A Beginning

So we are setting off on becoming "adults", buying land or a house or both and setting down roots of a sort. I've really gotten hooked on the whole idea of buying a piece of land outright that we can homestead. The only way we can do this is if we liquidate my wife's 401k, and for a sizable chunk of it we (she) can buy the land with no lending, no banks, no nonsense. Imagine having no mortgage, no rent. This is the grand motivator for our life experiment, I guess I should say for the rest of our lives, for the beginning of our new lives, forever and ever amen.

I've also really gotten hooked on building a home debt-free. Who wouldn't? In my case, I think you need to be somewhat of an adventurer. What qualifies as an adventurer? How about someone in their late 30s who figures "if I can't find a job I'll just live on the Appalachian Trail for as long as it takes". Yeah, that kind of adventurer. Words like "unrealistic", "dreamer", "head in the clouds", "dropout" or "homeless" have all swirled about, but actually, it's not unrealistic at all. Nor is it a dream. What it takes, though, is a great deal of courage, of ideals that can't be swayed, of information and ponderings and plannings that have accrued in the mind over decades; in other words, this is not a new idea.

How do we have a home debt-free? Ok, I can see buying a parcel of raw land, a blank canvas yet to be painted, but an actual shelter? A domicile? What are you, independently wealthy? Hardly. We've had to struggle for many years, sometimes (fairly often, actually) skimping on meals, cutting corners where we could (and sometimes where we couldn't) just to make ends meet. So how the heck do you afford a place to call home on top of all that uncut land?

Ladies and gentlemen, it's called a yurt.  What is the genesis of this project? How/why/where did you get this crazy idea? How will you keep up with the neighbors?

I remember, long ago, my parents got me a book for my birthday. We were always bookish sorts, these were the things that were most exciting to me to receive. Imagine all that information (or misinformation) crammed into those pages just waiting to be used! For only the price of a book (admittedly more and more expensive all the time) there were whole worlds to be investigated and learned from. So this book that started it all, for me, was an oversized paperback called Shelter by Lloyd Kahn and Bob Easton, published in 1973. I'll let the copy editors speak for me:

Shelter is many things - a visually dynamic, oversized compendium of organic architecture past and present; a how-to book that includes over 1,250 illustrations; and a Whole Earth Catalog-type sourcebook for living in harmony with the earth by using every conceivable material. First published in 1973, Shelter remains a source of inspiration and invention. Including the nuts-and-bolts aspects of building, the book covers such topics as dwellings from Iron Age huts to Bedouin tents to Togo's tin-and-thatch houses; nomadic shelters from tipis to "housecars"; and domes, dome cities, sod iglus, and even treehouses.

 I was always interested in building places from natural objects. My father was a carpenter, and I grew up around things being built, and wondered at them. I also grew up building as many shelters as I could in as many ways as I could out of things I found in the woods behind our house; if an errant wanderer strayed back there in the early 80s, they would have thought they were in an Ewok village for the number of lean-tos and ramshackle teepees they would find.  After I got this mind-expanding book, I was convinced I would be living in an earthship or geodesic dome or a wattle and daub hut soon enough. If only that were true!

Distractions happen, life gets in the way (what a lousy excuse!). Fast forward to today, and suffice it to say I am doggedly determined to make this a reality. And we're ready to do it, too. Ready to be adults, but in a different way. Ready, instead, to take that notion of adulthood and tilt it on its head, to instead back away from the rat-race and the 3 car garage and the mortgage and the swimming pool. To get back to where we once belonged. To regain the place in our ecosystem we feel we belong.

We are going to build a yurt.

 I don't think yurts ever even come up as a viable option in Shelter, surprisingly. Maybe that's because the late Bill Coperthwaite hadn't yet brought the notion to its full fruition in the western world. If you haven't yet, read his A Handmade Life; it'll change yours forever. But I digress. "But a yurt," you say "Isn't that like living in a tent?".  My coworkers at my job at a small college here in the Pioneer Valley all laugh at me. They always joke that "why buy that piece of lab equipment X, I'm sure he could just make one out of twigs and mud".  Laugh away, my friends! Hopefully you'll see things from my perspective when you come to your first yurt-warming (I need to get a trademark on that).

To be continued...