[1] The average American household earns 42 percent more, adjusted for inflation, than it did 30 years ago, and spends nearly 70 percent more, according to the United Nations and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, says Claes Johansson, a statistician for the United Nations Human Development Report, our gross domestic product per capita (i.e., average wealth) has grown by nearly 90 percent during that time, and our life span has increased by 5.2 years. “Both are indicators of a higher standard of living,” he says.
[2] Four in five Americans say they’re satisfied with their housing situation. And yet, 40 percent are actively looking for a new house, according to an Associated Press survey; and 72 percent say they can barely afford to maintain their standard of living, according to a Washington Post poll. Why the discrepancy? “People are reluctant to criticize their houses or standard of living, because to do so is to criticize themselves,” says Claus Bech-Danielsen, Ph.D., a housing researcher at Aalborg University in Denmark. “Or they may be saying they’re satisfied because they’re at their financial limit.”
[3] The typical house built in the early 1900s was all about function. According to the National Association of Home Builders, it was between 700 and 1,200 square feet, stood two stories, had two or three bedrooms, and—unless it was in a city—probably lacked indoor plumbing. It was heated by a woodstove, steam boiler, or coal furnace. Only the very wealthy had air-conditioning.
[4] “People enjoy listening to rain on their roofs because, to their ancestors, that sound came with having shelter and staying dry,” says Robert Barton, Ph.D., an anthropology professor at Durham University in England. “We also biologically associate rain with bringing life in the form of food.”
[5] “Improving a home builds ties between the resident and the house,” says Bech-Danielsen. “Physical changes translate into a mental connection.” This attachment is derived from a certain neuropeptide in the brain, which carries information or a feeling to cells. This molecule differs only slightly from the one that creates attachment and love between people.
[6] Taking on the elements is symbolically important for people who are leading high-stress lives, says Clare Cooper Marcus, Ph.D., a University of California at Berkeley professor of architecture and the author of House as a Mirror of Self. “It’s an escape from the trappings of modern life at the most basic, instinctual level.”
[7] “To feel ‘at home’ simply means you can act without thinking,” says Bech-Danielsen. “It’s the feeling of comfort that comes when you control your environment, whether it’s your home, your car, or your office. There will be no surprises; you can work by routine.”
[8] “The exterior of your house represents how you see yourself fitting into society,” says Cooper Marcus. A Utah University study found that people are more likely to view a new and bigger home as a status symbol than less necessary symbols, like a luxury car or an expensive vacation.
[9] “Evolution planted inside of men the pressure to be the best fathers they can be,” says Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor at California State University at Long Beach. After all, those who abandon their children are left without descendants.
This Simple Palace
It’s a tiny cottage, unremarkable in every way but one: Spending time within its walls teaches a man what it means to live like a king
BY OLIVER BROUDY PHOTOGRAPHS BY RAYMOND MEEKS
It wasn’t a simple life, necessarily, but it was a compact one. When the sun dropped over the western skyline and the mill shut down for the day, the thudding silence resumed for the walk home through the trees. It was 1943, but high in the Black Hills it might as well have been 1920. They cut their ice each fall from Iron Creek Lake and bathed in zinc tubs. If the mill ran late and the electricity was on, you might be able to dial in that Joe Louis fight on the radio, faint and scratchy. Oven-heated bricks wrapped in newspaper kept the beds warm at night, and with long johns ordered from the Montgomery Ward catalog, you might not have to stoke the stove until morning. There were no restaurants, no movie theaters, no shopping malls. Once a month, the grandparents would drive down to the Franklin Hotel in Deadwood, lock the girls in the pie wagon, and drink martinis on the veranda.
One has to be careful. The temptation to sweeten the past can sometimes be too great to resist. But this is part of why I came out here, to take a closer look. As it turned out, one look at my hunting cabin, with its dark, grubby interiors, windows like gun ports battened by 30-pound hatches, and linoleum floor littered with mouse droppings, was enough to wither any trace of nostalgia. The thing was built like a pillbox, with board-and-batten siding that could keep out a bear, and was probably meant to. In my grandfather’s day, this was still a home’s primary purpose.
