Cheap Dirt: Many Hands Make Light Work

Many Hands Make Light Work

I should probably clarify something. Ken and I could not have survived those three and a half years living on the land without the help of our friends and their couches. Anytime the roads got really bad and we didn’t dare risk the drive…or whenever we wanted to stay in town and see our favorite band “Lyle and the Sparkleface”  –  we would crash at our friend Skip’s tiny studio apartment. I think we actually slept on the floor so you can’t even call what we were doing “couchsurfing” technically. Skip used to joke that we were his Russian roommates. This was a cinematic allusion to the Jim Jarmusch film Stranger Than Paradise…about a super hip American whose not so hip cousin arrives from Hungary – yeah, we got the country wrong. 

Ava’s supposed to crash on Willie’s extra cot for one night but that turns into a lot more. Here’s a clip of when she shows up at his door.

Ava: Hello? I’m Ava.

Willie: Yeah, no kidding. 

Ava: Are you Bella Laona? 

Willie: No, I used to be. Call me Willie if you gotta call me something. 

Ava: [speaks in Hungarian]

Willie: Don't speak Hungarian at all. Only English, right? While you're here, only English. Yeah, well, come in.

Ava: Tomorrow I must go to Cleveland in Ohio by train. 

Willie: Yeah, well, you can't go to Cleveland in Ohio tomorrow. Auntie has to go into the hospital for 10 days. So you can stay here tonight and then I don't know what you're gonna do after that.

Ava: For 10 days? 

Willie: Yeah, 10 days.

Ava just stands there in this tiny, messy room with no place else to go. Sooo awkward. Nobody likes that feeling of overstaying their welcome. But sometimes you don’t have a choice. And with the extreme shortage of affordable places to live in our country right now, a lot of people are feeling exactly like Ava right about now. When I tried to track down data about how many couchsurfers there are, the numbers aren’t there. A 2020 Government Accountability Office report showed homelessness is seriously underreported by Housing and Urban Development because they aren’t counting the number of people doubling up and sleeping on spare beds or couches. Back when I was doing it, there was not a term for it. But now people like us are all known as couchsurfers. The dictionary defines them as “to stay overnight with a series of hosts who typically provide basic accommodations such as a couch to sleep on at no cost"” The definition usually stipulates this is a short term fix. But Ken and I once slept in another friend Jason’s spare bedroom for months when our dog got very sick and we couldn’t leave her alone on our land. 

Couchsurfing has also become a long term situation for Samantha Marks, a forest service employee in Pinedale, Wyoming. Last winter, when the Trump administration started firing thousands of federal workers, she didn’t just lose her job. She lost her employee housing too.

You probably heard all about it on the news last winter…

“We begin tonight at six with those job and funding cuts to the US Forest Service– 

“Billions of Americans are about to see and feel the impact of a 10% job cut of the US Forest Service. This too is part of the Trump administration's plan to shrink the federal government–

“The White House won't say how many federal workers have been or will be fired, but Ian Lee tracked down three of them in Wyoming–

The Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE cut over 34-hundred forest service employees in the U.S. and another thousand from the park service. And one of those thousands was Sam Marks. She had just gotten a fulltime job as a physical science technician at the Bridger-Teton National Forest in northwest Wyoming. Unfortunately, she was still in her probationary period, which made her an easy target to get RIFed – that stands for “reduction in force.” I talked to Sam over Zoom right after she got fired. I could see her on the screen walking around outdoors with a lot of snow in the background.

“So where are you right now?”

“So right now I'm in my barn on my property,” Sam says. “My wonderful boyfriend is helping me move all of my stuff into the barn because with the federal employee thing, I was living in federal housing. So I don't have that much longer.”

Just to be clear, anything Sam says about her employer is her own personal opinion and experience and she’s not representing the U.S. Forest Service in any way. On the screen, I could see her boyfriend on a mountain bike, carting stuff up her driveway because it wasn’t plowed.

