 There are two different homey environments that have been sticking to my brain-ribs for the past several months: the Earthship I stayed in with my siblings on our mini-road-trip to New Mexico last November, and the treehouse at the Hostel in the Forest that Linden and I called home for two nights in Georgia this past January. These spaces each have their own special kinds of magic. Earthship Biotecture: |
 A welcoming burst of rosemary at the front door |  Alenni harvests cherry tomatoes |
My most recent stay at an earthship was during the first-ever Davis Sibling Adventure. The Davis Family consists of four siblings: ’85 Shenandoah, ’87 Emily, ’91 Luke, and ’95 Alenni. My memory of our childhood is mostly filled with music, video games, and road trips to National Parks and museums (sibling mileage may vary). Naturally, for our first Davis-Sibling-Vacation, we went on a mini-road-trip to New Mexico so that we could listen to music and play video games together (and stop at Great Sand Dunes National Park on the way).
The trip as a whole was super fun, but what has lingered with me was the night we spent in an Earthship. Earthships are a radically different kind of off-grid, self-sufficient home designed by one man who wanted to do things differently (and he was visited by four wizards, who helped guide his architecture dreams). Our stay left my siblings and I totally enchanted with this architecture. To get between rooms, you have to step out into the greenhouse, which runs the entire length of the home and serves as an immense and remarkable hallway. If you have to go to the bathroom, you have to walk through the greenhouse. How could someone feel unhappy when they must move through this plant-filled space so many times in one day? Enormous shrubs of rosemary and citronella greet your nose at each door. Although there was a freezing blizzard outside, we stayed cozy and warm inside thanks to geothermal heating and cooling--quite a difference from the large, on-grid custom home we had stayed at the night before, which relied on a number of systems for heat--and all of them failed to warm that house to a comfortable degree.
The trip as a whole was super fun, but what has lingered with me was the night we spent in an Earthship. Earthships are a radically different kind of off-grid, self-sufficient home designed by one man who wanted to do things differently (and he was visited by four wizards, who helped guide his architecture dreams). Our stay left my siblings and I totally enchanted with this architecture. To get between rooms, you have to step out into the greenhouse, which runs the entire length of the home and serves as an immense and remarkable hallway. If you have to go to the bathroom, you have to walk through the greenhouse. How could someone feel unhappy when they must move through this plant-filled space so many times in one day? Enormous shrubs of rosemary and citronella greet your nose at each door. Although there was a freezing blizzard outside, we stayed cozy and warm inside thanks to geothermal heating and cooling--quite a difference from the large, on-grid custom home we had stayed at the night before, which relied on a number of systems for heat--and all of them failed to warm that house to a comfortable degree.
 Greenhouse hallway connecting all of the rooms in the house |  Recycled glass bottle wall |
I won’t go into too much detail about the specifics of how incredible eathships are as far as building systems and technical information, because curious folks can read about that elsewhere. I want to focus on a number of the aspects I found most fascinating about the space.
One of the big marketing pushes for earthships is gaining total independence from bills and government entities. You can build your house yourself using tires and bottles, generate your own electricity through solar power (some models have experimental turbines as well), grow your own food in the enormous south-facing greenhouse, and collect and filter your own rainwater (which is recirculated and used for a multitude of tasks before watering your plants). Because much of the house can be built yourself out of hundreds of collected tires, cans, and bottles, it is possible to build an Earthship for a much lower cost than a traditional house if you're willing to spend months--if not years--pounding dirt into tires. Own your home, own your energy, own your food source. Sounds pretty good.
On an earlier trip to NM I stayed in the “first” Earthship, lovingly named “The Hobbit Hole,” and it was just as wonderfully hippy-dippy in practice as it sounds: nice for a cozy visit, but not really somewhere you’d want to live full-time. The sibling trip experience was totally different; we stayed in an Earthship completed in 2016 that felt every bit as modern and comfortable as any suburban single-family home. It was easy to picture an average daily life of a family taking place in this house. Where Earthships before had been a different lifestyle choice, it seems that the architecture has evolved to merge its ideals with a traditional way of living. This opens up the architecture to the public, rather than ensuring that only a small niche population would find the designs livable.
