Off-grid and online: what I’ve learned living and working on a remote island during lockdown
Lessons from a remote island in isolation, kindness and self-sufficiency.
As I write this I sit at my laptop with hair so wet that cold drips are soaking into the hood of my jumper. I washed my hair four hours ago but it’s a drizzly autumn day on Great Barrier Island, and with no mains power to plug-in a hairdryer, and no heating to expedite the drying process it’s taking its damn sweet time drying au naturel.
In truth I do have access to a small generator here that would just about power a hair dryer, but living here has given me a deeper appreciation of the hierarchy of energy needs. As an appliance with a heating element, blowdrying my hair would suck up a taxing amount of energy for what is essentially luxury, so it’s a nonstarter.
A deeper understanding of how household energy is used, managed and conserved is one of the many invaluable lessons I’ve learned here.
The peaceful, beautiful, exhilarating and sometimes infuriating experience of life on a remote, off-grid island is a literal world away from where I grew up in the suburbs of middle England. There’s no mains power at all here. It is completely off-grid, powered by stand-alone solar panels and generators. There’s a very narrow range of mobile phone reception and WiFi is hard come by and expensive where you can get it. The closest city is a four and a half hour ferry or a forty minute flight away in a plane the size of a small van. It takes two vehicles — a four wheel drive car and a quad to navigate the track through the bush to the waters’ edge property I live in.
For some people, being so cut-off from the hyperconnected world we have been incubated into is a nightmare. For others, it’s a utopian dream come true. I have found my experiences of living here, working, cooking, showering, hiking, sunbathing and occasionally shooing rats out of the house, to be somewhere in between the two. Of all things the island is a teacher. And for my presence and persistence this is what it has taught me.
You can’t always get what you want — especially if what you want is aubergine.
There are three small grocery shops on the island servicing around 850 people. During lockdown this number ballooned as Aucklanders came to shelter in place in their holiday homes. The closest store to our shelter in Schooner Bay is the picturesque Stonewall Store, named after — you guessed it — the stacked stone wall dividing the store grounds from the road. It’s a small but well stocked store that has just enough shuffling room between aisles without brushing elbows. But during lockdown the safest way to pick-up supplies was to put in an email order and pick up your shopping at the back of the store yard.
Supplies are freighted over to the island on the ferry on Tuesdays, so to get the fresh produce you want, you have to be tactical about your timing, even in pre-lockdown days. What I found picking up my order on a few occasions, was a mystery box of whatever was left over and substitutes. One box included a substitute of beetroot hummus which I have now become obsessed with and eternally thank the shopper who took the last original hummus and introduced me to its brighter, redder, tastier cousin. An aubergine drought for about two weeks left a hole in my usual vegetarian diet, but forced me to be more culinarily creative, something my boyfriend had to endure for the seven weeks.
The weather changes everything and the stars are as beautiful as the poets said.
Yes, the weather is the lord of the island. It dictates when planes can fly, when ferries can sail and whether or not you’ll be showering with hot water. In a logistical sense the weather is the ultimate contingent. But it also transforms the entire personality of the island in a way I’ve never experienced before. When the rainclouds roll in it’s palpable, close and immediate. There’s no sanctuary to be claimed under the glass and steel skyscrapers of cities or riddles of streets in the suburbs. The wind rumbles the houses until they shake, and sheets of rain can be seen crawling towards the shore from the Coromandel peninsula, giving adequate warning to get the washing in.
Living here can feel like being inside a lush, green snow globe that occasionally gets shaken up, causing a torrent of atmospheric chaos. But when the precipitation settles and the clouds evacuate, the stars that are left behind are nothing short of majestic. Great Barrier Island is one of just twelve dark sky sanctuaries in the world. This means that the light pollution is so low that the stars you see here are a rare glimpse at the eternal, glittering milky way and the universe beyond. I’ve happily endured neck ache from wondering up at the celestial beauty here on more than a few occasions.
The island is powered by a network of kindness.
You can’t always rely on traditional services. Ferries may be fully booked, essential building materials might be unavailable or simply too expensive to source here. Transport, goods and services are in short supply a lot of the time. But luckily kindness is not. The island may be off-grid but it is powered by a network of kindness that keeps people’s lives running smoothly.
Friends and islanders from neighbouring sections are quick to offer help wherever and whenever it is needed. As a writer whose livelihood is earned online, when I first arrived on the island in 2018 I had no shortage of people offering me a quiet space to work at their homes where they had some kind of internet connection before we got ours installed — which took another year!
On our first trip back to the mainland after lockdown we loaded our truck with various items from other islanders including clothes to return and custom made furniture for delivery. We returned with a shopping list of goods for ourselves and others, as well as a dog who was taking the ferry to her new home away from the mainland. Although this is standard practice for the islanders who don’t expect payment for their goodwill, we were gifted a bottle of gin and a jar of honey — something akin to island currency — for our help.
Isolation is a privilege to be endured.
Like everyone else in lockdown, there were days during isolation when I just wanted to see people. I wanted to be in a crowded pub back home, surrounded by the faces of my friends and the committed regulars of the local drinking hole. I wanted to walk through a thoroughfare in a swarm of people and feel like a tiny part of the pulsing veins of a thriving community.
This particular brand of homesickness was more potent, with a sharper sting, when I would look out across the bay towards the faint outline of the closest mainland and feel like I was a lonely dust mite living on a discarded scrap of wool that had been blown far from the wool shed.
But for every day of introspective loneliness I had hours of basking in the crisp, clean air, dawdling along deserted beaches, drinking in awe inspiring sunsets and endless green tangles of bush and the knotted, aged trunks of pohutukawa trees. Isolation like this is a gift, and even during this global emergency I have been reminded on a daily basis that the world is unspeakably, achingly beautiful.
Self-sufficiency comes in stages.
I have always been fascinated by people who live the kind of homestead self-sufficient lives captured in grainy old tv shows like Little House on the Prairie. I’ve marvelled at these people — a hardy, resourceful breed that seemed to be born with the ability to work with the land they inhabit to reap bountiful rewards of homegrown veggies, fresh baked bread and herb gardens that would make a botanist green with envy.
In the seven weeks we isolated, tucked away in the bay, our veggie garden grew from an intractable mane of fresh mint to a living catalogue of tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, beans, courgettes, pumpkins, basil and silverbeet. With the help of a bread maker bought second hand from the local lodge, we’ve made bread, buns and chutney from the garden produce. In a bid to taste something that reminded me of home I even whipped up my own Yorkshire puddings from scratch, something I honestly never thought I would do after decades of being loyal to Aunt Bessie.
I’m starting to learn that self-sufficiency isn’t something you’re born with. It’s not a skill possessed solely by the frontier pioneers who mastered it. Right now I’m making my own Yorkies, but in ten years I might be running a fruitful, seasonal kitchen of almost entirely homegrown greens and goodies.
Hopefully, as I lean into the small island life, it will teach me much more about how to live in symbiosis with a rugged, untamed and idyllic place. And occasionally let me escape to a place where I can get UberEats.