“My neighbors get their roads plowed and stuff. I was just like, oh, I won't need that this year. I'm not building. And then the timing kind of worked out. I was like, ooh, like one more month until the snow melts.”

There’s no good time to get laid off but it was especially bad for Sam because it was winter. She was relying on forest service housing to keep a roof over her head while she built a house on the land she just recently bought. She turned her phone around so I could see her view.

“ I have five acres, which is really nice. More than enough room to start getting things going. And then on the outside of this fence, which I don't know how well you can see is a ranch. So it just kind of opens up into the Wyoming Range, which I love. It's beautiful. I get to see the mountains at sunset. And then town's not too far this way. It's about a five mile bike ride.”

Sam showed me the foundation on the land where she was planning to build a strawbale house. And she gave me a tour of the barn she had mostly finished building herself. Her belongings are piled around where her boyfriend left them.

“So some kitchen stuff, some camping gear. These are the barn doors. It's not insulated or anything, which is one of the main reasons why I'm just not tough enough to live in here in the Pinedale winter. It's a great barn, but that's what it is. It's made to be a barn. It's drafty. I like the wood stove. Like I just built this last summer. So the wood stove isn't hooked up. There's no heat in it.”

Pinedale is one of the coldest places in Wyoming, hands down. I can tell you, as someone who reads the weather on Wyoming airwaves on a regular basis, it gets ten, twenty below here often. So moving into her barn wasn’t a realistic option.

“I was like, oooh, I can't, I don't really want to do this in winter. Like even if I'm tough enough to sleep in a cold sleeping bag and then I have to get up and then I don't have running water.”

So Sam was scrambling to figure out some other options. A friend offered to loan her a camper trailer. 

“ I have 10 more days where I could be in forest service housing and then I'll just be couch surfing until we can get the camper here.”

Sam isn’t from Wyoming. She grew up in Indiana and got a degree in engineering, but didn’t love that lifestyle. Then she moved to Pinedale for this job. She said she just fell in love with the place. One thing she didn’t love, though, was living in the employee housing.

“ I'm 27 and the Forest Service housing, it's great. It's housing, I'll take it. It's cheap. But, you know, we have dormitory style with roommates and I'm kind of excited to move on from that. You know, I've done my time with it. It's one thing to have multiple people in a house, but like sharing a bedroom even after college is like, all right, this isn’t so great.” She laughs.

She was ready to settle down. She started saving up her money for a real home.

“ I'm pretty sick of moving around. That's why I got the place here. I was like, okay, like I need to stop moving. I need some stability in my life. And I have a little bit of mixed feelings. Like, had I known this job was insecure, like I said, like I waited until I had permanent seasonal. 

On the paper, I did everything right. I don't know if I would have made the same choice, knowing. I probably would have waited another year or two to pick this place. But now I'm also kind of glad that I did because I need some sort of stability in my life. I'm like, okay, I can find another job. But if I don't have a place to live, it feels like too much is up in the air. To be like, I could just move anywhere and work any job. And that's pretty overwhelming. And here I'm like, all right, I have friends I can couchsurf with. I'm a little bit settled. Luckily, I had worked for the Forest Service for a couple years or a couple summers before this because I do have a pretty good sense of community here, which is really nice.”

It isn’t just Sam. Stability is something her generation doesn’t have much of in general. On average, most Millennials aren’t getting around to buying a home until over 40. I ask her what she’s going to do for work now that she’s laid off. She has no idea but doesn’t really want to go back to civil engineering. 

“ It was just kind of soul sucking. I would get up each morning like dreading going to work and like counting down the hours and just, it was really hard. I've tried multiple jobs. I tried three different civil engineering jobs and all of them, they would like call me on weekends and there was just no work-life balance.”

