Homesteader and Author of A Handmade Life
An Interview by Rod MacIver
Bill Coperthwaite is a homesteader living on the northern Maine coast. He has spent time with indigenous cultures around the world studying their folk wisdom and living skills with a view to incorporating them into an intentional community on his land and from there into the culture at large. He lives alone in a yurt, one of many he has helped build in different parts of the country.
I had heard of Bill from several different people. Since he has no phone, I wrote and asked for an interview and a short time later received a postcard welcoming me. He met me at the road and we walked a mile or so to his yurt. We sat in the second floor in the late morning. Birds sang outside. The room was lit by natural light – windows circled the entire living area of the yurt.
Shortly after we got there, I pulled out my green tea and offered him some. He didn't drink hot or cold beverages, he said, or alcoholic beverages. No, he just drank water and fruit juices. "Everything else,” he said, “was an acquired taste.”
He went on to say, “I bet the first time you drank coffee, you didn’t like it.”
“Depends how much honey was in it,” I responded.
“I don’t put salt or pepper on my food either. Or eat smoked fish or smoked ham. Initially that was done to meat to preserve it and we got used to the taste. But it tastes fine cooked simply. We don’t need all that other stuff.”
So Bill drank some fruit juice that had turned bubbly in the sun, and I drank green tea. I pulled a loaf of bread out of my pack, and Bill produced a loaf he had bought, and we cut it up. “Want some butter on that?” Bill asked.
“No, thanks.” I said. “I’ve gotten used to bread without butter. Find I don’t need it.”
How did you end up here in Maine?
I came here in 1960. I was thirty at the time and had just been through an experience in Mexico working with the American Friends Service Committee. I had already gotten my ideas together on the subject of needing to design a better society — the building blocks: simple living and community. I was starting to talk in terms of social design; designing by cultural blending, by borrowing from this culture and that culture and putting them together to see if we could come up with some solutions. I didn’t think it would happen automatically. If we were going to have a better culture, we had to design it rather than have one imposed by a community leader. If enough of us got together, and began thinking about better societies, a better society would emerge in and of itself. So I bought this land using the money I made in Mexico. The town considered it wasteland and didn’t want it. It had no road to it and it was isolated. It was just was I wanted. Later I bought some more. Almost all the land around here, bordering the ocean, was under $5 an acre.
Even when I was growing up, cleared over woodland sold for $10 an acre. And here was land that was not cut over, on the ocean, at $3.50 an acre. I would have had to go up to Newfoundland or Cape Breton to find land that inexpensive. I was thinking in terms of community at that time – still am – still think that community – intentional community is the only way to live. But it hasn’t happened here yet. And I was also thinking in terms of a school. I had been working in various experimental schools. I thought then, as I think now, that we have tremendous room for improvement in how we help kids grow, or help each other grow.
Why has the community not happened?
If you want to start a community it is easy – just put out a call and say there is free land. You will have all the people you want. More than you want. And it won’t work. I wasn’t interested in starting a community that was going to fail. Most successful communities are based on a charismatic leader, which doesn’t interest me, or an authoritarian system, or a religious creed, which also doesn’t interest me. I thought that maybe you could have a community that had a common thread, a common purpose revolving around the search for better ways to live. As a community we would search the libraries, search the world for information and then experiment with it and publish it. But it didn’t happen. I didn’t find the right people. And so I keep gathering my collection of information and publishing it.
I still believe in the basic theory. An individual, or individual family, living in the wilderness is vulnerable. You break your leg and it is all over. One person cannot take up the slack when you are trying to slop the hogs and till the land and raise kids. If you have a community, one member can take up the slack for another. And also, if I have animals here, I am trapped – I cannot leave them unattended. If you are a community, I can take care of the livestock or kids while you go off to South America to do your study in the mountains. Then we swap over. So for me, community makes all kinds of sense.
Bill on Living Simply and the Role of Solitude
If we are going to live within our income on this planet, we have to live more simply. Learning to live simply and go lightly is such a beautiful thing. It has an aesthetic aspect to it. It is a delight. It is fun. For example, I have no desire anymore to make chairs that I can make and you can’t. That is not going to solve our problems. This chair I am sitting on here has three pieces to it — a democratic chair. I can teach you how to make this chair in a few hours. That is simplicity. That Windsor chair is no longer exciting to me at all. At one time it was. At one time I loved making those. I am glad I learned the skill, because I can use the skill in other ways. But instead of designing a chair that puts you down because you can’t make it, I can look at this chair and say ‘I can design this’ and maybe you can’t. But you can make it. And I will help you make it. That, to me, is exciting.
