Strapped in snowshoes, alone in the woods of Manitoba, and armed with a chainsaw, Gordon Daigneault had one way to survive: gather fuel to heat his dwelling.
Though now he has power—gathered from the sun—to cook with and light his home and water running through pipes to flush the toilet and take showers, heat depends entirely on his wood-gathering endeavours. It gets especially cold in winter in these parts—about an hour-and-a-half’s drive from Winnipeg—and wood fuel is the only way to warm up and keep the pipes from freezing.
Before arriving here, Daigneault lived in Winnipeg and worked in packaging manufacturing for 20 years. He says it really wasn’t his thing.
“I learned pretty fast as a young adult that I didn’t care for the city life, but that’s where the work was,” he told The Epoch Times.
He'd rather go fishing than watch TV, he said—would prefer a walk through the woods than through a shopping mall.
His love of the outdoors and distaste for city life probably sprang from his upbringing in the tiny village of St-Pierre-Jolys, 50 kilometres southeast of Winnipeg, where he was born. As a boy, he would go with his mother and siblings to forage for berries while his father hunted.
“We always had food, even with our low income,” Daigneault said.
That’s also where he learned to survive.
“Growing up and spending a lot of time in the woods with parents who guided me on what was good and not good to eat helped, and I just expanded my knowledge a little at a time,” he said.
Taking this wisdom, Daigneault applied it on his remote two-acre plot. He never goes hungry.
“Food has always been easy,” he said, adding that in the summer he fishes, gardens, raises chickens for eggs, gathers berries and mushrooms, and hunts deer and rabbits. “Blueberries are big for me and I pick a lot for myself and to sell.” He expands his summer activities every year to help get through the winter.
There is no shortage of game, he says. Snowshoes work remarkably well in deep snow, and late last year he managed to track down and bag a doe with his crossbow, which sustained him through the winter. Daigneault says he likes old-fashioned hunting weapons and owns both a flintlock muzzleloader and a longbow, which he’s spent many hours mastering.
The plot Daigneault calls home first appeared on his radar in 2019 when he was still working in manufacturing.
“I was talking with a co-worker, and he brought up that his friend has a cabin he’s looking to sell in the area,” he said. “I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but as soon as I saw it, I was interested and agreed to buy it.”
Plans for the cabin were abandoned by its previous owner. For a decade, it was left half-built and decaying. Daigneault knew it was a fixer-upper but would chip away at the project and slowly furnish it with what was lacking.
Fortuitously, his brother owns a cabin nearby. He lent a hand, using his tractor to dig trenches for power cables and a hole for a septic tank. Contractors dug a well. One of Daigneault’s friends helped with plumbing, another with the wiring. Power is mainly generated through an array of solar panels, which he sometimes plugs his slow cooker into for simmering legs of veal. When it snows, he has to dust off the solar panels with a broom.
“Everything runs as you'd expect from a traditional house, but I do have to watch power use when the sun isn’t great,” he said, adding that he uses plenty of batteries, while a generator serves as a backup.
After buying the cabin, Daigneault moved in right away, but while still working in Winnipeg at first. However, getting home at 2 a.m. after a 12-hour shift and snowmobiling through -30 degree weather was exhausting, he said.
“Without anyone keeping the wood stove going when I was away, it was about that same temperature inside the cabin [as outside],” he said.
Daigneault made his final commute in the winter of 2020 when he left city life for good. For the past five years, it’s been only the woodland life for Bushman Gord.
Out of necessity, he, along with his brother, started a firewood business. It serves a dual purpose. Chainsaws in hand, they brave the forest to gather dead wood, which they sell for extra cash while also fuelling their own stoves. Lately, as the weather warms, he’s been starting early, before the heat and the bugs come out.
Rising before the sun, Daigneault brews coffee on his wood stove before tackling chores like feeding the animals and stocking wood or pumping water. If the pipes freeze, he needs to have barrels full in case of an emergency. Then the work begins.
“Depending on the day, I‘ll either tackle projects around the property or I’ll head out to my brothers to make firewood,” he said. “Along the way, I'll stop in areas to forage for whatever is in season and again on my way back home.”
“I’m still learning social media,” he said.
Sure, cabin life takes a lot more effort, including gathering wood and lighting the wood stove to cook, and he has to “go easy on the power on cloudy days,” he says, but it’s also far more frugal and “doesn’t require a big income.”
Daigneault says he can’t see himself moving back to the big city. He loves this freedom too much.
“I don’t have any regrets at all, except for maybe I should have started a lot sooner,” he said. “Trading the city for a life that has me eating healthy foods with clean air and water and easy exercise with the freedom is a worthy trade for me.”
