My husband and I have a long history together. We knew each other as babies, but didn’t start dating or fall in love until I was 15, and he a freshman in college. One day not long afterward, we visited my mom’s classroom; she was a 4th grade teacher in the elementary school I myself had attended. We were her ‘guest speakers’ one day helping to demonstrate Colonial Crafts – grinding flour for bread and churning butter – and we asked the kids if they knew where butter came from? Back then our birthplace of Orange County, NY had until recently been 90% farm land (and dairy farms at that), but sadly not one student knew the answer to our simple question. How quickly we lose connections to our roots! In fact, the only response we got was from one little boy who queried back, “The grocery store?” Not what we were looking for … but it started us thinking of getting back to the roots in our own lives … and asking ourselves basic questions, such as where did things really come from? Did we truly know the sources of the all the things that we used on a daily basis, such as our water? And electricity: it didn’t just come from the switch on the wall. How did it get there? We had an insatiable desire to understand all the things we had taken totally for granted as we were growing up in middle class households. On our quest for such knowledge, it wasn’t a far mental leap to start questioning other things too, such as what constituted the ‘necessities’ in our lives, and what things were actually ‘luxuries’. We really wanted to know.
That was back in the 1970’s … and everyone’s awareness was suddenly focused on personal environmental responsibility. I had just taken part in the very first Earth Day at my high school, where our class had created an artistically shocking display. For the event we had created numerous fully-clothed papier-mâché human forms. All wore gas masks and were strewn in various positions on the hallway floors, along with garbage and litter of every description. Large quantities of dry ice created the illusion of pollution, with it eerie, vaporous, smog-like effect. It was a powerfully graphic image that jolted many of us on that very first Earth Day into a state of sudden environmental awareness and a desire to be better stewards of our fragile planet. And so, a few years later when I joined Dana in college at Alfred University in western New York State (after a year at Goddard College in Vermont, where I also had the good fortune to meet Helen and Scott Nearing on several occasions), we started our own Thoreau-like experiment to determine what we really needed to live ‘the good, simple life’, as defined by Helen and Scott in their classic book. We also made a commitment to one another to become part of the solution instead of the problems of modern life, and for the last 40 years, this quest has continued to evolve.
When I say we got ‘back to basics’, I mean literally that. We were young, idealistic, and wanted to make our own way in the world, paying our own way as we went. Food, Shelter and Education, we decided, were on the top of the ‘Must Have’ list, but dorm life and cafeteria food appealed to neither our social sensibilities, our appetites nor our wallets. And so we sought a rather radical alternative. We decided to take ‘Housing’ literally into our own hands.
One man’s Junk is Another Man’s Treasure
At the end of the school year when students went home for the summer, we discovered that there were many of our generation who did not share our passion for ‘making do’ or recycling. Rich, wasteful college students left hordes of perfectly good stuff lining the streets for the trash man, knowing that ‘Mommy and Daddy’ would buy them new furniture and new toys next semester … no need to hassle packing it up or taking it home! Our disgust at the blatant wastefulness soon turned into a personal recycling effort that provided us with two wonderful bicycles, a slightly cracked fiberglass kayak that needed only a small patch – and which we still use to this day!! -- and all the furniture a couple of college students could ever want or imagine. We made out like bandits! But now, where to put it?
One of the most easily overlooked trash-treasures turned out to be the most valuable find of all: some old canvas tarps we found in the woods, no doubt left over from a raucous weekend college ‘campout’. We soon found ourselves in the college bookstore once again, and another book that changed my life had the immediate solution to our housing needs: The Indian Tipi by Gladys and Reginald Laubin. It was the ‘bible’ of Native American Tipi living, and costing all of about $1 back then, this ragged, little dog-eared volume is today one of my most treasured possessions. For the cost of a spool of carpet thread and the loan of a friend’s Singer sewing machine, these tarps were quickly sewn into enough fabric to create a 17’ diameter tipi. A gallon of paint disguised the fact that they were old and stained, and voila! our very first home was born! We lived in it until the first snowfall on a corner of an old farmer’s field. Our ‘refrigerator’ was an old metal milk can we buried in the stream (a simple, low-cost solution, by the way. The food stays cold inside, but the tight fitting lid keeps stray wildlife out). But Alfred winters are notoriously cold and snowy, with lots of lake-effect snow from Lake Erie, and even though we had a fire pit for warmth and cooking, our little tipi just wasn’t going to cut it once winter flew. My husband had been reading about a guy named Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes, and since we thoroughly enjoyed living ‘in the round’ of our tipi, we thought that a circular permanent structure could be easily built to house us through our college years as well. We were right. And then another opportunity presented itself to us, this time in the form of building materials. The old village Town House needed to come down, and we got the job to demolish it. When I look back on it now, that was a rather crazy, time consuming thing to do, but it provided us with most of our building supplies. The following year, a major flood in western NYS gave us everything else we needed to complete our home, as lumber yards were practically giving away water-damaged goods. Between that windfall and the generosity of the retired farmer on whose land we had pitched our tipi, (and who allowed us to build what turned into THREE geodesic domes by the end of our college years), we were sitting pretty! We ended up bartering the farmer use of his land throughout our school years – 5 years in all -- in exchange for giving him the structures when we were through. He rented them out for many years after). Alas, this was 40 years ago in a very rural area, before building codes or permits … Doubtful whether this could be done many places today.
For the first couple of years, we lived in our domes without plumbing or power. We had a woodstove for cooking and warmth, a gas refrigerator, and kerosene lamps. We took showers at the school gym and lugged in water from campus. But gradually we added both running water and electricity after learning how to install them ourselves. We then re-joined the modern world, much the wiser, and also very appreciative of these things we had formerly taken for granted.
After graduation, we moved back to our roots in the Hudson Valley on the family farm, established in 1790. We reclaimed the old orchards, bought a couple horses and some cows, put in raised bed gardens, got a pig, some chickens, a goat … and started a big restoration of the farmhouse that took us many satisfying years to complete. I worked at a local museum demonstrating pioneer crafts … everything from blacksmithing to spinning & weaving to open-hearth cookery. Dana put his environmental science degree to good use as a scientist doing environmental impact statements on the power plants along the Hudson River. We got involved with Peter Seeger and his Clearwater Festivals held each year, which were bringing attention to the pollution of this beautiful waterway. During these yearse grew our food, cut our own wood, ground the wheat that made our bread. And we discovered that while the ‘Simple Life’ is not always ‘simple’, it affords a way of life that is wholesome, honest, sustainable and very healthy and satisfying.
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