It`s a common perception that all back-to-the-land idealists of the 1960s and `70s wound up buying high-priced homes in the suburbs and that the generation that came of age in the `80s only measures success in terms of condos and BMWs.
But in every era there are those who turn their backs on the rat race and go it alone. In the remote wilderness of far northern Minnesota, we found six people-two couples, a single man, a single woman-who are living the backwoods life quite happily, thank you. And we learned that, though they all value solitude and the beauty of nature, their principal reason for residing in the wilds is financial; they have reduced expenses to the bare minimum.
By giving up their pursuit of the almighty dollar, they have forsaken some of the creature comforts of civilization. But they`re not as
uncomfortable as you might think.
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After a heavy snow, the only way to reach Steve Johnson`s place on High Lake near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area is to don a pair of cross-country skis for a mile-long trek through the woods.
Once there, however, you discover a surprisingly elaborate homestead. Over the last eight years, Johnson has built more than a dozen log structures on his 40-acre parcel, though a few are still incomplete.
And they are likely to remain that way, for Johnson often builds for love.
A jack-of-all-trades from Wisconsin Rapids, Johnson, 36, came to the Ely area in 1980 with a female companion and built a cozy, ”temporary” cabin for the two of them to use while he worked on a larger structure. She left, he stayed, and the temporary cabin became a permanent home.
Some years later, after meeting a woman who had two small children, Johnson was again inspired to build for the future. Now standing as a mute memorial to his second broken relationship are the foundation of a cabin addition and an incomplete building that was to have been a new ”summer kitchen.”
Johnson, meanwhile, has built a tower on his cabin, where he watches the sunrise from a small deck and sometimes sleeps in a 7-by-7-foot room with big glass windows. By day, the brilliant winter sun warms the lofty room; by night, a small wood-burning stove does the job. But despite the pleasure of seeing ”spectacular” sunrises, Johnson is thinking about dismantling the tower. ”It spoils the esthetics of the cabin,” he explains.
Besides, he`s already planning a new cabin that will teeter on a cliff overlooking High Lake.
The interior of his temporary cabin is a testimonial to Johnson`s ingenuity. Every inch of the cramped first-floor room is neatly utilized. In an area the size of a small bedroom, there is a cooking stove, a wood-burning heating stove, a sitting area and a wood-heated sauna-plus a makeshift shower. The cabin has two lofts, one for sleeping, one for storage. And part of the outside deck has been given over to a screened-in summer kitchen, with yet another wood-burning stove.
Near the cabin are many other buildings, including shelters for the sled- dog team that Johnson once owned and an ice house (Johnson cuts several tons every winter). The biggest building, however, is a workshop and storage area for Johnson`s 14 canoes. He`s built 10 of them, ranging in size from a 7- foot solo canoe to a big 26-foot Voyageur replica.
The man who built all this is a creature of contradictions. He describes himself as ”ambitious,” yet he likes a lifestyle that keeps financial responsibilities to a minimum. ”I can live on $400 a year,” he boasts.
Bandy-legged and muscular, Johnson earns his living by occasional stints as a canoeing guide, carpenter and lumberjack. But for the most part he devotes his time to gardening, hunting and fishing-and, of course, building. He sums up his lifestyle with one word: ”Choice.”
When pressed to elaborate, he adds, ”If I don`t like it, I don`t have to do it. We bring who we are to what we do. And right now, I can bring as much work or play as I want to everything I do. That`s choice.”
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Margaret Vos is proud of her toilet.
It occupies two floors of her multilevel, six-sided log cabin. The seat of this composting machine is two floors up, perched above a container that is 7 1/2 feet long, 6 1/2 feet high and 4 feet wide. The toilet makes great fertilizer. But more importantly, it is an inside facility and is therefore a luxury.
Margaret Vos, 37, is a mountainous woman with a beaming, cherubic face. On this day, like many others, she sits on a well-worn wooden office chair near her heating stove, looks out the floor-to-ceiling windows on a snow-covered woodland scene and suddenly giggles at an unspoken thought.
”I`m from Virginia,” Vos says when asked about her background. ”That`s the state of Virginia, not the mining town.”
She`s said this countless times. And then she goes on to repeat, once again, the story of how she came to northern Minnesota, bought her land near Ely and built her cabin. She was a student, she says, at Cornell College in Iowa when she enrolled in a five-week summer field trip that took place on nearby Basswood Lake. The class, she recalls, was sponsored by the college geology department, but in reality it was mostly about canoeing and wilderness living.
Some years later, after dropping out of graduate school, Vos returned to the Ely area, where she worked as a food packer for an outfitting business and as a winter caretaker for a resort. In 1974 she bought 80 acres and, with the help of friends, built a small, 8-by-12-foot shack. Later she spent two summers building her current house, which is perched atop a steep hill. Today the shack is home to a man who provides Vos with cut firewood instead of rent. She earns her living by weaving (she owns a large floor loom) plus bead work, the harvesting of wild rice and part-time work as a music teacher at Vermillion Community College. She is deeply involved in Voyageur Vision, a project aimed at teaching women the skills of ”quality crafts and how to survive.”
