Abide By The Land

Back when we were still living in basement apartments, Ken and I once drew a detailed imagining of our dream life. In it, we sketched a house with chickens, a garden, kids running around, a view of the mountains, a wind generator. We aspired to be real homesteaders. Not the guys who came out here in wagons but a modern day homesteader. Here’s one definition from a current homesteader on YouTube.

“At its simplest, homesteading is when an individual couple or family relocates to a piece of land and endeavors to live a life of independence and self-reliance. You don't need to have a full 160 acres, although you do need to have some land to use for resources. You don't have to live off grid, although many do. You don't need to have a presence on social media. I certainly don't. And you don't need to sell vegetables and you don't need to have a full barn of livestock. The heart of modern homesteading is to independently take care of as many of your own needs as possible. And for every homesteader out there, there's a personal, unique way that they've figured out how to do just that.”

Okay, so it’s someone trying to independently take care of as many of their own needs as possible. That makes it sound like an affordable option, right? And maybe it once was, maybe it could still be. But with the price of land sky rocketing in a lot places, is it really possible these days? Living in Alpine Ranches, we certainly never achieved this illustrious status. Lots of other people I talked to dream of this life too, also without much luck. It’s a high bar. Back in the early aughts, I spearheaded an effort to create Big Hollow Food Coop here in Laramie. And that’s when I got to know Gary and Celeste Havener. I wrote an article about them and visited their land. Immediately, I knew I’d met the real deal, a couple who’d achieved the homesteading zenith. Living in a sustainable little house on a piece of land in the mountains, growing their own food, horses, chickens, honeybees. They made it look idyllic. But once I started getting to know them, I realized, ooooh, this life has not been easy to achieve. And now that they’re getting older, it’s extra hard to sustain. So I thought it might be in order to let them take off the rose colored glasses on the whole “homesteading” thing. And maybe offer a few pointers. Ladies and gentlemen…the Havener’s of Centennial Valley.

One of my favorite things in the universe is making the trek out to the Centennial Valley in southeast Wyoming to visit Gary and Celeste. You drive across the prairie, take a left at Sheep Mountain and wind all the way into the narrowest corner of the valley. At their place, I have to park, open a barbed wire gate, pull through, park, close the gate, all while their three horses watch me nearby in hopes I’ll forget so they can escape. It’s winter so I can’t drive all the way down to their house. I park at a snowbank and start tromping the quarter mile in over the wind-hardened snow. When I reach their cute little round house built into the hillside, Celeste comes out on the porch to greet me, her waist length silver ponytail swinging.

“How are you?” I ask.

“I’m good,” she says.

“It seems like it’s been forever since I’ve seen you.”

“I was thinking that too. My god, how long has it been?”

“I know.”

Gary comes out, a silver braid down his neck, big leather moon boots on his feet. Then we go out to see how things are on High Horse Farm. That’s the name they use to sell vegetables, eggs, honey….

“Okay,” Gary begins. “So we've got a barn to shelter the horses and hay, and I put my new wood shop in there since I sold my old one. It's very small, but it works. And we've got 1, 2, 4, 4 high tunnels out there. Self-made high tunnels out of cattle panels, which have been awesome. So we have like 20 inches of top soil here. That is unheard of and we took advantage of that and we've grown, like I said, four high tunnels. We supplement it with our horse manure and compost and such.”

“Then this is your sauna down here,” I say.

“Well, yeah. It's epic,” says Gary, taking crunching steps over the snow. “It was one of those things we had to build, because we used to do sweat lodges, but that was a long time ago. And now we have a sauna, basic Scandinavian style sauna with a wood stove.”

We mosey over to the barn. On the way, I see their bee boxes stacked up next to the tunnels and we walk past a child’s sled in the yard.

“ And is this the sled that you guys use to kind of like pull all your groceries?” I ask

“Yes,” says Celeste.

“One of many,” Gary adds. “Plastic sleds are great.”

