From the Ground Up

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The Workshop

When I met the Oregon cob aficionado Becky Bee, she was stomping around in a clay pit, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and holding the comers of her flowered cotton dress above her knees, away from the thick orange liquid earth. She looked blissful, stomping rhythmically, as though she had the finest vintage of organic Oregon grapes beneath her toes. Her arms and legs covered in clay, she joked, "You probably don't really want to shake my hand." I'm not sure I would have made it through Becky's seven-day natural building workshop in the Ozarks without the little Buffalo river nearby to go and jump into every few hours when I began to feel too much a part of the earth. Summer was heading toward Arkansas, and though the thick forest canopy holds the heat at bay, it seems to hold the humidity in and sends you leaping regularly for the cool moving water.

With wild hair and the body of a 20-year-old, crouching here and there to roll a cigarette, Becky Bee is the kind of eccentric teacher who inspires a certain fascination from her students. Self-sufficient since running away from home and becoming a teenage mom (she's middle-aged now), she has seldom had what she considers a proper home. It's ironic that she fell in love with building and helping others make homes for themselves. She discovered cob at a workshop in 1989 while living in New Zealand. When she returned to five in her birthplace, Oregon, she attended one of the first cob workshops given by Cob Cottage Company of Cottage Grove, Oregon, in 1993, and she became an "unofficial building instructor" for them for a season. (Oregon is the hot place for cob in North America.)

In 1994, Becky started Groundworks and began to hold her own workshops, many of them for women only. Attending her workshop is a bit of a cult experience, with the emphasis as much on building community as on building homes. You'll have a better time at her workshops if you are partial to drumming, singing, and new age rituals. I'm not particularly, but I did end up enjoying the diverse set of characters the workshop attracted, aside from getting what I came for in terms of learning a great deal about putting up a natural earthen building. I also enjoyed some great music from High Tea, a trio of women folk musicians who attended the workshop, and from some neighborhood bluegrass and folk musicians who dropped by our campfire some nights after we stopped working and started sipping the blueberry wine from the organic blueberry farm down the road. Murray Valley is full of people living an alternative life.

Massage therapist Ann Lasater moved to this Arkansas valley from Houston 25 years ago and started River Spirit. Her wooded property on the Little Buffalo River has facilities for small retreats. Some of the people who came to learn about cob and help her build the retreat center's hermitage by the river live fairly near Ann in "communities," meaning they own land in a group and decide by consensus how to use it and live on it. I met a woman named Joy Fox who moved to the area because she saw an ad in the back of an issue of MOTHER in the '70s advertising cheap land. Another woman I met, Mollie Curry, edits a newsprint staple-bound sustainable-living magazine called the Permaculture Activist (P.O. Box 1209, Black Mountain, NC 28711, $19 a year).

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