family during the winter months. With a rain water collection system and a solar hot-water heater installed, this is also the only spot on the property where a warm shower is possible.

Serving as an outdoor classroom and a woodworking facility, the "shed shop" and its vestibule is a hub of productive activity. It's here that fir poles are stripped for construction, axe handles are crafted, and furniture is made--all with hand tools.

To further their vision and facilitate more year-round learning, the Knapps are also constructing a classroom building. As you might suspect, the lumber for this project also has been harvested and milled exclusively on the grounds. The post and beam framing includes several hand-hewn logs.

To support the growing number of students expected when the classroom is completed next year, a "humanure" outhouse actively composts waste.

Hopefully this quick visual tour of Koviashuvik's facilities helps paint a picture of our setting. The old-world style of construction and earth-conscious design also point to more than our physical surroundings--they embody the character of the people who live and work here.

In addition to the Knapp family, we're sharing this special place with three younger apprentices.

Yard, Lottie, and Carensa enjoy a lighter moment fixing Yard's bike together in the shed shop.

As we've knelt in the dirt with them, shared meals with them, and learned alongside them we've found them to be impressively mature and very capable despite two of them being half our age. We're pleased to be fellow apprentices with people of such great character.

I think the magnetism of Koviashuvik attracts a special kind of mettle.

Into the Woods

Adventure has found us again and this time it's in the woods. Chapter three of our sabbatical journey brings us to a homestead near Farmington, ME where we learn to live off the land much more than we've ever done before. Our first week at the homestead has been a period of moving in and adjusting to the new lifestyle.

Just as our tight living space in Guatemala, Ecuador, and on the road in our trailer took some getting used to, so too our adorable living quarters on the homestead come with a learning curve. We affectionately refer to this as the "gnome home."

This sod-covered stick-built structure is where we'll do our cooking, eating, and sleeping during October and November. 

Half the floor of this one-room hut is exposed dirt, the other half is dirt covered with balsam fir which gives it a little spring and lovely aroma each time we enter. We cook and heat with the wood-fired stove.

Without running water, we collect rainwater for "wash water" and carry in buckets of water from a nearby spring for drinking and cooking water. Though we could sleep on the fir boughs, our family is trying out sleeping in the loft we access by a wooden ladder. The floor space is roughly that of a queen bed, but more oddly shaped.

Without electricity, our abode is always a little dim and in the evenings plain dark. We supplement with rechargeable lanterns and headlamps but we still find ourselves drawn in by our circadian rhythms. Never a family to go to bed early, sometimes we're all in bed by 8:00 if we've finished the chores for the evening.

It'll likely warrant a full blog post, but for now we'll finish the brief tour of our living space by answering what a few of you are likely asking at this point. Where is the bathroom? Well, it's an open air outhouse with a bucket.

Back to the land indeed! We look forward to sharing with you our day-to-day activities, other neat structures, living systems, and the people we work with at this beautiful place. It's a pretty time of year to be harvesting the late-season crops from the garden.

Grand Finale

We're only a day away from returning to our home in New Hampshire where we'll recharge and repack for our third and final chapter in our sabbatical journey. The end of chapter two--our U.S. tour--reached two climaxes in Nevada and Arizona.

Nevada

Though most of our travel in North America has focused on the beautiful natural resources we went to Nevada specifically to see the man-made wonder of Las Vegas. Still enjoying the company of Shelly's mother, Shelly and I took everyone to see a show as an early 15th anniversary gift to ourselves. Cirque du Soleil's "O" mesmerized all of us and kept us talking about it for days afterwards. It is a worthy highlight from our domestic experience.

The lights of The Strip at night were also a crowd pleaser:

We drove The Strip a couple times in our stay just to marvel at the opulence.

The Hoover Dam and resultant Lake Mead got a quick look on the drive, but that was about it for our Nevada visit.

Arizona

The capstone to our National Park tour was the bucket-list destination of Arizona's Grand Canyon. 

Our south rim exploration gave us a feast for our eyes. 

Each of us engaged the canyon in his own way.

Postscript

With some power driving including a 22-hour stretch with stops only for gas, we made our way from the Southwest to Colorado and to Pennsylvania. In Colorado, we stayed with my brother's family while we emptied and cleaned our trailer in preparation for its sale. After delivering the trailer to the dealer for consignment, we settled into enjoying family time.

In Pittsburgh, Baxter celebrated his 8th birthday with his aunt, uncle, and cousins at Nana's house. It's hard to believe the five year-old and seven year-old we started our sabbatical with have grown into these six and eight year-old boys.

Chapter 1: 14 Weeks in Latin America
Chapter 2: 15 Weeks in North America
Coming Soon--Chapter 3: 8 Weeks Homesteading in Maine

Stay tuned for the next leg of this adventure!

The Red Carpet

We arrived in Los Angeles just in time for the Emmys. Our version of the Southern California red carpet of attractions included the sunny desert of Palm Springs, the massive trees at Sequoia National Park, and beachside camping in Playa del Rey.

Palm Springs

Our trip to Palm Springs was prompted by a visit from Shelly's mom. She flew out to join us for a portion of our tour and wanted to visit her brother in the Palm Springs area. We found a palm tree lined RV park three minutes from Shelly's uncle's house and took advantage of the off-season rates. 

The mercury peaked around 114 degrees during our stay, so outside time mainly consisted of swimming.

Our family of four got to meet Shelly's uncle Frank for the first time.

Uncle Frank, Aunt Laurie, and Shelly's mom with the boys.

Additionally, Shelly met her first cousins Bear and Barbie for the first time. Barbie thrilled the boys by bringing her two little dogs over to visit and planning a desert egg hunt in Uncle Frank's back yard.

Also in Palm Springs, we were introduced to Shelly's first cousin Don--the son of Shelly's mom's sister. A lovely brunch was a great setting for getting to know Don and his wife Yvonne. 

Sequoia

Though we had previously visited the Redwoods in Northern California, it was a treat to take Shelly's mom to the most massive living things on Earth at Sequoia National Park.

It was a little challenging to explain the concept of the the most massive and largest by volume when the boys had already visited the tallest trees on the planet. Nevertheless, it was fun to visit the tree that is considered number one in mass and volume: General Sherman. 

Los Angeles

But it was in Los Angeles at Playa del Rey that we enjoyed an experience we had pictured as typical of Southern California. We were lucky to camp right at the edge of the sand at Dockweiler State Beach.

Our campsite's picnic table three feet from the sandy beach.

This allowed us to stay barefoot for a few days while we took advantage of what the beach could offer.

Reminiscent of Ecuador.

Learning to fly the two line stunt kite.

Playing with other kids from the campground.

Campfires on the beach.

Some of these experiences are likely once-in-a-lifetime for us. We've been fortunate to travel. To see beautiful scenery. To spend moments enjoying. Perhaps more than a red carpet of experiences, this sabbatical has been a magic carpet ride.

Magical indeed.