50 years off-grid: architect-maker paradise amid NorCal redwoods

I own 400 acres. You know, as a young person coming on the land, I could not believe that nobody wanted this. We came on the land and there was no water, no roads, no bridges. There was nothing but there were trees. Right here was a tree. I cut the tree and I made it fall. I created stresses in what's called the hinge here and it went perfect. Boom. The top broke and the tree went down, halfway down on that ledge. I said, uh-oh, we're in trouble. There's no way in the world we're going to lift this thing up. I tied a chain up on a tree up there and I have this World War II winch. I said, okay, Fannaray, you and I will get on here. One, two, three, jump. And we jumped and it went up, it went up. So then we just cranked it up and we built our bridge on top of the log. It's been there like 40 years. Everything on this farm that you'll see, there was nothing here. We never hired help. You got to remember, we came on the land, we had absolutely no money. This cost $8,500 to build. And so even doorknobs, see, we made our own doorknobs. The size of the house depended on the trees. There's no outside. We integrate the whole thing. I had no choice. I wanted to tuck it in and I got the house. I couldn't decide on how big the house was. I didn't make that decision. I just tucked it right into the, and that way it becomes a part of it. You know, we made the doors now. We cut the lumber, everything. But all of the wood here is redwood right off the farm. We never hired help. We poured the concrete, build the windows. We did the whole works. And you know, limitations are not necessarily bad. They actually inspire creation. Because if you can go to a store and buy it, it's too easy to just buy it. If you can't buy it, then you have to make it. So this is sort of a personal expression of an artistic form. And we did it for us to live in. Now, this is a third house. We first built a little cabin, and we did that in five half days. We got a cab, because my wife was five months pregnant. $2,800 built this. That got us through for 15 years. Children grew up, and they were there. Then we went to a three-bedroom house. The trees grew up around us, and we didn't have much sky. So one day, I sat down here, and I says, this is where I want to build the house. I had absolutely no idea of what I was going to do. And I looked up there, and I says, oh, there's the sky. There's the trees. I want that point of reference to be the beginning of the house. So I said, OK, I want this curve, because orientation and everything is perfect. And so then, whoa, in one second, that's established. So then I get up, and I look up here, and I says, oh, I don't want that ceiling to be that high and coming this way. So I said, let's bring it down to human scale. Then I turn around, and I said, oh, I want to look uphill. 20 seconds, the whole house was designed. But see, what's interesting about this kind of thing is that we had the sawmill. We had the lumber. All this, we harvested. Vanner and I were the laborers. Within the concept was every element required to come from start to finish. We were able to do the whole house without help, without contractors, without anybody. So what happens when you go from concept to completion without external elements, there's a personal sort of expression that you will not get if you have to have other people involved. OK, you OK? You know, it's real pretty looking up there. When it's raining, it looks like the rain's going to come right on your head. And you're there, and you kind of duck a bit, and the rain comes down. It's so nice. This is so cool. You know, you're sitting here. It's so different. But you know what's interesting? I've had two or three people over 20 years that cannot stand this house. Too much glass, no drapes. You know, I'm looking at it, I'm thinking, you know, what's the problem? Spiderwebs, you know, and, you know, they're beautiful. Now, these boards, they're full of knots and cracks, and it doesn't matter because the wood is not being used in tension, in compression. It's being used as stretching and pushing. So the wood is doing this, and it has 10 times more strength going this way and being, trying to pull it apart than it is to try to bend it. The boards are not the same thickness, the same width. They don't have to match up. So this is four layers. There's no beams, four layers of boards that make up this diaphragm. And you know, the parabolic forms are so fantastic in terms of structure. They're so strong because the curved form is what gives it the strength. An egg is very strong because of its shape. A boat or a car, automobiles, all these curved shapes, they're intentional. They're to give it strength because they have a thin material and they're getting the strength through the curvature. So buildings, they're economical. You know, the Romans were doing this. It goes back to Mesopotamia. They did arches way back. I mean, here, for the individual in the woods like this, you could build a little arch and you could actually fill it with 10 feet of dirt, and