“We do. You know, we walk in and so it's not the bringing in that's annoying,” says Celeste. “It's the taking out, taking out the garbage, taking out the laundry.”

“The propane bottle,” continues Gary. “A hundred pound or a hundred unit propane tank has been interesting lately for the, since we moved the freezer down here, we have a propane refrigerator or freezer. So I have to put the propane in the back of the sled every so often.”

Celeste is being modest. It’s not just annoying lugging that stuff. It’s hard and their health hasn’t been great the last few years. They’re both around 70 now. But they just keep putting on their wooden snowshoes to pull that sled up and down to their truck. Then we reach the horse barn.

“Who's this?” I ask.

“This is Obie,” says Celeste.

“Hi Obie.”

“Obie is a mustang,” says Celeste. “With the heart of gold.” Obie sniffs at that. “He's like, is it edible?”

“And this is a barn that we salvage the wood off of a remodel and built the entire barn pretty much,” says Gary.

“Really?”

“Celeste pulled the nails out of every one of these boards,” Gary says.

“ What are you doing there, Gary?” I ask.

“I thought I could feed these horses so they don't eat your coat or your microphone,” he says, rummaging. “Grain in galvanized trash cans works great. And we have a stray barn cat that keeps all of the rodents out of this area. Oh, that's, so we don't really worry about the horse grazing. We call it Lucy.”

“Although I think it might be Louis, but we're not really sure,” says Celeste.

Then we visit their newest addition. An older model camper they’ve been remodeling.

“And then our new camper which we're gonna try to do some glamping, you know, a little bit of extra income,” Celeste says. “Beats driving to town for a job. We'll see how it plays out. But I think, you know, I'd like to be able to share this place with other people to be able to let them come out and enjoy the sunrises and the solitude.”

“I mean, the sky in itself, you know, at night,” says Gary.

“It's amazing,” I say. “This last summer, were you able to sleep outside?”

“Yeah,” says Celeste. “Sometimes we are eight year olds.”

This camper could offer a new revenue stream. With their health issues in recent years, they’ve had to downsize their farm production. All the chickens are gone now. They also might sell a high tunnel. But really, after everything they’ve been through the last few years? It’s a miracle they’re still out here. A few years back, they seriously considered moving away from this paradise. I want to hear the story of that journey. So we go inside to sip tea at their kitchen table by the woodstove. Gary stokes the fire.

“It starts with one match,” he says. “It just has very good suck on it.”

“That sounds like it,” I agree.

“Yeah,” he chuckles. “My stove sucks.”

A great sense of humor is clearly part of their secret to how they made this life work for all these decades. But I ask them what others they have up their sleeve. Gary and Celeste love a good story. They say it all started back in 1974 when they were city kids from Kansas. Just 18 and 19 years old. The first house they ever lived in together was a tepee. They hauled it around in the back of their ‘53 Chevy pickup. They could get it unloaded and assembled in 40 minutes flat.

“ We just traveled up and down the Rocky Mountains and camped randomly, and then when we needed money, we'd just stay someplace and work, or spend a winter somewhere and work,” says Celeste.

“Then you'd rent a place at that point?”

“In the winter when the snow got so deep,” says Gary.

“But the teepee was pretty perfect because it's easy to set up,” says Celeste. “It's roomy. It's airy. It doesn't smell like a tent. You can have a fire inside. So it was fantastic.”

Can you imagine someone living this way nowadays? They cooked over a fire, stewing beans and deer meat. One time they even killed a jack rabbit.

“In our mind's eye, sagebrush, sage herb, can't be that much different,” Celeste says. “So he stuffed this rabbit with sagebrush, and the poor thing tasted like dirty socks.”

“I don't think the coyotes ate it,” Gary says.

Up in Washington, they picked Douglas fir cones, in Sheridan, Wyoming they built houses. They took whatever odd jobs they could find and saved up enough to head to the next powwow and then went and got new jobs afterwards

“We never went hungry,” says Gary. “We always worked, wherever we went and we would save, I mean, in those days, money was a totally different animal and we would work hard for several months. And buy gear and save money. And then we'd think, yeah, we're going, we're on the road. And we'd go on the road, and when we ran low on money, we'd make more.”

