Kind of Like Camping

Back in the 1970s, when they were in their 60s, our Newcomb grandparents used to pack up their pickup truck and go out to West Virginia on the weekends. They owned some property on a wooded mountainside, with a cabin.  They had been campers since they were young people together -- there are movies of them in canoes, waving from the doorway of a cabin, being silly on adventures.  I don't remember thinking anything was unusual as I watched them load the truck to go to a place with no electricity or running water.  It meshed with the life we knew as kids.

At that time, our farm life was spread over three farms plus a lot of scattered fields in the Tysons Corner area.  There was the home farm which had all the amenities, the farm in Loudoun which didn't even have a place to sleep and we never thought of spending the night there, and the Maryland farm which had sleeping places but no electricity or running water.  The Maryland farm was an uncomfortable destination for me. I never loved going there. I told my father that it wasn't good enough until there was orange juice in the refrigerator. That was a tall order.

When all the kids were still young enough to be controlled by our parents, the whole family would go to Maryland for a few days.  We did this until I was well into high school.  All along the way, my parents were always working on home improvements.  In the distant past, there was a house trailer that served as a kitchen and dining room for the family, parked outside a huge, dilapidated house that still had piles of past inhabitants' belongings in some of the rooms. My parents successfully renovated two of the rooms: a bedroom for themselves and one for us.  The rest of the house I still dream about. (As a little kid, I had no context for thinking about architecture, but in hindsight I now realize the house had a central stairway, four large rooms on each floor, and there were three floors.  Four chimneys. No kitchen. High ceilings.  Lots of windows. It was a house from the past.)

One winter while we were visiting family in Hawaii the house in Maryland was burned down by arsonists and that was the end of that project. My parents shifted their focus to the granary, a building with a roof over two grain bins with an open area between them.  My father cut doorways into the bins and proceeded to make the middle area with the dirt floor into a kitchen and dining area.  The rooms that used to hold corn now became bedrooms.  The space above the central bay became a loft for another bedroom. He rigged up a water system and tinkered with a wind generator to store electricity in batteries.  The usual practice was to bring a charged battery with us so we could have lights at night, after we got past the era of oil lamps.

Anyway, this is all a long way of saying that Jon and I seem to be falling into some of the same patterns as the people who came before me.  When we bought Timothy's property, in the middle of the Loudoun farm, so that no one else would buy it and become an unpredictable nuisance to our farm, we did not really think about what it might mean to the two of us. We really had no idea that eventually we .would begin to be in Loudoun on a regular basis.  It was a whim, buying ten acres that we have never -- to this day -- walked through to the borders. Most of it is woods and most of it is steep and hilly. We just stay on the cleared edge, where Timothy built a cabin and planted a significant blueberry patch.  

Over the four years that we have owned the property, Jon has made gradual improvements.  We have running water in the summers, when the water is in the underground irrigation pipes at the farm. We have an outdoor shower which I adore, with hot water on demand. He installed a gas stove that was getting thrown away because the oven doesn't work.  Compared to my parents and grandparents, we are living in the lap of luxury.  It isn't really like camping at all, except that it is an escape from the tight and busy landscape of our home base.  

At night, when we are sleeping right under the metal roof, on a bed that is at the height of huge screened windows, the breeze moves over us.  Turkeys fuss all night long.  Sometimes foxes do a lot of screaming.  I have never had a night of insomnia in that bed. Even when it is cold (last week it was 37 degrees), the sleeping is great. And I think: Timothy was a genius.  The design of this cabin is unusual and sublime.  This season, for the first time ever, we finally cleaned up enough that it doesn't feel like we are living in a warehouse.  The other broken stove (that Jon is hoarding for some unknown reason) is not in the middle of the room anymore, it is parked on the edge of the living space. Most of the horizontal spaces are clear because there is no junk mail or paperwork that comes to that spot.

The whimsical reason that we decided to buy this property, in addition to keeping it away from strangers, was that we want to create a family compound. A place where our children and their families and cousins and their families will gather.  A place that is not defined by the farm but has its own identity as a recreational spot.  We haven't made much progress on the next big project (building a more-season house), but Jon says he is ready to start thinking about it.  

I would never have predicted, as one who really likes to have a refrigerator with orange juice, that I would willingly spend time in a primitive setting. But it isn't truly primitive, as Jon has made it much more civilized and we also have the Green Barn close by with every amenity (provided by Jon as well: a real bathroom, an insulated room that can be heated and cooled where we sit and have breakfast before the day starts) including a connection to the Internet.  So it is kind of like camping, but really not.