A house in town, a house in the country

No, you must not live on the edge of wilderness

House in the country, Cornudella de Montsant

My friend

Blake Boles

recently advocated for a particular way of living in a community built on the edge—not the “secure, prosperous” and predictable city, nor the wilderness where “mind and body roam free,” but something in between:

What these people lack in resources, they seem to enjoy in autonomy and flexibility. Like you, most hail from the city, where they maintain friends and contacts. But barring emergency or invasion, they will no longer dwell in the city. Living on the precipice between civilization and nature suits them best. Here, among like-minded misfits, they feel most at home.

As Blake admits, his timing was somewhat off—soon after the piece was published, the Los Angeles fires started ravaging exactly this type of “edge of wilderness” community.

The wildland-urban interface is no place to build a home, in my humble opinion. Yet millions around the world insist that’s where they want to live. Heads in the sand, happy with their view of the mountains from the back deck, certain in their belief a forest fire or hurricane or flood will never come for them, because, well, it hasn’t yet.

As a former climate activist turned post-nomad builder, I have always had a keen eye looking over my shoulder at potential climate disasters, especially when deciding where to buy property.

In 2022, I explained my thinking in a post on climate havens that’s been getting some additional attention in the wake of the fires. In fact, pretty much every time there’s a natural disaster in the U.S., someone reliably emails me after having googled and found my post.

But then, after every disaster, a great forgetting happens for everyone not affected. Homeowners who have lost everything are generally left to fend for themselves, while homeowners elsewhere go about their lives.

My personal wake-up call was in 2018. That was the year the IPCC report came out warning of dire consequences if the world couldn’t avert a further 1.5-degree rise in temperature. The authors said we had only 12 years to avert disaster; in fact, we blew through the 1.5-degree threshold in 2024, after only six years.

If you are a digital nomad, you might be able to keep saying: so what? You move around, and you can keep moving so that these things don’t affect you.

Or more likely, you probably profess to care deeply about climate change, all the while taking multiple trans-Atlantic airline flights each year, or driving your diesel van around the continent, and meanwhile turning your head from the dumpster fire that is politics.¹

But if you own property, or if you are invested at all in the future of a particular community, then I submit that you need to pay more serious attention.

I purchased my homestead in the U.S. not only for its proximity to climbing, and the nostalgic attachment that the White Mountains hold in my heart—I bought it knowing full well that the community in Central New Hampshire would be a haven from the worst effects of climate change, at least for many decades.

Meanwhile, I have no illusions about the fixer-upper I own in Spain, which does have a glaring climate weakness: drought.

All of Catalunya, and much of Spain, has been in severe drought conditions for several years. Photos you may see of the area online (especially on property listings) may show a verdant river flowing from a dam down through a canyon lined by stunning cliffs. But that’s misleading: you can now walk right across that river bed nearly any day of the year.

To be honest, I still have a moment of minor surprise every time water comes out when I open the tap.

This is, at least in part, why I have never viewed the house in Cornudella de Montsant as my forever home. There are other reasons, too. But climate is the one I most certainly cannot control or change my mind about. It’s just a fact. It’s built-in to the area—just like the cliffs themselves.

But enough about the climate—it’s actually not my central critique. Blake’s post reminded me of a much more profound question for anyone who loves the wilderness, anyone who longs to be outdoors for a good part of their life, as I do.

Blake writes:

Only when you’ve wandered among basin and range for years, feasting upon silence and solitude, can you return to the world’s periphery, wild-eyed and sunburned, to find your new people, create your new profession, and begin your new life.

This reminded me of my time at the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), where I spent three months in the wilderness in the Pacific Northwest: on a glacier, climbing, sailing, hiking, and in general living in the transcendent warm embrace of the forest, the mountains, and the ocean.

My time at NOLS was so impactful that I nearly devoted my life to the outdoors. I considered becoming a wilderness guide. But it was on that trip that one of the instructors read us this passage from a lecture by the great Willi Unsoeld², and it convinced me to spend my life otherwise:

And so what is the final test of the efficacy of this wilderness experience we’ve just been through together? Because having been there, in the mountains, alone, in the midst of solitude, and this feeling, this mystical feeling if you will, of the ultimacy of joy and whatever there is. The question is, “Why not stay out there in the wilderness the rest of your days and just live in the lap of Satori or whatever you want to call it?” And the answer, my answer to that is, “Because that’s not where people are.” And the final test for me of the legitimacy of the experience is, “How well does your experience of the sacred in nature enable you to cope more effectively with the problems of mankind when you come back to the city?”

And now you see how this phases with the role of wilderness, It’s a renewal exercise and as I visualize it, it leads to a process of alternation. You go to nature for your metaphysical fix – your reassurance that there’s something behind it all and it’s good. You come back to where people are, to where people are messing things up, because people tend to, and you come back with a new ability to relate to your fellow souls and to help your fellow souls relate to each other.

Maybe you’ve read the magnificent book Into the Wild (or seen the movie) about Chris McCandless. I wish Chris had lived past his solo adventure into the great Alaskan wilderness because I think he would have become a kind of modern-day Thoreau. His writing is worth a read, no matter what you think of his life choices.

Chris gave everything away, all his possessions, to seek a life of adventure in the wilderness and live in the lap of Satori. Tragically, he realized too late that it is in our connection with other people that true happiness lies. He seemed to realize this only as he was dying alone after ingesting poisonous mushrooms. He scribbled a last note in his copy of Dr. Zhivago, which was found with his body: “happiness only real when shared.”

Blake and I have talked about our mutual respect for McCandless’ life and the example it set. And happiness only real when shared is part of what I think Blake was getting at when advocating for living on the edge between wilderness and the city.

But I advocate a different path, one I think Willi Unsoeld would have approved of: a house in town and one in the country.

For me, the wilderness (including my time at the cliffs climbing) has always served as a time of renewal—not the end itself, but a means to an end, the end being to strengthen my connection with people, or to better equip me to live in society. I climb for the “reassurance that there’s something behind it all and it’s good,” but at the end of the day, it’s not a life devoted to climbing that I’m seeking, but a life devoted to connections with individuals: my family and friends, the people I love.

A house in town is for life where people are. The house in the country is for the renewal of your spirit.

I’m not the first to come up with this way of living; as far as I can tell, the wealthy British aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries also held a house in town and one in the country as the ideal way to live. They felt an obligation to engage with society and politics, but they balanced that with the open air and peace of country life.

I know not everyone has the resources to live like this. So, let this be the second post in a row where I do a disclaimer: even to contemplate such a lifestyle requires immense privilege. Even so, if it’s within your means—if you have the freedom and wealth and time to choose your way of life, then I would suggest that a house in town and one in the country is the way to go.

And of course—keep a keen eye over your shoulder for climate risks.

1. I’m certainly no saint in this regard. My climate sins are many—I just try to mitigate my exposure in other ways.

2. Both Blake and I have tried to find the full context for this, but have searched in vain. If you have the speech, by all means, send it along!