Laundry. I hadn’t really given much thought to how I would wash my clothes here, because really, is there anything more mundane in life than laundry? In my book, it’s up there – or down there, as the case may be – with cleaning tile grout and mowing the lawn. (Though, there was a time when I would have given a decade off my life to have a lawn to mow.)
Maybe I’d envisioned – very, very briefly – mashing my clothes against river rocks, or perhaps, using a washboard and tub. In the latter scenario, a musical interlude would ensue where I and several other Tow Hillbillies would bust out into some northern jug-band number.
But you should see the river rocks around here. Like everything else, they’re coated in moss (or I guess, being underwater, algae). And the water is the colour of my morning tea because of the tannins released by the trees into the river. You can’t actually see the bottom, which I imagine is mud. I suspect that any river washing would get my clothes dirtier than if I just continued to wear them.
The washtub is a viable option but in order to minimize the proportion of my life occupied by laundry I take a two-pronged approach. Firstly, I do less laundry by having less to do. One of the great joys of living out on North Beach is being able to wear the same clothes, day in and day out, and having no one care (at least I don’t think they do). 98% of the clothes that I brought up with me go unworn. Anyway, these days it’s too cold in the mornings to stand shivering in my boxers pondering what statement I’d like to make with my clothing.
I’ve read about fashionistas conducting the experiment of wearing the same black dress for 31-days, of course, accessorizing it in different ways each day. I’m doing something similar but for 300+ days and my accessories range from gum boots and a hard hat to an elbow brace and camo overshirt. But really I’m cycling through three pairs of the same military surplus wool pants. I have more in common with Einstein, in the perhaps apocryphal story of how he had a closet full of the same suits so that he didn’t have to waste time every day deciding what to wear. He could then keep his brainpower free for theoretical physics. I can keep my brain free for scoring stuff off the beach/in the bush to eat. And he has also had that unkempt hair thing going on, which makes me think that I’m on the right track.
Part two of my laundry strategy is to avail myself of the very best in laundry technology that modern science has to offer i.e. your basic household laundry machine that’s plumbed into/plugs into a wall.
As of about a year ago, Masset became a Laundromat-free zone i.e. the only launderette closed their doors. Masset is now officially a one-laundry-machine town. There is a single washing machine and a single dryer in the covered area beside the bathrooms in the local campground outside of town. The last time that I did laundry at the campground, there was a lineup of four other laundry bags and when I did get my turn someone took my clothes out of the dryer mid-cycle and stuck theirs in. I came back from town to find my clothes in a wet heap. The thought of sitting in my car to keep watch over my laundry is not as appealing as you might think.
40 kilometers (25 miles) to the south in the town of Port Clements, they have it slightly more than twice as good as we do. They have two washing machines (the third broke down and won’t be fixed “until business gets better”) and three working dryers in the laundry room attached to the Golden Spruce Motel. You used to be able to go next door to the Gas Plus and get a slice of pie at the lunch counter while you waited but they went out of business. It was the only gas station in town. So the people in Port Clements now need to drive 80 km (50 miles) round trip to fill up their gas tanks. Personally, I’d rather have a gas station than an extra washer and two additional dryers.
Anyway, I started doing the odd load at a friend’s in town, Andrew, who is incidentally now, as of this week, the new mayor of Masset. He’s a good friend of many Tow Towners and now he can chalk up some of us using his laundry machines to being part of a town beautification scheme. (One of his primary goals is to ‘clean up’ the downtown core.) But as the Mapper pointed out, “We’re in our late-30’s and we’re doing our laundry at our friend’s place.” Way to feel like self-sufficient woodsmen. (I probably shouldn’t mention here that Andrew’s also got cable.)
Since then I’ve stepped up my game by a half-measure. Rescue Ross and Nurse Kelly brokered a deal for me with a friend of theirs and fellow nurse, Kirsten, who had just moved out onto Tow Hill Road. She now has a wood stove for heat and is nervous about using an axe. So I split kindling for her and she let’s me use her laundry machines. The best trade I’d heard of out here, besides the woman who was trading physical intimacy for fresh halibut (a textbook win-win-win situation).
Even those long-time Tow Towners who started out squatting in teepees on the beach have laundry machines now. Rich and Lisa, make their machines work off-grid by powering their ‘eco-smart’ washing machine with their 2000-watt Honda generator (the dryer runs on propane). Unfortunately, the new machine that they brought in from off-island was a little too smart. It wouldn’t run unless the water temperature as detected by the machine sensor reached a certain level. Since the water was coming by gravity feed from a rainwater cistern, with no water heater involved, this was problematic. Lisa figured out a way to satisfy the machine by heating two pots of water on the woodstove and throwing them in the machine with the clothes and mixing in another pot of cold water. This seemed to work 4 out of every 5 tries (better than what she was doing previously, which was pouring hot water from a jug into the intake hose).
If I stay out here, I’ll have to figure out a long-term solution because it is one of my enduring beliefs that en suite laundry is near the apex of living the privileged life we in developed countries have become accustomed to, whatever Maslow’s hierarchy may say to the contrary. Happiness is a dryer-warmed garment.