I met Mike in the summer of 2011. That summer reminded me of all that I had read about the 1960s counter-culture, because I was living on the road, and also because of Mike, nicknamed the Mole, who welcomed me onto his property to learn about homesteading. I stayed on Mike’s homestead for two and a half weeks, and in that time, I was repeatedly preached to about the virtues of A Course in Miracles, spent the night in an underground house, was trained in the tactics of street protests by a leader of the Battle of Seattle, witnessed earnest conversations about MKUltra, Bigfoot, and Ruby Ridge, learned to build an earthen greenhouse, and spent many hours hiking the northern Idaho forest with a wild dog named Wolfie. All of this occurred in seventeen days, off of a dirt road outside of Bonners Ferry, Idaho.
I was traveling across the country, occasionally staying on organic farms throughout the prairie and Rocky Mountain region, but mostly living out of my car. I stayed at campgrounds beneath black skies and Joshua Trees, behind a rest stop off of I-5, on organic farms in Washington and Nebraska, and beneath pine trees next to the Grand Canyon. I found—whenever I decided to talk to my neighbors and fellow travelers— mostly young, restless people—like myself—whose lives were suspended in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood. When I arrived at Mike’s homestead I was introduced to a barefooted, American original whom I met on the internet and who I hoped would school me in the ways of homesteading. But before I arrived at Mike’s kingdom of subterranean houses, with dogs and hippies galore, I needed to cross the country from Maine to the Idaho panhandle.
In Denver, I gave money to a man in a Dead shirt on Larimer Street. He had a hungry-looking dog panting in the late-summer humidity. Around the corner, dozens of young people stood around tents pitched sidewalks, panhandling near a sign that said Jesus Saves. I checked my email at a coffee shop, went thrifting for flannels, and ate a breakfast burrito the size of a prairie dog. Before I left town, to head west on I-70, I went back to the Lower Downtown district with a large bag of dog food for the many dogs I’d seen living along Lawrence Street, sprawled across the hot concrete, keeping watch over the wraiths of skid row. I sat in the back of my hatchback and filled bowls of food and water for the road-weathered dogs and rolled cigarettes for their owners. I was ready to move on from Colorado, west to Utah. I had spent many hours driving through Iowa and Nebraska dreaming of the snow-capped Rockies, but Denver seemed to me a dirty, indistinct American city, and despite the mountains and the occasional 10-gallon hat, it didn’t meet my expectations of the great American West. I was headed for Salt Lake City and then north to Montana.
Montana is where I decided I had finally arrived in the West of my imagination. I set up camp thirty miles outside of Missoula along the emerald waters of the Clark Fork River. The state park was upstream from Valley of the Moon, where I saw white canvas tipis dotting the clearing of the valley; from the bridge, it looked like a field of tulips against the enormous Rocky Mountains. After setting up camp, I drove into Missoula to buy insecticide to destroy the wasps’ nest that was clinging to the sticky wall of my car’s wheel well. The Walmart parking lot was only a grilled cheese sandwich vendor and nitrous tank shy of a Phish concert. All along the back of the lot were RVs and white guys with dreadlocks playing hacky sack and grilling cheap meat. I liked it there. I sat on a strip of grass behind the row of RVs, away from the grill smoke and patchouli oil, and called Mike to check-in. I wanted to make sure he was still expecting me. “Should be there in three or four days,” I said.
Mike Oehler was a back-to-the-land hippie and legendary homesteader who created a brilliant and original concept for underground housing. He lived in an underground cabin of his own design for more than three decades. Mike’s houses, as he put it, would “Cut heating costs by eighty percent and eliminate air-conditioning costs.” It would also “shelter your family from hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, fire, atomic fallout, mobs, gunfire, and other results of social disintegration.” The houses were typically built into a ridge and had asymmetrical, recycled windows across one or two sides. From certain angles, the home was invisible behind and beneath the earth. The inside was surprisingly bright, the living spaces flooded with natural light. The cabins we toured didn’t look or feel futuristic, they were primitive and cozy. The houses were small spaces that utilized nature in obvious and utilitarian ways. They smelled like old wood and tin, and the ones where people still lived, like woodfire and pot smoke.
