The Beginning of the Beginning

Here we are. At the beginning. It took 26 years, 6 spent in higher education, 11 moves (of which 3 were cross-country and 1 was international), countless love-interests, and many precious friends, pets, tents, and cars... Where am I exactly? Deliberately unemployed, married, and sleeping, cooking, showering, and using the bathroom outside on a 13.5 acre piece of Southern Vermont's beautiful mixed-woods forest. In the posts that will hopefully follow, I want to paint a picture of how we are going about carving out our own little existence in the way that we have always dreamed. Partly I hope to write this all down so that when we go to do it again for ourselves or friends, reminisce, reflect on our mistakes, whatever... i'll have a good solid platform to work from. I dont want to forget the details. I also hope to share with the world how easily it can be done. I have met so many people with the same dream as mine- to live in harmony with the natural environment, grow a ton of your own food, build your own house,  not have to work 40 hours a week for the next 40 years- and Im here to say that the hardest part (as far as I know, so far) is deciding to actually do it. First, here's some background to the story that will follow. I promise my posts after this one will be less words and more photos.

The back-story

I grew up in Connecticut with what I can only call a "priviledged" childhood. I had, and still have, parents and a sister who love and support me no matter how many phone calls they get with me saying, "I have news. Im moving here or doing this ridiculous thing.. next week." I went to a private, Catholic, all-girls (yes, really) high school that accomplished two things: It got me ready for college and made me realize that I found my spirituality outside of the Church. Come time to choose a college, I was more than ready for a different scene so I chose New Hampshire. I studied Math and Physics but, really, was more focused on friends and my new-found interests in sustainability, environmental activism, and my role in it all to care about much else. I spent a year living in NH post-graduation until finally deciding to move west, with my best friend, to Oregon. Whether we got into the grad school program that we both applied to or not, we were going! I had always been a teacher-of-sorts and worked in many diverse teaching environments but nothing that I really wanted to do long-term. Luckily, we both got in and became members of the new cohort in Portland State's Leadership for Sustainability Education M.S. program. A total life-changer! This is what Id always been looking for but couldn't quite put into words. A field of study that combined my environmental "stuff" with my teaching "stuff" and even focused on other things like the importance of community and ecological design (i.e. Permaculture which quickly became one of my #1 interests). And, since my story is really a joint story, this is when and where I met my husband.

He was a German citizen freshly in the US and happened to be traveling through Oregon at the time, the tail end of his 4 year around-the-world trip. I had walking pneumonia. After weeks of bed rest, the aforementioned best friend dragged me out for "just an hour."  We met and he spent the remainder of his 3 month tourist visa getting to know me, in Portland. From the beginning it was clear that we shared the same values, interests, and most importantly, goals for the future. Felix is an amateur builder whose exuberance and eagerness to learn new things is beautifully mind-boggling. We quickly recognized that we found something special in eachother and that's what made the next year and a half of Germany-Canada-US trips (he lived in Canada and Germany during that time) so hard. Enough was enough and my family got another one of those calls. Were were getting married.. next week. From the beginning, we knew that we were going to try to be homesteaders. He'd be the builder; I'd be the gardener.  Before we were even married, even thinking of marriage, we were looking at land for sale. We viewed buying land as a first step toward our goals (which ill explain in greater detail later). At first, we had a broad scope. We weren't sure where to buy the land, for how much, or with who. For a long time I planned on doing all this with my best friend. When it became clear that Felix and I were antsy to come back east and she was still loving the west, we had to put our joint plans on hold. For now, she knows she always has a spot to land in Vermont and I hope, selfishly, that she'll return back east one day.

Anyway.. I will always look back on the land hunting process with love but it was not pretty. We lived for a year in a yurt on the land of some close homesteading friends. It was a great glimpse into our future and we literally spent every spare minute trekking around the forests of NY, NH, VT, MA, even Virginia and North Carolina. Felix is a social butterfly who needed to be biking distance to some sort of small town. I am the quintessential Waldkind (forest child) who needed to feel completely surrounded by trees and have enough open/semi-flat space for a super awesome garden. Those became our greatest priorities. Also, we wanted to build our own earthen house. And soon. When we found out many of Vermonts counties had no zoning or building codes, it was a done deal. Not that we want to build recklessly or take shortcuts, but both Felix and I feel stifled (Issues? Maybe.) by all the rules and regulations that homeowners and homesteaders have. We both feel that Vermont is truly the "free-est" state in the country and we feel comfortable putting down roots here because of that. After probably 50 different properties, we officially narrowed our search down to the southeaster corner of the state. We spent the summer in Germany and, thanks to my parents, continued our land hunt by spotting good properties on-line, forwarding them the details, and then they would take a trip up to VT and look at 4 or 5 at a time. Our land in Guilford, only 4 miles from downtown Brattleboro (with a population of only 12,00 but still the metropolitan hub of southern-VT), was one of those. Before even steeping foot on the land, we were afraid it would go by the time we would be home in September 2013, we made an offer. Long story short, we were left disheartened and frustrated with the sellers and their realtor and without a property. They were hard to communicate with, conveniently decided to leave out some details, and refused to negotiate. All of this is not illegal but we did loose some respect for the world during that process. After much consideration, Felix and I decided that we absolutely can not let this amazing piece of land go. It was, in fact, in our budget (although at the high end), it fulfilled my need for the forest and Felix's need for an occasional party-night, and even had an over-grown clearing on the land to get us started. We'd take it!

No going back

So, in mid-November, we were officially land-owners. We were spending the winter in Oklahoma and Canada because Felix had a great work opportunity. When we got the final news from the lawyer we hired to do the closing, we were already so far out of our element that it felt like it could not possibly be real. In the weeks before we had, with the immense help of our fabulous lawyer (seriously, never changing his price even after we found out all these things went wrong) found out there were massive complications with the deed and they had to rework all the paperwork in order for us to get title insurance. We could not now really be land-owners. We could not really have a place to land, finally, after years of being nomads/travelers/couch-surfers/hooligans. But it was true. So we waited out the long winter mostly in Canada working to save up as much money as we could. In the spring, we'd have the time and finances to build our little cabin and begin what is sure to be a wild ride. 

April 9th - day 1 of forever. For the first night ever, we tiredly set up our tent not worried about being woken up at 6am by a man threatening to call the cops if we don't leave his land. In the morning we'd unpack the overflowing pick-up truck that we borrowed from my dad. But for tonight, we'll make a fire and try to let reality sink in.  We're home now.

Post Script

This is my first blog post ever. I am by no means a writer and I don't assume that people find my life all that interesting. I welcome, with open arms, the feedback from whoever happens to read this. What would you like to hear more about? Maybe I focused too much on one thing or the other.. please let me know! And, again, I hope that future blog posts will get down more to the nitty-gritty stuff. I will be focusing on the building of our straw bale cabin, the changes that we make to the land, interesting methods/tools that can be useful to the average homesteader, the gardens/landscaping, and, finally, how we, as humans, are feeling about all of this and how its affecting the way we feel we fit into the world.

Love and Grüße aus Vermont!