T or C was growing slowly, one property at a time. No two buildings were alike, each a peculiar harmonizing of unmatched parts made to fit together in spite of being the remnants of dozens of other projects. The whole place seemed to have been constructed piecemeal from what could be plucked from dumpsters. Tacked-together scraps made quirky fences, unusual ceilings, and sturdy sheds that all said in no uncertain terms that this place was not commodified. T or C is part Mad Max and part Burning Man, with remnants of the Wild West strung together in avant-garde fashion and tethered to third world simplicity.
That night, in a hot tub next to the Rio Grande, under a star-studded sky, we asked each other, “What will we do here?” T or C was a place that invited us to dream aloud. We were content with the only answer available at the time: “We’ll figure it out.”
What’s In a Place?
Truth or Consequences, New Mexico
Low cost of living: inexpensive property, taxes, and goods
A debt-free life: work less, live more
Hot springs: mineral spring aquifer and a relaxed culture of people who like to soak
Sunshine: no more light depression
Low population density
Clean air
Water: many aquifers, two lakes
Abundant natural resources: hundreds of miles of desert in almost every direction
260+ day growing season: better food for less money
Warm climate = lower utility use: opportunity for solar hot water and power, lower heating needs
A newly emerging community
Modern pioneering
Flexible building codes
A progressive community: welcoming and friendly, creative people
A healthy lifestyle: hiking, exploring, nature
A decommodified lifestyle
A culture of people who make things, acquisition of new skills
Culture shock = personal growth
High-speed Internet
Daily mail delivery and pickup: USPS, FedEx, UPS
Part Two
Life Hands-On
Makers of Shelter
Many think that life is not interesting because they make nothing, but they do not realize that they have to make a world, that they are making a world, either ignorantly or wisely. If they make a world ignorantly then that world is their captivity; if they make a world wisely then that world is their paradise.
— Hazrat Inayat Khan
“Warm up by the fire before it goes out,” said a voice from the darkness as I stood and turned toward the Airstream to hit the sack. I took a single swig of the homemade hooch being passed around that night and stood with my back to the fire. The brew was awful, but the patch of heat in my middle was worth it.
I followed a moonlit trail to the 10-foot by 5-foot trailer, balanced on cinderblocks, that served as storage shed and guest house. I expected it to give way when I climbed aboard and added my weight in between the rows of boxes.
“Maybe it’ll help me pass out, so I won’t know how uncomfortable I am,” I whispered to Mikey.
“Voices carry,” he reminded sternly.
The yipping sound of a coyote pack informed us of a kill scored nearby, a bunny, maybe a small javelina. It was cold this New Year’s Eve.
“I can’t believe they bought forty acres for less than $10,000 and they don’t pay taxes,” I whispered.
The trendy young couple putting us up had one bill to pay. It was for a phone that they shared between them. They were free.
Property in the land grant in Terlingua, Texas, came with very low taxes. Sure, there were a few thorns, things that had to be lived with. I’m not even talking about the goathead thorns, vicious little spiked barbs that pierce through boots like rattlesnake fangs. Regional dogs hop three-legged waiting for sympathetic humans to pluck the freeloader seed from their calloused paws. I’m talking about the absence of conveniences that most of us take for granted: running water, paved roads, and an electric grid. In scorching heat, people who own property erect metal roofs and giant empty cisterns. After seasonal rains fill the cisterns, the landowners return, park a trailer, and try to survive the desert while they build a permanent home. Every building supply is an hour’s drive and gallons of fuel away. Some who attempt to live in Terlingua fail because it is too hot for labor most hours of the day, most days of the year. There is no shade unless you build it, and there are many reasons to take siestas.
Some build forever. With no overhead there is little need for a job and no rush to finish anything. This suits those who build out of scrap just fine. Finding good junk requires patience. You’ve got to be in the right spot at the right moment. Jobs interfere with the melody of serendipity required for getting the best scores.
