Living in a Tipi: One Man’s Journey

As a result of a house fire, one man reevaluates what is important in life and rediscovers a childhood dream of living in a tipi.

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by AdobeStock/madscinbca

As a result of a house fire, one man reevaluates what is important in life and rediscovers a childhood dream of living in a tipi.

In 1989, a midnight August storm unleashed a bolt of fire, connecting heaven and earth through the mountain farmhouse in which I had been living for the past seven years. Crude columns of hand-stacked stones propped the old wood-frame building, built almost a century earlier, two feet above the ground. Its sagging interior wood flooring had at some point been covered with creaking linoleum, its roof nailed with tin. That roof, the fire investigator later told me, reflected heat downward like an oven, turning the fire into a blistering inferno. Nothing survived it, not even metal tools.

Everything I owned was incinerated in an unstoppable blaze that must have lit up the driving rain like falling diamonds. I don’t know because I didn’t see it. My dog, Elly, and I were fifty miles away, sleeping at the summer camp where I had just returned campers after a week-long wilderness program on this same leased mountain land.

The Phone Call

The call came the next morning. I was packing gear and about to return home when one of the camp owners came out of the office and called me to the phone. She followed me back inside. A woman not given to shows of emotion, she put her arms around my chest as though to hold me in place when I picked up the phone. Then the side of her face pressed into my back.

  • Updated on Sep 18, 2023
  • Originally Published on May 31, 2012
Tagged with: Green Homes, indigenous peoples, Mark Warren, nature appreciation, tipi
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