you could make a underground house quite easy without a lot of structure to hold it together. See, again, I got the ground coming up right here, and I like to hide the toilet. So I'm back here on the toilet, and it's kind of back. And see, even though it's all open, you feel a sense of privacy. And then I like the mirror. So basically, it extends the space double. So even in the bathroom, you didn't worry about privacy? No. What do you got? Some deer seeing you? I mean, come on. This is the kitchen. Now, I always like to have the kitchen where the ground comes up to the kitchen. We have pet deer that come and lie down right here. They love to watch us. A little fawn would jump over, and he'd be here, and we're washing dishes. And she's right there with her face. And I always like to bring the ground up to the kitchen level sink. I also like to keep the sill. I like to bring it right down the sink. And now you're like a child. You see the ground as a child sees it. When growing up, you're always looking down. It's nice to look parallel and see the tree, and see the ground, and see the leaves as a child. So these are all made. This is a dowel, and this is a piece of copper pipe. So I made the handle that way. And the drawer has got a slider on it. And you just, the drawers open up. And then try to use the light in the corner. I made a door that was connected. Rather than having a door half and half, I made most of the houses I made my own. It's redwood? Redwood, all redwood. By the way, this is redwood. I really like wood cutting boards built in. So basically you go from water, chop chop, onto the stove. But here I did the pizza oven, and it's preheated. So this is with stones, but it has vents from the stove from the outside to preheat it. I put in this wall a chimney. So I had no money to buy a stove. So I have a junkyard down there with a bunch of steel. I needed a stove. So what I do is I go down the junkyard, and I'm looking. I'm saying stove, stove, stove. Oh yeah, I saw this pipe. It was like 30 feet long. And I said, there's my stove. So this is a greenhouse in the fall, winter, and spring. And this extends the garden. Now, this broccoli plant is three years old, and I just picked a cluster of broccoli off of it. See, these are snap beans. Delicious. Why did you put something right below your house and not away from the house? Well, the thing is, it's so nice. You just walk down. Like this morning, I came down, and I got some crookneck, zucchini. See it right here? There's another one out to harvest. And then I got some bell pepper. I got some broccoli. And I went up, and I made an omelet for us to have breakfast, right? And so you just take it here. So also, it's sunken in the ground. So from the house, we don't see it. And does it help the growing season? Well, yeah. Well, in the winter, being sunk in the ground, it never freezes in here. So I've had tomatoes year-round. So your idea was to get out here and be self-sufficient, like food-wise? Yeah. You know, we went three months without ever shopping. See, the sustainability that I envision, the climate here, such with the greenhouses, you could do 75% for sure. I think that we need to think in those terms of becoming self-sustaining in food production, in energy, and financially. We get those three elements in place, and we can have a good life. But you have to have some money, and you have to have energy. So solar here is about, there would be a potential of doing hydraulic from the river. There'd be a power in it without hurting anything, but the laws won't allow it. Now those are solar panels that heat up the hot water for showers and hot water for the house through solar hot water. This is 25 watt. It's a closed system, so it doesn't take a whole lot of power. And so I'm circulating the water here to a water tank on the roof. You came out here and had solar when you first came out? No, no solar. We went 25 years without refrigeration, 17 years without a telephone, or even more. We had to put our own phone line for two and a half miles from the nearest neighbor, and we had it sitting on the ground, and we had mice and bear chewing the line, and I had to service it myself. This is the first house we built here. It was beautiful. It's kind of had its day. This whole thing in five half days, we built the whole thing with five people. $2,800 built this. We lived 15 years here. The children grew up in here. You know, we didn't have disposable diapers. We had cloth diapers. So she had a little basin. The kids would bathe there by the window, wash the diapers. We had a ringer washing machine to wash. I built a rack right here and hang the clothes in the winter on the clothesline, and then each of us would grab the rope, and we'd lift the clothes up there, and they dried up there. No big deal. We had, 17 years, we had a composting toilet in the barn. This was very, very comfortable. It had a 50-gallon drum for a stove here, and it had a ladder going up, and there's a big room up there. Why did you decide to do this shape? Well, it was the easiest and most, at least, four-by-eight module. These