When I was younger, I didn’t pay much attention to Jung and Einstein and many others, talking about the joy of solitude. As they got older and older they talked about how much solitude meant to them. Now I understand why. To me, living out here, the solitude, the lack of noise, being away from the roads and machines and chain saws, is somehow very productive for my thinking. It is very exciting. You don’t have to run away from society if you live in the woods. It doesn’t have to be that at all. Once you get your system of thinking understood, it is a little bit like this: there is this little fellow who lives inside my head, who sometimes sits up behind my left ear, sometimes my right ear, and if I treat him right, he is wonderful. He will come up with the neatest ideas – maybe not world shattering in somebody else’s terms, but Earth shattering in my world. But if I go to sleep late, he doesn’t cooperate. Or if I eat too much coffee ice cream and can’t sleep, or over strain by working too hard, he doesn’t cooperate. But if I give him the right conditions, and eat meals regularly, this little guy will turn on all of what he knows.
If I live in a city or a town, the distractions keep this little guy from going into action. Out here in the woods, every day is very exciting. Enjoying solitude like this is one of the most exciting discoveries of life. I believe it is there for everyone, but our society does not encourage it, making it one of greatest missed opportunities, one of the greatest secrets. We have somehow been sold a bill of goods – that some people are the thinkers, and other people are the doers, and others are couch potatoes. We are not led to discover the excitement of our own creative thinking. I think it is there for everyone if we knew how to encourage it. But for some reason, that I don’t understand, we haven’t learned how to promote this, or develop it. If we are going to have a decent society we are going to have to promote this inner development. I am not talking of spiritual things here, but of honing a person’s natural creative interest in life. This type of development is for me as exciting as anything I have ever done, whether it was mountain climbing, or shooting rapids, or some other adventurous exciting thing.
Financial insecurity
I grew up in a family without any money, but they encouraged me to grow, to succeed at school, at athletics. Their encouragement was there. No one put me down; there was plenty of love and affection. Whenever I needed money, there was always work I could get. The kid next door might have been given a ball glove, but I could work to get a ball glove. I got help from teachers, because they saw me as someone who came from a poor family but who wanted to learn. I grew up liking to work. Half of the battle of living in a spot like this in the wilderness is liking to work. If you have to struggle to go out there to cut your wood, or build your house, or plant your trees, then that is going to be hardship. I can’t think of pain or hardship.
There should have been financial insecurity, but it hasn’t happened. I don’t have health insurance, so if I had gotten really sick that would have blown things, I suppose. I just decided that to have the insurance, to have the security of that sort, I would have had to go sell myself outside. When I was twenty-three it became clear to me that most people live lives of quiet prostitution. Selling themselves – their art skills, their brains, or their muscles. We put down people who sell their sex, but we weren’t putting down people who sell their muscles or skills. I decided those many years ago that I wasn’t going to do that if I could help it. I was going to work at work I believed in, and get along on what it paid. And I have been able to do that. And lucked out in many cases.
One of the nice things about simple living is that it costs less money. You don’t need the money for gadgets that you do if you are trying to keep up in society. Out here you are not under show as much, so the fact that you don’t have this or that isn’t continually put upon you.
Work has been maligned by overwork. In my life, I shift from one activity to another, and I don’t know which of them are work and which are leisure. When I am out chopping wood, or hauling supplies, my brain can be thinking about what I am reading – sometimes I will take a book with me in the woods. On a cold winter’s day, I will chop until I am sweaty, and then sit down a bit, and read for four or five pages, and then I will get up and chop some more. Which is recreation and which is leisure I don’t know. It is meaningless any more.
The Role of Work
Work is a lovely word to me. It doesn’t bring images of pain or stress or laboriousness. The hardest work I can remember doing is making the beach down where we had the canoes. I made that beach hammering the ledges. You take a sixteen pound hammer, take thirty blows, and you are ready for a rest. So I would take thirty blows – and you have to wear heavy clothes – leather jacket, heavy pants with shin guards, gloves, a mask over your face – the rock sails off just whistling like a bullet. After thirty blows I’d sit down and read five pages. Then I’d take thirty blows. It took two summers. Sometimes there was help, sometimes there wasn’t. That is what hard labor in a prison camp is like but it was enjoyable. I am happy I have the beach. I can bring my twenty-foot canoe in sideways.