They did this for three years. Until one time, they were traveling through the Laramie Valley of southeast Wyoming when a gnarly blizzard hit. They ended up staying for the winter. In exchange for rent, they fixed up a rickety old cabin hanging off the side of a mountain.

Celeste says, “Then we found out that the man who had rented us the house did not own the house.”

“Oops.”

“And the owner came in and he was not happy, as you can imagine,” she continues.

But job offers kept rolling and so they returned to Centennial for a second winter and finally it stuck. They found another cabin to fix up in exchange for rent and lived in it for six years. All this time, they believed they couldn’t have children. But then a miracle happened.

“My wife wasn't supposed to have a child. Period.”

“I got pregnant,” Celeste says. “And we decided we needed something a little more secure.”

“We needed land,” Gary says. “ And in the same time right before we got pregnant we went to the Black Hills Alliance gathering in Rapid City which was huge and there were huge workshops there about how we’ve got to take care of ourselves.”

“One of the workshops was on how to build a log house,” says Celeste.

“How to build a log house from scratch,” Gary adds.

“Which sounds crazy,” Celeste continues, “But in a three day workshop, Gary was able to turn around and say, I think I can build a house. And they were saying, you know, find land, find land, dig in, become community. And so we did.”

So they went back to Centennial where a woman had offered to sell them a piece of property.

“She was willing to give it to us contract-for-deed,” Celeste says. “I mean, we could not have afforded land had it not been contract-for-deed.”

Can you imagine such a thing nowadays? Someone selling 50 acres of mountain land owner-financed where you don’t go to a bank to get financing…you put your money down and the property owner carries the rest until you pay them off? Me neither. Gary was skeptical though because the land was prairie, not up in the mountains. But they looked at it again and decided, let’s do it. And shook hands on the deal. Then they got started building a house. At the time, they could cut firewood for free on National Forest lands. They’d save money building a log home with logs they collected in the woods.

“Gary had always wanted to build a hogan, you know, a six sided structure,” says Celeste. “Well, we ended up breaking each side in half. So it became 12 sided. Which turned out to be a godsend. Because we could move the logs. The logs were easier to move. I could peel the logs easier. And so yeah, then we started in. Gary built the house. I peeled the logs.”

Gary sketched out the design of the house on typing paper.

“It took me two and a half years to get to the point where we actually moved into the main house,” says Gary. “We lived in the tepee in the yard, basically what's the front yard, and then we built the front porch, which was 8 by 14 like an Arctic entrance. And come fall, we just put the wood stove in there that we had from the other house.”

With their newborn son, they lived in what’s now their mud room while they built the rest of the house. Celeste worked at a nearby cookhouse. Gary switched off building his own house with jobs building other people’s. So, okay, this is the hardcore part of the story. The part where maybe not many young couples today might venture. But don’t worry, when winter came, some local women talked them into living in a mobile home for free. Only catch was that it came with a teenage boy.

“All we had to do was feed him,” says Celeste. “And we had no idea how much a 16 year old kid could eat.”

“We went through an elk in 3 months,” says Gary.

“And we were close enough that Gary, he could ski over here and work on the house in the winter. And the snow actually worked to his advantage in that he had the logs.”

“We put the logs in here,” says Gary. “In the middle of the house. And underneath them were his tools. But as the snow built up I put a snow cave in here. But the snow itself worked almost like scaffolding, right?”

Then when summer came, they moved back into their mud room.

“In the good weather, I would work on the house. A lot of times Celeste would be at work and our son, we'd put him in a cradle board because we grew up with people like that. And we put him in the cradle board and I'd put a nail in the wall over there, and I'd hang my son up there. And I'd tie a bottle on there and his toys and he had his hands free and he could watch.”

