People often ask me what it’s like to live in a yurt. As I wrote in an essay published in The Smoking Poet last Fall, much of the living goes on around the yurt rather than in it. And that’s as it should be with a shelter traditionally used by nomads.
Take the shower. There’s no room in our twenty foot diameter yurt for a shower unless we want to cut out some of our precious living space. And we don’t. We’ve been meaning to put a shower on the porch, but we can’t bear to enclose it and displace the house wrens that nest in the rafters each spring. So we mostly rely on outdoor showers naturally heated by the sun through hundreds of feet of black pipe. The problem is, the water in those pipes is too hot on hot days (when a cold shower would be fine) and not hot at all on cold days when we really need a hot shower. And now that we’re burying the pipe under the frost line, there will be no more hot water gained the lazy way. We’ll have to build a proper solar hot water collector.
So to make it easy on ourselves during this cold, rainy spring when there is too much work to do and not much sun, Jerry put together a propane shower under an apple tree near the yurt.
Note the lovely platform to keep our feet out of the mud.
We’ll add a shower curtain when guests come. That will help block the wind too. But for now, we enjoy a spectacular view.
View to the west.
Today, I discovered another benefit, though it will only last another week or so. We’re working up heavy sweats and mucking around in some strong smelling stuff, like rotting organic matter around the spring and water ditches, compost, and a ton (literally) of rabbit manure we trailered in for the garden. When we peel of our clothes at the shower and wait for the water and soap to take effect, the fragrant blossoms cut through some of the not-so-pleasant odors that waft out.
Apple blossoms
