novel use of Carmen's Warm Bags

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On Flat Lake Time
- a Modern Survivor's Guide to Living off the Road System in Alaska

The Novel Use of Carmen's Warm Bags
Warm Bag Design - Carmen Cooper drawing

            Our third freeze-up, we had taken the pontoon boat in to Big Lake to have Haggard put it into storage on a Sunday, and then started commuting by skiff on Monday. The temperatures were getting down into the teens at night, so we thought we might not be able to get through Mud Lake by the next weekend, the next time we’d be home in daylight.
            Starting our commute on Monday morning we discovered that the steering in the skiff was frozen. It was eighteen degrees out so it was understandable that it might freeze up, but I had copied what Don was doing and greased up the steering slide bar to try to prevent it. I was discussing the situation with Gail and she suggested using our new corn bag heaters to thaw the slide mechanism. The corn bags were made for us by Carmen Cooper, one of my work associates.
            Carmen is a quilter and made two heaters for us by sewing feed corn into flannel material. She sewed tubes of fabric about sixteen inches long, closed one end, and then made three seams a third of the way along the tube by sewing through the fabric, but only half way closing the adjoining compartments thus created, as in the diagram

above, so that the feed corn can flow through. She then fills it half full with corn. It only takes two minutes per bag to heat them up in the microwave. The seams allow the corn to adjust comfortably to feet, necks, or, as we were about to find out, to outboard engine steering gear. We heated them up in the microwave for a few minutes and draped them over the metal tube that holds the steering slide bar, leaving them in a plastic sack to keep them clean. It only took two minutes to thaw out the steering so I could move the outboard engine back and forth using the steering wheel.
            On Tuesday, we repeated the same procedure, and it worked fine. On Wednesday, we did it again and were starting on our commute across Flat Lake when, just after getting past Don and Marcia’s dock and past Scott and Rachael’s island, the engine overheating alarm started wailing away! I looked back at the engine and realized that the water tattletale was not there, so I figured the water pump was broken and shut off the outboard. Then we started to paddle toward the landing, which was about a mile away, in the dark, with some light fog moving in, and a full eclipse of the moon scheduled sometime that day.
            We had two paddles in the boat, so we each paddled. Every once in a while we would stop to rest. It was like paddling a raft; we made very little headway and, if one of us stopped, the boat would just rotate in one spot. Gail said it would have been a lot easier to go back and get the kayaks, but we were quite far out by then, so we kept at it. During one of our rests, Gail commented on how beautiful and quiet it was out. Then she noted that there were no Northern Lights.
            I said, “Yeah, if there were Northern Lights, everything would be perfect!”
            We laughed and started paddling again. A little later (it took an hour to paddle across), I looked to our left, to the north, and said, “Now everything is perfect; there are the Northern Lights!” and we started to laugh very hard, considering that we were still paddling.
            When we got to the landing, we were quite awake, got in the car, and planned how to get back to the cabin that evening. During the day I called Don about it and then arranged a ride with Craig. I called Don later to let him know we had a ride. He had been
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