When I was 19, I had just graduated from college with a Bachelors in Cultural Anthropology. My dream had been to live with and study an African tribe, after learning many positive things about community, music, awesome work life balance and so forth. One African tribe works only about 16 hours a week to meet their requirements for living. Another African tribe does field work in work groups of friends. However, not everybody works. To keep the work fun, some of the group make live music while the others plant and harvest. However, it’s not that simple to jump into a paid gig to live somewhere fun and write about it. In the interim, I was hitchhiking around the US. I landed in Atlanta, and scored a few free nights at a youth hostel there, helping fix a very derelict Victorian mansion that needed lots of love and a few more customers to pay for the rehab. From there I got an amazing deal on a flight to London, $238 on Virgin Atlantic Airlines. There was just one catch. It left in the morning three days later, and not from Atlanta, but New York City. A gamble given that hitchhiking can be completely variable. Some days, like everything, one good thing can happen after another, with hundreds of miles traveled with beautiful people who are a joy to spend time road tripping with. Other days are just the opposite. Standing hours by the roadside, thumb out, hassled by everything from mosquitos, passing thunderstorms and local law enforcement (Yes, standing by the side of the road is a crime in most places).
Rushing to get to NYC to catch the flight. During this time, sleeping in my tent in various places along the road, being stopped by the cops just for being where I was not supposed to be, I realized that having a place that is my own where nobody could tell me that I had no rights to be there or to do what I was wanting to do, like sleep or just sit and read.
Over time, I got lucky. I love working on houses.
I remember for the longest time I had way more ambition than money. And in the end, the money didn’t block me. I hitchhiked. I’ve slept in some crazy places. One cold December night in El Paso, the best place I could find was a very convoluted mortuary building that had many entrances and various stairways and ramps where there was enough concealment to roll out a sleeping bag and sleep unobserved from the street. In a park in Sacramento, where the park was strictly patrolled, I found a circular ring of bushes that was pretty discreet. Unfortunately the discreteness also meant some people had used the area as a bathroom, but that was the best option available at the time. That night I remember being woken by a very bright searchlight from a police car that was looking for people violating the after dark curfew in the park. I stayed very still and eventually, the bright light aimed elsewhere and the police car drove off. One very early morning in Budapest, getting off the train at just before 2am, paying for a hostel or budget hotel seemed like a very poor use of limited funds. Leaving the train station, I noticed scaffolding in front of a palatial building across the street that was getting a facelift. Since the next morning was a Sunday, and I wouldn’t be surprised by early bird stucco workers, I climbed up one level (I didn’t want to risk two) and rolled out my sleeping bag, partially strategically positioned so that if I rolled a bit, at least my hips would be restrained by the vertical scaffold supports, the rest of me was just suspended with no side rail about 12 feet off the ground, more than high enough for a very rude awakening. On a motorcycle trip, also just before turning 20, I rode through the south and in Washington County, Arkansas, on a local road off the busy main interstate, I camped at night just on some land that looked vacant and had enough of a dirt track off the main road for me to pull off. I had pulled over, parked my bike, eaten a snack of unheated canned Spaggetti-Ohs and was just settling into my sleeping bag to sleep when an extremely bright light seared my retinas. A voice, deep, gruff, unfriendly, with a strong southern accent told me that I was trespassing on private property, that he had multiple guns, and that I needed to leave Now. I couldn’t see if it was more than one person, but there were several million candlepower of light aimed my way and the best course of action was to hurriedly roll up my tenant with everything in it, pickup my can of Spaggetti-Ohs, hurriedly bungee everything back on my bike (badly, the finesse of good packing was not a priority that moment) and ride off into the darkness. The darkness, with all the lurking badness that I might usually wonder about felt welcoming after the brightness and the fear of not knowing who I was dealing with, what they might do, and whether they had the aspect of kindness in them that makes traveling and meeting strangers beautiful.
The next morning at a diner somewhere in what probably was the same County the waitress exclaimed with great surprise when I told her I was from Colorado “why, there ain’t been no stranger in Washington County in more than a hundred years”. I couldn’t tell, but I didn’t get the impression she was pulling my leg. I didn’t tell her about the incident. She did a good job with Southern Hospitality, I didn’t want to spoil the moment.