The homestead where we spent New Year’s Eve is part of a low-tax land grant in Terlingua, Texas.
The earth-cracked town of Terlingua sits just north of the Mexican border, buffered by Big Bend National Park. In the center of town, a long, creaky wooden porch greets guests before they find three doors: the roadhouse bar Star Light, a gift shop, and a bookstore. Rockers with their backs to the brutal western sun sit next to ashtrays spilling over with cigarette butts, facing a view of a dusty cemetery filled with makeshift tombstones. Mexican candles, light-scorched photos, and sun-bleached plastic flowers mark the graves.
Mikey and I were in Terlingua to meet builders who work with papercrete, a fibrous material made of reused paper. A few people in the region were rumored to be building houses with it. Everyone chose papercrete for the same reasons: it is an easy-to-work-with waste material that can be obtained free, and it offers significant insulation. Back in Truth or Consequences, Mikey and I had just spent the better part of a year experimenting with it. We had been making papercrete blocks at the rate of 200 a day. The blocks filled our property, making it look as though a cemetery full of tombstones had sprung up overnight. The road trip was a needed break from labor, an effort to satisfy our curiosity about what other builders had been making with the stuff, and an excuse to tour the region that was our new home, the southwestern United States.
Before leaving our hosts, we took a good look at their desert setup. It was tidy and reflected good planning. I had the impression that the couple was newly married and that wedding money had bought everything in sight. Four cisterns that held a combined 10,000 gallons of water sat along the end of a thermal-resistant roof that shaded their stylish vintage Airstream. Along the trailer’s south side, rows of potted plants, mostly vegetables and herbs and a few rare-variety cacti, sat between the trailer and a huge screen of dark shade cloth that was pulled taut and resisted wind. The screen, an impressive 20 feet by 10 feet, softened the sun’s brassy ultraviolet rays, giving the plants a chance to thrive. In the desert a garden’s success relies on time out of the sun. Beyond the screen, two outdoor picnic tables baking in the heat made the dining room. A few feet farther, an antique porcelain clawfoot tub sat atop a handmade platform. A modest photovoltaic (PV) solar setup with four batteries had been carefully positioned in the path of the sun.
They have everything they need, I thought. I wondered if I could live so close to the bone.
The couple who had built the next homestead we visited had left Terlingua because it was becoming “too developed.” A $50 annual fee to service a paved road had pushed them to wilder territory on the other side of the border. They were building a new homestead in Mexico. Abe and Josie knew that a $50 annual fee could lead to other fees and eventually the need for a job.
Abe and Josie left behind their slip-form mud home and headed to Mexico to avoid a $50 road fee and possible future expenses.
We spent the day tooling around the lot they had left behind, discussing what could be revealed about the techniques they used to build their mud slipform structure. We found a pile of fans that we figured were collected for their motors. Abe built small wind turbines out of trash. By now I was used to visiting people’s junk piles. I thought of them the way that I had o
nce thought of the free boxes on the steps of Brooklyn brownstones. But junk piles are not always free. In the Southwest, junk plays an important part in the local domestic economy. It has value. If you find yourself perusing a junk pile, you’re probably being offered a gift.
Behind the house, we found an outbuilding that housed a battery bank, the repository for the power generated by a PV solar and turbine setup that was still functioning when we arrived. An elegant black widow spider hung down in front of the only door to the power room, as though guarding the loot. Having lived in the desert for over a year, we were accustomed to negotiating with the impressive venomous creatures. We rolled newspaper into a tube shape and set it on fire, whispered an apology to the life of this world, admired for a moment the lovely lady’s fine architectural lines, and torched her.
“When you are this far from a hospital you can’t take chances,” we reasoned. With the bounty unguarded, we were able to connect a few detached wires and get power running in the house.
