The Montana House – An Urban Homestead

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Just fifteen years ago, downtown was mostly boarded up. People tell stories of street parties that raged through dawn and dilapidated industrial spaces squatted by artists. Those times are over now, and what was once a haven for dreamers and freaks has been glossed over by tourists, upscale boutiques, and yoga studios. Even with the rampant gentrification though, the city manages to hang on to a unique combination of understated southern charm and unbridled artistic expression. Musicians play banjos and fiddles in the street, and rusty pickup trucks haul supplies to small organic farms all around the city.

Asheville came into its own on these legs, and it now comprises a robust oasis of liberalism in the midst of the bible belt. The town’s been attracting the type for awhile now, and you can’t help but feel it’s become a bit mired in its own mythology. As with any trend, followers can be fickle. Style can give way to fashion, cool to hip, and cultures anchored by authenticity and creativity can sometimes degenerate into murky popularity contests.

But this is the way of things I suppose, and it’s hard to get too offended by a fad when so much of it centers around something as noble as sustainability. Converting diesel engines to run on used vegetable oil, utilizing local plants, and buying clothing second-hand can’t do too much harm. And even with all the hype buzzing around Asheville, you can still find architects in the city if you look hard enough—people building exactly the lifestyle they want for that reason alone and quietly grinning when the noise around them begins to mimic their own spontaneous tics.

We rode up to the house where Rob stood silent, eyes burning and slightly elevated to the sky. “There’s a bear.” The words came out like they were supposed to mean something, but after seeing our confounded silence, he went on.

He was in the process of assembling an Ocean’s 11 team of sorts. “We have two vehicles,” he explained. “Adrian’s gonna drive his truck, Cory’s gonna wait in his car to watch for the cops, so we just need two more people to help haul the carcass into the truck bed.” Tim and I hesitantly smiled at each other–we were in. Rob nodded his head, satisfied with the plan. “I’ll go get a tarp and some gloves.” Turning around, he made his way through the back yard to the wood shop he lives above, his body bursting out of a tank top and tiny red cutoff shorts. Despite the absurdity of the whole situation, it sounded urgent enough. It was time to pick up some roadkill.

Cory calmly got into his car and fished around the center console looking for the key. He spotted it in the ignition and cranked it, his scraggly rat tail hanging down over a shredded green t-shirt. This is the first time Tim had met these guys, but there were no niceties exchanged. Cory would just zone in on the road and occasionally remark on the edibility of stinging nettles or point out blackberry brambles that were coming into season. He wears a permanent poker face, fearlessly aware of the social dynamics around him and saying just enough to keep people guessing.

After parking the car a couple exit ramps up for reconnaissance, we piled into the truck and parked it along the interstate median. It was just a minor traffic violation, but the whole thing felt somehow… illegal. The adrenaline surged through our brains and it was like we were just watching ourselves as we rolled the 300 pound corpse into the tarp, dragged it between six lanes of honking steel projectiles, and hoisted it into the truck, zooming past police cars just moments later.

Back at the house, Tim and I sheepishly watched as the boys went to work sliding knives through the hanging beast as a few others others ran between the computer and the yard with useful information. “In China, they use the gall bladder medicinally!” The surgical focus of the group quickly eased our nerves, and before we knew it we were getting our own hands bloody while they performed an autopsy.

The bear had sustained fatal head injuries from the collision. It must have had just enough sense to wander into the grassy median before collapsing, after which an army of winged arthropods began to congregate around its collapsed cranium. It was still warm inside, indicating a fresh kill, and portions of purpled, bubbly muscle tissue showed heavy bruising. It was crucial, warned Cory, not to pop the stomach. The food inside had begun to rot, and judging from its heavy bloating, a puncture would unleash a crippling odor.

After a few hours, the first team of butchers went off to a concert and another took its place, working well into the night. After burying most of the internal organs in the back yard and processing the rest of the animal, we had a freezer full of bear meat, about ten mason jars of rendered fat, and the hide had been salted, scraped, and brought to a taxidermist to be tanned. The bones were wrapped in chicken wire and dropped off at a stash spot where bacteria, maggots, and carrion beetles would get to work over the next month to ensure a clean skeleton for display. Rob planned to turn the scrotum into a coin pouch for Mandy, his girlfriend at the time, but it ended up sitting in the fridge until someone threw it out. Luckily, the testicles had been promptly preserved in alcohol and placed on the spice rack next to the cumin, paprika, and free-range squirrel head.

