Adobeland: Living a rich life in small houses

Off Our Backs, Mar/Apr 2003 by Sabot, Karina

I live in a hole in the ground. It's like a hobbit house. Since I have always felt an affinity to animal habitats, living within the stone and mud womb of our Mother in a nine-- foot circle feels spiritually rich.

My home was built by a woman named Adobe. She and the other settlers on this land dug down four feet and around by nine. They set stone and mud to secure the walls and floor, and put in three steps up to sunlight level. Then they lifted a tree trunk into the center and fastened eleven slender trunks around it, like umbrella spokes. Planks of painted and raw salvaged wood got nailed between the spokes and created a sturdy quilted ceiling. I love lying in bed and staring at the various colors, grains and weathering of those wide boards. The rough stones jutting out from the gritty mud walls appeal to my visual and tactile senses. There are times I sit drinking tea, admiring the shapes and integrity in the beauty of the stone floor. It makes me laugh to be able to spill water on the floor when I bathe. The and desert soaks it up in seconds. Essentially, I love having what's normally regarded as "outside" natural beauty surrounding me inside.

"Adobeland" was created 30 years ago, in the revolutionary 1970s, as a separatist womyn's (read "lesbian") community. It exists on 10 rural acres west of Tucson. Two one-acre plots were sold off to early members of the community who wanted sisterly relations without the constant challenges of communal living.

My neighbors on the land live in straw-bale homes, tents, trailers, camper vans and handcrafted woodframe houses. We are legally defined as a "primitive campground." There are also two abandoned kivas that the packrats have moved into, a tree house, a sweat lodge, and plenty of cleared footpaths and driveways netting the property. Where the humans don't live, the animals and plants do in abundance. We are rich with saguaros, prickly pear, and cholla cacti, and palo verde, and mesquite trees. We cohabitate with Gambol quail, jackrabbits, ground squirrels, mice, rattlesnakes, Colorado river toads, tarantulas and coyotes. This past week my dog and I were chased in the moonlight by javelina!

Adobe is the founder and titleholder to the land. My kiva was her first hand-built house, and she describes retiring there at night with her cat on her shoulder, flashlight in one hand and beer in the other. Since then she has constructed a sky-lit octagonal music studio using railroad ties, mud and bottles (where I can hear Molly cat jumping on the piano, making minor chords), and attached two simple wood-framed rooms for her living space. In the early years she orchestrated the building of a community house, a bamboo outdoor shower, a community kitchen, and recently, the formal camp bathroom with flush toilet (required by law).

For her 70 years she is the liveliest person I know. She's always tinkering with her flower and vegetable gardens, or rushing off in her old pickup for senior softball and tennis. (We should all be so healthy!) On land she maintains a wide resource area that is a junkyard of pipes, all types of wood, bathtubs, sinks, etc., where wimmin can shop for free to conjure their new homes.

We have a few permanent campers. Rhonda, the Scottish spiritual medium, lives in a trailer, and so does Max, a very private Navajo womon. Jane arrives each autumn from the northwest to occupy her two-room straw-bale home, which has lovely shaded patios on three sides. She has a sculpted cob bathtub, and coiled thick black hoses on her tin roof for heating water. She cooks in her mirrored solar oven and maintains an organic veggie business. She also built a two-story cylindrical cob temple, which has a roof-high sleeping loft. You climb up to it from log steps that spiral around outside the temple wall. It has a designer wood ceiling and is open 360 degrees to the infinite desert sky.

Snowbirds arrive on the land in the winter. Some are nomads who travel between womyn's lands year round. Two fled ashrams, and a growing number are there because of multiple chemical sensitivities. Everyone wants a cheap and safe feminist home to live in.

One early morning this past summer, before the air became intolerably hellish, Adobe and I were alone on the land. She said, "I always wonder if any wimmin will show up." Yet, by word of mouth and carefully selected advertising, Adobeland is known on a few continents as a place where just about any womon can find a place to rest, even thrive. Wanderers with many accents and experiences arrive with tales of creativity and strength. I especially like it when the old timers return and tell me stories of their homes, some of which have washed back into sand, and are now a part of our natural herstory. I've made a habit of traveling to

alternative communities to study cooperative living and working, secretly hoping to find a feminist utopia. However, I learned that it takes conscientious planning, livable guidelines, and spiritual maturity to create a new culture, or even a shared lifestyle. It takes more than friends or peers living on land together to make a cooperative and functional community. My years living and working on the Tohono O'odham Nation demonstrated how the remains of "village as extended family," who are as important as self, lingers even after the US government gives the option to assimilate or die. This means we can't eradicate what we've socially encoded so easily either.