Does your house float?

My wife and I often house-sit for short stints during the winter months when we’re tied up in town. It’s a good opportunity to get off the boat for a bit, get away from the psychological struggles of living in a damp, closed-off cave and into a place with all the amenities of modern living that we have otherwise chosen to forgo. It’s like a little mini-vacation, really, a chance to remind ourselves how the rest of the first-world lives, and why.

But often, we come away from those gigs with a new appreciation for our own lifestyle, simple and self-contained as it is.

Last Saturday’s windstorm provided one of those experiences.

We have been watching two pugs for some friends of ours who were out of town for a couple of weeks. The first few days were a luxury of big-screen TV with several million cable channels, uninterrupted high-speed Internet, microwaves, full-size oven, on-site washing machines, huge refrigerators, and a bathtub. Even the pugs seemed to provide novel entertainment in the form of long walks in fall leaves.

Then came the storm.

We were both away from the house for most of the day; my wife returned first, mid-afternoon, only to find her way blocked. A tree had come down across a power line next to the only road in or out of the neighborhood, dropping the line right into the middle of the road and taking out power all along the hillside.

Exhibiting laudable compassion but scant sense of self-preservation, Mandy, worried about the pugs left alone in the dark, cooling house, drove under the wire and went down to the garage. The house itself sits on the waterfront, a hundred stairs down from the road, usually accessible via an electric tramway running up and down the hill. The tram, of course, was unusable; the stairs (on which she had, last year, badly sprained one ankle) were cluttered with downed branches and leaves.

Steeling herself for a descent through the flurry of debris in heels, Mandy made her way down the hill to retrieve the pugs. When she got there, she found that it was high tide. Fifty knot winds were rolling huge breakers onto the seawall, crashing up and over the deck, and cascading down into the basement. Normally, a sump pump automatically drains any water that finds its way down that far, but with no electricity, there was no pump.

People are forever saying to us, “Oh, I’d be worried about having a house that might sink!” but of course they’ve got it completely backwards… their houses absolutely would sink, whereas we like to think of ourselves as having a house that probably floats.

The house we were watching certainly would not float. Mandy grabbed the pugs and went back up the hill.

We met up in town and had dinner while debating our course of action. I decided that our obligatory house-sitting duties might include going down with the house, should it come to that, so we decided to go back in the hopes that the power had either been restored or we could find some alternate method of powering the pump. We normally have a generator on board our own boat which we could have retrieved and taken with us, but had loaned it out to a friend for a few weeks.

Things looked good as we drove back to the house; lights were swaying, but on. But as we drove down the last stretch of road, we passed a City Light truck–a small one, not the sort that fixes anything–poking around near where the tree had come down.

The power line was still down, although deactivated and marked off with cones. Beyond, all was darkness.

Something else that comes of living aboard is a habitual readiness for finding one’s way back along dark docks or being able to open a combination lock at night. So we had flashlights on us and used them to pick our way down the hill (pausing to laugh inappropriately at pugs high-centered in leaf-piles) and into the house.

It was dark and without heat. Another question we constantly hear about living aboard is, “How do you stay warm?”

Well, it’s not always easy, but we have a diesel furnace that is powered off our 12 volt system (as are most of our lights), a system backed up by a hefty battery bank, solar panels, and usually a separate generator. It works whether we’re attached to shore power or not, and if the city electrical grid goes down, it bothers it not a whit.

I thought often of that tiny little Wallas furnace as we shivered through the long, dark night at the house.

And it was dark; we scoured the cabinets and pantry and found only a handful of birthday candles. On the boat, we use candles a lot, not just for ambiance, but also because they can actually heat up such a small space pretty well on their own. Huddled over a tiny birthday candle (stuck in a used Keurig k-cup for a hold–we didn’t have any cake to put them in), the light and warmth were swallowed up by the vast space of the house.

Power, water, and sewage are the three great things that most people use (or, ahem, produce, as the case may be) from the city unthinkingly day in and day out. Deprived of only one of the three for less than twenty-four hours, we found ourselves pretty miserable.

Those are also the things that people most often worry about when it comes to living aboard, and they are frequently cited as the most significant obstacles when people tell us they couldn’t do what we do. But it seems to me that they aren’t always aware of the trade-offs they are making when they forgo the self-contained nautical solutions to those issues. Our head and heat and water and power aren’t as voluminous and powerful as city-connected systems. But they’re simple and easy to fix or bypass when problems arise.

Public utilities are tremendously reliable, of course. And it’s not that houses can’t be equipped to deal with outages. But on board a boat, you almost can’t help it. You’ve got stocks of food that lasts forever and is easy to prepare because that’s what you eat on passage. You’ve got spares because you can’t count on a hardware store when break out on the water. When power or water have gone out in our lakefront neighborhood in the past, we often haven’t even noticed.

The power came back up in the morning, the pump came on in the basement, our heat and unlimited power and lighting were restored. Salt caked the deck, windows, and siding on the waterfront exterior. Puddles emerged beneath the refrigerators; they’d self-defrosted and leaked overnight. There was no bilge for the water to drain into.

But we left with a renewed appreciation for how little our boat is like a house!