I grew up in Alaska, and I think I disagree in a philosophical sense.

There's a lot of stuff hacked together in ways experts in the relevant fields would certainly not find beautiful. Expanding foam is probably not in the toolkit of very many master architects; most people have never read an electrical code (and in many places, there's no entity imposing one); many boats, snowmobiles, and other vehicles have been adapted in ways that would make the engineers who designed them want a drink or three.

Most of it works though, like that shell script you hacked together as a teenager from random mailing list archives to automate some task that still needs automating 15 years later. It works and it enables people to do things they could not otherwise do (the economics to support the relevant professional services wouldn't work). I see a beauty in that.

There is beauty in a utility shell script. But I guarantee you, no one in this forum wants to work at an org or in a society where everything is a mishmash of shell-scripts. It's sometimes nicer to have things that scale and are standardized across the board.

No doubt. Rural life does not scale past a certain point, which is why cities exist.

Just as long as the romance is tempered with the reality of the occasional house-fire.

It is, but those usually stem from the need for heat in the extreme cold, which is often achieved by the old fashioned method of burning wood in a stove.

Most wood stove fires aren't directly because of the stove, but people who have gone years and years without ever cleaning their chimney or try to slow burn lots of shit wood like pine. And when the chimney builds up with tons of creosote it can then catch on fire and burn inside the chimney, seriously overheating it and causing a fire.

Speaking of pine, it's harder and harder to find decent firewood that isn't mixed with pine. We mostly cut our own from felled trees on the lot, of which there is no shortage, but sometimes it's handy to buy the odd cord and boy has the quality gone downhill.

Yep, I live in the Rockies and it's all we have here. Everybody in the mountains are burning pine. Just season it the best you can. Burning wood is also the main way to go because gas is too cost prohibitive up here.

I'm curious to understand why gas is prohibitive in the Rockies, if you don't mind. It's (at least, it seems to be) so ubiquitous in the Sierra's (where I am right now) that I kind of assumed it was like this every where in the mountains today.