They could have built right next to the road and brought in utilities on the cheap. But, in their usual manner, they didn’t choose the easy way. They built over the hill so they’d get the view of the creek. That meant they couldn’t afford to bring that infrastructure all the way down. So they bought some old school solar panels even though their neighbors all said it was too cold for solar. But Gary and Celeste knew it was the amount of sun, not heat, that made solar work.

“Truly it was a Fred Flintstone array,” says Celeste.

“Oh, our first fuse box was a lunchbox from my son, and that was great. It had a door and fuses go in there and it worked,” Gary says.

Meanwhile, their ranching neighbors were watching all this with raised eyebrows. But looking back, the Havener’s realize they couldn’t have succeeded at homesteading without the help of their community. It’s a theme we’re hearing in nearly all these off grid stories, right? But in the Havener’s case, their neighbors liked the fact that these young whipper snappers took an interest in doing things the old fashioned way.

“One of our aunties in Centennial gave us a propane refrigerator, which we'd never heard of,” says Celeste. “We had another couple give us a gas powered washing machine that had a Briggs and Stratton engine, like a little motorcycle thing. It was interesting.”

“The buy-in we got from older people particularly,” Gary interjects.

“They were excited to have a kid in the valley and younger people,” Celeste says. “And they had been through things. Aladdin lamps, all these different things that they knew, how to trim a kerosene lamp. Your chimney gets dirty – you use newspaper.”

But Gary and Celeste also weren’t afraid to try new fangled inventions their neighbors were skeptical of.

“We had an outhouse,” says Gary. \”But when he started being potty trained, I said, you know, you can't potty train a kid and have him go out in a blizzard. So we got a composting toilet.”

“It's worked well for us, but you get to know your shit,” says Celeste. “So to speak.”

“Yeah, you deal with your own shit, for sure, and the thing is, is with a composting toilet, it's aerobic,” Gary says. “Your septic system is anaerobic. That's why it's so foul. Compost toilets are made so that you have a tray that you pull out periodically. And by the time you get to that point, this stuff has already broken down. It's not foul.”

Maybe you’re like me and don’t want to ask but are really wondering, so what do they do with this “humanure” after that?

“We put it on trees,” says Gary. “Actually we have two fine specimens of Doug fir out here. 50 yards from the house is where I've always taken it because I just feel like, because I'm not going to put it on foodstuffs and I don't want it around the well. So I take it out there. But those trees went through pine borer beetles and droughts and everything else. And they've grown probably 30 feet since we lived here.”

Besides the poo, living a homestead life might sound hunky dory until you get up close and personal. But the Havener’s are willing to live in a way most Americans just aren’t anymore. Even at their age. Gary recently turned 70.

“If we both fall down sick and can't get the firewood in here. Yeah, we're probably going to be frozen in icicles in here sometime.”

But their younger selves made sure to take good care of their future selves. They built a home that protects them.

“This house is built in such a way that one, it's earth burned,” says Celeste. “So there is some warmth there in the summer. This angle of the sun is such that it's shaded so it stays nice and cool in the winter as you can see right now the sun is coming in and so we get great solar gain.”

So eventually, after a few years of slowly but surely building their house, they had a beautiful home.

“ So the south side is basically all windows and totally without intent, when we built the house, the rafters are such that in the summer there, the eaves block the sun,” Celeste tells me. “So the house stays nice and cool no matter how warm it is outside. But in the winter, the eaves are short enough that they let in the sun. And then there's the cathedral ceiling. So even though it's not a large house, it feels bigger than it really is.”

It hadn’t been easy to make this life a reality. But things were about to get a lot harder.

The Havener’s moved into their 12-sided house and Celeste started going to college to become a soil scientist. Their son Ishmael meanwhile was experiencing a rather unusual childhood. That’s back when winters were much harsher.

“January when he was a kid, we had four foot of snow everywhere you walked,” says Gary. “And it was just, it was like living in the poles.”

They had several snowmachines but they were always broken down. So little Ish had to do a lot of wallowing in the snow.

