A Change of Venue

This ride is taking me to some unlikely places. Back in college, I had a hard time seeing how I was going to fit into a professional occupation. Mostly because I wasn't thinking about the future. Then, in my first senior year, it hit me that I was going to have to take my place in this world and actually do something of vocational consequence. I weighed my interests of building and the outdoors and physical labor and measured their contrast to some practices of forestry and the effects of construction coupled with urban sprawl.

Fast forward through several living situations, occupations, and varying degress of civil engagement, and here I am 20+ years later well-seasoned in the realization that we cannot live separately from our economy, much less the natural one.

I tended toward rejection of the notion of contributing to the economy we built that is so destructive to the world I love so much. I figured I’d wind up living on some hillside in the woods as a hobo of sorts and maybe avoid this existence that can be toxic on so many levels. I took menial jobs and saved money for experiences that connected me with a variety of places. My abodes consisted of one stint in a little trailer park, studios in two barns, the floor of a boat shop, and a room in Ecuador where I chose to live without electricity.

And now I’m entering the fray with Bridget as homeowners. I watched with something of amazement as our mortgage broker worked out the loan and paperwork with the title company. It seems we complicate things to the limit of our capacity to understand them. Of course, the middle people make their livings doing this, but that’s another story. Then we forked over a wad of money, got rolling with an escrow payment plan, and viola. We have a home.

Walking through it, the standard upgrades had been done with freshly painted walls, carpeted

bedrooms, and luxury vinyl tile flooring throughout the rest. It seems like a plastic bubble. Compared to the feel of the rough sawn floorboards beneath my feet at the barn, the tangible wilderness of grain patterns in my ceiling boards, the broad light shining in through two picture windows overlooking a wild river bottom, and squirrels running across the top of my ceiling, this whole suburban existence feels like an artificially rendered box of lifeless sterility.

However, it's a blank slate, inside and out. Built in the 80’s so no lead paint. Manufactured roof trusses so no load bearing interior walls. A construction style that is impressively well insulated for that era. An unfinished, untouched (now that the the previous owner pulled up the carpet) basement. It comes with a big yard.

Contemporary of the 80's, A skirt of landscaping stone

surrounds the house with the age old landscape fabric poking through in places, sprinkled with variegated hostas. The wild plants of the area have proved dominant, however. It was a good try, kind of. This modern take on natural landscaping and comfortable living is going to be a joy to work on. The neighborhood is nice, with some households embracing the notion of keeping some feel of a forest with large trees and even natural understory in some cases. My most immediate neighbors, like most, obediently run their sprinklers to maintain their monocultures the proper shade of green.

I have spent the last two months moving things in and getting settled. My shop will be in the garage, along with some of my boats. Cramming the contents of the first floor of the barn into the two staller is taking some creativity and some serious letting go of unused tools.

I won’t go into detail about our plans for the place. That you’ll see as they happen along the way. As best I can tell, the work on the place will take the following phases:

1. Make it livable for us

2. Make it cool on the inside

3. Make it cool on the outside

4. Enable it to embrace a new approach to living that emphasizes efficiency of energy and space, along with sharing of resources

It is strange, this institution of home ownership. I own a house. I own 0.6 acres of this Earth along with it. I am supposed to maintain this property according to the social ethic that has been established in the neighborhood. It is mine and I am supposed to covet, protect, fence, poison, water, mow, pay others to work on, take pride in, and be willing to die protecting this parcel that is similar yet neatly cut off from all the neighboring pieces next to it. I own the bundle of rights to do all sorts of things to this piece of land that has been here for millennia, and will remain for millennia to come. I own the plant communities that live here but not the animals or the air that pass through and over it. I think I own the water that flows under it, but people are evidently still allowed to poison this. And within reason, I should manipulate this property to be precisely what I want it to be within my budget and my time on Earth, without regard to the next people who live here. The next person can take my labors to the landfill and start over, perhaps remodeling the kitchen and bathrooms every few years when the smell of fresh paint wears off the newest look that the Jonses had established and subsequently moved on from.

What a load of horse shit.