A pair of rusty Frigidaire doors from the 1950s opened like an entryway to a western saloon and gave us access to a garden inside a fence made out of dozens of 4-foot-long stalks from the ocotillo plant. The thorn-covered posts had been stabbed into the ground 3 feet apart. They were strung together with barbed wire, making a low-cost barrier to keep out critters. A few heads of lettuce and tomato plants persisted in the soil.
“It must have rained recently,” Mikey said, fingering the lettuce as though considering it for dinner.
Cisterns around the place were full of rainwater. One could easily move in and begin to live in the still-working homestead.
These rusty fridge doors from the 1950s lead to a garden.
Abe and Josie’s handmade fireplace features their baby’s handprints and has a BBQ lid for a door.
The slipform mud home was designed for thermal gain. A sturdy building, it suffered only from being absent of life. Dust blew through windows that had shaken loose from their hinges. We spent the night on the floor in the loft perched high above an open living room. For warmth, we lit a fire in the tiny handmade clay potbelly stove below. The chimney, molded by hand, resembled a tall tree with lumpy bark and gnarled limbs. A small set of handprints indicated that their first child had participated in the making of it. The stove’s door was made from the top of a rusted barbecue set on a hinge.
On the earthen stove we heated the tamales we’d made at home. We had carried them in a cooler so that we did not have to rely on restaurants while on the road. After filling up on black bean and cheese tamales, we prepared for the darkness that was already creeping in.
The next day we visited a property that was rumored to have a papercrete structure. The compound was a sprawl of rusted-out vehicles, half-finished domes, and dusty trailers. A rowdy herd of goats and a not-so-friendly dog guarded the loot. With trepidation we toured the compound, finding interesting-looking homemade jigs for bending the rebar that made up the armature of a well insulated papercrete dome. The dome provided shelter for the bearded goats. The dog favored a patch of shade produced by a mesquite tree. We never found the owner.
In Marathon, Texas, housing conditions improved when we arrived at Eve’s Garden, a papercrete hotel hand-built by Clyde Curry. Clyde set us up with a purple, red, and metallic gold room decorated in pretty textiles. It had an impressive domed ceiling and a soft, comfy bed. After settling in, we joined our host in his library. We sat before a warm fire and thumbed through Clyde’s collection of building books. We talked about the heroes of our craft: Clyde, about Nader Khalili and a guy in Mexico who started a website and built a compound called Flying Concrete; and Mikey, about French builder Antti Lovag and his protégé Robert Bruno. I like Middle Eastern architecture, Moroccan and other African structures made by no one in particular, community efforts using skills passed down for so long that they became innate. My favorite building book is Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language.
That night we drank wine and savored delicious food grown in an indoor greenhouse that connected one part of the large hotel to another. Its humidity helped hold the building’s heat. In spite of outside temperatures in the teens, the hotel did not require artificial heating. We discussed tensile strength, R-value (a measure of insulation efficiency), solar gain, square footage (circumference and area), dry times, and cost per square foot, and when we could no longer keep our eyes open, we took a quick dip in the indoor lap pool and went off to sleep in our majestic papercrete room.
Clyde Curry built Eve’s Garden, a papercrete hotel, in Marathon, Texas.
Lying on the bed that night and noticing the accumulation of moisture that Mikey’s shower had produced on the domed papercrete ceiling, I wondered if the condensation was cause for worry. Paper can mold if not well sealed. But the heavy latex paint that Clyde had applied thickly and everywhere seemed more than adequate.
I felt like a total pansy on much of the trip. My good-looking but wimpy street shoes had made hiking treacherous. I didn’t think to pack a flashlight or enough warm clothes, and I had no idea which plants were to be avoided and which were to be eaten in a pinch. Our Terlingua hosts had sprung from their trailer each morning looking perky, clean, and well dressed, while I flopped out of our shed dirty and disoriented, making futile efforts to wash my face with what seemed like an eyedropper of precious water.