These things make most people cringe, even written down here in black and white. Just the word ‘roadkill’ sounds toxic, but this meat was about as fresh as possible. These people have just learned to recognize roadkill for the resource it is, trusting their own eyes and nose rather than expiration dates and regulatory boards. Seems to be working out for them so far. A free bear meat stew is hard to argue with.

And they don’t stop at roadkill. The kitchen is stocked with a constant supply of edibles lifted from dumpsters across the city. When you begin to see how blurry the line is between food and garbage, a whole host of financial pressures disappear. American cities are swarming with free sustenance, and it’s not just stale bread and rotting vegetables (although it does make great compost for vegetable gardens). We’ll find shrink-wrapped organic produce, boxes of waxed cheeses, and still-frozen packages of unspoiled meat. A few days before Halloween, we picked up 25 gallons of fresh apple cider. At some point you stop questioning these things and just see a good haul for what it is. Dumpsters have become one of our primary sources of food, and we’re eating pretty damn well.

These people won’t just eat anything though, and sometimes their level of scrutiny surprises me. One evening, we were on an event crew setting up a children’s hospital fundraiser. In America, it won’t do to just tax the rich and build a hospital–you need to lure them into a shiny building with fine dining and fabulous prizes. We were the uninsured twenty-somethings operating heavy machinery and power tools to erect the spectacle. After finishing the job, we dug through the dumpster where the catering leftovers had been placed, emerging with a bottle of red wine and several pounds of fresh crab cakes, skewered shrimp, and succulent beef. As we consolidated the garbage, Cory soberly looked over to us. “Hey, do you have any of that water left?” He skeptically peered at the bottle in his hand. “I found this one over there, but… I’m not really comfortable drinking after someone I don’t know.” This is the same man who proudly strutted around town one evening dressed like an ’80s porn director, hair greased up with bear fat.

Cory is the owner of the house and the community’s unspoken leader. He and Rob are the first of their kind I’ve met—the standard subcultural labels don’t really seem to stick. There’s a kind of hillbilly hipster vibe that echoes through the house with a clear detour through sixties counter-culture, but none of that really pins it down. Bones and pelts hang everywhere like trophies, mingling with art, power tools, and dream catchers. Nobody here hunts though, raising a whole new angle in arguments against fur and meat—these animals all met their end crushed by somebody’s automobile.

“That’s a good point,” says Rob. “We’ve actually had… shit, three or four vegetarians I know that have eaten our road kill.” He smiles and puts on his exaggerated southern accent. “If you can get your hands on some good ol’ fashioned roadkill with no pesticides or hormones growin’ in it… so much better than anything you can get at the grocery store.”

Seventeen people live here, plus a constant flux of friends, lovers, and travelers, but like the people, the community defies categories. It’s not a commune. Certain things are shared like tools, art supplies, and dumpstered food, but rarely have I met such fierce individualists—self-motivated people who, although thrive in the constant presence of each other, have clear boundaries, and sometimes massive notes are found in the kitchen when somebody oversteps them. Things occasionally get out of hand, but people here prefer the occasional mess to sacrificing their freedom to chore charts, mandatory Sunday dinners, and monthly kumbayas. The whole thing is pretty down-to-earth and was actually born from practical considerations rather than utopian ideals.

When Cory was looking to buy property, he calculated how much rent he could pull in by packing the place full of roommates. Since it comfortably exceeded the mortgage, he went ahead with the project and the place became an empty canvas of sorts for him and his friends to start painting. Cabins and gardens and work spaces started springing up around the two primary structures and the place slowly evolved into a DIY wonderland. When the house next door was foreclosed on and went up for sale, Cory’s brother Brandon bought it and the community expanded across the property line.

