Bill's strategy for winter is to insulate the large panoramic windows with thick plastic foam covers. To add to the lack of comfort, there is no washing machine, no real stairs to the upper floor, only a ladder. One wonders how did Bill manage to talk his wife into joining him in this primitive lair. Apparently, more and more people succumb to this back to nature craze. They buy a piece of land deep in Alaskan wilderness and settle there, far from their fellow Americans.
Immigrants are no exception either.
A friend of mine, Nikolai Darasseliya, originally from sunny Georgia in the Caucasus mountains and a graduate of the Moscow University, dreams of saving enough money to leave the sunny California where he is living now, and to settle permanently in Alaska, where he can fish salmon. Don't ask me about their reasons.