What changed? - #46
A year in a house of logs.
This past week, we celebrated one year of closing on the cabin we call Shangrilogs.
When we said we were moving from a cabin in the mountain outskirts of Los Angeles to a cabin in the mountain outskirts of Telluride, no one batted an eye. We were gaining 9,000 feet in elevation and 2,000 square feet of living space, leaving the 11,000 or so residents of Topanga for the 180 residents of this high-alpine valley, and every person we knew just said, “yeah, sounds right.”
I came across a comment about this newsletter recently on a Discord channel. (I was looking.) They were deeply familiar with the area I now live in, and they were frustrated with how remote I painted it. I sort of agreed with them, it’s only 13 miles to a grocery store. It was, in fact, 13 miles to the grocery store when we lived in Topanga. And that’s in LA county! We don’t live down a 4-wheel drive dirt road that you need a snowmobile to access in the winter. We have running water and WiFi and town politics. But one woman’s remote is another woman’s commercial airport because 30,000 people drive through Topanga every day. That is 167 times the number of people that live in this town. Yes, we absolutely could live off the grid — but that was Ben’s dream. I wanted a town.
I wanted a place where neighbors shared pantries. Our eggs, their sugar, your apples. Where they could stop by and take some of our mountain mint, not by knocking and asking but by knowing and enjoying. Where get-togethers just got together — not because someone organized it or because it was on a calendar, but because some people went outside and more people followed. I wanted potlucks and greenhouses and other people’s dogs scratching at our door. I wanted to have long talks in driveways, to get hustled at lemonade stands, to know the name of every flower and every weed trying to take its place. I wanted a smaller life in a smaller town where everyone knew my business because my business was knowing them.
This, we got. It is slow to make friends, but it is fast to make ground. We have borrowed tortillas and sleds and cars. We have shared tools and herbs and treats for every dog and cat that swings by our porch. We have car-swapped and carpooled, hosted and been hosted. We have made this place our home.
I still worry about not fitting in, with these lean and scrappy women climbing mountains at dawn.
I still worry about being forgotten, everyone else’s careers moving up and away in the cities I moved up and away from.
I still worry about these being my worries.
I’ve been having these dreams — I’m incredibly dressed, so well dressed in fact that sometimes I shift out of my body in the dream to watch myself in these dresses and jumpsuits I’ve never seen here on Earth. I am at some convention or back in college or somewhere people gather in hopes of being the best people there. People are drinking and gossiping and I can feel it, there are monsters here. No one in my dreams ever believes me. I used to try to save people in my dreams, but the last few years I’ve started to only save myself. With knives and scissors and rope and hammers, I have destroyed every fanged goblin that has tried to take me in my sleep. When you wake up every morning from battles you fight alone, it can be hard to remember there are people by your side here in this land of dust and pine.
But I make the coffees and I harness the cats and I rouse the dog and we all go outside in the garden together. Early enough the sun is still hiding behind the house. Even in the summer, the morning air is only a few degrees shy of a mid-winter’s day. There are only a handful of precious quiet minutes before we’re sniffed out by my favorite locals: Lili, the fluffiest gray-furred girl yapping with excitement to see Cooper; Dash and all his pummeling red retriever puppy strength, desperate for someone to wrestle; Emma, black feathered tail tucked until you kneel and sing her name back to her; Betty June, coming up from creekside to see what all the fuss is about; Chego, army crawling his nose closer and closer to the kitten in the brush.
Down the street and up the hill, their families are pulling themselves together. A whistle from the East, a call from the West, and the four-leggers disperse back to their beds and their bowls. Somewhere inside, there’s a laptop buzzing with activity. Slacks ping and emails ding and meetings pile up and I just don’t care the way I used to. I still have an hour or two before salary and mortgage and benefits and insurance and other long-clawed words find their way into my skin.
If this rugged landscape has surprised me at all, it is in how much softer it has made me. I have a Google Doc I treat as my journal. I started it in 2016 and it is over 180,000 words. The only rule of this journal is that I cannot read what I once wrote. But today, I made an exception. I wanted to see if who I once was matched who I am now.
In a journal entry from May 2021, a month before we moved here, I wrote this note to myself:
“Still fantasizing about money, and why? Fantasize about how you want to live.”
There are so many entries agonizing over how to be happy. The word stress appears 116 times. Anxiety appears 155 times. But there is a spaciousness that appeared when we moved here, an expansiveness matched only by the sprawling sky above us. There is more wonder and more exclamation marks, more pictures and dramatically fewer numbers. But most notably, there were fewer and fewer entries desperately digging into the soil of my heart to see what it wanted. I think, I hope, that is because it wants for less. I don’t want a helicopter or a yacht. I don’t want a house so big I don’t know who’s in it. I don’t want to be featured in Forbes or Bloomberg. I don’t want business class and business suits and businessmen. I don’t want to climb a ladder for the sake of being in charge. The only ladder I’m climbing these days is the one I use to water the plants.
A small town won’t solve your problems. A mountain in your front yard won’t pay the bills. A plunge in the creek won’t absolve your sins. But the space and the quiet and the stars I could never see before have offered me a clarity that was somehow obscured in the smog of the city: I want to feel nurtured and protected, to be leathered and loved. And here, I do, I am.
When it’s time to take the cats inside, the neighborhood is awake. Off to town or riding up the hill, chopping wood or talking to the postman, tending to the garden and driving the kids to the bus stop. In the moments after waking, I am alone, but this town never lets me stay there for long. Maybe that’s all I ever wanted.
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..."other long-clawed words find their way into my skin. "
Man, I love a good turn of phraseand this one's a beaut.
As for your heart wanting less, I can't speak for you but when we started our nomadic lives, I was surprised to discover not that my heart wanted less but that it wanted more. Not more things or prestige. But to see more places I'd never heard of or imagined existed. To meet people I didn't know existed. To hear more stories and take take more pictures.
To want more of an actual lived life, not one manufacture by Google and Facebook and all of the rest.
Not telling you to do yours different, truly. Mad respect for how you must care for those cats to train them to harnesses. I want tell about the Great and Glorious Slate, our city cat that has taken to rural life with gusto. We too started him and his sister Mango on leashes. They graduated to a zip line. Mango died (preexisting heart condition). Slate took on the chore of hunting voles in our baby orchard, still on his tether. We'd tie him down to a 25 lb weigh he'd drag and twist around the tree trunks. He kept telling us, despite the skunks, raccoons, owls, coyotes, and likely lurking mountain lions, that he could look out for himself. We finally gave in, reluctantly, after a couple escapes where he dragged his tether through places that were made more dangerous by the restraints. He killed all the voles on our 3 acres homestead. He rode shotgun down the block and a half as I hauled water twice a day to the second orchard we couldn't irrigate properly at first. Watering and voling (voles can kill young apple trees) became his jobs. Sometimes he walked back home alone, mostly he waited in the truck. His territory expanded to at least 50 acres across 5 neighboring properties. We'd see him walking down irrigation pipes, hunting. We'd see him strolling through the neighbors' llama pen. Never in the road, he hates cars. Then like a ghost he'd be home. We got him dogs. He did not want dogs. He likes the dog door though. He grazes with the chickens if they get goodies. He's 14 now, and will still occasionally walk with us and the dogs to the second orchard, but he's not as far ranging as he once was. We are still terrified for him, but when we see him striding across the pasture, jumping through fences and knowing what he is all about, the fear is worth it. He's our best cat, won't be the same when he's gone. Pets should live forever, that's all there is.