The brothers grew up on a farm in Hickory, and although it’s still in their blood, they thrive in the kind of social environment a family farm can’t offer.  So they decided they could have both. “I was a kid on the farm,” smirks Cory. “Now I’m an adult, they say. We have some aspects of farm life here. We live peacefully without attracting neighbors’ attention, eat out of the garden, have chickens, a woodshop, a metal working studio. But since it’s Asheville, there’s all the art and parties and bars and shows, so it’s a lot more entertaining in both ways, really.”

When they first started building, they put ads on Craig’s List offering to tear down old structures in exchange for the materials. They poke their heads in construction site dumpsters and sort through garbage piles on curbs. There’s so much material out there, and when you start to recognize it, the tendency is to amass as much as possible just in case it might come in handy one day. Sometimes working at the house feels like you’re just moving trash from one pile to the next.

“All we have,” chuckles Rob, “are piles of random materials. I first met Cory when I was giving away a whole bunch of trash. A couple of Cory’s crew stopped down to the warehouse I was living in and took a bunch of our complete shit and brought it here. Some of the stuff I don’t know what they did with it.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Must have thrown it away or something.”

But it’s well worth it when it’s time to work and everything you need is somewhere on the property. Matt, a folk musician here, was building his cabin during our stay. He first arrived in the city calling himself Moses Atwood, living in a van downtown and cultivating a certain mystique around his music. When he discovered the Montana House though, he felt for the first time in his life that he found a home, so he started building. Now he introduces himself as Matt again. “I love reading and romanticizing about the vagabond lifestyle,” he says with a smirk. “But every time I try it… I’m miserable.”

A few months ago, I could barely use a power tool, but we got a crash course in construction helping Matt build his new home. This kind of work is quite different from what I’m used to—there’s a refreshing freedom and honesty in manual labor for somebody who’s spend so much time with more intellectual work. When writing, a whole host of existential questions linger. It’s hard to know if I’m using the right words or if they’ll have the right effect or even if the right people are reading them to begin with. Am I contributing to the dialogue or distracting from it? But when you nail in a floorboard or paint a wall, it’s hard to argue you’ve done otherwise.

While most people are somehow invested in the living space, almost everyone has jobs around town. Some are committed artists or musicians. Some farm land or construct buildings or work in bars and restaurants in the city. A few make the house itself into their art and their livelihood, building up the property in exchange for free rent. Everyone has their own life in and out of the house, and are reluctant to define the living arrangement at all. “I couldn’t give it a name,” says Rob resolutely. “These are my roommates and most of them are wing-nuts, therefore the place is crazy.” With so much flexibility and so many different people, skills, and resources, the possibilities seem endless.

So much freedom can be dangerous though, and the place goes through long bouts of stagnancy. At its worst, it becomes fraught with project ADD, mired in confusion and miscommunication. Soon after we arrived, Cory and Rob got an old house boat with the idea of fixing it up and taking it down the Mississippi, but gave up a couple of weeks in when the scope of the project became clear. The same happened with a bicycle-powered raft. The blacksmithing shop, bicycle shed and vegetable garden lie in ruin, those who tended them having moved on to other projects or spaces. One morning, I woke up to a filthy kitchen and Rob in the back yard, suspending a ladder aimed to the sky. When I asked what he was doing, he calmly retorted, “I’m making a ladder to nowhere,” and continued working. I’m not sure if he saw the irony at the time.

But at its best, the house breathes life into the entire group, everyone feeding off of each others’ inspiration to make the place worthy of their vision. Even though the garden is now full of weeds, the soil is fertile and the greenhouse ready. The blacksmithing tools still work. It just takes one or two people to make the change, and the mood gathers momentum that can be difficult to reverse once it gets started.

The end result isn’t always what matters though–it’s the dreaming and scheming and movement and work that drives these people to wake up every day. Just using their bodies and their minds to rearrange their environment together seems like enough, and sometimes any final product is more of an excuse to start moving than anything else.