A year of building in the desert had made me capable of having sophisticated conversations about building with people like Clyde, and yet a door that divided the cozy life of Eve’s Garden from the unforgiving desert was all that prevented me from being as useless as a sapphire cocktail ring. In the desert I felt as though I were on a ship stranded at sea and didn’t know how to swim. I had learned about building shelter, but I still didn’t know how to survive in the world outside of it.
Cooking and sleeping outdoors, knowing how to find drinkable water, and reading upcoming weather conditions by looking at the sky were not skills I had yet. More than 30 years of acculturated knowledge made me perfectly able to operate a bidet, avoid paying retail, and get a free parking spot almost anywhere in New York City. But I could not conceive that a 50-degree change in temperature was possible in the same day, nor was I prepared for it when it happened.
I remembered the stories told days before by the sturdy desert dwellers who sat around the fire. There was one about living in the back of a pickup truck with a dog for 10 years, working a stint counting trees while residing in a tent deep in a forest for several months, and serving as a firewatcher in an 8-foot by 8-foot cabin miles from the nearest road. My contribution to the conversation sounded something like, “Put me in any New York City neighborhood any time of night and I am not scared.” I had no idea that city folks are notorious for saying these kinds of things (lest their value go unrecognized by those who wield a different variety of knowledge). Desert dwellers knew such things as after becoming dehydrated out in the desert, the first sip of water should be used to wash the toxins out of your mouth and spit on the ground. And there’s what to do if a forest fire broke out and there was no time to run from it. You could jump into a water tank. If the fire passed over fast and you got out before the water boiled, you might survive. I was not a New Mexican yet. I did not have a dog of the heeler variety or a nonworking toilet serving as art in my yard, although both were soon to come.
With my ego stuffed deep in my pocket, below the pack of handwipes that it became my habit to carry in case I was offered another hole in the ground to poop in, I thought about the image I had crafted of myself as the outdoorsy type and reviewed where this impression came from. In day camp, my group twice won the best campsite award because of a fence, a fire pit, and a swing that I designed. As a little girl, I had imagined tending a garden and filling an odd lot of dusty bottles with exotic plant remedies. I built sturdy forts in the woods behind my house. At Burning Man I made an impressive outdoor shower that everyone wanted to use. Many people who knew me thought I was really tough. But I’d been hanging out in F
rench restaurants too long. I definitely couldn’t light a fire without a match. The only plant I had ever grown was fruitless and died on my fire escape back in Brooklyn.
This is what I came for, I thought to myself. To find the edge, the point at which my knowledge ends. I was exactly where I want to be: uncomfortable. What I was itching for was something new. It was common sense. I didn’t mind feeling ill at ease as long I was getting nearer to it. I considered the ways to acquire common sense: by living close to nature, by playing, by making mistakes, by taking time for contemplation, by allowing for trial and error, by listening, by building, by problem-solving, by maintaining relationships, by hiking, by growing plants, by cooking. Really, I didn’t know. But I suspected that it would come from experience and not just from reading books or hearing of it being told.
Mikey and I toured more of the southwestern United States, stopping at alternative-building hot spots: Alpine, Texas; Tucson, Arizona; Crestone, Colorado; and Questa and Taos in northern New Mexico, to name a few. We surveyed unusual buildings made of straw bales, rastra, papercrete, earth-block, and ferro-cement; tallied the attributes of each material used; and noted their flaws and benefits. We inspected rounded earth ships that seemed to have evolved in the landscape naturally and along with the boulders jutting up next to them. We sat in simple teepees, Quonset huts, homey yurts, and kiva domes, and when we were lucky, we met their quirky and inspired makers. Though the people we met lived lives different from anything we’d experienced, and came from backgrounds nothing like ours, our common ground was immediately evident. We were working on essential problems: shelter, fuel, food, water, and power. We sought a life free of drudgework and a way to live in balance with nature. I thought of Swap-O-Rama-Rama and the way that it brought together people of all ages, colors, and socioeconomic statuses. In the desert, creativity connected people to life and to each other, too.
The Good Life Lab Page 6