First Year at Kalien: Welcome to Survival Mode 2015-2016

From my journal, August 12, 2002:
“The Rivendell project—a vision born during a run through the Barn Trail woods. An artist retreat of 25-50 acres, a colony for artists. A place for people from all walks of life (but especially creatives) to find encouragement. Private spaces for solitude, a gathering space to meet for food, drink, dialogue. Think tanks, salons like the French Revolution, in evenings around a great room, a fireplace.”

Thirteen years. That’s how long it took for that vision to transform from scrawled words in my journal to fifty-five acres of Appalachian wilderness. Thirteen years of fighting church bureaucracies that asked “how will that put butts in the pews?” Thirteen years of losing 125 acres and a thirty-two-year marriage. Thirteen years of wondering if this dream was actually God calling or just my own stubborn delusion.

In 2006, Creative Community finally received its 501(c)3 nonprofit status—deliberately structured as a public charity, not a religious organization, because I didn’t want to exclude anyone. By 2015, Gina and I had purchased and paid for our wilderness land. We called it Kalien, which means “beauty is calling.”

We sold our beautiful Lebanon home, said goodbye to suburbs and civilization, and relocated permanently to the end of a country road where the dream would finally become reality.

What I didn’t realize was that the dream was about to become a nightmare first.

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The dilapidated RV that had looked questionable from the outside turned out to be a daily torture device disguised as temporary housing. We could not figure out how to get water to the damn thing, and what water we did have came with a six-gallon shower and a toilet the size of an airplane lavatory.

The water would run out in three or four minutes—just long enough to get completely soaped up before the flow stopped entirely. The heating element was possessed by demons: scalding hot one moment, ice cold the next, then nothing at all just as you reached for the shampoo. We had to put our used toilet tissue into baggies and remove them daily because the septic situation was, shall we say, inadequate.

“Unpleasant” doesn’t begin to cover this ordeal. “Medieval” might be closer.

The Barn Storage Debacle

Bright-eyed and eternally optimistic (also known as “delusional”), we used old shelves in the barn and plastic containers to store our groceries, food, and supplies. This brilliant plan lasted exactly until the first hard rain, when everything became rain-soaked due to the barn’s porous roof. Accessing our soggy supplies meant navigating a mud floor slippery as an ice rink.

Our solution? A stack of ancient pallets stored in the back of the barn, which we used to create a temporary floor for the storage area. This worked for a while—and by “worked,” I mean it kept us from breaking our necks every time we needed a can of beans.

We set up a portable table on a rare flat area up the hill for dining, but the bugs and mosquitoes launched such aggressive attacks that we finally purchased a big screened-in tent to cover our improvised dining area. The tiny table in the RV could barely accommodate two coffee cups, much less actual meals.

The Great Pasta Catastrophe

One fateful day, I had the brilliant idea to cook pasta and spaghetti on the tiny gas burner in the RV. Everything went fine until we attempted to drain the boiling pasta water into the shallow sink.

Physics happened.

The water swished like a tidal wave right back out of that ridiculous excuse for a sink and seriously scalded Gina. That was the end of our culinary pursuits in the RV. From that moment until we finally had our main lodge finished, we subsisted on takeout.

Our dining options were limited to what lay within a thirty-minute drive: Wendy’s chili and burgers, and what quickly became our favorite (and only) restaurant—a greasy spoon Mexican place next to an Interstate truck stop.

That Mexican food was probably mediocre at best, but after weeks of surviving on whatever we could heat up without access to a proper kitchen, it tasted like the greatest gourmet fare of our lives. We made friends with Ricardo and Fabio, the owner, and they became lifelines during our first year of building.

Finding Real Help

Here’s the thing about rural Tennessee construction labor: we could not get any white local person to show up without being high, drunk, or actively trying to cheat us out of money. Our Mexican and Puerto Rican friends from the restaurant were life savers—amazing workers and men of their word who understood what it meant to show up and do honest work.

They helped us in ways we never could have managed alone, treating our crazy project with respect and bringing skills we desperately needed. Unfortunately, as I write this in 2025, they’ve probably been arrested and deported by Trump’s secret police. The irony that the people who helped us build our American dream are now being persecuted by America itself is not lost on me.

From “My Life Digitized”:
“Wilderness Farm (Kalien)—Anger, Confusion, Pain, Healing, Dream Realized then Questioned.”

Tornado Roulette

One night, a massive tornado was approaching. We were smack in the middle of Tennessee’s tornado alley, and our neighbor Boogus came screaming up on his four-wheeler, yelling, “Get your asses to my house and the basement right now! That little RV is going to be smithereens if this thing comes close!”

