“Why didn’t I think of that?” is a question I’ve beaten myself up asking many times in this odd new off-grid life when the latest thing to go wrong has gone wrong.
And it’s one I ponder while looking at a landslide, a flood and a jumble of upturned tanks on the hill below our building site which just before the storm was an almost-finished water treatment system.
I make a lot of mistakes by rushing into things, not preparing properly and thinking stuff can be done in a set period of time when it can’t … but I can’t take the blame for everything.
In 2002, the then US Secretary of Defence Ronald Rumsfeld explained the lack of evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in a speech referring to “known-knowns, known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns”.
Photo: Ana Spross
Like Secretary Rumsfeld and given my lack of experience living in this self-reliant way, it’s the unknown-unknowns which often get me.
“If only I’d thought about that thing I didn’t know might happen, before it did” makes me feel better when I say it out loud, but it doesn’t mean the whole water treatment tanks aren’t now trashed.
I wasn’t always so ignorant: in my job as a BBC foreign correspondent, I learned to make risks rather than take risks and got pretty good at assessing whether or not they were worth the reward.
“Flying into Ebola and active insurgency-land in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?”
Yes, it was worth it, but it took me ages to persuade the bosses back in London I wasn’t insane, and to apologise to my wife Ana for not telling her until afterwards.
I’ve learned a lot about how to do stuff off the grid, but I often get really frustrated when my own stupidity or lack of properly thinking things through means I not only fail to achieve the thing I set out to do, but actually make it worse: more difficult and more expensive to rectify. This happens a lot.
Photo: Ana Spross
I was never terribly good at DIY before, so why should that change with practice? (it really should, shouldn’t it?)
The approach I took in my previous job for getting that interview, that access to a place to tell a story and then get it on air doesn’t work with installing a solar water pump kit that came without instructions and two pieces missing.
As a reporter for a big organisation, it was a lot easier getting hold of people who want to get on the telly and have their perspective heard than being the annoyingly pushy foreigner in rural Portugal who should know by now that things take time.
A good old-life example of the “unstoppable force vs immovable object” approach was forcing my way onto the front lines in South Sudan by pressuring and persuading the military.
Surviving being ambushed three times in the day, and then driving back in the dark through rebel-held territory while holding a satellite dish on the car roof with one hand just to get the story on that evening’s news takes a certain level of bloody-mindedness.
But there’s not much you can do if key people in your building project don’t return calls.
My most recent “unknown-unknown” involved the recent heavy rains and the presence of newly-dug trenches for the pipe and cable infrastructure for our new guest lodge.
And to be honest, it’s something I would have expected to be on a builder’s list of known-knowns.
When the new downhill trench to our main solar-power control building was finished, I realised – with an eye on the weather forecast – that it bisected a couple of streams bringing a load of water to our lake and it got me thinking.
We forced a reluctant builder to block the trench and flatten some ground to encourage any overflowing water towards the lake.
And given it created a downhill escape route for all the water languishing on our clay hilltop, if we’d left it, the solar house would have been flooded and all our solar batteries destroyed. That’s a known-known.
Sadly, the trench on the other hillside was not diverted and despite my previous successful efforts to guide rainwater around, the deluge created a landslide that inundated the half-built fossa, flipped and buried the biggest tank in clay, floated another out of a 3m deep hole and smashed all the pipes linking the system.
It’s a total mess – it’s going to cost more to undo and redo again than it cost to do it in the first place and the work will eat up vital time.
Once it’s drier, we can bring back the machines, dig everything out and start all over again.
There are great parts to living this life, but sometimes I wish it wasn’t just us who had all the responsibility for guessing what might happen before it does.
And having to coordinate everything ourselves leaves gaps of plausible deniability where people with greater experience can make excuses for not acting.
Alastair Leithead is a former BBC Foreign Correspondent and freelance journalist now living in a remote rural part of Alentejo with his wife Ana. You can see a video tour of their building site on the blog “Off-Grid and Ignorant in Portugal” which he writes alongside “The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure.”
