Julian SmitThere’s a sound I wasn’t prepared for.
Not the wind. Not the cold. Not the particular silence of a snow-covered forest at three in the morning. It was the trees.
During the ice storm of January 2024 — the first real test of our new life off the grid — the forest around us became something alive and angry. Ice had been building for hours, coating every branch, every limb, adding weight that the trees hadn’t carried in years. And then, one by one, they began to let go. A deep crack, a long groan, and then a crash that you felt in your chest. Giants falling. All night.
I’d seen ice storms before. From a window, from a car, from the city. I had never been inside one.
We came through without serious damage — partly luck, partly the foresight to move one of the cars before the freezing rain started. Some ice dams on the roof to deal with later. A few anxious hours. But we were fine.
What I noticed most, in the morning, was the dog.
Shep had bounded outside before I’d even finished my coffee, nose down, tunnelling through snowdrifts with the absolute conviction that this was what life was supposed to be. No hesitation. No assessment of conditions. Pure, unfiltered enthusiasm for the world exactly as it was.
There’s a lesson in that I’m still working on.
The first winter taught me that off-grid living isn’t really about the technology or the prep lists — though both matter. It’s about your relationship to the unexpected. A pipe that might freeze. A storm that takes out trees you’ve come to love. A pump that needs replacing. The question isn’t whether these things will happen. It’s whether you’re the kind of person who, when they do, pulls on their boots and deals with it — and maybe even finds it magnificent.
We survived our first winter. No major incidents. And every morning, an Aussie Shepherd reminded me that there was nowhere he’d rather be.
[Coming in the next post: what our first full growing season taught us about water — specifically, where ours was actually coming from.]
Julian Smit