When I get off zoom with her, I realize Sam is living day-to-day with no clear idea where she’ll lay her head at night. Luckily, Pinedale really needs dog and house sitters. So many that when I reached out to check in on Sam in the spring, she had decided NOT to move into her friend’s camper after all. The couchsurfing options just kept rolling in. And then, when DOGE layoffs got challenged in courts, Sam got rehired for her forest service job. She said she could have moved back into forest service housing but she decided, nah.

“That was one of the main overwhelming things about being fired. I was like, okay, I have this much in savings, I can find another job, but also having to find a place to live felt so immediate. And I was like, okay, I can figure out one of those at a time. But doing both just was really overwhelming.”

She was living with the reality that she could get laid off again at any moment and lose both job and home all over again. So she kept couchsurfing. And when the snow melted, she started building her house. That’s when I decided it was time to go see her progress with my own eyes. 

“Hello!” I call.

“Hey, how’s it going?” asks Sam.

“I figured I must be in the right place because of the giant pile of straw bales.”

“Kind of gives it away a little bit,” she says, laughing.

But it’s not just the straw bales that give it away – there’s also a whole house framed in on her foundation. I’m amazed at how much progress she’s made this summer. She’s done a lot of it with the help of friends. And today she’s called in a gaggle of them to help her hoist an especially large roof beam. We head over to her barn to wait for the rest of her pals to arrive. Now that it’s warmer Sam is living in her barn, sleeping in the loft and cooking with camping gear. She put in a woodstove and it’s cozy. Her friend Jacquelyn marvels at Sam’s progress.

“ So this is where you live?” Jacquelyn asks.

“Yeah,” says Sam. “There’s a little sleeping loft and the couch is open, if you wanna sleep on it.”

“Red leather!” I say. “Can't get better than that.”

“Okay, to be honest, it's a nice couch, but it feels a little bit like bachelor pad vibes,” Sam says. “I don't love the couch, but that's a future thing.”

It’s a beautiful barn with big windows and doors. But it’s not a permanent home. It’s only July but Sam is already thinking of next winter.

“I don't think the house will be ready for next winter, so I think I'll be having to actually rent a place because it's all winter. But for the summer it's been good. And then a lot of it is honestly like people in town have a lot of dogs, so I've been doing a lot of like dog sitting in a house sitting and that between that and, you know, we have access to the aquatic center, which is really nice. So it hasn't, it's not like pure camping.”

She’s kinda got to think this far in the future because there’s rumors of more RIFing in the works. So her job is once again under threat. She’ll hang onto it as long as she can though. She loves what she gets to do every day. Her work studying glaciers feels especially important.

“That's my favorite part of the job, is we're kind of just trying to figure out what level of impact the ice has and how much it's changing and then that relates to everything, like immediately in the vicinity. So like yesterday we were looking at different stone flies that can only live on ice. But then also like everything downstream, just, and then like the trout relies on the cold water specifically. So if those go away, all the water's warmer.”

It makes her sad to think that if she gets fired permanently, no one will be watching over these disappearing glaciers. So she’ll stand guard over them as long as she can. But that means, she doesn’t have a backup plan she loves. It might mean a return to engineering.

“But at some point, if you need a job, you need a job, like whatever it is. I would love to go into natural house building, but you're seeing, I'm actively learning how to do it. I can't be like, Hey guys, I know how to build. You should hire me!”

She knows she definitely doesn’t want to leave Pinedale. Sam’s built community here. So she’s not trying to figure everything out. She’s just putting one foot in front of another.

“That's my goal, is to have this place livable before next winter. There's a very small chance we'll happen this winter, but that feels very ambitious, so I don't really wanna rely on that. My line for livable is I need heat and running water for the winter. I just, I don't know if I'll have the heating system in, but maybe I'll have till November to work on it. That's just not determined yet.”

There’s a lot that’s not determined yet. But especially on a day like today, she can’t worry about that. She’s got a roof beam to hoist. Her friends are starting to arrive and we head out to the house to get the game plan.

