Back to the Country: Part II

(Excerpted from Chapter 15: Back to the Land: The Grateful Unrich…)

In April I buy a culvert and hire a backhoe to put in another driveway off the highway. We buy a metal frame building kit from our crazy neighbor Fred and put it up near the road.

We drive to Tahlequah, Oklahoma where Jill drops me off. I have $1,000 in my pocket, most of what we have to our name. I hitch a ride with a trucker all the way to the Mexican border, then catch consecutive buses all the way to Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. I spend $400 on Guatemalan textiles, spend one night in a hotel, and head back north via Palenque, Mexico where I spend another $400 on Yucatan hammocks. Without sleeping I catch the next bus for the US border.

Back to the Country

(Excerpted from Chapter 15: Back to the Land: The Grateful Unrich…)

A man is rich in accordance to the number of things he can leave alone – Henry David Thoreau

The 69’ Reliant runs like a top all the way to a cheap Indian-run hotel in Hays, Kansas.  Through a canopy of frozen fog we enter the ghostly Ozarks.  We careen down ribbons of twisting highways in search of land.  We sleep one night in the cramped car behind a repair shop.  On Day #2 we sign a contract for deed on ten acres and an old mobile home fronting Highway 62 between Gateway and Eureka Springs in the northwest corner of Arkansas.

The asking price is $29,900. We offer $20,000 with $10,000 down and the balance payable monthly over five years.  They accept – fully expecting with one glance at our old car full of everything we own in this world that we will never be able to pay off the remainder and they will get the property back, along with our ten grand.  We later have a feeling that happened to some before us on this piece of land.