Asked about her lifestyle, Vos looks out the window and exclaims: ”It`s great. The peace and quiet and the beautiful woods. I don`t have to worry about bills. My home and land are paid for. I don`t have insurance. My taxes are $1 a week. My propane averages $1 a week. And maybe it costs $1 a week for gas for the chainsaw. My poor old car is my biggest expense. That`s enough, don`t you think?”
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On a cold afternoon, just before sunset, the interior of the wedge-shaped, sod-topped log cabin owned by Jon Strom and Terry O`Brien is filled with wall-to-wall warmth, as if a basement furnance has been pumping heat all day. Actually there hasn`t been a fire in the home`s wood-burning stove since the previous evening.
Strictly speaking, Strom, O`Brien and O`Brien`s two sons live on a farm. When Strom bought the abandoned 100-acre site near Cook in 1980, the farm was already in the slow process of growing back into woods. Today the meadows are filled with brush and stumpy pine trees.
The cabin Strom built is an odd-shaped beauty. Huge posts support a series of heavy 12- and 15-foot log beams that hold up the roof. Most of the spacious-seeming cabin is an open great room with a log ceiling. Expansive, heat-gathering thermopane windows span the entire front of the house; Strom salvaged them from a demolished convenience store in Worthington, his hometown.
The internal heat comes from an iron wood-burning stove set on a stone-slab floor in a sunken lounge at the center of the house. Above the lounge is a bedroom loft for Strom and O`Brien. Her two sons, Nathan, 15, and Rafe, 12, share a bedroom-like alcove that has been plastered with posters of rock groups. The dining area has hardwood floors (salvaged from a demolished fire station) and in a back hallway sits a full-sized bathtub, ready for filling with water heated on the kitchen`s wood-burning cooking stove.
Terry O`Brien, 40, describes herself as a veteran of the back-to-the-Earth movement. A Minneapolis native, she moved to the Deer River area with her first husband in the early 1970s. They were divorced a few years later.
A part-time teacher and radio reporter, she continued to work around northern Minnesota. She married Strom in 1981, and they moved to his cabin. Strom, also 40, is a sculptor, specializing in wood.
There are inconveniences, of course. The boys ride the bus 40 miles one-way to attend school in Big Fork. And O`Brien drives 50 miles each way on the days she works at KAXE-FM, a Grand Rapids public radio station where she`s a talk-show host.
”Right now the boys are into sports, which means they`re never home,”
Strom says. O`Brien adds, ”If you asked them what they miss most, it would be television. For us, if we miss anything, it`s the lack of access to good movies. The nearest theater is 25 miles away.”
Then Strom quickly rejoins: ”It always takes a trip down there (to the Twin Cities) to realize what`s special about being up here.”
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Not long ago Marshall Helmberger was standing outside his one-room log cabin, feeding chickadees from his hand. The birds were fearless, each taking its turn, darting to Helmberger`s outstretched palm to snatch a seed.
Then it happened. A chickadee was just preparing to land on his hand when there was a sudden sound like a towel snapping in the wind. In an instant, the little bird was gone, clutched in the talons of a sharp-shinned hawk that had streaked to within inches of Helmberger`s arm.
Helmberger and his wife, Jodi Summit, smile when he finishes telling this great anecdote about living way out in the woods, where nature can seem both embracing and brutal. The expressions on their youthful faces are almost identical-blandly serene but carefully distant.
But, of course, they`re hospitable, offering herbal tea brewed with water that was pumped by hand from an outside well and boiled on an old, propane-fueled stove. The 36-by-20-foot cabin they built in 1984 has a split, clerestory roof; the afternoon sunlight streaming through the rows of south-facing windows bathes the little cabin in hueless amber.
Everything is in its place. Summit knits for fun and profit, and both the supplies and products of her trade are on display. The furniture is inexpensive and unmatched but also tasteful. The wood-burning stove-they have no electricity-offers a compelling warmth.
A native of Bloomington, Minn., and a graduate of the University of Minnesota, where he studied political science, Helmberger says his childhood dream of living in the woods was nurtured by numerous hunting and fishing trips with his father. While still in college, he paid $6,000 for a 20-acre parcel with tall pines and balsam fir near Tower, Minn., where their cabin now sits. Land, he adds, is much cheaper in the area these days-going for as little as $150 an acre.
Helmberger met his future wife during a summer biology field trip in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Summit is a graduate of Bowdoin College in Maine, where she majored in biology and geology. In the spring of 1984, after scavenging discarded building materials from construction sites in
Minneapolis, the two moved to the north woods and began building their cabin. They had a roof over their heads by December.
The couple try to minimize the need to make money. For six weeks in the spring, they plant seedling trees for the state and federal forest services. This year Helmberger spent three weeks fighting fires in Montana. In the fall they gather wild rice from lakes in the Superior National Forest and hand-parch it for discriminating customers. Helmberger is a freelance writer (he owns a small, battery-powered word processor) specializing in how-to articles and essays on environmental issues.
Yes, they have to use an outdoor privy and tote water from their well.
When asked what they like most about their lifestyle, the couple fall silent. ”Probably the peace,” Summit says, casting her eyes on her lap as she sits folded up in a chair. ”What I like out here is the quiet. You go outside and it`s absolutely still. You don`t hear anything.”
Her voice trails off. ”That`s what I like.” –