I am not under pressure to do anything here. I am five years ahead on wood. That makes me the richest man in Maine, by the way. I don’t have to go out and cut wood today. I have to cut it sometime, but the system I have worked out takes an average of five minutes a day, to get the wood, to cut it, stack it, to bring it here, to put it in the stove. Takes an average of five minutes a day. I don’t go out for five minutes a day. I go out for a couple of hours, and then other days don’t do any of it.
I don’t have a chainsaw. With a good sharp axe, and a modern bow saw — Swedish sandvic tempered, hard point blades — you can cut all the wood you need. Even the monster trees. So with this light bow saw and a good axe I am harvesting the trees now at six inches. A six or seven inch tree with a bow saw makes sense. One two feet in diameter – that is laborious. When you have firewood that is six inches in diameter, you split it once – one blow – and you get two pieces. Thinking this whole process through makes it more fun for me. For example, I have designed a special wheelbarrow that works for these trails and allows me to carry more wood more stably. It is exciting. Did you notice the shoulder strap on the wheelbarrow? Ever seen one before? The Chinese developed it. It has been in China for thousands of years. My use of that idea is an example of cultural blend. I borrowed their knowledge of the shoulder strap So the weight isn’t on my hands. It is on my back and my hands are free to steer. I have much more control. You may not have noticed the belly strap too. Without it I have to use my hands and shoulders, which is very inefficient. With this strap I just push with my belly, and it goes up the little hill. That was my addition. So I have taken something from the ancient Chinese, added a modern addition of my own, and created a more efficient wheelbarrow.
Part of the fun is that I was able to think about it and design it myself while I am hauling firewood back and forth.
Part of my day is spent writing, part reading, part cutting wood. Part redesigning chairs or a crooked knife, or making some spoons, or talking with visitors. I spend the early part of each day, when my brain is sharpest, writing and organizing, and then maybe working on the design of a chair. I am supposed to go out in the middle of February to Penn State, and do a ten day work shop on making chairs. So there is an opportunity to make some money while sharing the design and improving the design.
Calendars
Originally it started out because I was troubled by the whole Christmas commercialization – and I am still troubled. I decided to make calendars and give them to friends at Christmas time instead of a card. Then people started asking if they could buy them for their friends, and I got the idea that that would be a help to support the Yurt Foundation. Friends who were going to give gifts to friends at Christmas time could consider the calendar as one of the possibilities. And help out the Yurt Foundation, plus it spreads the word about the Yurt Foundation.
How does good work get out? Some of the best books I know are not being read. The book, For Peace and Truth by Pierre Saraso. I have not yet met someone who has read it. And it is one of the most important books I have ever read. Ends and Means by Aldus Huxley. A fantastic book. And Eric Fromm’s book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness – even the editor of Manas, Henry Geiger, hadn’t read it. This book may be one of the most important books of the 20th century. The first half is great. The second half is about the psychoanalysis of Gerbels and Himmler and Hitler and Stalin, but the first half of it is fantastic. He takes Conrad Lorenz apart bit by bit – proposes the thought that man is not innately aggressive – it is learned behavior. It is a fantastic book.
So there are these books out there that I think are very important, that people aren’t reading. Why should I write a book and add to that. How do you get messages out? I like the calendars because you can put short bursts of things, and people can read them in little pieces rather than chapters. The big drawback is that they are ephemeral. As are pamphlets. Temporary. It has to be a bound book to be kept. That is too bad, because many of the best things can be said in a paragraph or a few pages.
I started in 1974, and dedicated the first one to Richard Gregg. Except for two or three years, they have been done every year since. They are sold for $10 each, and people who put in $50 will get eight calendars. And that has been a major help keeping this small, non-profit organization going.
The Yurt Foundation – the yurt in the Yurt Foundation is not the fact that we are building or designing or selling plans for yurts, all of which happens. The yurt is an example of cultural blending, of taking the structure from central Asia, which works beautifully there, felt-covered structure made with light weight latus frame, portable, semi-portable, covered with felt. It is semi-desert – under 10 inches of rain, and most of that comes in the winter as dry powder snow. It blows off. You don’t have a rain problem with rain. Maybe occasionally you do, but basically you are covered with insulation that comes from your sheep – goats, cattle.