Gary says, "During kindergarten, we just put a snowsuit on and he'd get his cross country skis and–”

“--we'd hook a lead rope,” finishes Celeste.

“I would pull him because you know, it was early morning, he's going to school and he had his snowsuit on and his skis and he had his poles and his backpack and and I put a lead rope on from my belt and he just sat back there and glides,” says Gary. “Grade school when he was in Centennial School, I think that was kind of a golden time. He had friends, we had a lot of kids in the valley at that time, and they all went to school together, and they had some good teachers, and then in junior high, they'd bus our kids to town. And that takes an hour and a half each way.”

But around junior high, when Ish was busing into the big city of Laramie, he realized something. Wait a sec, I’m not living a life like the other kids.

“It was the classic junior high thing where suddenly you're hyper aware of income,” says Celeste. “And so yes, we have never been over the top wealthy, but suddenly he was seeing people who were wealthy and he was seeing things.”

“And he did get embarrassed,” says Gary.

He was conscious of the fact that he was living a very different lifestyle.

Off gridding is all about circumventing the traditional economic strata. It’s about saying to the world, I refuse to be rich OR poor. A concept that’s hard for a teenager to wrap their head around.

“We didn't put a mortgage on this, we didn't do anything,” says Gary. “We paid for it with cash each month, or with the money we made.”

“Well, and there were those things, like the windows,” Celeste says. “We had plastic over the windows the first winter. And as we could afford it, the glass went in. I think my parents paid for the well.”

“No, that was my parents.”

“It was a thousand dollars,” Celeste continues. “Back then it was a lot of money. And so yeah, I think when he was young, it wasn't a big deal. It was kind of cool. People liked it because they could climb, the kids could climb around on the rafters and stuff. But then he wanted to fit in and it wasn't a fitting-in kind of house.”

This kind of pay-as-you-go plan requires a huge amount of patience and living in less than ideal circumstances, sometimes for years. That likely sounds burdensome to most Americans. Why save and live in such austerity for years when you can just put it on credit? But that plan paid off for the Havener’s. They’re now debt free. These days, Ish lives in Denver and doesn’t even like to go camping because he says he had a lifetime of it growing up. As the years passed, the weather changed, got a lot warmer, and Celeste and Gary were able to grow more vegetables.

“In the winter time when we first moved here the snow covered the fences,” says Celeste. “There were no fences And it stayed like that all winter. There was a lot more moisture than we have now.”

They put in several high tunnels and started a local farmer’s market in Laramie where they could sell their harvests.

“My background is soils, and soil microbiology and Indigenous ag,” says Celeste. “And so I approached the downtown merchants and said, I think we could have a market here. And the market just blossomed. I mean, it was amazing.”

Now that farmer’s market is one of Laramie’s pride and joys. Mostly they grew and sold a lot of greens.

“We have cool short seasons, and what likes cool short seasons?” says Celeste. “Greens.”

“Edible greens,” says Gary. “Asian greens are real hardy.”

“And then we decided we wanted to do tunnels,” says Celeste. “I mean, we have hundred mile an hour winds every winter, not all the time obviously, but randomly, we can have a couple of feet of snow dropped in one night. And then we started a small CSA, which is Community Supported Ag. So essentially we grew for, at one point, 12 families.”

“We delivered every week, once a week,” says Gary. “And then we had our eggs. We still had chickens before the fire and then we had honey at the end of the year, we'd always offer up a pint of our honey. I laid some, a bag of tomatoes off on one of our ranch neighbors over here, and, and that year he let me on his place to go elk hunting. Things like that.”

But then two things hit hard, back to back. Sure, the warmer weather meant better gardening. But it also meant forest fire. And the Havener’s are surrounded on three sides by national forest.

“Stereophonic fire,” says Celeste.

“What's that?”

“That's what we had during one of the fires,” says Gary. “It went all the way around us. It was burning Sheep Mountain. It was burning all the way around in the south and west.”

And here’s where living remotely can really get scary.

