Trusting the vision

It made perfect sense to me. I was at that crossroads, the one where all the cards are tossed into the air. My 17-year marriage had ended. I was falling in love again. Why not move to the desert with this man? Why not build my own house? In fact, building an off-grid, sustainable house seemed to be a natural extension of the work I'd been doing all my life. I had practically preached sustainability to my college writing students for years.

"Write about your passions," I had advised, borrowing the wise suggestion of my own best teachers. It was the only real direction I felt qualified to give.

I'd once been captivated by a newspaper article about a guy who'd built his own house in the southern California desert, east of San Diego. His beautiful home had clay walls he'd fired from the inside. The walls sparkled with colored glass bottle bottoms. The dome-shaped roof fit organically with the flowing contours of the rolling hills. He'd gathered the clay from the land he built on. The story remained in my head and worked on my imagination.

So on Ian's 33rd birthday, we drove down to Taos to hear Ike give a talk about his earthhouse designs. He was blunt. He had a self-effacing sense of humor. He was rough around the edges in a Mad Max way that, as it turned out, wasn't unusual for northern New Mexico. To us he seemed fresh, smart and funny.

Best of all, he seemed to think about things like we did. When he explained his ecological vision it made sense to us. He agreed that it was about time our consumer culture learned to recycle discards and reuse them creatively. He talked about used tires, cans and bottles being indigenous building materials everywhere on earth. It didn't sound one bit crazy to the part of me that hated to see magnificent forests devastated for lumber, fresh, clean water flushed away.

As far as we could tell, Ike had designed a way to live sanely in this crazy world. His vision invigorated us. We felt like we could become part of the solution. And, as far as building goes, there was nothing that either of us loved more than a big art project.

Were we naive? Just a little bit smug? Romantic? Hang on. You haven't heard the whole story yet.