THE FREEDOM WAY
(Page 8 of 26)
What about winter in a tent? All right, what about winter
in a tent. No one can answer that better than a simple
liver who tried it, and here is the experience of Mr. and
Mrs. Charles H. Macomber. Thomas Drier tells about how they
managed it: "If as some philosophers have said, we are rich
according to the number of things we can get along without,
Mr. and Mrs. Charles H. Macomber are multimillionaires.
They lived in a tent all last winter near Plymouth, New
Hampshire. One time the temperature got as low as 32
degrees below zero. Attempts were made to persuade the
Macombers to move into a house, but they protested they
were entirely comfortable and neither they, nor their cat
"Mittens", nor their dog "Peaches" had any desire to desert
their tent.
RELATED CONTENT
A trailer makes a fine home for a simple liver, and used
trailers are going onto the market in increasing numbers
now that the housing shortage is being relieved. Out in the
west are ever so many persons who swear that a sheep wagon
is the best place on earth for a human being to live, the
most compact, the most comfortable, the most friendly.
Frank Robbins of Glenrock, Wyoming, for instance, has spent
maybe half his life in sheep wagons, on the bleakest,
coldest, windiest spots in Wyoming. He never suffered, and
although he owns a comfortable ranch house near town, he
prefers living in his sheep wagon. Life there, he says, is
simpler. It is reduced to its elements. It is beautiful.
But if you want a permanent home-if you have the AngloSaxon
feeling that only when a man lives underneath his own roof
does he live-why that opens up a whole new field of delight
for you.
Build your own home. Let it be, according to the locale in
which you build it, a log cabin, an adobe house, a rammed
earth dwelling, even one made of bamboo or palm fronds. But
if you build it yourself, you will enjoy it the more. And
how do you know you can't build a perfectly satisfactory
home for yourself?
There are dozens of cheap manuals on log cabin, rammed
earth, adobe, or other construction on the market, and the
best advice you can receive is to buy yourself one of these
books, live with it until you know it practically by heart,
and then-go to it.
While you are building your home, you can live in a cave or
in a simple tent. George Baker, for instance, who has been
introduced to you before and whom you will meet again in
the next chapters, because he is such a paragon of all the
pioneer virtues which make simple living practicable, did
that. He had an 8x 10 wall tent. This he pitched on his
rented homesite. In it he lived all one summer while he
fashioned a oneroom log cabin with his hands. He said that
no period of his life gave him greater enjoyment than the
weeks he was arising early, working late on the first home
of his own he ever built.
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