Excerpt:

When we found this land, it was a parcel of 80 acres that had only a gravel road, no fencing, no plumbing, and an old, tumble-down barn that once briefly housed llamas. Over time, Carl acquired another 100 acres that bordered our acreage from a variety of locals who got word that some fool out-of-towner was buying up forgotten acreage. (We maybe got a good deal on the first purchase, but not on the later ones….).

When we found this land, it was a parcel of 80 acres that had only a gravel road, no fencing, no plumbing, and an old, tumble-down barn that once briefly housed llamas. Over time, Carl acquired another 100 acres that bordered our acreage from a variety of locals who got word that some fool out-of-towner was buying up forgotten acreage. (We maybe got a good deal on the first purchase, but not on the later ones….).

We had a vague idea – make it beautiful, build buildings that belong here, add animals, bring people together, be true to the contours of the land and the demands of the climate. We described this beginning-of-a-dream to the local man who’d been caretaking the property. He listened and replied to us, ‘This land has waited a long time for you.’ We kept him on….

The first thing we built was a bathroom.

Finding good pastureland in a mountainous rain forest climate is a challenge, and we spent years tilling up abandoned fields, pulling out plastic sheeting and concrete that had been dumped and covered over with a thin layer of soil, and leveling enough earth to start to build. Most earth that got moved required rock-face walls to serve as retaining structures. We sourced all the rock and labor as locally as possible, and chose lumber, paint, roofing, and paving stones to reflect the history and raw products of our surroundings.

A wide swath of protected wetlands, which we could not legally change or develop, wends its way through the lower 40 acres. In the wetlands are streams that ultimately feed into the Tennessee River, a drinking water source, so we had to live with several years of silt fencing as we carved out pastures and leveled land to build foundations. The wetlands had made this land less attractive to commercial developers, but we embraced the rough and gorgeous wild flora that grew there, springing into swaths of yellow and lavender every June.

Placement of the buildings was a 6-month-long debate, settled after numerous gatherings of architects, builders, land-use specialists, designers, and a consulting mystic, as well as our own amateur process of sitting still at different times of the day to imagine which view our barn or our arena or our back porch might ‘want.’

Within 6 months of our acquiring Blue Star Ranch, we held a dedication ceremony on a hilltop at the site of our future home. Carl hiked to the four corners of the property and gathered a sampling of tokens: leaves, bird feathers, soil, seed pods, moss, lichen. We built a fire circle, gathered friends and neighbors, and Carl spoke simply to the fire: “From the east to the west, from the north to the south, to all of the generations before us who have been stewards of this land, you may rest now. We pledge to do what we can to preserve and caretake this land as best we can until the next folks take over.” We laid the tokens in the fire as a ritual of our promise and celebrated with hugs & (literal) moonshine as the stars came out in the sky.

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