What I’ve been puzzling over is the trade-off of independence vs. community dependence, and this really comes up against my own idea of what community means. I value being able to walk to Olde Town Arvada, to the library, to my favorite coffee shop for meetings. I value being close enough to friends that I can drive to their houses in 15 minutes or less. I value riding my bike to the grocery store and to get breakfast burritos. Earthships do not meet the building codes of most developed areas, and most Earthship communities are far from city centers. We saw some interesting concept drawings for urban, mid-density Earthship development, but it seems unlikely that these would ever be implemented. While there may be a sense of community amongst those who live in Earthship-exclusive neighborhoods, there are also a large number of homes that are short-term rentals.
Outside of the incredible beauty and fascinatingly efficient systems, our night in the Earthship felt much like a night in any middle-class American home--we cooked dinner together in the kitchen, played video games, watched a movie on a large TV, took hot showers, and went to bed.
One of the big marketing pushes for earthships is gaining total independence from bills and government entities. You can build your house yourself using tires and bottles, generate your own electricity through solar power (some models have experimental turbines as well), grow your own food in the enormous south-facing greenhouse, and collect and filter your own rainwater (which is recirculated and used for a multitude of tasks before watering your plants). Because much of the house can be built yourself out of hundreds of collected tires, cans, and bottles, it is possible to build an Earthship for a much lower cost than a traditional house if you're willing to spend months--if not years--pounding dirt into tires. Own your home, own your energy, own your food source. Sounds pretty good.
On an earlier trip to NM I stayed in the “first” Earthship, lovingly named “The Hobbit Hole,” and it was just as wonderfully hippy-dippy in practice as it sounds: nice for a cozy visit, but not really somewhere you’d want to live full-time. The sibling trip experience was totally different; we stayed in an Earthship completed in 2016 that felt every bit as modern and comfortable as any suburban single-family home. It was easy to picture an average daily life of a family taking place in this house. Where Earthships before had been a different lifestyle choice, it seems that the architecture has evolved to merge its ideals with a traditional way of living. This opens up the architecture to the public, rather than ensuring that only a small niche population would find the designs livable.
What I’ve been puzzling over is the trade-off of independence vs. community dependence, and this really comes up against my own idea of what community means. I value being able to walk to Olde Town Arvada, to the library, to my favorite coffee shop for meetings. I value being close enough to friends that I can drive to their houses in 15 minutes or less. I value riding my bike to the grocery store and to get breakfast burritos. Earthships do not meet the building codes of most developed areas, and most Earthship communities are far from city centers. We saw some interesting concept drawings for urban, mid-density Earthship development, but it seems unlikely that these would ever be implemented. While there may be a sense of community amongst those who live in Earthship-exclusive neighborhoods, there are also a large number of homes that are short-term rentals.
Outside of the incredible beauty and fascinatingly efficient systems, our night in the Earthship felt much like a night in any middle-class American home--we cooked dinner together in the kitchen, played video games, watched a movie on a large TV, took hot showers, and went to bed.
The most beautiful garage in the world, complete with food-producing fish pond
Living room and kitchen of the earthship
 Privacy in the bathroom is created with a large stained glass window looking into the greenhouse hallway |  It was a blizzard outside, and yet the earthship remained very comfortably warm with no modern, grid-connected systems |
The Hostel in the Forest:
Designed for Short-Term Interdependence
 Linden on a forest swing |  There is a duck in this picture. Linden and I chased it in kayaks for an indeterminate amount of time. |
During my trip to Florida in January, Linden and I took a drive up to Georgia to stay two nights at the Hostel in the Forest. This is a magical place that was also the brainchild of one man who wanted to do things differently. The Hostel consists of two geodesic dome common areas, a handful of delightfully scrappy treehouses connected by winding boardwalks, and a few other common space buildings and gardens in an otherwise humble Georgia forest. It is designed to be communal and feels like a grown-up summer camp. Linden and I stayed two nights in Grounded Peacock (a guest-book-suggested renaming from the official Lower Peacock), the bottom half of a double-decker treehouse that sat a short path away from the magnetic gathering place of the fire pit. A glorious wooden porch swing hung next to our hut: the perfect spot to drink wine and coffee while watching the general happenings of the extroverted.
