When I take stock of my life these days – married, new baby, living in an ordinary house in a typical neighborhood on the outskirts of Denver – it seems improbable that I spent a year living alone in a self-sustaining house in the middle of the high desert of New Mexico. The more time that elapses between that singular, remarkable year and the present, the less I comprehend how I ever did it. It was a year of solitary cold winter nights, power outages, and water rationing. It involved manual labor and self-reliance. It was a raw existence lived in the midst of Nature’s spare, clean beauty.
It was all the more remarkable because I think of myself as the average American girl next door, not an extreme environmentalist. I grew up in a small town in the mountains of Colorado, obeying my mother’s daily command to go outside and play, regardless of season. During the summer, my sisters and I rode our bikes through the woods with our teddy bears in the baskets on our handlebars. In fall, we played hide-and-seek behind the quaking aspen that had turned a glorious yellow. Even in winter we went outside to tunnel through the snow like cold-weather gophers, or to slide down the piles left by the snowplows, and by spring we fooled ourselves that it was warm enough to take off our shoes and wade in the river that was rushing with snowmelt.
From the beginning, I felt I was a part of Nature (which always has a capital ‘N’ in my mind). I just assumed everyone else felt the same way until I became an adult and looked around to realize that most of America suffers from overdomestication, the condition of being oblivious to the natural world despite living in it. That realization nudged me on my way toward a personal revolution.
The seeds were planted early. They were in the lectures from my dad on the merits of parking your car in the shade with the windows cracked on a hot summer day: ‘A stiff cross-breeze is as good as air-conditioning.’ (This is not actually true. When I was in graduate school, I drove a Honda CRX whose air conditioning had broken, and I couldn’t afford to fix it. One summer day as I was stuck in gridlock on the beltway around Washington, D.C., I decided that cross-breezes do not, in fact, equate to air conditioning. On the plus side, I learned that I have a high tolerance for suffering, which helps when you live a labor-intensive life like the one I had in Taos.)
There are seeds in my dad’s love of architecture, which he transmitted to me. He was a creative thinker in terms of home building and energy use, and my formative years were spent living in a house my dad had built during the last energy crisis in the seventies. I cut my teeth on the phrases ‘put a sweater on’ and ‘close the door, I’m not paying to heat the whole outdoors.’ I learned about south-facing windows, sun angles, and insulation early on, and the term ‘R-value’ (a measurement of the efficiency of insulation) entered my vocabulary before the age of ten.
The seeds were nurtured by a comment I ran across in a book about being able to appreciate something without wanting to possess it, an idea which, coupled with the frugal streak that runs in my family, freed me from spending bundles of money on things I didn’t need.
All of these were buried in my subconscious, ready to be exhumed twenty-five years later when I decided to build a retreat where I could go on the weekends to decompress from the stress of everyday living in modern America.
Too much stress was the true impetus for my building a house near Taos. I built it in an environmentally-friendly way because of those seeds that had firmly sprouted in my conscience, and I built it inexpensively in deference to that deeply-rooted frugal streak. But the reason I built it at all was that the stress of everyday life in the working world of America, coupled with some personal stress, had beaten me down to the point of exhaustion. It had gotten so bad that my physical health suffered. I clenched my teeth until they cracked, I had insomnia, my thoughts raced and I couldn’t shut them off, and I was on my way to a nervous breakdown. I needed a place to go where I could find, in the words of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, a ‘still mind and a peaceful heart.’
When I graduated from college in 1990, nobody told me that the only things I would get out of a corporate job were a salary and benefits, and that there was more to life than that. The country was in the midst of a recession, rather like today, and I was thankful to have a job that paid the bills. But by the time I reached my thirties, I realized the bargain I had struck with my employer was that I would give them my time, energy, and skills, and they would give me money. The fine print that I had only skimmed said that I would also give them my ideals, my principles, my physical fitness, and my mental stability. In exchange, they would give me stress, ‘core values,’ and lip service to work-life balance – a phrase ironically coined by the corporate world where there is none.
A typical overachiever, I worked long hours, ran my office’s volunteer activities, chaired the education committee at the local Chamber of Commerce, swam three times a week, coached a master’s swim team, acted as power of attorney for my debilitated father, and climbed mountains in my spare time. These days it wears me out just reading that sentence. But at the time, I didn’t realize I was driving myself to the point of collapse. Overwhelmed, I knew I needed more than just a vacation to rejuvenate; I needed a completely different way of life.
While searching for a way out, I gravitated toward the sections of the bookstore that promoted alternative lifestyles and bought books with provocative titles such as Your Money or Your Life, How to Survive Without a Salary, and Mortgage-Free! Radical Strategies for Home Ownership. I fantasized about traveling for a year, building my own house from scavenged materials, or dropping out and becoming a ski bum. Instead, I trekked for a month in Nepal, hired a builder who specialized in strawbale, and dropped out to live off the grid.
In October of 2006, I quit the stressful corporate job I had held for a decade, broke up with my boyfriend, sold my conventional house, and moved full-time to a small, solar-powered, strawbale house in the vast sagebrush outside of Taos, New Mexico. I had no central heating, no source of electricity beyond what the sun provided, and no water supply other than what I caught on the roof. Living on savings, disconnected from both mainstream America and the national power grid, I adjusted my life throughout the next four seasons to accommodate the quirks of the house and drastically downshifted the amount of electricity, water, and other resources I consumed. By the end of a year, I discovered that what was good for me was also good for the planet, that consuming less and conserving more helps us all.
