Badlands Here We Come

Off the grid, scrubby trees, and mud-caked tires--if you want cheap land you gotta go here!


So, with a general idea of wanting to be somewhere within the triangle of Nashville, Pulaski, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, we struck out one weekend after perusing the interweb to take a look at some land.

Now, we were wanting somewhere from 20 to 60 acres--and didn't want to pay more than $3500 an acre for it. That meant the land we would be looking at was largely 'unimproved'--that means, usually, far REMoved from water and power sources.

While that was OK by me, the sister and family want to be grid-tied, at least at first, and to have some--emphasis, some--of the mod cons at their disposal (although not necessarily a disposal).

So we looked. And looked. And drove out to parts unknown in the backwoods and meth labs of middle Tennessee to see what we could see.

Yes, there is land that is less than $3500 an acre. Yes, it is usually unimproved and filled with trees. What we saw that we liked was far from--well, let me back up a second.

Years (as in over 20) ago, my sister and her husband ministered to a congregation of about 100 folks outside of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. They fell in love with the land and the people, finding solace for their bodies and minds there. Our objective for choosing middle Tennessee was to be within an hour of these people so those relationships--which never faded when my sister and my brother-in-law accepted teaching positions at a university--could be sustained into redundancy.

Fast forward to the land hunting again; what we saw was too far away from these good people in that lovely valley. Besides, what we saw was too wild for us to consider.

So, yes, we found land. And no, it was not land we would buy.

We returned from our first land-hunting trip extremely depressed because we were right back where we'd started.

On the other hand, we now had knowledge that 20 acres was quite a bit of land, and we knew we could and would take less land in the right place.