New Life in the Woods

As most of you have heard, I’m moving to Oregon at the end of November. I’ll be moving to a good sized cottage near Grants Pass in SW Oregon. It’s a big move, away from all family and friends and probably away from my old career.

This blog is a way to let everyone know what led up to this, what my hopes and fears are, and what progress I make as I begin the move and start a new life in the woods of SW Oregon. I hope to have lots of photos to share eventually too, which should be fun and interesting. Many of you have already heard me relate much of what I will put in this first posting, but I feel the need to get the basics down first, and expand from that.

Why?

So, let’s get right to it: why the move? Basically, I can’t find work or pay my rent or bills at my present location anymore. I will talk about this at more length another time, but, in brief, I had lost hope of being “responsible”, paying off my debts, and perhaps eventually buying a piece of land somewhere where I could do all of the things I really wanted to do “someday” down the road.

At the time I finally realized this, about five weeks ago, I talked to my mother about it a little bit. She reminded me that her neighbor was still looking for tenants for her property in Oregon, was in fact offering free rent in exchange for repairs and/or caretaking. She promptly gave her neighbor a call and I spoke to her briefly and arranged a time to talk more. One thing led to another and I drove up a few days later (mid-October) to visit the cabin. The property is quite large (I forget how many acres, but it’s big), in the low mountains around Grants Pass, covered in woods, and it has a mid-sized house and a cabin a little further back. There is a tenant staying in the house, also making repairs in exchange for rent, but the cabin has been empty for months.

The Cottage

The place is beautiful! I hardly slept the first night I was up there. I kept going outside on the small deck in back to look up at the stars. The cabin sits on the other side of a ridge from Grants Pass (which is about 10-15 miles away as the crow flies) so there are no city lights to ruin the night sky. You can see thousands of stars on a clear night through the gap in the trees around the cabin. The cabin sits on a slope and there is a seasonal stream in the small gully/ravine below. It is “dry” at this time of year but still a bit marshy. I expect it will start running when the rains really get going this Winter. There is a spring just a little ways up the ravine with a Spring Box, tank, and pump that I hope to get working at some point. You can’t see lights anywhere at night. After about 10 p.m. or so, you can’t even hear cars or any other man-made sound.

Wildlife is all around. There’s a deer trail up the hill right by the cabin. There are lots of strange sounds at night and wild turkeys sometimes roost in the trees right around the cabin (hunting and fishing require permits). The trees I can identify so far are a mix of Fir, Oak, Madrone, and Maples (all great for woodworking or heating). Up by the main house, there’s a clearing where I can probably garden come Spring and I plan to have chickens in “free range” run in the small clearing right next to the cabin.

Since the cabin is on a hillside, on stilts, there is space under the house to setup a woodworking shop, or other craft tools. There’s a small shale rock quarry just up the driveway about 100 yards and I think I can use that stone to landscape the area around the cabin (make steps and terraces, etc.). The entire time I was up there my mind was boiling over with ideas for things I could do there, ways I could make a living off the land or supplement it through “arts and crafts” activities. I can’t wait to get back and get started!

Practical Matters

But all that will have to wait for a while. It won’t be easy to leave my old life behind and once I move there will be lots of work to do. The cabin was vandalized some months ago and it needs some new wiring and plumbing for a start, plus new appliances and a new wood stove – which is the primary source of heat. I’ll be moving up there in early December and it is already getting down close to freezing at night.

In fact, there are enough repairs to be done to probably guarantee me free rent for a year or more. In addition to getting water, electricity, and heat going, the place needs some gutters repaired, exterior trim, the exterior wood siding needs to be stained, interior sheetrock here and there where it was never finished or later damaged (and then it will need paint), interior trim, the floors need to be puttied and refinished, kitchen countertops (they are just plywood now), kitchen cabinets, tile under and around the woodstove, and many other little things.

My only expenses will be utilities, food, clothes, and sundries. I may buy some Wood for heating at the start, but it can be had for free from the land itself with a little hard work and sweat (this is very hilly country, with lots of up and down trudging to carry the wood home from where the dead trees are). I came back from my last trip up there aching and with trouble walking for a few days just from carrying the equivalent of five 16″ logs up to the cabin from the ravine in back (ok, they were BIG logs, but I will definitely be getting into much better shape up there, just to keep warm).

How will I afford even those few expenses when I don’t yet have work up there? I estimate that, living very simply, all of the above expenses will cost me about $300/month. Many of you have chipped in to cover my moving expenses and give me some money for food and utilities for the first few months. I also serendipitously received some back-pay from a contract I did in 2006. The check was a long time in coming, but it arrived at just the right time! Beyond that, I expect to get my deposit back on my current apartment in December sometime and probably a tax refund early next year, so my expenses are probably covered for quite a while, if I live simply. You might think this will be a huge change for me, but, in fact, I have been living with a very small food budget off and on for years now. I have made an art of “kitchen sink” soup, and I enjoy baking my own bread.

But to make this work, I have to get rid of all of my other debts. I’ve simply been out of work too long. There are a lot of reasons for this, and I will talk about some of them later, but for now let’s just take it as given that I have to cut expenses to make this new start work. Rent will be taken care of, but I am behind on payments to my credit cards and I don’t know when I will have the kind of income required to make regular payments again (much less the missed payments). So, I decided that I have to declare bankruptcy. Even if I weren’t moving to this great place with free rent, I can’t afford to pay my bills here and now, much less pay the rent where I have been living.

After several weeks working on it, I finally filed the papers Wednesday, November 7th. I may have to stay in Berkeley as much as a week later than I’d planned in order to attend the “Creditors Meeting”, but that will probably be the only meeting I have to attend and a few months later (in all likelihood) all my debts will be permanently discharged. That will be a huge load off my back and it will be a big part of making a new start up North.

Don’t get the wrong impression: while my expenses are covered for a while, I do plan to look for work once I move. From what I’ve seen so far there aren’t a lot of positions for writers of any sort being advertised in that area but there are plenty of other jobs I might qualify for and I won’t need a big income (for a while at least). Beyond that, as I mentioned earlier, the cabin itself and the land around it are giving me all sorts of fantastical ideas about alternative ways to make a living.

In my next post I will be talking about the first couple trips I have made up to the cabin and some of my hopes and fears relating to my new future there. But feel free to post comments or questions and I will try to respond to those too.