Living with this many people really thins out your mask. Most of us have the luxury—or the misery, depending on how you look at it—of living alone, or with a family or lover. When we’re out interacting with the world, we often distance ourselves through manners and niceties, and it can get exhausting. After coming home from a long day at work, many of us just want to plop down and relax, away from the social demands of the spectacle. Here though, there is no escape from other people, and it can be suffocating. My mind would constantly question dynamics around me, probing intentions and fretting about imposing, offending, or miscommunicating. Eventually you just learn to let it go, and are forced to confront yourself and your community in a way that most of us never have to.

Even the people who have lived here for years sometimes long to move into a single apartment–a place they can come home to and see everything exactly how they left it. “I’m still very tentative to stay,” says Rob, “but the most interesting people I know all live right here. You have conversations about different walks of life and it opens your mind and allows you to see a lot of different angles. But it also can be very intrusive at times…” his mouth curls up into a smug grin. “Like with you guys comin’ over here and stickin’ microphones and cameras in my face.”

While the space is a kind of half-way house for many—a place to have fun, make friends and expand your perspective, a solid group has stuck around long enough to cultivate a resilient micro-culture that endures through the transience. They’re performing a delicate balancing act between community and individuality, letting people take part when they feel inspired, but allowing them to disappear into their own world at the drop of a hat.

And it really wouldn’t work otherwise. Not for this group and not for most of us. Returning to a community-centered lifestyle can’t look anything like it used to if it’s going to work in modern America. In tribal societies, people share thousands of years of family, culture, and deeply entrenched tradition and ritual. But raised apart as individuals from disparate backgrounds, each of us has developed a different kind of rapport with the world around us. When you artificially gather twenty Americans in the 21st century, any successful attempt to live intimately will have to honor not only the group, but each individual composing it. Forcing serious conformity risks social collapse.

It’s not a commune, and the people who live here are a world away from the hippie stereotype. In fact, they cringe at the word ‘hippie’ and really don’t even get along with the true hippies in Asheville. They don’t imagine they’re doing anything abnormal or revolutionary. It’s just a bunch of friends living together, finding family outside of the prejudice of genetics.

Writing this now after spending a few months at the house, it all seems perfectly normal to me as well. It’s amazing how adaptable the mind is—how brittle its prejudices become when confronted with the razor-sharp edge of reality. Now when I pass what looks like a recent kill on the road, I don’t see decay and disease, but fresh food and ethical fur. When I walk into the kitchen and see a pile of dirty dishes, I just calmly wash a few and make lunch, leaving the leftovers for whoever might be hungry. I still haven’t left an angry note. Maybe once I start paying rent.

But all of this begs the question, “Who the hell are these people anyway?” Perhaps the word ‘hippie’ is no longer relevant to 21st century America, but whatever happened five decades ago seems to have at least ignited the spark that allows all these splinter groups to burn so brightly. For all the stereotypes about aimless idealism, hippies managed to organize themselves in such numbers and with such a sense of inevitability that generations of freaks to come have felt empowered to create their own niche in American culture.

The night had finally come, and we all gathered in the cinema room with a case of beer, a plate of fried sheep testicles, and tense nerves. A few were understandably terrified about their lives being portrayed on camera for the world to see.

But after everyone laughed and cried together, reminiscing long into the night, the group experienced a profound spike in productivity and cohesion, and work around the house took on a certain unstoppable zeal. Cory and Rob were giddy as they stayed up all night making a giant kaleidoscope and Leon spent days constructing an LED-lit staircase for the art room. Cory and Brandon’s parents were deeply moved by their sons’ world. “I knew you guys were doing something fun,” admitted their mother, “but I was never really… proud before.”

Sure, we romanticized the house, glossing over its problems and dysfunctions, and we all joked about how it was urban homesteading propaganda. But everything on camera actually happened, and the surge that followed was undeniably real. “I’m here all the time,” says Cory. “and the romantic side of anything you do day to day gets lost. Marriage, sex, drugs, your normal job, your great job, your new car… that’s just human nature.” Helping our friends here rekindle the magic reaffirmed why we’re doing all this, and there’s no better way we could have shown our gratitude for everything they’ve done for us. Sometimes, we just need to look in the right kind of mirror to remind ourselves what’s really possible when we muster the courage and simply decide to make it happen.

Here is a selection of photos from the film (and some that didn’t make it):