The Story of the Land I Live on

    Sometimes it’s hard to know where a story begins. The story of my new house might begin when I bought the land it sits on, far up a steep mountain side, so close to nature and remote from the trappings of civilization, but the story of my association with that land begins long before that, in 1974, when I was just out of Napa State Hospital (a story for another time) and joined a group of friends to start a commune on this land. I began building the little house I lived in for so many years, the basis of my Jefferson Public Radio commentaries and my three books.

Another picture of the house is on the cover of the book to the right.

One couple in the commune, Dan and Lyn, started building a substantial house across the draw from mine, and a couple named Kenny and Anna started another permanent house on the other side of the land. Everyone else was creating fairly temporary houses here and there in the woods, and, sure enough, pretty soon people started drifting away. When I suffered a relapse of the schizophrenia that had put me in Napa the year before, I, too, left my half-built house. I moved to Houkola, a commune on another mountain in the Siskiyous. Lyn and Dan split up, and both left the land. Kenny and Anna split up, and both left the land.
    I spent two healing years at Houkola. Then one day Lyn approached me to say that no one was living on the land, so why didn’t we go in as partners and ask Kenny, whose name was on the deed as owner, to divide the land and sell half of it to us?
     So that’s what happened. We bought the half of the land our houses were on and moved back to them. 

     I was lucky in acquiring this land – the down payment had already been made, and monthly payments were only $40 for each of us. Sometimes that $40 was hard to come by, but every month I gave it to the bank until, ten years later, the land was paid off.
    Lyn and her daughter lived in her house for several years; then they moved away. I stayed, creating a home in the wilderness, adding on to my house, making improvements, raising my son. Renters periodically stayed in Lyn’s house a few months, then left. I stayed, creating a tiny lawn, planting flowers, picking cherries and apples off the trees I had planted. Anna had a caretaker in her house; then he left, and another moved in. I stayed, living cozily and happily in my little house on the mountain without electricity for decades.
    In the fall of 2005 my father died, peacefully, in his sleep, at the age of 98. My mother, two years incapacitated by a stroke, died the next spring. Two years later I and each of my siblings received our inheritance, mostly from the sale of our childhood home.
    Just about that time, Anna notified me that she was putting her land up for sale. When I told my son, he urged me to buy it.
    “Why should I buy it?” I asked. “I love my house.”
    “Mom,” Ela said, “buy the land, and we’ll build you a house you like even better.”
    With that I made a leap of faith. Okay. He promised. I loved my little house in the mountains, but maybe there could be something better a quarter of a mile away on the same mountain. Maybe there, closer to a source of electricity, I could live more easily without losing my closeness to the natural world.
    I bought the land. Once I did it seemed inevitable that I would have, I who had been one of the original commune members, who had built my house there and lived there year after year as other people came and went. Owning both parts of the land, I made it whole again. The next episode in the story of the land was for me to build a new house on it.