Living On The Land, Part 1
My story of living in a tent in the woods
Last summer, I moved onto a piece of raw land in the Northeastern U.S. and lived there with my girlfriend for 8 months, May through January. The land does not have any utilities, buildings, or cell service. The section we lived on is across a creek without a bridge. There is a driveway, and that’s it.
It was idyllic, easily the best life choice I’ve ever made. But it brought to life the tricky moral and logistical challenges inherent not just in living on the land but in living on Earth. It crystalized for me the trade-offs humanity must make if we are to survive as a species.
We chose to live across the creek mostly in the interest of seclusion, but also because the land is much prettier and less impacted by human stupidity—both historic and contemporary—across the creek. Less road noise, garbage, and invasive plants; more towering trees, charismatic wildlife, and quiet vistas. This meant that we had to ford the creek to access my truck and thus civilization. While this created certain limitations—there would be no topsoil deliveries to our garden, for instance—those limitations created a “necessity is the mother of invention” dynamic that made the entire experience much richer.
Once we settled on the general area we wanted to live, we needed to find a place to sleep. This was a bigger challenge than you might imagine because the land is steeply sloped in most places. So we searched for the flattest spot we could find within reasonable walking distance of where we usually forded the creek.
The best option was not very flat at all. In order to have a level place to sleep, we had to build a foundation, and we chose to use a resource that was immediately at hand: stones. Our tent site was located next to a dry stone wall, probably built by German farmworkers in the 19th century. Removing stones from what were then (wildly unsuitable) corn fields would've been a constant and incredibly demoralizing task: new stones come up every year. No matter how many you remove, there are always more. This is a function of loose bedrock and the fact that stones conduct heat better than dirt, which slowly pushes them upwards in a process known as frost heave.
I would get a taste of the agony those farmworkers endured over the next three days, as I deconstructed portions of the wall and moved them to our tent site. My girlfriend—being far better at Tetris than I—was in charge of placing the stones so that they formed a stable foundation. This was deeply exhausting work, both because stones are heavy and because we had been sedentary for months.
By the end of the third day, my hands were locked in a ghastly claw-like gesture, my forearms pulsed with pain, and every muscle in my body was spent and aching.
But the foundation was complete, and because it's made of stone, it will outlive me. I was elated and profoundly satisfied to have built something so useful and lasting.
Erecting the 16 ft bell tent was trivial. We quickly moved in: a queen-sized mattress pad, a handful of storage containers, some basic shelving and whatnot for books and clothes. It was immediately more comfortable than some apartments I've lived in: roomy and quiet and hospitable and beautifully lit. It sat in the shade of the forest, the deeply soothing sound of the creek and the rustling of the leaves a constant, remarkable soundtrack. Wildlife was everywhere: a black bear ambled lazily past our open door within a week. It was exhilarating.
The next step was to build an extremely rudimentary kitchen: a small, level area with a propane griddle, water filtration, and some porcupine-proof food storage. We hung a solar bag shower from the broken branches of a red pine tree, although I never used it, preferring to swim in the creek. My girlfriend, less enthusiastic about bathing in snowmelt, preferred the brief, warm showers next to the kitchen.
Despite the relative simplicity of our infrastructure, I have never been happier making coffee, cooking a meal, or bathing after a long day. The forest was indescribably lush and beautiful and full of life. I was immersed in life at every scale: from the bizarre insects and mushrooms that made unexpected appearances, to the enormous bald eagles that would fly low over the creek, the gang of wild turkeys that would hunt for meals in the leaf litter, the startled porcupines that would scurry up trees, and of course, the forest itself, a city of trees that defined my visual life.
The next major project was to clear some of those trees, a necessity if we were to grow any food on the land. Despite my confidence in the morality of this task—the land has been repeatedly clear-cut and some sections of the forest have grown back in a way that is visibly unhealthy—it was still an emotionally challenging process. The trees that we cut were 60 years old, but we ended their lives in minutes. We started with only manual tools because of our shared hatred for the awful noise and safety hazards posed by power tools. Even so, the largest tree—a 100'+ behemoth of a white pine—took only 20 minutes of sweaty work to cut down. Eventually, we adopted power tools in the interest of expediency, but this only intensified the emotional tension. A tree older than both of us combined could be gone in an instant.
These sorts of ethical ambiguities characterize all aspects of our material life, but they are hidden from us by the abstraction of exchanging numbers on a screen for finished products that have traveled the world in endless supply chains. We are rarely confronted with the difficult choices inherent in the things we consume: if I am to eat, this tree must die. This bird's nest must be destroyed. This chipmunk's den must be crushed. All of the insects living here must depart in a frantic stampede as the food chain violently collapses.
Being forced to make such choices personally cannot help but effect one's entire outlook on politics and economics. The truth is that there is not a single thing we consume that does not involve such trade-offs. I suspect we would live in a very different world if we were all forced to confront that reality at eye-level.
The tree felling partially complete, we set about building and planting into a hugelkultur bed. The fact that it was built from some of the trees we cut, giving new life in their death, felt right. Although it was yet another physically demanding project in a summer full of them, the satisfaction of creating such a beautiful and productive piece of infrastructure—one that would contribute so much to our subsistence for the next 10 years and beyond—was profoundly joyful. Seeing bats, dragonflies, turkeys, chipmunks, native green bees, and countless other forest critters make exultant use of the new garden added to my sense that I was a positive presence in this place.
But there was another dimension to that joy, one that was less visceral than the pleasure of using my body to build a gorgeous, productive garden, and it imbued meaning into the entire summer of hard work: I was building something that prefigures the kind of world I want to live in. Although I am under no delusions that the garden or homestead itself will make any meaningful change in the world, there is real personal meaning in experiencing a living, breathing version of a better world. I believe deeply in the possibility that humans can live a vastly richer, more egalitarian life by building an eco-socialist world filled with hugelkulturs and the like, and while I've built them before in community gardens and backyards, this was different. This was the closest thing I'd ever experienced to utopia.
It was, of course, a long way from actual utopia for the simple reason that it lacked other people. It was a marvelous little world but a personal one. To me, that doesn't nullify it, it's just what I was personally able to create under current conditions. But I've drawn a great deal of strength from that experience, and that strength has led me to share my ideas about how we all might lead such a life, if we desire it. So while I may not be building a real utopia on my little patch of wooded hillside, I am building something that allows me to contribute in some small way to making the world more like it.
And as I said, even utopia is not without prickly moral questions. That is an inescapable part of life, and we cannot pretend otherwise, lest we swap one set of delusions for another. This experience has helped clarify the necessary trade-offs for me in a way that no amount of reading ever could. For that, I am forever grateful.
Next time: our homestead gains some young ones, our infrastructure gets an upgrade, and the forest offers new surprises...
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—The Last Farm
Ah this resonated so much with what we’re also doing. Thank you for describing in g these feelings and also the decision making so well!