This is a story I’ve told many times now, yet each time I tell it, I feel that I can never get it quite right. There’s so much to recount. So many little pieces that are all equally as important but equally easy to forget. I always struggle with where to begin. Folks usually tell me that the beginning is as good of place as any, especially when telling a story. But to do that, I would probably have to first return to my father’s childhood rather than my own. And then I would need to tell you the story of his wild ride of a life. That’s a book all unto itself. Not enough time for that here.
So I guess I’ll just give you the brief (ish) version. The one I would use (and probably did use) on a college entrance essay. But with more “color.” Or something like that.
This is a bit about the way my sister and I grew up and a bit about my parents. And then a bit about where it’s left me as of late—in a place of confusion and frustration with the world around me.
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So to put it simply, our up-bringing was unconventional when compared to the standard two-car-garage-suburban-dwelling-nuclear-family which seemed to be at it’s peak in the mid 90’s when I was born (maybe it hasn’t peaked at all yet?).
Rather than falling in line, my family marched to the beat of our own drum. A way of living I seem not able to break from. My partner swears the only person who possesses more disdain for the rules—and is more stubborn than me—is my own father. She might be right.
In today’s world (at least pieces of it), our lifestyle back then might not be so uncommon, hell it might even be considered fashionable to some, or at least romantic. Think #vanlife or #wanderlust or whatever trendy, faux attempt at authenticity and realness is being exploited this month by big brands and corporations. Think of all those carefully curated photos garnished with #folk and #maker in some perfectly staged studio in Brooklyn or cabin in the woods. But then make it actually real, and without the sole purpose of garnering engagements and likes on Instagram. And then you might be getting close to what my childhood was like. And what my parents were doing to make a living before the bullshit Instagram era of falsehoods and bullshit. I think I said bullshit twice.
Back then, my mother and father occupied the fringe of society, especially in our rural midwestern town. And it was by necessity rather than trendiness.
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I grew up in the woods of East Central Illinois. My mother, father, sister, grandfather, step-grandmother and I called a 137 acre piece of old-growth forest our home. My father is one of six brothers, and it was his idea to purchase the piece of land. He rallied two of his brothers and my grandfather together under the banner of getting back to the land and self-reliance (a notion popular amongst my father’s generation.) The four of them came up with the funds, the lion share coming from one of my uncles, and purchased the pristine piece of woodland.
My father and grandfather were the only ones who decided to live on the property full-time, while my uncles opted to have weekend cabins on the property. When they all first embarked on the home-steading journey, they wielded chainsaws and machetes, carving their way through the dense woods of their new home. They were starting from scratch—all the way down to cutting the only road in and out of the woods.
My grandfather built his home towards the “top” of the property. His house sat as a sentinel to greet anyone who entered the property. Anyone coming or going on the only road in or out had to pass by his home.
The road itself could have it’s own chapter of that book I talked about earlier. It was a marvel. My father originally cut this road by hand and then later improved it with his trusty blue Ford tractor. He spent many days each summer maintaining it, laying rock and grading it. Those days were always something I looked forward to because he used to let me ride with him to the rock quarry in his old dump truck to get the rock for the “driveway” as my mother and he called it.
To get an idea of the magnitude of the original task of cutting the road and the monumental job of up-keeping it, here’s an anecdote. When visiting our home, one of my mother’s friends said that it reminded her of the moonshine roads of her Kentucky home. The rolling, winding gravel lane that snaked through the woods surely had to have some glorious destination at the end of it. And sure enough it did—a mile back into the woods from where the road started sat our two cabins that my father built.
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When my father first moved to the property, he lived out of an old Shasta trailer while he slowly built his first cabin out of salvaged materials. He was and is a very industrious human. A renaissance man is probably the best way I can describe him. A carpenter, truck driver, finisher of concrete, electrician, botanist (by necessity), gardener, farmer, artist. What he didn’t know he would teach himself (he still does today). He never graduated from college and I think he saw little value in stuffy classrooms and stuffier professors telling him the way things were. He had his own idea of the way things were.
And then my mother moved into his little cabin with him. The way she tells it, when she got there he still hadn’t installed windows and doors but instead had the holes covered up with visqueen.
She is an artist. She’s done other things like working for two different universities, running youth ministries at our local Methodist church, marketing, modeling, living on a boat in California—things like that. But above all that, at her core she is an artist.
When my mom moved down to the property from Chicago, my father was growing hardshell gourds. The way I understand it, he wasn’t doing much with them at the time. They were just one of the many crops he was cultivating (he also grew corn, beans, squash, melons, brussels sprouts, kale, tomatoes, onions, apples and potatoes). My mother had the idea to paint them. So they did, and thus Goods from the Woods was started.
For twenty-ish years they sold their gourd artwork all over the country at art shows, and galleries, shops and individuals would buy their work. They had wholesale accounts all over the US, and achieved a minor amount of fame in their little circle of artists and patrons. For a long time my mom was known as “The Gourd Lady.” I think she liked it.
We traveled as a family around in an old blue school bus (from the 50’s I think) that my dad converted to a camper. “The Big Blue Bus That Rocks” was how it was known. That bus crisscrossed the country multiple times, and we drew quite a crowd wherever we went from what I’m told.
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At the homestead, our lifestyle was one of self-reliance and low impact. We tried to live as close to the earth as we could. Though we still depended on fossil fuels and the machines they powered, it was my mother and father’s goal to do no unnecessary harm to the land around us.
Our home was powered completely by solar and had no conventional running water. Instead we hauled the water we needed when we needed it and stored excess in a large tank outside our house. For many years most of our food came from our garden. My parents helped to start a co-op in our little town, but that eventually went by the wayside in the advent of the Walmart-proliferation era in which we now find ourselves.
Eventually my mother and him split up (they are best friends today despite not being married). My mother, sister and I moved to town and my father stayed at the property continuing on his off-grid dream.
As of late my father has had to cash in his chips. His life of manual labor eventually caught up to him and his body could no longer take it. Now he lives with my sister on her own little farm in Indiana.
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I am not sure where I am going with all of this, and there is much more to the story than I have told here. I have found myself today in a world that does not make sense to me. Living close to the land is ingrained in my spirit. It’s my foundation and my baseline, not some new idea that’s “in” this season. It’s fundamental for me, and I think that is why I have such a hard time going about my day to day today in the world around me. I have strayed so far from that beautiful piece of land in East Central Illinois, and the life my parents built there. But I believe that living small and living with as low of an impact as possible is possible. And is paramount now more than ever if we hope to have any type of hope for the future of our species on this planet.
So in these dispatches I plan to tell stories from my own life, my families’ lives and the lives of folks I meet on the road. My current line of work allows me to travel (which opens up a whole other set of internal conflicts for me that I will reserve for another time), and I am afforded the rare privilege of meeting people from all corners of the globe, seeing places that many only dream of, and experiencing things that many will never be able to. And I hope to do so with as little impact as possible. I don’t want to leave anything behind when I go except some words and pictures maybe. At least that’s the goal.