Everything at the Hostel points to intensive, short-term community; guests may stay for a maximum of three nights, and volunteer staff members stay for up to six months. Guests are greeted with a long, genuine hug and "welcome home" from every single employee. Hostel rules are very, very bendy, but include welcome guidelines like "no cell phone or electronics use except in your cabin." A vegan dinner is served communally each night, preceded by the Hostel's most iconic ritual: everyone stands in a circle holding hands, listens to the forest for a closed-eye moment, and then sharing time begins. Each person says their name, where they are from (staff says "I'm from here," a terribly endearing phrase that seems to enliven dinner with more fairy magic after each uttering), and what they are grateful for that day.
After the meal, the Hostel population joins in an epic cleaning party that will forever ruin your boring at-home cleaning activities. Linden and I helped out with the least-sanitary, most-fun dishwashing of our lives, all while dancing to perfectly corny music blasting across the kitchen. Once every task for post-dinner cleaning was complete, a cacophony of banging pots, screams, and bellowing conch shell marked the return of the kitchen to its "Vital Glory" and released all from their chores.
On our first night, dinner was followed by an invitation to listen to stories in the library (a gorgeous, wooden geodesic dome lined with leave-and-take bookshelves). The second night led to an open-mic/sing-along party in the library, and while Linden and I left after a zany tambourine-banging, flute-dancing, harmonium-droning jam session, we could hear the drumming continue for hours and hours after we climbed into the bunks of Grounded Peacock.
There is no consistent, on-site, long-term overseer of how things are going at the Hostel. Knowledge of the runnings of the Hostel must be passed between the ever-changing sea of volunteers, or else it will be lost; for example, during our visit we went on a walking forage tour of edible plants in the forest. The woman who led our tour had been at the Hostel for a few months, and was getting ready to leave. During her stay, she discovered that the Hostel's large vegetable gardens had been long-neglected and grown over. She spent her months as a volunteer replanting the gardens and researching wild forage items in the forest, crafting incredible salads for the communal dinner each night. Desperately trying to pass all that she had learned onto a new staff member, the tour leader had kept detailed notes; however, I did not get the impression that this new staff member was in any way interested in forest foraging or gardening, and I fear that the gardens will fall back into a sorry state as well. I wonder how many times in the 35+ year history of the Hostel eager staff have had to identify the edible plants growing in the forest, and how many more delectable salads could have been made of forage if there was a larger system in place to document some of the work of the volunteers. Perhaps it is part of the charm of this place that some things are lost and must be relearned and rediscovered down the line.
A connection to other hostel-stayers was quickly forged. It is easy to make fast friends in an environment where the default is stories and sharing, but I think the real key is the short-term nature of the experience. There is no relationship maintenance, no continued expectations or failure of expectations. Any interaction was feeding friendship for that moment only, and there is a certain closeness in that. The name of my favorite "hostel friend" is long forgotten, but a catchy song he performed in the library still pops into my head every few days.
Everything at the Hostel points to intensive, short-term community; guests may stay for a maximum of three nights, and volunteer staff members stay for up to six months. Guests are greeted with a long, genuine hug and "welcome home" from every single employee. Hostel rules are very, very bendy, but include welcome guidelines like "no cell phone or electronics use except in your cabin." A vegan dinner is served communally each night, preceded by the Hostel's most iconic ritual: everyone stands in a circle holding hands, listens to the forest for a closed-eye moment, and then sharing time begins. Each person says their name, where they are from (staff says "I'm from here," a terribly endearing phrase that seems to enliven dinner with more fairy magic after each uttering), and what they are grateful for that day.