frames were built one on top of the other. There's 10 of them. Here's one frame that's complete. Now, it's got two beams going across here. They're bolted here, and then it's got two below that are bolted across, and then it's got one on top. Four-foot module, basically. So there's no waste of lumber. So what happened, we built these one on top of the other, all bolted. See, this is four-foot, and eight-foot is right here, from here down. So that's four-by-eight. So you bought those? You bought them already with the white on it, so we didn't have to paint it. It's just fiberboard. It's insulated board. I've got a hardware store. Well, Lumberyard. Then we put these guys here up, and they're four-by-eight, so they could move within, I don't know, half a day. We had all the sides up, and then these two-by-threes went on over that, and then insulation went down. Just sheets were rolled down. And then the tin was put over the top of that, and we had a wall, complete. And the roof, same thing. I mean, it was so easy. I'd never built a house that was so easy to build as this thing. Half days, five people. We had all the frames up. Then we had to come in with the glass. Now, like I told you, I don't design. I follow logic. So I had to brace this wall from tipping. So the first thing, without knowing what I'm going to do, I put a brace in. Boom. Now I got it braced. Then I wanted a door, because I wanted to walk out here. So I determined the door. So the door, I picked this size, two doors. And so then that determined the vertical here. Well, I got this vertical here. It was logical to go from here, this corner, that. So I got that corner. Then this pane was too big for the glass I had, so I had to cut it in half. So I put this here and that there. So then that duplicated, and the whole design was, it designed itself by following a logical sequence and doing what was necessary for structural integrity. Simplicity. Simplicity is difficult. It's easy to make things complex, but to do them simple and inexpensive. Is the A-frame just a more affordable way to build in general? Not necessarily. See, what we did is chopped it off, because all the heat goes up. By chopping it off, yeah, this is affordable. This is the most space for the least expense that I ever have done. It's the volume. There wasn't that much to heat. And then the most wonderful thing for us here, we had a gas light. We never had electricity. And my wife and I, we'd be here, and the boys would sit there and books, reading. That was our entertainment. They learned to read when they're like three to four years old. Now the stove is a interesting stove, very inexpensive, probably the cheapest thing you could buy. Top loaded, and it has vents on the side. So you put your wood in, and tubes go down. It's kind of like a rocket stove. And the wood was put in, and so we got the chimney going out, and that's what kept us warm. We actually cooked on here and dried, made toast and whatnot. Gas stove, and now we did 52 loaves bread a month. Baked all our bread. But anyway. So you slept downstairs? No, we slept up. There's two rooms up there. Okay. So they were homeschooled in here? Yep, homeschooled. Well, when we say homeschooled, and we did the three hours, they didn't do much more than, we did some geography. We did calligraphy. We thought calligraphy was important. You know, the people don't have calligraphy anymore. Yeah, I see some Narnia books here. Yeah, there you go. We taught them how to read early, and so then that was, and then they went out to milk goats. At five years old, they took over all the chores. They were out at seven o'clock in the morning with a lantern. There was a goat shed, and each one had a goat to milk. Their schooling was 90% outdoors. Yeah, right here. Because you have so much land, you need one of these. Well, yeah. How much land do you have? 400 acres. You know how much I own to the top of the mountain here? I go about a mile that way, top of the mountain there, and halfway up the mountain behind me. It's huge. Who did you buy the land from? There's a whole story there. It starts with Union Lumber Company. They owned the whole forest for hundreds of miles around here, and back in 1906, they had logged a lot of the old growth up north, and T.L. Johnson was second generation or something, so he owned this, and he found a market for the old growth timber, so every one of these clusters has or had a series of trees that were like five, six foot diameter, and so he come in and he cut every one of them. See, we talk about the logging, the original logging, so this is a railroad grade, so they hauled all the trees out by train, so they had tracks. There's a railroad track went down here, tracks across, and the trees, they took them down from the mountain. What they did is they cut them, and they rolled them down the hill, the whole tree like that, the trees like this. They rolled them down from the top to get them down. You know what they did? All of these trees went for railroad ties for Chile and Argentina to make railroads. All the big red ones, and these trees were like 