Living the dream, not even sarcastically
I'm going to tell you about the best thing I've ever done
I spend a lot of time in this newsletter digging in to areas of my life where I feel I’ve struggled or lost my way: in Silicon Valley, trying to have babies, dealing with chronic health issues. Today I’m going to do something different and tell you about an area of my life that I feel like I’ve done so stunningly right that I can barely believe the breathtaking reality of it. This type of topic is harder for me, actually, than the hard topics. In excavating my pain and error, at least I am certain that I am on the level with humanity: we’re all struggling in our own way, it’s the nature of living. In talking about this precious, outrageously good thing in my life, I risk being boastful, or else tarnishing the IRL goodness of it by posting about it on the internet.
In any case, I’m going to talk about it because this week has been a slog with a sick baby and a sick mama, and this newsletter and its author could use some inspirational content once in awhile 😉.
Dreaming the dream of ten million millennials
Six years ago, a friend of mine expressed a version of a dream that seems to be held by nearly every city-dwelling professional millennial I encounter: our friends should all buy a forest property together so that we can spend time together in nature and do creative projects. Being an urban professional millennial myself, I knew this was something I wanted. My crew was turning the corner into our thirties, and many of us were on the precipice of starting families. It seemed that without some herculean effort, we would be swept off into our increasingly isolated and distant nuclear family boxes as people made individual decisions about careers and schools and moving to be closer to parents.
The forest property seemed a powerful antidote to this: an actual, physical place we could commit to together, a place to gather and to continue carrying out the weird and wonderful creative antics of our twenties within a larger family context. A connection to the earth. A playground for our kids. An epic party venue. A canvas for the next phase of life…
Ok, come on, that sounds cool, but it’s not real.
Doing it.
This group had some things going for us as we set off to execute on this extraordinarily cliched but also rarely-executed-on millennial dream. We had a ready-made group of people with a history of camping and doing creative projects together, having gone to Burning Man together for a number of years. Our ability to bring a bunch of people to the desert for eight days and house and feed them boosted our confidence that we could do something wild and big. We had extensive experience collaborating on massive and meticulously organized spreadsheets and negotiating the needs and desires of a large group.
Nine people quickly converged around the idea, and we got down to brass tacks, which in this case involved far-flung drives to explore the areas around where we lived, meetings and side discussions and more meetings, documents and comments on documents and updated documents, vision boards, and task lists, and on and on. We endlessly discussed money and developed budgets and researched mortgages. This group was well off by any measure, being a bunch of professionals living in San Francisco. But we were not rich in the sense that any one of us could afford to buy such a forest property on their own, and even divided by nine it was out of reach for some. So we spent over a year thinking and discussing and spreadsheeting in pursuit of a financial model which included different ownership shares for different investment amounts as well as a sliding scale of ongoing mortgage payments. All this to say, we worked our little dreaming millennial butts off.
It was in a state of stunned reverie that I awoke one morning in April, 2019, to learn that the deal had been finalized early that morning, and I was now a part-owner of thirty acres in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I could not believe we had pulled it off. I could not believe we had corralled all nine people across the finish line. I could not believe that people in our group were willing to dip significantly into personal savings, some delaying personal home purchases, to dive headlong into this wild, massive project and all the accompanying risks.
The VIP room at Paddy’s Place
There is something I heard over and over when we were searching for our shared patch of forest, and it was some version of, “that never works.” I heard so many stories about someone’s uncle or their friend’s brother who co-purchased a vacation home and now everyone hates each other. That was a risk of the venture—it’s still a risk—but four years on I am here to make an emphatic case for doing the damn crazy thing anyways.
Our patch of forest is nestled in a valley strewn with redwoods. One cleared, south-facing hilltop serves as the central gathering place, and on summer mornings I can sit there and watch the fog lift from the valley and dissipate as the first rays of sun come over the ridge to the east. The old growth redwood forest was clear-cut in the second half of the 19th century, as with the whole range, and so we have learned the locations of the mother stumps, wide as cars and surrounded by their offspring in fairy circles, which are as magical as they sound.
In a highly California lineage, the property had passed hands from a former child star, to a mom and pop weed farm, to an ashram, and then to us. The detritus of these former owners included a few small one-room cabins chock full of mouse poop, a dirt road, and critically, a working well. We also purchased an unused solar array from the ashram owners and set it up in the first year, giving us the basic infrastructure: power and water. More interestingly, the child star appears to have been an avid gardener and collector. As we began to whack our way through the overgrown, invasive, and highly flammable Scotch broom that had overtaking certain parts of the property, we uncovered seven citrus trees, two cherry trees and an avocado tree. At the base of such finds, we often also encountered piles of themed collectables: two dozen chicken statues, for example, or ten teapots, or a collection of plates with lions on them. At the beginning of year two, we dug out of gnarled weeds a twenty-foot wide and ten-foot tall prickly pear cactus, which we named Paddy (for her pads).
I could (and hope to one day) write a book about all the silly, crazy, beautiful things we have already gotten up to in the forest these last four years. We’ve learned about forestry and fire management, we’ve become proficient with chain saws, and we’ve hosted annual crab festivals for our made-up holiday, Crab Nebula Day. We’ve been led by one of our group in an exploration of place, beginning to understand the history and ecosystem of the region. We’ve hosted two weddings for our group, and we’ve put on amateur but extravagant plays on a little round wooden stage. Last year, we began the DIY construction of a community lodge, a project led by my handy dad, and the fulfillment of a lifelong dream of mine to build a house with him.
Mostly, we sit on the hilltop in a circle of weathered chairs bought on Craigslist in front of a cast iron stove that one of our group found in the dirt by a broken down trailer on the far side of the property. We all thought he was crazy when he suggested that we haul the five hundred pound clunker up to the hilltop to cook on. He wasn’t crazy. Now we stuff the stove with wood from the fire prevention clearing efforts and put sausages and zucchini on top, and I swear I’ll never have a more delicious dinner.
It was on one such night, on that hilltop, laughing about nothing and everything, that we decided to jokingly call our forest Paddy’s Place, a nod to the cactus, and also definitely an Irish bar. Someone suggested that the circle of chairs on the hilltop is the VIP room, and that actually we were in the VIP room at Paddy’s Place. Lol. You had to be there. But that’s the crazy thing—we are there, together, a lot, just like we imagined. Many of us are in our mid-thirties now, and we’re having babies like time is running out (hah), and we still regularly do nothing together in the woods, and we still come up with such inane, you-had-to-be-there jokes, and the opportunities to for the next crazy project still feel endless, just like we wanted.
So I guess what I’m saying is, this has worked, so far. It has worked beyond my wildest dreams. And if it all falls to pieces sometime in the future (which I don’t expect), it will still have been worth it.
If you have been thinking about something like this, I’m here to counteract the naysayers and tell you: it could be worth a try. It could be the best thing you’ve ever done.
✍️ Tell me…
Do you have a success story like this? Something you were told would never work but then DID?
What is your Big Dream you hope becomes a reality one day?
Do you have any questions for me about Paddy’s Place? I’ll answer as many as I can in the comments!
This is a wonderful win and celebration of our humanity when we come together in community! Yay you!! May it be so for many years!
If I were to have a dream, it would be to move to a cozy little cottage by the sea and sand. 💙😇