Landsick

Dove is inherently far hardier than I am.

They are used to the outdoors.  They would happily sleep outside next to a fire.  When they walk outside, they not only having surer footing, but they are quieter as they pick through the leaves.

If I want land for stillness and meditation, Dove wants land for activity and movement.  They want land that is theirs and that they know, deeply. For the last few years, they have routinely joked-not-so-joked about running away into the wilderness. They want land and space on a level of a craving: they want a space they can walk daily with their dog Hazel and build whatever they desire.

Part of this desire is just who they are, and part if it comes from what I sometimes refer to flippantly as Dove’s “unconventional” background. That’s the nicest way to describe it. Total transparency in this and blog posts about their childhood: I’m using approximate ages for storytelling. Dove doesn’t have firm recollections of which year some things happened.

At age six, Dove lived in a trailer park with a creek and a neighbor with coyote and pet racoon. 

At seven, Dove lived on 11 acres of forest alongside a river.  It was surrounded by empty land, empty houses.  They taught themself to build fires and cook outside, spending all day outside.  They explored abandoned houses.   

Around age twelve and then throughout high school, Dove and their brothers spent summers and breaks with their mother and her fifth husband, a much older Vietnam Vet, on a property named Planet Raybon.

As Dove describes it, Planet Raybon started with just 40 acres of property and absolutely nothing else.  Dove’s mom and Raybon slept in a camper at first.   The house as built by hand- a simple affair with basically two rooms- an upstairs where Dove’s mother and Raybon slept, a downstairs with a kitchen and a bed where the brothers slept.  There was a giant barn style door that opened up. Dove and their brothers helped dig post holes for the various steel buildings that were eventually erected, sleeping outdoors on the platform floor as they built them.    

Plant Raybon had no running water or electricity.  Planet Raybon had plenty of guns, a pot farm*, and parts of dead endangered animals and birds to sell. They would stay other places occasionally for a hot shower or if Raybon got too physically abusive.

All of that negative was balanced out, at least to Dove, with the fact that they had the entire outdoors, all of the land of Planet Raybon to make up for those shortcomings. Dove had land that they knew deeply, every inch of it, and they spent almost all of the daytime outside.

Since moving, Dove no longer jokes about running away into the wilderness. They do, however, joke about never leaving Robin Woods ever again.

*It wasn’t a pot farm, Dove says. It’s was just some pot plants. Well, maybe they also sold it. Ok, you can say pot farm.