10, 11 feet, and they're huge, and then the train, they were able to do rigging where they could pick up these logs and put them on the train, but they did horrible damage to the forest. What they did, man tries to make the most profit for the least amount of work, so they cut the trees in the spring, all the needles and the branches half dried during the summer, and then they set the whole damn forest on fire, and they did this like eight, ten years in a row because they wanted to burn the leaves and the branches, so it'd make it easier for them to get the trees out, and they completely changed the ecology of the forest by doing that process. That was the trees they cut in 1906 to 1920. There were two here, but the original tree might have been something back there. This is like, these are clones. These are fairy rings, as they're called. All of these trees are feeding off the original, and they're all clones. The original trees were this stump here, and that stump there, and there's a couple behind. They cut those, and then out sprout, regeneration of redwoods. There's two ways, from seed, and also from sucker growth. You see all these little babies here have a potential to become a giant tree. So nature, there's a little space here. You get a little light because they cut some branches. It's trying to build, and this is incredible growth. This is like one year from here to here because it's feeding off the old trunk. Now that tree is probably not much more than 100 years old, and if we were to release some of the competition around it, in 50 years it would be like this. It would be like twice the size of that. So anyway, these are growing well. This would be saved. This would be saved. You take one, two, those two out, and you take two more out. And by doing that, to get photosynthesis, you have to have growth. And by thinning, you're going to get more photosynthesis, carbon-oxygen exchange. You're going to get more of it by cutting trees out than if you don't cut them. So people say, oh, you're cutting redwoods. Well, you could be cutting them detrimentally, or you could be cutting them beneficially for the ecology and for the forest. So there's extremes. Human beings go to extremes in whatever they do. The redwood tree, you got the environmentalists. They don't like cutting any trees. And then you got the industry that cuts them all, and they're cutting trees they shouldn't cut. Here's the original tree was in this space. We're talking probably 20,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, and it rotted. So these are clones. This is a second, third generation, this second or third generation, and this is probably third or fourth generation. So it's happening. The conditions for growing redwoods, nature is enhancing, and so the trees are getting bigger and bigger and better than they were before. Humankind, when we manage things, we deplete the resource, and we don't put back what we take out. These are all children. These are genetically the same tree, all this whole bunch here. And that one there is a child of this one here. And look at how much, you talk photosynthesis. This tree, it saves so much carbon, right? And look, there's a tree now growing on top of the rotten stump. So now it's feeding. That's an oak tree that's growing on top. Pretty awesome. Now here again, we're not going to touch these, but if you were to cut that one and that one and that one, within 50 years, these trees would be enormous. They'd be like that. I did what's called a non-industrial timber management plan. So every fifth acre, every tree was measured for the height and the diameter, and so that inventory was gained. And so by the inventory, you can get the growth rate. So now you know how many board feet a year per acre is gained with a growth rate. I planted 40,000 trees in the forest, and 40,000, see, I earned my living with Christmas trees. So there were 40,000 trees that we harvested 1,600 every year over 19 years. This is the one and only tree that I've ever seen and grown that grew from seed naturally. I found it under a redwood, and this is three years old, and this is a growth this year that it put on just from spring to now. Now this genetically, because it's one of a million that has grown from seed, would be a fantastic seed if you wanted to clone it. Now the way I clone redwoods, and I've done thousands of them, I've done cloning for geneticists, and so I take a little thing like this, and I strip these needles off, and I get a knife. I found out it was better to cut it at a slant so it's like a wedge, and then I dip it into a septic so it doesn't rot. And then I have a mix of perlite and peat moss for a medium that I stick it in. I dip it into a hormone, NNA, stick it, and within six weeks I got a wart. And then within 12 weeks you got roots, and within two years you have a tree that's twice as big than grown from seed. I was getting 85-90 percent success, and to get that kind of rate of success you have to do the process that I just described. But now this is a conifer, and it's Douglas fir, and I did 2,000 clones of this for my own