Hi. I’m Jim Arraj, and we are on our way to see where I
live. You are in Klamath County, Oregon, which is about the size of the state of
Connecticut, but has only 60,000 people. It has Crater Lake on one end, Klamath Lake on
the other, and it is bordered by the Cascade Mountains. It is also home to one of the
world’s great ponderosa pine forests where I live with my wife, Tyra, the only people
in 100 square miles. See that flash? That’s home. Let’s make another pass. How
did we end up out here, with me being from New York City, and Tyra from Connecticut? I
guess the story starts in San Diego. We had just had our first child, our daughter
Elizabeth, and I had finally found a job working for the county welfare department. We
looked at our future and got scared: the kids off at school, us working at jobs we
didn’t like to pay for a house we wouldn’t have much time to be in anyway. It
was the idea of time that hit us the hardest, or more exactly, the lack of time. We would
be living a life we didn’t choose, someone else’s life, really, a life without
the time to find out who we really were.
That desire for time was the beginning of many adventures. We began to dream of
tropical islands where we would build our hut, the coconuts would fall from the trees, and
we would have all the time in the world. Or cool tropical uplands where it would always be
springtime and we would live on fruits and vegetables that cost only pennies a day. We had
dreams of spending the winter on retreat up in the Sierra Nevada mountains with Elizabeth
and baby John. Or starting our own business and making a living with our hands. Or going
on a long retreat on the California coast, and then finding five acres in the country and
building a house ourselves – only to find everything too expensive.
All these dreams were to lead us to the forest where the land was beautiful and cheap,
but far from paved roads and power lines, and a mile high in the snow zone of the Cascade
Mountains. It was here our schooling began in earnest about simple living, and how
complicated it was. The first thing we needed was a house, and quickly, for winter was
coming. Making handcrafts and a bookcase or two hadn’t really prepared us for this.
But we muddled through by reading books, drawing plans on the backs of envelopes, and
overcoming our biggest obstacle, which was the notion that had been pounded into our heads
all our lives – that you bought houses made by . You didn’t just jump up and
build your own.
Once we got the house up – and it didn’t immediately fall down – from
then on we would simply build whatever we needed or wanted. When the kids decided they
wanted their own rooms, we told them to build them themselves, and they did.
With a roof over our heads the days took on a rhythm of their own, and grew into weeks
and months and years. We would make bread. For a long time that was the kids’ job. We
would do home school with the kids, and all of us would sit around the lunch table and
discuss everything from tigers to tattoos. We would make tofu. Our electricity came from a
solar panel which was connected to a battery, and then to an inverter that converted it
from DC to AC. We would cut and split wood, and feed it to our wood stove made out of an
old hot water tank.
Slowly our eyes began to open so we could really see the forest around us.
We never had a well, and we would haul drinking water from town in the summer, and
collect rain and snow in our little ponds for the garden. Growing a garden was a tough job
when you are almost a mile high and can have a frost any month of the year, and if you do
manage to grow something, the chipmunks are waiting to pounce on it.
And each year there would be something new to build. Our favorite style was to dig some
holes in the ground, cut and treat some poles, and then just go on from there. Not very
complicated, but tiring at times. One year Elizabeth decided she wanted to have a place of
her own, and she just went out and built it.
Another year it was Tyra’s turn. She wanted a little meditation hut, complete with
a stained glass window which we made from 1" thick slabs of glass.
And little by little the dwellers of the forest came to visit.
In winter it is as if we have moved to a completely different place. The snow can cover
the ground 4’ deep or more, leaving us to get in and out by skis or snowmobile. Back
when we used to have some neighbors Herb tried to keep the road open with his World War II
6-wheel drive Navy truck.
We had hoped that by living in the forest we would find what we valued most –
time. And we did. I found time to write book after book about the things closest to our
hearts: Christian mysticism and metaphysics, and their dialogue with Eastern religions and
Jungian psychology.
And Tyra started making videos about these same subjects that have ranged from
straight-forward interviews and conferences to complicated documentaries that took us far
from home.
But we have always come back to the forest.