Here, it is useless. In Maine or Vermont, a felt covered structure will collapse in the first rain. It is gigantic spunge with a ton of water. I had been working with low-cost housing in Mexico, and one day I saw a picture of a yurt without its cover. I was ready to recognize it instantly as a structure that would work here in this climate. So the word Yurt is a symbol of this blending, of taking things from central Asia.
That is a neat way to solve many of our problems. If we would just like to start to look to the folk wisdom that is turned out around the world, instead of putting it aside as old fashion, useless, primitive, knowledge, look at it for the beauty of it and see if there is some way we can incorporate it and grow from it. We are rapidly destroying the folk wisdom that exists in people’s minds. We need to capture that as much as we can and preserve it because it is one the greatest sources of wealth that we have. The snowshoe – these primitive people came up with this elegant solution – supporting yourself on snow, or skis, or kayaks, or canoe paddles, or birchbark canoes. If they didn’t exist, and you came up with one, they would have you in the museum of modern art, and treating you as a design hero.
Maybe it is knowledge of child care or gardening or care for the elderly or herbal medicines. The solution of our problem is so difficult we can’t afford to ignore wisdom wherever we find it. So the Yurt Foundation is used to try to collect this kind of information, experiment with it, and hopefully publish it.
Practical knowledge is not one of the things that we are preoccupied with in our anthropology or architecture departments.
Falling Beautiful
Did you cut the wood here on your property that you use in your yurts (which are made of and covered in wood)?
All the boards came from outside. I could have cut the logs and shipped them out, got them milled and had them brought back. That was just too much work. So I went to the sawmills outside and got the lumber and happened to find these wide, 21-inch boards, and brought them in on the canoes. A lot of canoe trips. Once you get the boards loaded it is no problem, it is loading and unloading. And of course it is over a number of years. The average person nowadays who wants a house, they buy the land and in three months they want to be inside. If you are willing to let it grow as your skill grows, if you build it over time, your skill grows over time, you learn more and it costs you less. This building has been in place in 1976. It isn’t finished, and it never will be finished. That lower floor down below, with wood storage and the shop, is an earth floor. If you need another guest room, you would build it, add a floor. Not only am I getting a house, but I am getting a chance to experiment with a new design. Is it work, is it study, is it experimentation? Is it fun? Each of those. The added fun for me is that is seeks to put things within the grasp of the ordinary person.
There are no rafters. No heavy timbers to lift. A 12 year old can pick up the boards and help put them into place. There are a lot of things to this design that don’t meet the eye, and one of them is no rafters. Being round is only part of the secret. In a normal house, the rafters take the load, and the roof boards are dead load on the rafters. They are not doing any work – they are just keeping the weather out. If you were to put better wood in your rafters, and lay them down, they can be both sheathing from the weather, and contributing to the strength of the building. That is why this is a tension roof. There is a steel cable around the outside. That was the beauty of the Mongolian structure – in a teepee there is a lot of waste space down at the ground. Negative space. Where you can’t sit and you can’t walk. So some ingenious person thought ‘Gee, I can raise this up in the air and put a vertical wall under it. And I will have much more room. It was a great idea, but it collapses. Because the earth is holding the teepee from going outward. Some one said lets put a belt or rope around it, that takes the thrust of the roof. So you have a teepee without the negative space. This was an ingenious thing, and that is the basis for this. It is round, it has a sky light and a tension band.
Helen and Scott Nearing
I was fascinated by Scott (Nearing), one of the most truthful human beings I have ever met. And he was brilliant and concerned. And he was much older than me. Fifty years older. I was a little boy, I knew nothing about left politics, I knew nothing about politics, I wasn’t interested in politics, I wasn’t a vegetarian. In later years I looked back and tried to find what we had in common. And one, I liked to work. Work wasn’t and isn’t drudgery for me. And I was a pacifist. But they were militant vegetarians. Intellectually Scott was a marvelous person.
I read all of Scott’s books. I was surprised that Helen (Scott’s wife) hadn’t. Maybe it is understandable that you don’t read all your husband’s books. Some are completely out of date, but to a person who is trying to understand the person of Scott Nearing, how he moved from being this kid with a silver spoon in his mouth, his father a banker and his grandfather the head of a mining town, going to the best of schools, and going to church and being a concerned Christian youth, what happens to this person who becomes ostracized by society just for doing what he believed. In a sense Jesus Christ was too. He was ostracized for following his best intentions.