use. This is a one tree out of 40,000 that made the best Christmas tree. And when I took the cutting, I'm taking this, and I'm trying to make a tree out of this. The genetic characteristic of this thing is a branch, right? I took it off of a ranch. Well this thing, the top wants to be a branch, and it's taken 20 years to get it into a tree. It's finally recognizing that it needs to straighten itself out, and now it's starting to create a leader. So the tree can't figure out where's the main stem, and it keeps wanting to be a branch. This whole thing is. You grew Christmas trees? Yeah, I did 40,000. That's how we earned a living. We sold 1,600 a year on mom and pop. We made 65,000 bucks in 1993 on a Christmas tree lot. That's how we paid the farmers through Christmas trees. So you can love the trees, but also use them to make a living. Well, you know, here we got bare land. It's got no trees on it. We plant 4,000 trees per acre. So now we got trees growing, so all of these trees are actually doing beneficial for the environment. You have to understand the ecology, and what's good for the ecology, and let decision based on environmental factors rather than profitability. Short-term gains are not good for forest management. You'll have to look at a horizon of about 75 to 100 years. You can't look for the quarterly dividend on your stock. See that cluster of trees there? There's probably $10,000 worth of timber, but you take an old growth tree, they're worth $250,000 to $300,000 per tree, and that was like 40 years ago. So you see, that's why people that, you know, why does the man that owned a piece of land have a right to something that's 2,500 years old? That should belong to the people. I always say it's very unfortunate that when Teddy Roosevelt, Muir Woods, when they were saving Yosemite and all, that they didn't make a proclamation and say every redwood tree that's so big or so tall or so old is a historical monument. Take them out of the public domain. See, it would be wonderful to have 1,000 trees like this, and this property could do that, and then what a park it would make. Now I'm trying to create a way to create an income for the people that will take on this operation after I am deceased, and in order to do that, glamping or camping is allowed. Can you imagine coming out of urban life, working all day on a computer with a thousand people and noise and what have you, spend a weekend here? Privacy, no noise, there's logging operations going all around me and you don't even know it. I mean, this is absolutely, I thought the logging industry was going to be a problem, but it certainly isn't. See, this is some furniture I'm doing. It's a redwood tree that's sliced. See, this tree had a fire, so the tree is trying to heal. So these things came up around this dead core until they met, and then the rings are going in a circle. So it healed, so this will always be here, but the tree itself is not affected by this injury. It healed itself. Here again, these are redwood rounds. See, the log got cut and I sliced them, and then laid them out. But this little stone wall, you like to sit where you're feeling embraced. So I'm introducing landscaping of native plants. I got rhododendron, I got rhododendron there, and this is a beautiful tree. Now this is oak and then there's bay laurel there, so in the evening you got the sound of the water and you got the fragrance of the bay laurel. This is going to be the bathhouse. There's going to be composting toilet, there's going to be an on-demand hot water system, a wash basin, a little deck. Come up on the deck and you got a view of the river from the potty. You know, the idea is to try to make it so that your senses are kind of pleasing. I think it would be fantastic for a weekend getaway. There are so many elements that are contrary to the future of people having a productive, healthy life. Now a lone corn will not pollinate, so what I do with that, kind of get this pollen on my palm and I come over here and I hand pollinate. I kind of touch the silk like that. You take the food production, because there's so many people, it's become industrialized to where the soils have no minerals. The minerals and the food you buy, they're full of chemicals. This is a blueberry, raspberry, and boysenberries. I have about 10 pounds of frozen blueberries. You see, you just can't buy stuff with the same flavor. We were canning. Our record for applesauce was 157 quarts in one morning. We canned 100 gallons of apple juice in one day and we made the machines to do it with. See, you can't do this without machinery. The first thing I bought when I had no money was a backhoe, because that made the difference of 20, 30, 40 people. So rather than being in a commune with 100 people, I've got backhoes and D7 cats, and so then I had the skills, I had the background, and so the equipment made the difference. You got to remember again, she and I built all this, just the wife and I. Vanneray and I built this by ourselves, this whole building, and these buildings here. There was nothing here. Is this a Quonset house? Yeah, it is. I