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Wednesday, January 11, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
‘Happy People’
The great battery of
recent storms has made
things interesting. Cars are
off the road, pipes are freez-
ing, heat pumps are failing,
and I’ve got three snowy
mounds down in the corrals
I think contain horses. By
the time you read this, we
may have received another
15 inches, which will raise
the stakes considerably.
Yesterday, while snow-
shoeing from the house to
the barn, I kept thinking
about Werner Herzog’s bril-
liant documentary, “Happy
People, A Year In the
Taiga.” The film chronicles
the life of fur hunters near
the remote village of Bakhta,
along the Yenisei River, in
the deep Siberian taiga.
They get real winters
around Bakhta, and it’s a
tough life for the Happy
People. They have some
modern conveniences, but
it’s truly a life without much
luxury. They make their own
skis, smear a kind of birch-
bark porridge over them-
selves against mosquitos in
the summer, charge around
the dense taiga on rickety
Soviet snowmobiles, fish
the river from questionable
boats, and in one epic scene,
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a trapper returns to his cabin
after checking his lines only
to find it has been crushed by
the incredible snow load. It
is a matter of living or dying
for him to get a fire started
against the brutal cold, but
he just quietly whistles his
way through to solving the
problem.
It’s at that point in the
movie when we understand
why it is called “Happy
People.” They just are. It’s
a mindset, a quiet embrace
of their circumstances, a
gut-level resilience in the
face of daily weather and
wilderness hardships that
defines who they are. They
seem to be happy because
they aren’t mentally at war
against the realities that sur-
round them. They aren’t
imagining sun-soaked
beaches in the Caribbean
and torturing themselves
with comparisons.
We do better when we do
that, too.
There is no question that
all of this snow, and below-
zero temperatures, have
brought some hardship.
Simple tasks take twice as
long, getting anywhere is
dangerous, and we can start
to worry about things we
don’t normally think much
about. Ice dams, for instance,
or the EM function on a
thermostat — which I didn’t
even know existed until our
heat pump motor decided to
unbuckle itself and fall over.
Some of our neighbors have
reported ominous sounds in
their ceilings, and last night
one of our dogs growled at
snow falling from the trees.
Things can get weird
fast when the weather goes
wonky.
But the Happy People
have far more difficult chal-
lenges than we do, and for
far longer, and seem to
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take everything in stride.
As Laurence Gonzales
wrote in his fabulous book,
“Deep Survival”: “The mad-
dening thing for someone
with a Western scientific
turn of mind is that it’s not
what’s in your pack that
separates the quick from the
dead. It’s not even what’s
in your mind. Corny as it
sounds, it’s what’s in your
heart.”
It seems to be that, at
some level, the Happy
People of the taiga have
made a lasting peace with
the notion that the chal-
lenges and inconveniences
of life are natural, and
healthy, and can even be fun.
Hunting cabin in the middle
of nowhere collapsed? No
problem, I’ll just build a
little fire and whistle a little
tune. It’s hard not to love a
mindset — a richly lived
nonchalance — like that.
I’m not proposing that
shoveling snow off the roof,
thawing out pipes, watch-
ing three hours of plowing
magically disappear, or
thinking about the flood I’m
certain we will fight off in
the barn this spring is fun.
But there is certainly a way
to bring myself around to
enjoying the challenges, to
shrug a little bit more in the
face of consequences and
occasional setbacks that I
may not like.
And there is, in fact, a
tremendous upside to these
storms. One of the reasons
I’ve embraced this epi-
sode of incredible weather
is that it has convinced
me, after several years of
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procrastinating, that I need
a tractor. More importantly,
it has also convinced my
lovely bride. I’ve been toy-
ing with the tractor notion
for some time, throwing the
idea up in the air to see if
it landed in the need, or the
want, box. But perpetual
plowing and shoveling has
made the decision for me.
And so the great snow of
2017 has come like a gift
from the heavens, because
it convinced me that I both
need, and want, a tractor.
And that makes me very
happy, indeed.
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New Year,
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– We can straighten ‘em out –
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— 541-549-3368 —
The hunters and trappers of the Siberian taiga, despite extreme conditions, are Happy People.
Sat., Jan. 14th, 7-9 pm
Doug & Katie Cavanaugh
Open Tuesday-Saturday 12-8 pm
391 W. Cascade Ave. | 541-549-2675
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