Down to a Trickle: Etseri, Svaneti

From the luxuries of Canada back to... Svan reality, like a slap in the face with an ice brick. Ice, because although the place we left behind was quite a bit colder than where we returned to, the effect of the latter was much more severe.

The unnamed person who neglected to leave the house heating on at least left the water running, which meant that it didn't freeze. If it HAD frozen, I would have had to drag out 150 m of plastic pipe, connect it to our entry point on the main village pipe, join the other end to the house, patch up leaks, and hope for the best. So that was something.

But the cold indoors had allowed all standing water to freeze partly or fully. So... upstairs, no water. A sink left running up there had spat out its tap filter and bizarrely frozen the stream into place, as if in a flash, the filter still stuck in the still column. Downstairs, a big piece broke off the toilet pedestal, and some water leaked out of that, although a few days later we discovered that the toilet still may be useable, albeit needing to be flushed by bucket. But that's better than trips to the outhouse, no?

Snow had blanketed everything and, in the absence of internal heating, had built up on the roof of the house instead of doing what it usually does and sliding right off the unpainted metal by its own weight after a few inches' accumulation. It's only now starting to come down. (All around us the poor people with painted roofs are shoveling it off...) And the hot water tank downstairs also refuses to run, so the only non-icy water we have is what we heat on the wood stove or in the kettle.

Electricity? It was there when we arrived, then vanished, but just in our house, so, not a neighborhood thing. But the house circuit box seemed to be in order, all switches up and on. Early in the morning the power did come back, but very weakly, and only some hours after that did it return in full force, where it's been ever since. I got up a couple of times during that first night to stoke the stove, as it was at the time our only source of heat in the whole big place. Jet lag meant that I was awake anyway, so why not be useful?

In short, quite a discouraging return, although it could have been much worse. No fire emergency or collapsed roofs, some water actually running, electricity eventually stable, heating able to be turned on. We also missed the season's worst colds to date. Now it's warmer, only a few degrees below freezing, and with as much snow as we have insulating the water pipe (which it wasn't there to do in last winter's freeze-up), the cold soon to return might not kill the water this time, if we're careful to leave it running, as wasteful as that seems! The alternative is far worse, and much more trouble.

The house is slowly warming up, the chill in its bones thawing from the inside out with all the heating and stove fire we have going now, maybe enough to reverse some or all of the pipe-freezes which we do have, maybe even to the upstairs. Another small mercy: those frozen pipes don't actually burst, being plastic. That, too, would be so much worse than what we have.

The other place where the exact same battle between incoming frost and out-pushing warmth is taking place is... my own heart. As I write this, electricity has been off again for half an hour or so, though this is nothing new in winter; snowfall off the roof has accumulated a foot or so past the top steps of the house doorways and to the bottoms of the windows, with more bucketing down. I'm aware of the potential for crippling discouragement, and of the need to fight it off by staying positive. Otherwise, it's kill the livestock, pack our bags and head off to the Big City for the winter if not for good. Which I so don't want to do.

Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1350 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/

He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:

www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti

Tony Hanmer