By the time I knew him, he was elderly and living in a regular, above-the-earth house near a dirt road called Gandhi Way. On my first day in Bonners Ferry, Mike gave me a tour of his property. We spent six hours bushwhacking through thick stands of hardwood. There were no trails. Mike would pull a branch back and then launch it into my face; I learned to block my eyes when walking behind Mike. Hiking through the darkened woods he reminded me of a Zen mountain poet, his clothes hanging off of him like rags, his long white beard, and the way he seemed to speak in koans. He moved through the woods clumsily, always barefoot, with a walking stick, and a dirty white dog by his side. He spoke of Neal Cassady and San Francisco. He told me about working at a cannery in Alaska, hitchhiking around the country for two years in the early 70s with his dog, Bummer, and he talked about his friend and neighbor, Denis Johnson. Denis had given him his nickname.
On my second day at the homestead, I toured the ridge house, which was a sort of “underground” mansion and a marvel of primitive engineering with eco-futurist appeal. The ridge house was sun-filled, naturally temperature-controlled, and while you entered at ground-level at the front, you exited the back thirty feet above the ground onto a stilted gazebo-like structure with panoramic views of the Canadian Rockies. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. The concept was developed and perfected by Mike over decades of living alone in an underground house just down the mountain from where the ridge house was built. The roof was grass, like the other underground homes, but the ridge house was much wider and faced south and therefore it was brighter than my house at home. The front of the ridge house had a man-made pond, the function of which, as far as I could tell, was recreational. There was no furniture yet, but Mike had built a recess into the earthen floor, a circular sitting area for “house meetings.” It was the only feature I found to be impractical. My idea was to learn as much about the design and materials as possible, buy land in the foothills of the Appalachian Range, and build my own ridge house from the soil of my homeland in Western Maine.
During my first weekend at Mike’s homestead, he went to a party at Denis’ house. I remember him walking to his truck with a case of room-temperature Coors, and saying he wouldn’t be home until the morning. He returned with a signed copy of Train Dreams. I read it that night in my tent— pitched beneath a Spruce tree, near a clearing where the wolves would come down from the mountains and howl at the trains blowing across the continental divide.
Mike didn’t like me from the moment we met. In 2011, I smoked cigarettes and happened to show up to his property—of one hundred wooded acres—at the peak of the wildfire season. He did not like the casual way I walked around his property nearly chain-smoking self-rolled menthols. And I don’t blame him. Coming from the northeast, I didn’t understand the potential for calamity with one errant flick of my cherry. Mike was ornery and kept his days highly regimented. In the evenings he would sit outside in the dirt and drink a whiskey before retiring to the upstairs bedroom to write his memoirs. I didn’t dislike Mike, I was charmed by him. I admired his work, had seen the documentaries made about him, and felt starstruck by his closeness to Denis Johnson. In the early afternoon, I would join him for a swim at a nearby swimming hole—a small creek that emptied into a pool the size of a parking space. Breakfast was a hearty, pre-dawn meal prepared by one of the homestead’s female residents. Always a female resident. This was a retrograde policy that I found distasteful. During the sun-scorched days, an always-changing crew of peripatetic hippies worked on various projects around the homestead. I only ever saw Mike during the midday hours if he came to wherever I was on the property to make sure I wasn’t smoking too close to a stack of hay, or a pile of brush, and to make sure I wasn’t feeding one of his dogs.
Mike’s style of dog ownership disgusted me. His most beloved dog, Bummer VI, was a Great Pyrenese, I think. It was hard to tell because of the thick, footlong dreadlocks that hung from his body and dragged on the ground. During my time at the homestead Mike was training his dogs to not chase his truck down the road. His training method involved a hippie from Los Angeles standing at the head of the road with a tray of leftover bacon calling for the dogs to stay, while Mike drove back and forth down the road. When they failed, he would not feed the dogs that night. The human food, which was all they subsisted on, was a putrid, malodorous, gumbo of the previous night’s food scraps mixed with some kind of congealed grease. At night, I fed his dogs and Wolfie bowls of dog food (I kept a bag in my car as this was a habit by now). When he suspected my betrayal (the hippie from Los Angeles turned out to be a snitch from Beverly Hills), he blamed me for the dogs’ poor performance during the following day’s training.