I have entered the fray, but I’m going to adopt my own interpretation of the game and tweak the playing field. Just a bit. As a people, we have a slew of problems upon us that need addressing now, and the housing crisis is a great place to start. And let’s call this whole ownership thing by a name that better presents the responsibilities involved with it. I am a steward of a tiny piece of suburbia in Plover, WI. I am occupying it through a bank with whom I inherited it from its previous custodian. I am borrowing it from its next steward. I want that steward to be of a mind that is bent toward beauty, biodiversity, efficiency, and forward thinking. And so, I will manage the property with those goals in mind.

So far, we are still in phase I of making the place our own. It started with installing the tomahawk block. Then, as the reality

of things manifested differently than I might have predicted, the next project was to revitalize a closet into a pantry and make the bathroom closet more useable. We also installed toilet paper holders and towel bars hooks of various sorts. The two forms of updating came in some contrast to one another.

The pine shiplap boards I used for shelving are one of my favorite materials. Sustainably harvested from the Menomonie Nation, beautiful in grain, workable, inexpensive, and easily repurposed, it is probably the most sensible building material I can think of. And when all else has been exhausted, you burn it for warmth or compost it for soil. Or both. On the other hand,

we purchased the best bars and hooks the local big box store carries. They anchor well into the drywall, but will not support a person as a grab bar. As they become worn, scratched, and soiled with time, they will look shabby. When they become loose and their screws finally strip, or their metal gets kinked or broken, or they simply go out of style, they will be removed and thrown into a landfill where they will stay forever. These cookie cutter bars come wrapped in plastic and cardboard, along with instructions, from some far off land whose exploited natural resources I cannot fathom. The closets have a history, the fingerprint of my creative design, efforts, and mistakes as character, and their components a plausible future. The towel bars, well, they look appropriately nice and do a good job of holding my towels, for now.

I felt like a guest in the house for the first bit of time, still do to a degree. The work on the closets helped. Bridget and I put together some ideas for the wall at the entry to make it more attractive and useable. We hung bikes next to the dining room, where Biege has her office (for now), but replaced those with an art wall for Liam and

Julia. Despite these customizations, the place still kind of has the feel of post-modern sterility accented with a natural board here and there for some cliché personality. The smell of new carpet doesn’t help that sentiment.

Bit by bit, we are making the house our own, and occupying our role as stewards. We built new curtain rods, the kids had the chance to build their own beds, and they're loving the concept of decorating their own rooms. We are making basic repairs and getting things in order. And, we're exploring. Much as I speak down on it, I like this house. I like the neighborhood. I like the approach we are taking. I like that my kids can ride their bikes around the block. I like how many trees are still in the neighborhood and the natural spaces that are close at hand. Most of all, I love the potential of this space.

This past weekend my kids and I left the house on the bikes to see what kind of fun we could stir up on the local Green Circle Trail. It winds through some streets and neighborhoods, but seeks out a surprising amount of greenspace for such an urban path. The Plover River, Wisconsin River, Moses Creek, and all sorts of parks and green spaces are connected with this corridor. We rode under an osprey’s nest, through the bottomlands of the Wisconsin, crossed the property where a paper mill previously stood. We stopped by the river, went for ice cream, dropped in on a friend, and took a good respite at Iverson Park. We hung out in the river, enjoying its beach and sandy bottom before it flows into McDill Pond. We played frisbee, Julia and I dove in, and Liam pulled me around by my big toe as I floated in the water. Before getting out, I let the current take me downstream just a bit. Relishing the cool embrace of the water, I gazed up at the white pines and oaks bordering my viewscape. It felt like I was part of the scene, not just looking in from the outside. The warm character of the Central Wisconsin glacial outwash plain made me feel right at home. The feeling lasted through the rest of our bike ride, and we brought it back to the house with us, although my pride of Julia having rode 15 miles that day was a bit of a distraction.

My goal is to have that feeling of connection to the greater landscape stirred simply by sitting in the living room or lounging on one of the patios. As temporary steward of this parcel of our Earth, I get to curate that feeling. More than that, I feel a responsibility to manage this property in a way that compliments the local environment and landscape. Bridget and I will see what we can do. It's all been fun so far, and we're not even getting warmed up yet.