“So you see how there's two beams horizontal closer to us and there's a longer one and a shorter one,” says Sam.”

“Yeah,” replies her friend, Chris. 

“So the long one on the far side is particularly hard to do without help,” Sam say. “To the point where it's like, I'm not gonna do this, just me and one other person. It's not gonna happen.”

Sam gives her friends a tour of the partially-built house.

“Yeah, these will become walls.”

“I love it. I love it,” says Jacquelyn

“There's gonna be a front door here and two beautiful windows because this is like the beautiful sunset view for the Wyoming Range, which is kind of why I love the place. And yeah, this valley, like right over there is a giant ranch and so like sure they can do more development, but it's just gonna be open and beautiful and in the middle of the night you hear the cows mooing.”

“I love it. Yeah.”

“And that will be the kitchen and the bathroom.”

Sam designed this house herself. She’s still debating whether she’ll have one or two windows upstairs. Which is more important – saving money or a bigger view of the Wyoming Range?

“It's like you're building for the view,” I say.

“Yeah, absolutely building for the view,” Sam says. “You can't quite see the mountains with the rain, but it is there. There's a couple mountains behind that hill that are nice.”

Part of her building design was being totally honest with herself about what she’s capable of doing alone or with the help of friends. Like the size of the straw bales themselves. She went with the smaller ones.


“It was actually a deciding factor. They have the three-string bales and I was like, there's no way I can move that. And so the two string, it's still plenty warm, plenty thick and something I can move. I think the up high ones will be hard.”

And she made sure that all the plumbing is located behind one wall.

“ I've never done significant plumbing before and so like, there's going to be an interior wall right here downstairs where the bathroom and kitchen are next to each other. So all the plumbing is on one wall, and I'll be able to figure that out after the exterior walls are up, which for me is a big deal. It kind of lets me work during the winter on it.”  

“You're not gonna hire a plumber,” I ask. “You're gonna figure it out yourself?”

“I'm gonna do my best to figure it out myself. If things go wrong, I'm not above hiring a plumber if I need to ask for help. But I really think if I have the whole winter to sit with some books. I would love to have gray water and rain catchment on all that, but I'm just doing a standard toilet, standard sink. I think it should be pretty manageable.”

And she’s doing it all on a tight budget

“I had a little bit of sticker shock looking at doors and windows. So we've been scouring Facebook Marketplace. So hopefully get that up and then frame up for the bathroom window.”

Now we’re not just waiting for her crew…but also for a rain storm to pass by. Purple clouds appeared frayed along the bottom where it’s storming a short ways across the valley. We head back to the barn to hide. Sam met two of her friends in strawbale building classes she took this summer. The workshops involved camping out for a week while everyone worked on building an actual house. 

“One of them was like a big overview, like this is how you build with strawbale. This is how you build with cob, which is like a clay-straw mixture. And then I went through a second workshop specifically for plastering, which is kind of what I was most worried about. Like this is where you can mess it up. And there was chemistry involved.”

It was just what she needed to give her the confidence to start work on her own home. Not to mention, Sam discovered a whole underground community of people happy to travel long distances to help raise your bales. That’s where she met Arica Wyche] from Baltimore who’s been traveling the country helping build houses. 

“I just sort ended up building like for the rest of the year,” says Arica. “One thing led to another. But it's just like, once I got into it, the community aspect is definitely big. People are always like building things and more hands, less work.”

“ But there's no goal for you personally,” I ask. “You just are learning?”

“I'd like to, but at the moment I was just sort of like, I enjoy the community aspect. I like the travel. Like I've gone to, at this point I was in California and you're just like there and you're just working, but you also get to travel around and all of like your room board and stuff is like taken care of.”

Arica left behind a career in nuclear engineering for this adventure. After she helps Sam, she’s headed north to do some plaster work on an outdoor kitchen in Montana. Sam also met Jacquelyn Cerva in strawbale school. Jacquelyn drove up here from Salt Lake City.