“Being out in the tooleys, it takes two hours for the sheriff to show up here. It takes who knows how long to get the fire department here and we used to be on it. So you got to take care, clear your perimeter. Well, the last fire, I was out wearing respirators trying to tend the farm,” Gary tells me.

Each summer, they kept an eye on the fire danger. But then came the granddaddy of all fires – the Mullen Fire of 2020, the second largest fire in Wyoming history. Second only to the Yellowstone Fire of 1988.

“It was strange because we'd been up in the mountains getting firewood and we were like, oh my god, It's so dry,” says Celeste. “And then the next thing we know just, the fires over there. I'm like, we need to pre-evacuate. And Gary's like, look at the distance. Look at the map. It's so far away. And it was just an aggressive fire. And I remember our son came up, it was my birthday, and our son came up and was staying in town, and all of a sudden we are looking at this ridge behind these houses on the other side of the road, and the fire is obviously there, and we call him, and he's like, Oh, did you want us to come out and help evacuate? And it was like, uh, yeah. I put it on Facebook, ‘we could use some help.’”

“And we had six pickups,” says Gary. “We loaded up our own vehicles, people loaded up their vehicles, had the horses and trailers and all of our stuff went to the four winds. We didn't know where some of it was.”

I remember texting Celeste – are you okay out there? But they weren’t okay.

“I had people calling us, telling us to get the hell out of here,” says Celeste. “And you could hear it. I mean.”

“Sounded like a train.”

“It was, it sounded like you were standing next to a train. It was the most bizarre thing to hear a fire.”

“And it burned down a structure, right?” I ask.

“Well, it burned down three houses,” says Gary. “Three houses and a shed over there. My shop was over on the other side of the road. It burnt within a hundred yards of that. Well, fifty yards. They didn't have to slurry us, They didn't have to even spray here. They just kept it, they were up there on the road, when it jumped the road, and they had a cat right there. They just did a surround around it, and it was done. Done deal.”

“So did you guys consider moving after all these fires? Were you like, no, this is crazy?”

“No,” answers Celeste. “Because no matter where you live, there's always a natural disaster. There's tornadoes, there's earthquakes, there's floods. So no, it didn't really occur to us. I mean, when we left after them or during the Mullen fire, there was that kind of sick feeling of we might not come back to a house. But we've just lived here long enough that there's so much here that is just part of us. I mean, I like the solitude, I like the landscape. When I was diagnosed with cancer, I did go through a point in time where I was like, maybe we should maybe we should go somewhere easier.”

So yeah, that’s the other thing that walloped the Haverner’s, almost simultaneously. Celeste got diagnosed with breast cancer

“Yes, I got sick a number of years ago. I was diagnosed with cancer. And I needed to have treatment, and I chose to have treatment in Colorado. And so I stayed down there during the week, and Gary stayed here.”

“Also, I had a broken leg,” Gary chimes in.

Celeste’s doctors and nurses were taken aback that she wasn’t immediately giving up this lifestyle.

“ I was in Denver visiting a doctor and her intern,” says Celeste. “We were discussing how I snowshoe in and out and this poor girl was like, ‘you’re snowshoeing in and out in the winter?’ And I said, ‘yeah.’ And she goes, ‘you can't drive to your house?’ I said, ‘no.’ And she said, ‘well, what do you eat?’ And it was like, ‘well, we don't live on roots and berries.’”

Around that time, I remember running into them at the library and they told me they were considering moving away. That they had even sold a small chunk of their property where Gary’s woodworking shop sat. They were thinking seriously about using that money to buy something in a little town in Colorado.

“I remember you looking at Del Norte and oh, yeah, and like getting kind of serious about moving,” I say.

“We were,” confirms Celeste.

‘And that you sold some land even to make money to do it.”

“Well, we sold the land right at the end of COVID and Celeste had her cancer,” says Gary. “And during COVID, my business, I didn't have any business. So we had this opportunity and we took it and it was a godsend that we did because to sell the place over here – and we did and that money has supported us and is still supporting us or helping us now where if we wouldn't have, we would have been in real dire straits.”