bought the frame, the metal, and then these are all works in progress. Potential projects here for coffee tables and even jewelry. I've got here little scraps that could be kind of, this has character, that could be something. So all of this stuff is wood that's drying. Look at this stuff, it's beautiful. This is going to be kind of a side table. All these are potential projects. There's sculptures all over the place and I don't sell anything. And then these drawers are all full of extra things and these are saw blades and these are used spark plugs. This is a motor to a pump that actually is pumping water out of the river. It's a backup motor. I always like to have one or two of everything in case something goes wrong. I'm not going to run out of water. We made 157 quarts of applesauce one morning by using this machine to make the apples to chop them up. These chairs, I'm kind of modifying them. Generators, this is propane. And then this is for manufacturing. There's machines to cut steel and iron and welding. So I can do anything I want in steel, copper, brass, wood, concrete. So I can build buildings out of concrete and so I have the skills for all of that. You know, what happens, a young man comes out of education. In education, they sort of emphasize artistic beauty and all that. You get out in the real world and an architect is nothing but a bookkeeper. You don't get to really express yourself. And then here, I could take it from the tree, cut the lumber to size, to mill it the way I wanted, right to the finish, and I could have control all the way. So these chairs, I kind of made these so they're easy. You got handles. What's interesting is they're made out of the same board. You get one board and cut it up in different ways and you make a chair. The legs are 14 inches, the seat's 14, the back's 14. 12 screws put the chair together. They're real easy to build. And then this is a growth ring. This is in the winter where it grows very slow and hard. In the summer, it grows fast and soft. I build a lot of these. I build maybe 15 of them. Some of them are 30, 40 years old. Steel holding. Yeah, it depends. Some people, you know, they like to get in a chair and they like to go this, you know, they're leaning back and I'm thinking this is sort of lived this life expectancy. This is ready to come down. It was built to last for as a temporary building and it's been here 51 years, so. Do you think our home should have a lifespan? Well, it depends. You could make it last for a thousand years, but you could make it also that it lives 10 years. You know, you can choose. I started doing this maybe 10 years ago. I did one sculpture. The very first sculpture was this one over here. And I thought, well, that's pretty cool. So then I started doing more. Pretty soon I've got like 20, 30, 40 of these. And I decided, well, you know, I need a place to put them. And then I built the gallery to have a place to put them. I take pieces of wood that already have character and I don't really, I'm not really a creator. I'm an improviser. Here's a piece of wood laying on the ground. It looks like a rotten piece of wood. I thought, well, I'm going to throw that in a fire. And I thought, well, since I'm going to throw in a fire, what the hell. Get the chainsaw and I'm starting carving it. And then these are chainsaw marks. Now this one here, it took me like two years and I'd walk around it. And then one day I said, oh yeah, it would, because I didn't want to do any harm. So I said, okay, it'd be good to cut this little piece off here. Six months later, I'd cut a little piece and oh yeah, okay. This table is a root. The trunk is right here. I found it in a river and I towed it out and it sat out there for like 10 years in the rain. Then when we built the house, it was perfect. So what I did, I sliced it and then these parts all come off. See, the glass is one piece and then the parts just come off. So it was very difficult to decide. This is getting big. How big? You've got to make it manageable to be able to take it off. And these are getting small. So the glass gives the effect of water almost. Well, yeah, it looks like a pond with islands. One of the greatest teachers in the world is nature. Let's look at a seashell. Let's look at the hyperbolic paraboloid mathematical equations. Look at the bees and the construction of the honeycomb. Nature, if we think of and look at nature, nature is smart. Nature does things in a very important way. And we are not smarter than nature. We often think we are, but we're not. And so that's your schools. Look at these shapes, look at the negative, the background, look at the foreground and see how all the variations. Again, we variations and repetition create a music and whether it's art or architecture, and I can explain it in this wall. There's a repetition of these elements going down. Then we go around the wall and we start now looking. You know, Beethoven was boom, boom, boom, the knock on the door. So boom, boom, boom. See, I've got, I've got one, two, three, one, two, three, four. It's a melody. Now here's a pair, you