After the meal, the Hostel population joins in an epic cleaning party that will forever ruin your boring at-home cleaning activities. Linden and I helped out with the least-sanitary, most-fun dishwashing of our lives, all while dancing to perfectly corny music blasting across the kitchen. Once every task for post-dinner cleaning was complete, a cacophony of banging pots, screams, and bellowing conch shell marked the return of the kitchen to its "Vital Glory" and released all from their chores.
On our first night, dinner was followed by an invitation to listen to stories in the library (a gorgeous, wooden geodesic dome lined with leave-and-take bookshelves). The second night led to an open-mic/sing-along party in the library, and while Linden and I left after a zany tambourine-banging, flute-dancing, harmonium-droning jam session, we could hear the drumming continue for hours and hours after we climbed into the bunks of Grounded Peacock.
There is no consistent, on-site, long-term overseer of how things are going at the Hostel. Knowledge of the runnings of the Hostel must be passed between the ever-changing sea of volunteers, or else it will be lost; for example, during our visit we went on a walking forage tour of edible plants in the forest. The woman who led our tour had been at the Hostel for a few months, and was getting ready to leave. During her stay, she discovered that the Hostel's large vegetable gardens had been long-neglected and grown over. She spent her months as a volunteer replanting the gardens and researching wild forage items in the forest, crafting incredible salads for the communal dinner each night. Desperately trying to pass all that she had learned onto a new staff member, the tour leader had kept detailed notes; however, I did not get the impression that this new staff member was in any way interested in forest foraging or gardening, and I fear that the gardens will fall back into a sorry state as well. I wonder how many times in the 35+ year history of the Hostel eager staff have had to identify the edible plants growing in the forest, and how many more delectable salads could have been made of forage if there was a larger system in place to document some of the work of the volunteers. Perhaps it is part of the charm of this place that some things are lost and must be relearned and rediscovered down the line.
A connection to other hostel-stayers was quickly forged. It is easy to make fast friends in an environment where the default is stories and sharing, but I think the real key is the short-term nature of the experience. There is no relationship maintenance, no continued expectations or failure of expectations. Any interaction was feeding friendship for that moment only, and there is a certain closeness in that. The name of my favorite "hostel friend" is long forgotten, but a catchy song he performed in the library still pops into my head every few days.
Morning routine in Grounded Peacock
 Upper and Grounded Peacock |  The Hostel has kayaks, so we paddled around this lake |
Loose Thoughts
Like I said, these two places have really been gooey in my brain. Both the Earthship and the Hostel seek to give a deeper experience with nature--the Earthship through the careful planning and cultivation of an interior greenhouse, and the Hostel through a disorganized wildness of meandering treehouses in a forest. I think that for me, I want a home space that encourages independence, nature-integration, and self-reliance in some ways, but I want it to include a lifelong interdependence and proximity with a local community. Right now it feels like each of us must choose between the two: either live within walking distance to amenities like coffee shops, transit hubs, libraries, and restaurants, or live far beyond the outskirts of town to build an Earthship or treehouse or anything remarkably integrated with nature.
So for now, I choose to live near a city center in my beloved suburban house. I replace my lawn with a low-water pollinator garden and grow vegetables in backyard beds. I hang house plants from a closet rod in my living room so a bit of nature welcomes me home each day. And I focus on building long-term, sustainable relationships with the people I meet here.
So for now, I choose to live near a city center in my beloved suburban house. I replace my lawn with a low-water pollinator garden and grow vegetables in backyard beds. I hang house plants from a closet rod in my living room so a bit of nature welcomes me home each day. And I focus on building long-term, sustainable relationships with the people I meet here.
Bonus sibling fun at the Great Sand Dunes
1 Comment
Kate Sweet
6/13/2019 08:49:05 pm
Thank you dear Emily for another lovely story. And for the pictures of our darling girl.