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.

Background To It All

We've lived in urban or suburban areas most of our lives. My sister, who is 16 years older than I, is nearing retirement age (beyond this information she would kill me) and was looking to get away from cities and back to a more simple, more efficient, and more 'robust' lifestyle in retirement.

I wanted that, too. There is something good--a good, in fact--about building your own building, about producing your own food and having care of the land. Perhaps it goes back to our being made from 'dust' and returning to 'dust', something profoundly spiritual and physically re-creative (in both senses of the term) at the same time

There are socio-economic and political implications for wanting to do this, too. The American experiment may have run its course; rising gas prices put constant pressure on the consumer. All of this will be explored in detail later.

For now, here is the basic plan:

1.) Get land in conjunction with my sister, her husband, and their son.
2.) Start gathering information on how to 'homestead', live off the land, lard the lean earth, etc.
3.) Find methods of building that are low-maintenance, cheap, but strong and long-lasting.
4.) Build my (small) house first (within the first six months after purchasing the land); I move there.
5.) Start the fruit trees, start the outbuildings for food production, and get the land 'ready'.
6.) Build my sister's house within 18 months of land purchase
7.) My sister's family retires to the land.

AND do all this for as cheaply as possible.

Now, the caveats.

I am not a builder. I can hammer, patch drywall, lay tile, or do pretty much anything only because I don't know that I can't! Show me how, and I'll do it.

On the other hand, I know people who do know these things. I can act as facilitator for a collaboration. I can look for creative financing. I can scrounge for scrap and supplies. I'm in my late 40s and in poor shape physically but am a former athlete trapped in this now-sedentary body.

My sister has never been a 'worker' per se; she and her husband are academics. Their lovable, clever, but anemic son has never really used any sorts of tools other than whilst working on a car engine.

I plan to channel my deceased father's knowledge--he was a builder--and will this plan into actuality.