Sustainable Compromises: A Yurt, a Straw Bale House, and Ecological Living

6. Foundations

44 6 Foundations “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden Before I left home, the foundation of my beliefs had been largely fashioned by my parents or my friends. I was lucky to have had a good education, and I knew my way around books and ideas. I liked the Beatles, loved Dylan. I had poured over the rich and fascinating pages of the Last Whole Earth Catalog and had read Thoreau’s Walden more than once. I had smoked pot, done mushrooms, and hitchhiked my way all over the West. Still, I had not yet really ventured far from my 1950s midwestern Catholic ideals. It was only after I left my Nebraska home and began teaching at Las Tres Villas school in Tesuque, New Mexico, that I began to trade my narrow and untested adolescent views for wider ones. Unlike the largely white town where I grew up, the majority of families in the three villages where I taught were Hispanic. Because of that experience, I had begun to understand and to joyfully accept the diversity of cultures in the world. In addition, the Vietnam War was raging; and with the possibility that I might be drafted any moment, I had an active personal interest in wanting to end the war. I was also spending more and more time at Cornucopia and other communes, and with that I began to learn more about how people might live and work together. 45 Foundations Because of all of this, I soon was swept up in the dream of living somewhere way out in the vast New Mexican landscape. When the people at Cornucopia told me they were going to build out near the ghost town of Madrid, I began to think about becoming their neighbor. All of us would live in our own places and come together whenever one of us needed help. Such dreams were in the air in those days, and it seemed as if youth, optimism, and, yes, even ignorance might change the world. Two years before I built the yurt, counterculture hero Wavy Gravy created Earth People’s Park in northern Vermont. He bought several hundred acres that he intended to be a mecca of self-sufficiency, a place with “free land for free people.” Even the deed for the land was written so that it belonged to “all the peoples of the earth.” People could visit or camp or build a shelter and live rent free for as long as they wanted. The idea was that people would come and create a place of harmony merely by virtue of wanting to live off the land. Many people came, but few were prepared to survive the harsh Vermont winters. At its glory, there were probably twenty-five full-time residents, living in dispersed cabins, A-frames, canvas teepees, old school buses, geodesic domes, a 1950s vintage travel trailer, as well as an impressive eight-sided log cabin. Soon Earth People’s Park attracted more than just these “hippie types.” The prospect of free land brought gangs, drug dealers, outlaws, and destitute people in need of a home. The vision of “free land for free people” disappeared under the clouds of greed, selfishness, and poverty. Still, I was a product of my era, and that culture—a counterculture at that—told me that getting back to the land was a cool way to live. Thousands and thousands of people tried it, but very few were successful. Most everyone failed: those in experiments like mine at the yurt or like Earth People’s Park; those in communes, 46 Foundations monasteries, or cults; and those simply in some drug-hazed rock ’n’ roll dream. The ones who survived refused to adhere to some idealized concept of heaven on earth. They were the ones who learned to live simply, prepared for whatever might come next, who held it as a commandment to do no harm in the world, who could cooperate with others, and who could silence the raging demands of their own desire. In my case, the yurt was mainly a place where I could live so cheaply I wouldn’t have to work. Oh sure, I had the general sentiment of the times, to “walk softly on Mother Earth”; but how to do that...