Their son Ish even tried to lure his parents to move to Denver.

“We had to laugh because one of our doctors, one of our orthopedic doctors said, I am going to write you a prescription that says ‘do not move to Denver,’” says Celeste. “He said, ‘you guys are active enough that if you moved into a city and became sedentary, basically we would fall apart.”

Celeste underwent years of treatment and surgeries. She still can’t really ride her beloved horses. And that’s an awful lot for any couple to endure – back-to back fires and existential terror of cancer. Still, the Havener’s persevered through all these obstacles. Most people would have buckled. Not Gary and Celeste. They had a shared vision that kept them strong as a unit. It still does. It’s a secret ingredient in their homesteading recipe.

“When Gary said it's a team effort, it is,” says Celeste. “I mean, we enjoy each other's company. We're still each other's best friend. And so having the ability to talk while we're fixing dinner and I'm over here or he's over there.”

“I mean, she can paint at her desk. Or go out in her studio if she's got bigger projects.”

But it was more than just the steadfastness of their marriage that kept them thriving on this land. It was also the basic economics of a changing world. They realized this when they started looking at real estate in Colorado.

“So we began to look at places,” says Celeste. “And two things happened. One was that, no, we cannot replicate what we have here with the amount of money that we could invest. But the other part is, we see a lot of people moving in the valley and they change the fabric. Better, worse, I'm not going to say. They just change the fabric. And I realized that if we moved, we would become those people. We would be changing the fabric of wherever we moved to.”

“It's like the Milagro Beanfield Wars. Yeah,” says Gary.

That’s a really great novel by John Nichols about how development affects a Latino community in New Mexico.

"And so, we thought about it for a while and what was really strange is the thing that really shifted my mentality was, when the cancer came back, it was breast cancer, it came back into my spine, and that's not good,” Celeste says. “You know? I had an anomaly in that it was only one tumor in my spine. But, what happened then, I had been grousing about community. And what happened is, the amount of people who came to help us was unreal. People were bringing food. People brought us coolers of game meat, knowing that Gary couldn't go hunting that year. Some really crusty ranchers brought hay that we could feed the horses.”

“We would go over to get hay,” says Gary. “And that week we were scheduled to go down and go to the hospital or something. And we needed to have some big bales so we could just put them out for the horses because we were going to be gone. And we go over and load up the trailer and our neighbors, I'd pull the money out and he'd say, ‘put it back in your pocket. You're going to be driving. You're going to be staying in motels.’”

“And so suddenly I realized, I have community,” says Celeste. “I had been, in my little mind's eye, looking for the community I grew up with, which was, one, urban. It was in the fifties. And that doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. And I had to kind of come to terms with that.”

“And we'd go places and we'd look and we would be on the, what was it? The Zillow, we look at houses and you Google this and you blow up and you go, ‘holy cow, man, that's a nice piece of land, but look all around it,’” says Gary. “Like when we were down at Del Norte. ‘Oh, yeah, that's a beautiful piece of land on the real estate thing.’ But you go out there and it's basalt and it's full of rattlesnakes.”

None of these problems went away. They still live in the shadow of fire. And of the return of cancer. But now they know just how valued and supported they are by all those crusty old ranchers they live next to.

“We got some things that go on here that bind us to this place,” says Gary. “And every time we turn around, there's something that happens. Things are watching us here. We pray to this place. And it's kept us alive.” Gary starts choking up as he says, “It's hard to leave.”

“Do you feel that's true, Celeste?” I ask

“I do.”

“Has this place kept you alive?”

“It has.”

Can a young couple today replicate this recipe for finding and buying their place in the country? The Haverner’s aren’t so sure.

“ Can you find land like this?” I ask.

“See, that's, the land is tricky, because a lot of the smaller parcels, I mean, in Albany County in particular, it's usually these 35 acre ranchettes,” says Celeste. “And they have requirements. And you've got the homeowners associations, which is kind of a trick. Is it impossible? No. Would it be much harder than what we had? Yes.”

