"The Ideal Country Home" by Gene Gerue page 2

The ideal country home is located in an area that is stable. The income base is broad, not dependent on a single industry. In many ideal rural counties, the three strongest sources of income are transfer payments (such as retirement checks), agriculture, and tourism. Stability derives not only from economics but from social conditions. The ideal home is located within a fair and nurturing community.

It is a deeply personal decision whether the ideal country home is in a tiny hamlet, a small town, near a town, or out in the boondocks. Each has advantages; each has unique challenges. The ideal home site faces in a southerly direction with maximum solar exposure for lighting, gardening, and vegetative growth. Whether it is in a valley or on a ridgetop will partly depend on whether you wish to look up or down at soaring birds--the kind of view you prefer. Ridgetops get more winds, valleys flood more.

Without leaving the contiguous 48 states you can find virtually any type of house, climate, topography, and demographics you prefer. An A-frame in the mountains; a cottage at the beach; a cabin in the woods; an adobe casa in the desert. Two hours from the nearest neighbor or tucked against a small town. On a thousand acres, a hundred acres, ten acres, an acre, or a large lot. Ski country, fishing country, farming country. But country.

Obtain as much land as you can afford to purchase and pay taxes on. Nothing will guarantee your future peace and privacy more than ownership of a substantial land buffer around your home. Extra land provides the kind of privacy that makes window coverings redundant and the volume of Luciano Pavarotti or Willie Nelson while gardening strictly a matter of personal choice. And owning extra acreage allows one to be a land steward, an honorable calling on our distressed planet-home. If buying a large acreage seems beyond your means, you can look for a place that has characteristics undesirable to developers: remoteness, bad roads, rough terrain, steep access, and parcels too small to develop. Such land will usually be low-priced.

Like-minded persons can combine their dollars to buy a large acreage, deed housesites to each owner, and hold the rest of the land as common area, to be enjoyed by all and to be a buffer against intrusive development. If five buyers purchase an old 200-acre farm, and each uses five acres for house, outbuildings, garden and orchard, that leaves 175 acres to ensure peace, quiet, and firewood forever. We have friends who did this. At first they had trouble getting bank financing for house construction because of legal questions regarding foreclosure and resale in case of default. They hired a lawyer who drafted an ownership agreement acceptable to their banks. Our friends each now enjoy the use of a large, beautiful acreage that none of them could have purchased alone.

Now that is my viewpoint. There is another: buy only as much land as you need and wish to care for. This view comes from city people who treat country land like city land, busting their behinds to prune forests and manicure meadows. Forget it. Manicure to your mind's content around the house, mow meadows a few times a year to thicken the grass and prevent erosion, and cut firewood judiciously, taking dead, dying, and crooked trees. Let the rest of your land be natural. If the natural landscape offends you, you would probably be unhappy living in real country. Consider a small town.

There is in fact a great need for land to be protected from further human meddling. Forests, wetlands, grasslands, meadows, glades, and fens left in their natural states maintain biodiversity, protect watersheds, consume carbon dioxide, and preserve this bountiful and beautiful planet for our children. That such land can also be a buffer for serene living is a bonus.

"The home idea is clearly dying out in the cities. Homes seem to be incompatible with compact city life; the consequence is that the serious-minded middle class is constantly working out and out toward the suburbs and the adjacent towns, in the effort to secure the greatest possible proximity to nature consistent with business prudence. This transfer of domicile at once raises far-reaching questions. The political philosopher sees danger because this movement removes a large class of voters and is likely to leave the city, or the congested parts of it, in the hands of politicians. The social philosopher finds a new breed of citizen developing...not country-bred nor city-bred, but suburban-bred, product of neither extreme. Will this citizen have the prejudices of either extreme? And will he be a more useful social factor because of his intermediate origin?" (Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Outlook to Nature, 1924)

"So, do you think that small town life in America is disappearing? No at all! Communities such as these can be found all over the United States. I mean, it is shrinking, to be sure, but it's still out there." (Paul Newman, in an Interview by Jonathan Cutler in Venice Magazine, December 1994.)

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