know, boom, boom. This is kind of like the drums beating. This is a beautiful little thing. Right in there. You know, I developed a system of stonecrete. This is structural. Van Aray and I, from this wall here to the fireplace over here, we did it in two days, half one day and half the next day. What happens with stone walls, normally we have what's called masonry and you have a mortar that's made out of sand and lime and cement. The mortar in an earthquake rattles and falls apart. This is a stone faced concrete wall and this is structural. This actually takes the lateral loads, meaning wind and earthquake loads are being taken through the diaphragm. This roof is a diaphragm and all the forces are spread out among this curvilinear form. You know, I developed my own philosophies and my own ways through trial and error and through experience. And so then, you know, I have my own way. Oh look, what's interesting. See that tank over there is a reserve tank and water's bubbling over it. So the solar pump is now pushing too much water out of an extra, I've got five different reserve tanks. I've got a solar pump that's pumping out of the river and that's for irrigation. And then I have drinking water coming out of the mountain up there. Two separate systems. Wonderful water for drinking. Coming right out of the mountain up there. I dug a cave into the mountain. I have the water pipe from there, goes down here, goes up the mountain up there. I did this in one day by myself. My wife had leukemia and I was the only one. She put water in the mixer. This whole wall, including the benches, were done in one day by myself. That's how efficient this can be. I can't believe what we did, just the two of us without having any professional help or anybody. You got to remember, we were doing dawn to dusk for 43 years, seven days a week. How many people are prepared to do that? And yet it was fun. So this is a second glamping site. I did this all by hand. You wouldn't believe what I was doing here by myself. The kitchen is going to be below. Got water coming right out of this hose. I'm thinking of putting a sink here and you wash and then you take this bowl and you go out and dump it on a fern so you're not dumping it in the river. And then there'll be a burner. And then I had to bring stones down and build this little wall. You see, in order to avoid a tunnel effect, I could have brought this all the way out there, but it would have spooked you from up there looking down the river. So I've kept that back and then I created this frame for a composition. You're not in a cave. You're out here and you can feel the openness and the softness of change from inside to outside. This was so much fun working here. Look at the maple just sort of waving. I love the textures here. You've got the thimble berries that are wide leaf and then you have the tiny texture and you got a five-finger ferns and then you got the hoard wash growing on the rocks. I think this is awesome. You see, basically these houses don't need any kind of adornment. This is a bonsai. It's 51 years old and then some. It was here when we came on the land. Last year it was a beautiful bonsai. See, last year it had a root right here and it got torn off. This thing was up. It was kind of up like this so it got wiped out with the high water. The root, there's a root still anchored there and that's holding this together. So I trimmed it a little bit and trying to get the bonsai back. There used to be hundreds of little tiny fries and fingerlings right in here. There's a seven-year cycle between the egg and there's 3,000 eggs that are hatched. Three out of 3,000 survive and come back to spawn. There's a cycle of birth, growth, decline and dying. It's no big deal. People make a big deal. We're all going through that cycle. I'm actually okay if I were to pass away tomorrow because I've done what I wanted to do. I put this little shelf in here and here it is, you know, maybe 35 years and it's still here. Here it is underwater and I didn't think it would last. I got to do things here that I couldn't have done. So basically this was a very good thing for me, for my own satisfaction. And look from nothing, no money, we were able to accumulate all this over a lifetime. It's too bad that I can't start all over again and go from here. If I could go 50 years from here forward, oh man, I just can't dream of what this could be like. But I can't. I just don't have, I could save trees for a thousand years by putting them in a legal form, but I can't live that long. But you know what? In my mind I can see what it could look like. So I start a process that I can enjoy because I can see what the potential is. So now every one of these tags, see that tag there? That tree can never be cut. It doesn't belong to the land anymore. It belongs to the non-profit. I have a thousand of those. The light tips are all this year's growth. Now the trees that have the sharpest points are the ones that are growing the fastest. The ones that are more roundish are slower growing. I could go on and tell you so much about this tree. We could be here till midnight.