Then there was the mustard incident; Heinzgate. Someone (not me) didn’t return the mustard to the designated mustard spot on the door of the fridge. This offense provoked a tirade from Mike. Later, I stepped outside to smoke by my tent and look at the stars. One of the long-hairs followed and bummed a smoke. “How are you adjusting to the place?” he said. I knew that this man wasn’t trustworthy, that anything I said would get back to Mike. I didn’t care. “I’m honestly disappointed,” I said. “I feel like I got here a few decades too late. This isn’t a homestead, it’s a fucking nursing home,” I said, knowing in the moment that I was being too harsh. But I wanted more, and for whatever reason, I felt entitled. I only realized that I was an outsider among outsiders at that moment. It occurred to me: I was the longest-staying guest who wasn’t a follower of A Course in Miracles. Other travelers would stay for a weekend, a work week, or maybe a full seven days, and then they would move on to British Columbia, Washington, Boise, or along the Kootenai River to Montana, depending on which direction they were going. As I sat in the grass smoking, lamenting the lack of education at the homestead, I thought about the other residents, the sustained eye contact, fiendish smiles, and propensity for dropping New Age-y word salads, not to mention the hard work for a man who provided nothing but free land to sleep on. This particular long-hair had given me a lecture on the ills of shampoo not twenty-four hours prior. “Yah, man, think about it. If the government were to put mind-control chemicals into our bodies, what would they use as a delivery advice? Shampoo, man. Chemtrails are bullshit. That’s why when the revolution comes, the only ones who won’t have been red-pilled are the dirty heads.” He grabbed a hold of one of his dreadlocks and shook it at me to punctuate his point. This might be a cult, I thought.
That weekend I packed up my green Subaru and drove to Washington to attend a music festival at the Gorge. I didn’t mind the electronic music, but I wasn’t having fun, so I left early. I spent a few days banging around Spokane. I ate dinner at an Indian restaurant, treated myself to a room at a Days Inn, and adopted a dog from a shelter at the outskirts of town. At the local Occupy protest, I met a nice lady who recommended a diner with a dynamite veggie burger. I was alone at the diner so I played a song on their old jukebox. When “Touch Of Grey” exploded out of the speakers, it was louder than anything at the festival. The diner’s sole employee walked across the retro checkered floor and unplugged the jukebox without a glance or a word. Then I went back to Idaho and the homestead.
When I got back to Mike’s the energy had changed. Something had happened with a computer that really upset everyone. It was hard to piece together the full story as paranoia was high, but it involved an IBM Thinkpad that was—for no reason that was clear to me—determined to be both a listening device and the property of the FBI. I don’t know if it was my absence for the weekend, or my clandestine mission to keep the dogs fed, but I was blamed. I was a twenty-year-old undercover FBI agent sent to spy on Mike and his followers because they were…I’m not sure. I didn’t get that far. Strangely, I wasn’t asked to leave the homestead. They accused me of being a federal agent and a spy, but as far as I could tell I was free to stay. I didn’t. I left that night.
I was glad to be free of the oppressive, strained optimism and conspiratorial groupthink that permeated the commune. It was a joy to leave the valley, to see the horizon, and to be alone on the road with my new best friend, Zeus. Despite my complaints, I learned a lot from my time on Mike’s homestead. I learned how to stack hay, tie a few knots, and implement a guerilla offensive on the streets of a major American city. I learned that treating domestic dogs like you’re their wolfpack leader is not an effective way to modify their behavior. I learned that mustard goes on the door, otherwise the squat bottle will be dwarfed by larger containers and even though it is very fucking yellow, it will be impossible to find among the pillars of soy milk, sauces, jams, and the like.
I don’t remember where I slept the night I left Mike’s homestead. I know I drove west and then south to Oregon, and then California. I probably set my one-person tent up behind my parked car, next to some little-traveled roadway, and slept stealthily and soundly beneath the western skies, hidden from view like a lost mustard bottle pushed to the back of the fridge.