“The two story thing is what got me,” Jacquelyn says. “I'm like, I'm coming. She's like, we're doing this this month, this this month, this this month. I'm like, I want to come do all three, because it's so cool to see the process.”

This is the kind of grassroots organizing people are doing to make home ownership viable for people in their generation. Jacquelyn mentions a project in Moab, Utah called Community Rebuilds that’s helping low income families get the skills to build their own energy efficient affordable home with the help of volunteers. 

“ It’s because it’s really expensive to live in Moab,” Jacquelyn says. “The community comes together and the person puts in the sweat equity and they build these beautiful natural homes and it's so that people who actually work in Moab can live in Moab.” 

Not so different from what Sam has cobbled together. When I ask Sam my usual question about whether she’s doing all this for the natural home lifestyle or as affordable housing, she says, emphatically, it’s to help her afford living in this place with this view. 

“If housing was affordable, I think I'd do a different timeline. Instead of buying land, I would have bought a house, learned how a house worked, and then bought land, and then built a house. But because I feel pushed to do it, I'd be like, Okay, I will figure this out. I am reading books at the library, I'm asking people. I do not feel ready for this, but I don't have a choice of waiting, even though I do want to do it one day anyways, I'm doing it now.”

Finally the rain passes and all her friends arrive and that big beam isn’t going to hoist itself.

“Yeah, so I guess maybe if you guys wanna help me level it, we can get it level, screw it in, and then when it starts raining we can go in the barn.”

“Yeah, that's great. Let's do it. Sounds great.”

We all climb her curved staircase. There’s no roof yet, just open sky overhead. Sam’s our fearless leader and she gives us instructions.

“The goal is to have it sticking out on this end. So like, stick out at least two feet. And then only go halfway on this post. And then the  next beam's gonna go like halfway out there. So like stick it on half here.”

Every time she puts another beam up, the house feels more secure, she says. Right now, it still has a bit of a sway when the wind blows. 

“It might feel spooky. Like if someone steps really hard, it moves a little bit. Like structurally it's not gonna fall down. It's just because we're not done tying everything together yet. There's like braces down there. But like a tree waves in the wind and doesn't fall down. It will be sturdy when we're done.”

It’s an apt metaphor for the wobbliness of her whole life this last year. Every beam and bale adds a little more stability for her future self. A few days ago, Sam and a couple friends tried putting this same beam in place but it was too heavy and they gave up. This time, though, many hands make light work.

“Alright, so like roughly halfway. Yep. Okay. So I think both the board is worked and it might need to be moved. Should we try to flip it 180? Yeah, let's flip it over. Chris, how do you feel? Can you guys flip it 180? I'm doing nothing. Alright, cool. Good work. I love standing here. You remember how hard this was? Ridiculous. Okay, we called the right friends for this.”

Me, I’m of no help whatsoever. Except to document one real avenue to affordable housing that Sam has tapped into. Community. People coming together for an old fashioned house raising. When you’re living as close to the brink as Sam Marks and you don’t know what’s around the next bend, there’s nothing you cherish more than good friends.

A few months have gone by and so I reach out to see what progress Sam has made on her house. Turns out, she’s got all the bales in place and even slathered on the first layer of plaster. She was really worried about getting that done because it had to dry before it started freezing at night. All her doors and windows are in and everything is sealed up for winter. She’s doing all the electrical herself and hopes it’s done by Thanksgiving. But she still can’t live in it because it doesn’t have any heat or plumbing. She can’t live in her barn anymore either so she bit the bullet and moved back into employee housing. Back into those dorms with roommates. Not her favorite thing. But at least it’s not couchsurfing. In a text she tells me, quote, “I can’t say the job feels secure at all but it’s so much cheaper, it felt silly to go anywhere else.” And with winter bearing down, I suppose that’s what matters most. Making sure you always have a little shelter from the storm. 

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