Catching up to the 21st century, part 2...country living complete with wood burning stove

A township outside Willits is Brooktrails, 4 miles west of town up in the redwoods. Brooktrails has a small market, a video store and several hundred homes - about ½ of which are vacation homes. The creek going through the valley is dammed off to form a reservoir that supplies water for the homes. Water is very cheap per SCF, but the flat rate fee for access to the water is large because the reservoir silts over and needs to be dredged every few years.

We found an 850 sq-ft rental home that is owned by the same guy who opened the local natural foods market >20 years earlier. We signed a lease and planned our escape from the “rat race”. We packed all our stuff ourselves into a 17 foot moving van and drove up to Brooktrails in June of 2003. Some of the highlights:

- Living among the trees was great with peacocks, turkey & deer going through the yard every day.

- Living 4 miles out of town having to drive a steep & heavily traveled narrow road was not so great for my tastes.

- We were living without TV (other than movies) for the first time. I didn’t miss it a bit.

- We were paying off our sleep debt. With no alarms, we were sleeping 9-10 hours a night for weeks in a row. "Sleep Thieves" by Stanley Coren is an excellent book about sleep. Mr Coren also wrote another excellent book that we are partial to, both being left handers - "The Left Hander Syndrome".

- We discovered local community sponsored radio at KZYX. We volunteered for one of the KZYX fund drives and met some fun, dedicated and interesting folks.

- I started spending hours a day surfing the web, looking for real estate and researching natural building. Ultimately, stumbling along the cohousing topic would have a huge payoff.

- The home had a wood stove. We purchased a cord of wood in July and stacked it out to season over the summer. Check out woodheat.org for some great wood burning tips. We really enjoyed the radiant heat provided by the wood stove. Being a pyromaniac at heart, I really enjoyed starting a fire most every day over the winter. The place had backup electric wall heaters which we did not want to use unless absolutely necessary. The place had an electric water heater that the landlord replaced with a propane on demand water heater.

- The week before Thanksgiving in 2003, I played drums in the Ukiah Brewery open mic night. I met Estok Menton, CEO of Menton Builders that night. Besides being an awesome natural home builder, Estok also sings and plays a pretty mean guitar. Estok invited me over to play with his band the following night. I practiced nearly every week and eventually played out several times with the band. The members are my good friends, and I still keep in contact with them to this day.

- Searching around the Willits/Ukiah area for raw land made us soon realize that there was none within our budget closer than 15 miles from town. Living in Brooktrails made us realize that our desire is to live in the woods, but near an easily accessible town. Althoug we enjouyed our stay in the Willits/Ukiah area, it would not be the place where we set down roots.

- In August of 2003, my mom died. A road trip to get away and soul search ensued soon after in late September to early October. This was a truncated version of a road trip we had planned to take from CA all the way back to IL/WI to visit family. We saw our families around the time of the funeral in Aug/Sep which meant we would not drive any further East than the Rocky Mountains on this road trip. The plan was the same as for the California coastal trip in my last post - check out the cities as potential places to settle. The trip went from Brooktrails to Boulder, CO and included the following stops:

Sparks, NV - last little/big city before Black rock City and Burning Man
Salt Lake City, UT
Boulder, CO - fantastic outdoor college town, one of my top 3
Denver, CO
Colorado Springs, CO
Durango, CO
Moab, UT - spoke deeply to the mountain biker in me

The trip showed us amazing scenery. Unfortunately, we could not find significant multi-day backpacking trails - we are very spoiled to have the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. However, Boulder was an awesome town with beautiful scenery, hiking trails, biking trails and rock climbing all outside the backdoor. The Ball Aerospace Corporation has a division that develops space satellites in Boulder. They interviewed me and made a job offer.

To be continued....