Wynnie's mom has relocated to a decidedly UN-urban landscape. After a lifetime in Cleveland, Ohio, and eleven happy years in the urban oasis, we chucked it all and headed west. We spent a year or so caretaking a log cabin on several hundred remote acres of wilderness in the Siskiyou Mountains, about 3,000 feet above the Klamath River, maintaining our own infrastructure, such as it was, with bears, elk, and eagles, as our only neighbors.
As professional musicians, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to immerse ourselves in our music, and learn to live off the grid and very close to the land. As a gardener, it was the mother of all humbling experiences to realize that in this stupendously stark and beautiful landscape, everything that *could* grow there, already *was* growing there. That would be fir, madrone, scrub oak, and more poison oak than you ever imagined. We did manage to raise a few herbs and tomatoes, and the wildflowers were an absolute marvel, but despite elaborately-constructed feats of civil engineering involving miles of chicken wire, and endless free water piped directly from the proverbial mountain stream a couple of miles up the mountain, roses proved to be an absurd pipe dream. Still, we loved it there, and could have stayed forever.
We made the difficult decision to leave because we wanted to build our own place on our own land before it was too late - and because we found we weren't quite finished performing yet. The nearest town was 45 minutes down a switchback mountain road (barring rockslides, mudslides, wildfires, and snowstorms), and it's remarkably easy to saturate the market for 15th-16th century lute song in a depressed community of 900 seasonal gold miners and unemployed loggers. And Ashland, Oregon - the nearest site of both food and audiences - was a two-and-a-half hour drive through the Klamath/Siskiyou mountains.
We looked long and hard in Washington & Oregon, where we really wanted to settle, but the entire west coast seems to have become a suburb of LA in terms of land value, and we found we could afford (at least on two musicians' meager income) exactly nothing. So we packed up the lutes and headed back east, to rural upstate NY, where we managed to find a three-acre wedge of beautiful mature red oak woodland at the top of a hill on an unpaved road just past the reach of the power grid. It's surrounded by another 100 acres of woods, bears, wild turkeys, and derelict hippie dwellings built in the back-to-the-land frenzy of the 70's. Somehow we forgot that winter back here lasts about six months, and that summer is intolerably hot and humid. We are consoled by the fact that taxes are high and we are really not conveniently located near anywhere, although a nearby college town does provide access to needful things like food and interlibrary loan. The deciding factor was price, and our land is paid for free and clear.
So we're renting a shack across the road from our own land and building our cottage out of lumber from our own oaks and found items we've been accumulating for the last few years. Although the cottage is not yet framed, the first rose has been planted, along with a few peonies, irises, and herbs. Eventually, there will be a full report of this new adventure. All you who've anxiously written to inquire about the roseraie in Cleveland, please rest assured it's in wonderful hands, being cared for by someone who bought the house BECAUSE of the garden.
Stay tuned...