He wasn’t wrong. Our RV was precariously perched on a stack of cement blocks, not anchored down at all. We fled to his basement while the storm raged overhead, listening to winds that sounded like freight trains and wondering if we’d have anything left to come back to.

Many sleepless nights we spent being whipped around like toys as storms battered our inadequate shelter. The RV would rock and sway with every gust, reminding us exactly how vulnerable we were in our aluminum can on wheels.

Improvised Infrastructure

We rigged up a propane-powered outdoor shower—a contraption that worked about as well as you’d expect something jury-rigged by construction amateurs to work. We finally got someone from the power company to help us get water working in the RV, though “working” is a generous term for the sporadic trickle we achieved. Gina hated that shower because I had hung it up high on the tree and she was shorter than me, therefore the water was always cold by the time it reached her. We would shower nude with no worries anyone would ever come down our road. And no one ever did. Our only voyeurs were families of deer who probably couldn’t believe their eyes.

The Beverly Hillbillies Laundry Operation

Once we got the water working, we went to a secondhand shop of dubious origins and purchased a used washing machine and clothes dryer for fifty dollars total. There was obviously no room in the RV for such luxuries, so we put them side by side outdoors against the back of our aluminum palace.

Boogus gave us two rusty metal clothes poles equipped for strings, and we hung our clothes out to dry there next to the washer. Often the washing machine would be completely full of Japanese beetles, and we’d have to clean them out before we could do a load—because apparently even the insects thought our setup was too pathetic to ignore.

With the bright blue tarp draped over the roof to keep the rain from pouring in, and the washer and dryer stationed like sentries on the outside of the RV, we really did look like a much poorer version of the Beverly Hillbillies. I had truly reverted back to my Appalachian redneck days—all my education, all my years in mega-church pulpits, all my pretensions to sophistication, reduced to doing laundry outdoors while picking bugs out of a twenty-five dollar washing machine.

Thankfully, we were at the end of that country road, so very few people witnessed this sad spectacle. Though I’m sure the ones who did had stories to tell at the local church potluck for years to come.

Fearing for our lives became a daily reality check. Every storm was a potential disaster. Every mechanical failure was a crisis. Every day we didn’t get hurt or sick felt like a small victory.

We quickly realized that if we were going to survive this experiment in wilderness living, we needed to build something more substantial than a rolling disaster on cement blocks.

The Hawks Nest Solution

That’s when we began work on building The Hawks Nest—my artist studio on the ridge above the upper meadow. If we couldn’t live comfortably in the RV, at least we could create one beautiful, functional space that would serve as proof of concept for everything else we hoped to build.

From a blog post, January 2016:
“For the past fourteen years I have located a lot of my dreams in a place to be called Kalien. Many times it felt like a mystical utopia—a Galt’s Gulch, a Shangri-La—only scrawled words in my journal, a dream each night in the dusty recesses of my mind, only to wake in the day to find it was vanity. But for over 5,000 days, in the best and worst of times, I could not shake it. The dreamers of day become dangerous men, for we will risk everything to act our dreams with open eyes in order to make them possible.”

The Hawks Nest became our North Star, our evidence that this crazy dream could actually work, our first real step toward creating the sacred space we’d envisioned.

From “Dreams Digitized,” February 2022:
“I was standing on top of the ridge, at Hawk’s Nest site, my artist studio at our farm in the Appalachians… Cathartic tears at the beginning, and now cathartic tears at a new beginning without the farm.”

The next four years are another story entirely—one involving more near-death experiences, more learning curves steep enough to require oxygen, and the gradual understanding that building your dreams with your own hands is equal parts nightmare and miracle.

The Healing That Happens in Wilderness

From a blog post about life at Kalien:

“My five-year escape to wilderness, gradually returning to society, my ever-increasing enjoyment of life have enabled me to heal. My life at last is characterized by the essentials of who I am: freedom, intimacy, sensuality, curiosity. All things that my former faith controlled, regulated, forbade, censored.”

Looking back on that first year, I’m amazed we survived it. The combination of inadequate shelter, improvised infrastructure, and sheer stubborn determination could have killed us in about seventeen different ways.

But it didn’t. Instead, it taught us that comfort is optional, community is essential, and sometimes the only way to reach your dreams is to live through the nightmare that gets you there.

From “My Life Digitized”:
“The feel of the ground, the earth at Kalien on my body… Hard physical labor at Farm… five years of wilderness healing therapy.”

Every hot meal in a real kitchen now feels like a luxury. Every solid roof over our heads feels like a blessing. Every night we go to sleep without wondering if we’ll wake up in Kansas feels like victory.

The first year at Kalien was survival mode. Everything after that was just building on the foundation of proving we could survive anything.

Next Tuesday: The Naked Skunk Incident