But if you ARE able to find cheap land, they recommend foregoing debt, at all cost.

“ You really have to deal with what you can afford because you don't know what's going to happen in the future. You don't want to get strung out on loans,” says Gary.

“Yeah, you guys didn't have any debt,” I say. “That seems huge.”

“No, we didn't,” says Gary. “I mean, I was building houses.”

“Gary would work in town and then work out here, work in town,” says Celeste.

“I'd build a house in town, I'd come out here and work, I'd build another house, and then we'd buy material, and it'd sit here, and then we'd put it up.”

“We certainly went in stages,” Celeste says. “We didn't have an upstairs for a while, initially the windows were plastic.”

But maybe the take away is that stubbornness and a long term vision can get you a long way.

“I mean, we didn't have electricity when we built this house,” Gary says. “So I built, I sawed every one of these boards by hand or with a chainsaw. I mean, I planed the floor upstairs with a fricking hand plane. You know, I mean, things that we did because we are driven to have a home.”

“We were willing to accept that as part of the equation and it's not like we were trying to prove anything,” says Celeste. “And it's not like we were trying to go our own way. We just wanted a home. And that was how we felt we could do it. We didn't have a lot of income. Nobody backed us, that's for sure. The family did not really back us. In fact, my parents were horrified that I was living in the middle of nowhere and were offering us money to not be here.”

The Havener’s have a warning, though, for aspiring homesteaders. They say you shouldn’t do it because you think it’ll give you some idealized concept of freedom.

“Freedom's a tough word these days. It's almost worse than milk. It's on sweatshirts everywhere,” Gary says. “It sucks.”

“What's the right word then?” I ask.

“Well, no, there is a perceived freedom,” says Celeste. “People do see this, ‘oh man, you're living the dream, you're living the life.’ We don't see it as that. The house requires our attention as we require things. It's a trade off. It's always that way with the grass greener on the other side. You say, ‘oh my god, they don't have X, Y, and Z.’ True. But we also have to deal with our poo and we have to make sure we have water and last winter our gray water system kind of went and so we had to totally redo that. So yes, there's a freedom, but it's not this, ‘I'm going to go out and put flowers in my hair and sing and dance all day.’”

“Politically in our country at this time, there's like this idea that you can go out and that there won't be any rules, that you can escape regulation,” I offer.

“There's one big rule here and you cannot break it,” says Gary. “And if you don't listen to where you are, you're in trouble. It doesn't matter how much money you have.”

“That rule is?” Celeste asks.

“That rule is, you have to abide by the land.”

Abide by the land. These guys aren’t living free any old which way. Thumbing their noses at the government or laws. For the Havener’s, there’s a higher power they seek to do right by, a different set of laws. Those of the land herself. The way Celeste practices this abiding is to paint pictures of this place. Her paintings almost always include her horses. She paints them with thick, rich paint and bright primary colors. Gary added on to the house a few years back.

“Look at all these beautiful paintings,” I marvel. “Smells like oil paint out here too.”

“It does,” Celeste says. “ And this space is so sheltered from the wind. I can come out here and paint and then I'll go back in the house and go, ‘oh, the wind's kicked up.’ And Gary will give me that look like ‘the wind's been going all day.’”

“I asked her how big she wanted the window and she says, ‘how big can you get it?’”

The window takes up most of the north wall. Maybe the most essential element to their success at living their entire adult lives on this 50 acres off grid is they gave their heart and souls to this land, to this community. To them, it’s not real estate, something to be bought and sold. It’s part of who they are, a limb of their own bodies. They tried to leave. This piece of sage brush at the foot of Sheep Mountain just wouldn’t let go.

“That’s a beautiful view. Tell me about that view.” I ask Celeste.

“Well, it's the whole valley and I get to see the alpenglow in the winter on the Corner Mountain and Middle Mountain and Sheep Mountain, of course. The colors constantly change and I could paint that image every day. I could do a hundred paintings of that and never get bored.”

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