Why anyone would choose to live like this, in a miserable cabin with no running water—not just for a week, but month after month, year after year—was indeed a mystery. Granted, many modern amenities simply didn’t exist in my grandfather’s day. But still, he could have lived in Spearfish, which was at least on the grid and offered indoor plumbing—instead of an outhouse, like the decidedly unbearproof one out back, with a ripped poster on the wall showing Bette Midler’s face superimposed over Roosevelt’s on Mount Rushmore. Or he could simply have stayed in Chicago and followed his father in the steel business.
But he didn’t. He came here. And even after a single night, I began to understand why.
It is dark. There is no electricity. So you listen. At night, you get the feeling that everything is listening, and at the same time trying to make as little noise as possible. It’s hard not to want to do the same. So you shut down all movement and tune your ears outward, regressing to that state of alertness in which most animals spend their entire lives. And this is what you hear: the claws of a squirrel clattering on the pine bark; the eerie squeak of two tree trunks rubbing; the birdlike scow of a deer giving warning; the heedless trampling of underbrush that could only be a dumb cow; the warble of coyotes; the buzz of confused mosquitoes, enticed by the carbon dioxide but repelled by the deet; and finally a sound that gradually distinguishes itself from the rainlike patter of the aspens as an actual downpour. Then the lightning comes on, strike after strike, grazing on the hidden magnetite, and the thunder, crashing through the forest like an enraged boar.
I submit that there is no more satisfying sound than the drumming of rain on a roof. There’s a reason for this. It’s the sound of human ingenuity proving itself to the elements. The sound of home articulating its primary purpose: shelter.4 The same thing explains why few sounds are as irksome as the drip of a leak. That first night, I lay there in the cavelike blackness, visualizing roof repairs. As the hours wore on, a list of other projects began to take shape: replace the rotting porch steps; enlarge the windows to let in more light; and think about how to route the water from Potato Spring so I wouldn’t have to haul it in every day by hand.
I can picture my grandfather sizing up the job, weighing the merits of pipe and aqueduct. It’s precisely the sort of capital-improvement project he would have relished. In fact, if you look closely at the ruins of his old house, you can see signs that even in those halcyon days, he was never exactly content with his lot: An extra bedroom was added at some point, and a back porch. I suspect the porch-building impulse is native to all men. You wake up with it each morning, along with gummy breath and a full bladder. That we keep improving our homes or go on to buy new ones even after our basic needs have been met just goes to show how deeply rooted the impulse is.
It may even explain why some of us, after our first home has been perfected down to the last checkered dish towel, go backward, investing in cruder, surrogate homes (a sailboat, a hunting cabin) just for the pleasure of reengaging those basic threats (bears, blizzards) that our affluence has virtually extinguished.6 We do it because in a chaotic world, there’s nothing quite so bracing as raising that first wall against danger, nothing quite so gratifying as the exercise of self-reliance and plain old ingenuity to secure what is, essentially, the outer shell of the self.
I spent my nights encased in this shell, locked down in darkness. When you don’t have electricity, the tendency is to defer to the dark. I did have a lantern, but it was impossible to use it without feeling somehow conspicuous. Of course, the cabin was perfectly secure, but beyond the cabin walls lay an environment still foreign to me. This land had been in my family for generations, but when the coyotes howl, anyone would feel like a trespasser. This is not your land; it’s theirs.
Daytime, of course, was
another matter. Each morning, as dawn broke, I’d head out exploring.
The day began with leaving the cabin and ended with returning to it. In
time, I began to understand that the impulse driving me off the porch
each day was a need to control the land around me as thoroughly as I
did the confines of the cabin itself. This, in turn, seemed to suggest
a deeper truth, which is that, among other things, a man’s home serves
as a primary locus of control, a precedent for every other conquest to
follow, the initial building block, if you will, of his future empire.
No man of serious ambition will ever be content until he’s as “at home”
in the world as he is in his own living room, until he can traverse a
25th-floor conference room or high-end restaurant as confidently as his
own backyard.
