Do You Feel the Urge to Move to the Country?

To get closer to nature. To escape. To feel free. To feel safe.

Here is a quick trip back in time, starting yesterday and ending when I was five years old…

My neighbor redid his patio recently. This produced a lot of decent-enough free lumber, and I find it difficult to resist free lumber—so I scavenged some of it. I did not even know for sure what I would do with it, though I suspected I might build a small shed out back. (And sure enough, I started working on that shed yesterday.)

My love of lumber started in the 90s when a friend and I built a small spec cabin on a piece of land we bought in Montana. He had done construction before, so I followed his lead and learned a bit about framing.

I ended up with a few pieces of land in Montana as a result of a lifelong desire to live on a big piece of property somewhere, someday. That desire kicked in when I was five years old, traveling through Ireland with my mother. It was something about the rolling green fields and the castles, I suppose. Suddenly I knew I wanted land.

During that trip, we saw several Martello Towers—defensive forts built to resist an invasion by Napoleon. Though that invasion never came, the towers remain—small, round sentinels scattered along the coast. In hindsight, they actually look fairly lonely and a bit grim—each protruding like a single tooth out of an open, treeless field.

Yet for some reason, those towers sparked something in me. I knew from the moment I saw one that I wanted to dwell on a large piece of land someday. My own little kingdom, with my own little castle. That desire only grew over the years.

Then, starting in the 90s, this desire was further fueled by a new sensation—a growing realization that government is not the benign entity we are taught it is (by government-paid teachers in government schools). Ruby Ridge happened. Waco happened. And I changed.

From that moment, a big piece of land also started to feel like a refuge.

Obviously nothing will keep you safe if Moloch and Mammon conspire to send their alphabet agents to harm you. Still, being further out, and more self-sufficient, feels safer than being in the city or the ‘burbs.

Adding to the feeling is the knowledge that if the bottom were to drop out of everything—as it feels like it might, these days—a well, some solar panels, and a bit of ground to run some chickens seems like a better insurance policy than just having paper-money savings and complete dependence on grocery stores and utility companies.

I never moved onto any of those pieces of land in Montana (though I still own one of them). But the impulse remains—driven by both dreams and fear.

My wife and I are not yet fully on the same page in this regard. Left to her own devices, she would be just fine in the ‘burbs. Left to my own devices, I would get 200 of my closest friends together and colonize an uninhabited planet somewhere. It’s a mismatch that we will solve, though. We solve everything eventually. It’s just a question of exactly when, where, and how.

All of this weighed heavily on my mind yesterday as I worked on the shed. So it was rather a strange coincidence that when I went looking for a #FreedomMusicFriday selection this morning, the first song I found was “New York City’s Killing Me.”

The refrain of the song—both its words and its beautiful harmony—nail it perfectly:

I’ve just got to get to get me somewhere,
Somewhere that I can feel free.

(Naturally, my friends The Starfire Codes and Jacqueline Rendell would say it’s not a coincidence at all, and no doubt they’re right.)

I have spoken about this land thing with them, and with Will Dearborn and Tesstamona and other fellow stackers. I know many of you share some of these feelings…

Wanting to live a more natural life, closer to the earth.

Wanting to live among friends and family in a more organic community.

Wanting to run.

Wanting to feel safe.

Wanting to feel free.

It is perfectly natural to yearn for a life of “apple trees and honeybees and snow-white turtle doves.” And to want to escape concrete jungles.

And that has reminded me to add a song from one of my favorite singers, Eivor Pálsdóttir (video below). She too has the yearning:

I wanna get beyond the skyscrapers.
I know that freedom waits somewhere behind,
The skyscrapers.

That too is a perfectly natural desire—one that the lyrics indicate Eivor is confronting personally. And her lyric, “I'd do it for you” seems to indicate that there is another person, whom she loves, involved in the decision. That speaks powerfully to me, given the decisions my wife and I are trying to make together.

I don’t want to live in fear, or make decisions out of fear, but I do also feel like it is fairly natural to want to move to the country in order to feel a little freer, and a little safer.

So I am going to post these two beautiful songs (plus a nostalgic bonus) and then simply ask an open-ended question:

How do you feel about all this?