To read his books, and watch him being pushed out of one university, out of one situation after another, until finally he joined the communist party, and then leaving that because he was too independent for them. He submitted his manuscript on imperialism. They sent it to Russia. They sent it back with a note, “Don’t publish.” He quit the party and published. The party said they threw him out but he actually left so he could publish his book. They said Comrade Lenin has published the definitive book on imperialism, and Scott’s book wasn’t needed. But Scott saw it differently. Scott had references to imperialism going back for another two thousand years. So he quit. He was that kind of independent person.
It was fun to read Scott’s books, and see this mind holding to these basic principles, and how they moved from being on the side of the rich in society to being on the side of the poor.
They threw him out of Wharton because he was opposed to child labor in the Pennsylvania mines. He opposed the First World War in a pamphlet he wrote called The Great Madness. They took him to court for sedition. He won his case, but he was blackballed from teaching.
He and Helen, before they moved to New York, were burning his pamphlets in the stove in their apartment in New York City. They were that hard up. Finally they said we have to get out of this. He ran against La Guardia in New York. Society had pummeled Scott, so he had a right to be grim.
I enjoyed learning from Scott, and being with Scott, and knowing the person, but we were never companions in the sense of Richard Gregg and me – the two of us were just like two puppies playing together. To Scott I was a young person who was willing and eager to learn. But there was always a big difference between us. Richard and he were about the same age – the same age as my father. It is always fun to find that age can disappear in a relationship. I was so happy to find an older person who found the same things to be true that I was learning, and that had tested them out over the years. And he was so happy to find a young person coming along on the same path. It was a great relationship.
Richard Gregg ws a lawyer from Harvard law school. He was in Chicago as part of a labor dispute, and he was on the side of labor, and they lost the strike. He was without a job, happened to look in a window of a bookstore and saw a pamphlet by Gandhi. He got the pamphlet, and read it, and he was so impressed that he wrote to Gandhi. He got a reply back from Gandhi’s secretary saying that Gandhi was in jail, but if Richard wanted to come he would be welcome at the ashram. He went, and that began his concern with non-violence and pacifism. He spent a couple of years there, and off and on he went back to India to teach and live in the ashram.
I was in Mexico teaching school with the American Friends Service Committee, and I had read Richard Gregg’s Power of Non-violence. I wrote him a letter, and he said, “come visit.” I was hitchhiking through. I called him, and he came to pick me up. They were living up the river from Chester New York. His wife was a biodynamic farmer. A great, great person. Really nice. I spent a weekend with them. We became good friends. We spent time together regularly until he died.
I didn’t know the Nearings (authors of The Good Life, and other books) at the time. They were down there in Harborside Maine, about an hour and a half drive south. I knew about them. I don’t like to bother people who get a lot of attention, a lot of visitors, so I didn’t want to just knock on their door. I put it off until the right opportunity comes. I wrote an article, and sent it to Manas – which Richard Gregg had introduced me to – he knew the editor – so I got a subscription and enjoyed it. I sent Richard an announcement about having a seminar here on education. I got a card from the Nearings saying that they would like very much to attend, but had an obligation somewhere else, and would I come to visit sometime? This was the opening I needed. I went down later on in 1963 and met them. We became good friends and met regularly until their deaths.
Scott was much sterner than Richard Gregg. I used to try to get Scott to smile. Sometimes that could be fun on its own. Jokes weren’t part of his life. Whereas with Richard, jokes were right on the tip of his tongue. Ready to spill out.
Scott on one level, had the same background I did – the church school. You either believed Thou shalt not kill, and you become a pacifist, or you believe Thou shalt not kill except when I tell you to kill. And you see the duplicity of this. If you kill we will put you in jail, unless you kill when I tell you to, in which case we will make you a hero. They both can’t be right.
The fun for me is the adventure of working this thing through in your life. I believe very deeply that countries can learn to live peacefully with one another. It is innate in human nature to get along with one another. Most of the violence is committed out of insecurity. If we help people to be secure in what they have and what their needs are, and not only food and clothing, but their mental needs to be creative and develop, we can have a more peaceful world.
So I am not interested in placard carrying, in protesting wars. I would like to spend what energy I have to discover ways to help foster growth.