Later that summer, I had made my way via London, hitchhiking South through England to the Cliffs of Dover, and from there with the Ferry over to Calais, France. I then hitchhiked my way across beautiful, scenic rural France, hitting high spot ancient cities in Arras, Reims, Metz, Strasbourg, and then to Gottingen Germany. I found my way to a fellow hitchhiker I had met in British Columbia, Canada, who owns a landscaping business in Munich and worked for him. I lived like a Mexican guest worker in the US, saving all my money, eating, dressing and living cheap. I saved a good amount of money, probably 70% of my income and used that to seed my dream. In 1995, at the age of 22, I bought my first property, a half-acre of mountain land. Later I traded that half acre for an acre near Nederland Colorado, where I replicated something I learned from my landscaping job but applied it for me. We had gotten a contract to build a 5 car garage for a massively wealthy banker. The garage mirrored the architecture of his house, but at roughly 1200 sq. feet, it was vastly smaller. Yet it was large enough. All of us working on the garage, digging the foundation, forming out the poured cement walls and putting cedar shakes on the roof, agreed that with a kitchen and bathroom, this could be a very swank cottage. That was one of my pivotal lessons of my early working life. Make mistakes on your boss’s dime, so you can do things write when you apply them on your own. I made some stupid mistakes that cost time and money on the job. Working on my own house later, I probably saved myself the grief I had previously, unintentionally, inflicted on my boss. I had never done most of those construction related tasks before, but when I built my house on the Nederland lot starting at age 23, I was somewhat better off than totally winging it.
Next lesson: Don’t be ashamed of where the lessons come from
I had borrowed a number of house building books from the public library, but all of them seemed highly technical and not very well explained. I couldn’t shake the recurring feeling that somewhere between steps 2 and 3, there was a missing step. Something the author might have thought so obvious they didn’t need to waste aw single word or image on it, yet something pivotal and important to me that I was reluctant to start on the project without knowing that missing link. My solution came in the form of a book that for a long time I was a tiny bit embarrassed about as an aspiring 23 year old young man: “Housebuilding for Women”. That book, written by a woman for the truly uninitiated like me, really laid things out, and solved the various blocks I encountered in the other books written by those who were construction professionals. I built a 2000 sq. foot house with beautiful views of the Indian Peaks that form that section of the continental divide. Later, I parlayed the construction experience I learned that way into a small empire of dilapidated houses I had purchase, restored and then rented out. I became known for buying houses people wouldn’t let their pet go inside, where some passersby would tell me to just “bulldoze it” to that same house being beautiful, livable and a great reminder of classic American craftsmanship where even very prissy prospects were lining up to fill out a rental application.
Take Risks
I could have bought a condo with the money I had saved in Germany, or I could build a house. Buying a condo could have been a “safer” choice. I would have something relatively livable from day 1. However, I would not have learned anything about construction and remodeling, and would have been scared to tear into drywall to fix things, while having to build the studs and put stuff behind drywall from the get go really taught me how a house works. As a mentor told me, “condos from the 1970s and 1980s are like a venereal disease. Easy to get and hard to get rid of”. I’m glad I didn’t go that route.
Choose your Frame of Mind
My mom was one of these people who got her strokes from belittling others. She couldn’t help herself but to also treat me that way. After this got to be too much shortly after my 17th birthday, I moved out, never to move back, even though I didn’t have a place to move to. Walking homeless, along the edge of a graveyard with a small backpack containing all my possessions on a sunny summer day, I was pretty unhappy about how things were going for me, and my unhappiness really had nothing with my external circumstances at that moment. I was young, had eaten that morning, the weather was beautiful, I had all my limbs and my mental faculties, and so many more things working in my favor. I had this realization at that moment looking at the graves of people who no longer had the freedom to choose or change their path in life: I choose how I feel. Everyone has circumstances. We can focus on those. Or, we can focus on the flowers, the sunshine, the blessings we do have, that I even had a back pack and a future, and feel incredibly blessed. There are two truths, the one of bad things and the one of marvelous things. Both are true. There are camps of people that like seeing one or the other more. I could choose which truth to see and which group of people to be part of. I chose to see the positive.
Some people feel good and connected with others by sharing misery. It does work. It’s not as fun as the alternative, celebrating the life and beauty and goodness in everything. There are less role models in the second camp, and they don’t try as hard. Aunt Sally can bring you down with her constant whining about the pain in her knee, and her kids that don’t listen, and her cat that pees everywhere but the litterbox. But Uncle Joe who sees only good in things doesn’t need to convert you. He tells you things are amazing and goes off to have more fun. The bad view of life can get more converts, and Sally does try harder. Do you know why? Because she’s scared she’s wrong and she’s miserable for no reason. If she can convert you, she’s less likely to be wrong. And, if she’s wrong, she’s made the unfortunate choice of living her life in self-inflicted misery when another choice had been available all along. That is a scary thought. Uncle Joe knows he’s right. His life feels right. He doesn’t need to sell anyone on a twisted worldview for him to be happy. We need more Uncle Joe’s. Which way of thinking will you choose?