These people I have been mentioning are much older than I am. On the average fifty years older. I spent a good part of my early life – 25 to 35 – tracking these people down, and enjoying every minute of it. And tracking down old Eskimos. But one of the shocks came when Helen Nearing died. Helen was 25 years older than I was, and suddenly I realized that I didn’t know anybody in between. I had been focusing on older people, and younger people who had been students and whatever, but now, I suddenly find I am sitting there at the Good Life Center, and I am the older person there, at sixty-five. Which is a shock. Because I had been spending my time with people in their eighties and nineties.
I had one older friend, Bob Todd, up in Canada. John Todd’s father. We were good correspondents. He was a joyous, happy person. He was older than Helen. He died two years ago. So I know none of these older people any more. I would love to meet some more of them. Age isn’t important, but people who are doing this type of thing is. Joyous about the expedition, about the search. All these people I mentioned were excited about the search, joyous about it.
What has your search been about?
Searching for better ways to live. How to have a more decent society. Like Tolstoy said, ‘Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?” These are questions we cannot, by definition, find the answer to. The answers we can find are all about how we can live here and now, how to treat your fellow human.
There is no reason you can’t make a wooden bowl, that you can use and eat of, that your kids and grand kids can have. They don’t have to shatter and break like ordinary ceramic dishes. But it is an attitude. I love having the Eskimo and Indian stuff around. But I like even more using those not as artifacts but as living examples of things you can incorporate in your life. But not necessarily by replicating it. Ideally, the crafts and skills will evolve on their own. Life is made up of thousands of little things like this.
What I am trying to do in this house is to have everything possible made by friends or by myself or by someone who made it in some other country in front of me. You don’t do it 100%, but if it has meaning for you and you work at it, it is amazing over the years how it alters your life. As I look around here, I see few things that are not made by hand – the light bulb…
Much of what we have in our society now that we think of as beautiful are things made by someone else. In the sense of artwork, or made in a factory as the latest design of a CD holder. It is beautifully made and all that, but it is impersonal. And is ephemeral. They are designed to wear out. It is all mixed up in the money economy.
I think that there is more emotional security in people’s lives if they have an intimate relationship with their surroundings. What I am talking about is more than just knowing the flowers and birds and trees in your region. It can be knowing the things that you are using. If you make a shirt, you know that shirt in a way that you don’t if you just walk in and buy it. The same is true of a spoon or a bowl or a house. If you have been involved in making it, it gives you more understanding of that. Plus there is a confidence that comes. I can build my own house. For me, an awful lot of the violence in the world comes from insecurity. If we could find ways to grow in emotional stability we wouldn’t have to tell the ethnic jokes, we wouldn’t have to push someone else down, either mentally or physically. Otherwise we are going to continue having this society that does violence to people in so many different ways.
Gerry Mander says we spend more on advertising than we do on education. That is such a sad picture of a culture.
Straight lines
We need some straight lines. It is nice to have a level floor, a flat table top. But I have noticed that year after year, in some unconscious way, I have been searching for ways to get more curvilinear. Normally yurts are just curved when you looked down from above, but I find that when I look at that Windsor chair I built, that I like the swoop of the back of it. Somehow to my eye it is softer. So over the years I have moved to curving of lines whenever I can. I find, somehow, that emotionally it just feels better. It is like that little man that lives above my left ear is pulling the strings and saying, “That would like a little better if it had a few curves.” So for years I was sketching yurts that had curved walls. But I couldn’t figure out how to build them.
I have been making curved doorways for a long time. Hobbit doors. They just seem nicer. The human body is not rectangular. Yet most of our doors are rectangular. To me, they look ugly. It is so nice to have a rounded door. I haven’t made a rectangular door since 1976. Some people think I have lost my square.
Yurts
The Yurt Foundation is a non-profit that searches for information among other cultures that can be blended together to come up with better solutions, whether child care or architecture. Or furniture making or gardening. This research is supported by selling plans for various yurts, calendars and yurt building workshops. If you want to be a part of the building, you and your friends, I will come and work as a consultant. The only paid person there would be me. And then you have volunteers come and take part for the fun of learning to build. A workshop for a 17-foot yurt might take a week. A concentric yurt might take two weeks. A big family yurt needs more than one workshop – you burn people out trying to do it all at once. So you get your materials together, and feed them, and give them a tent or something to sleep in, and they donate their labor, and I come and guide everyone through it.
