Today, the two dirt roads that once wound through the town are overgrown with prairie grasses, and while the ponderosa pines still hold the town’s perimeter, the aspens have begun to creep in among the tar-paper wreckage. My grandfather’s cottage still stands, sort of, with a bow-backed roof and blown-out windows, and though vandals have etched their brief lineage on the walls and left beer cans among the rusted bed frames, enough remains to provide a pretty clear picture of the sort of life he lived: Simple. Functional. Devoid of extraneous luxury.
It’s a life a lot different from the one most of us live today, with our ChemLawns and our ice makers, our four bathrooms and three-car garages. Over the past 55 years, the size of the average American home has grown from 1,016 to 2,469 square feet. We have more gadgets, labor-saving devices, and entertainment systems than ever before. Never in history have humans lived so well.1 And yet, surveys show that many Americans remain profoundly dissatisfied with their standard of living.2 The house isn’t big enough, the driveway isn’t long enough, the ceiling isn’t tall enough, the view isn’t breathtaking enough, the walk-in closet needs a window. Real estate itself has become just another game, subsumed by the fever to stay one step ahead of the next guy. It’s very different from the days of my grandfather, when a simple cottage in the hills was enough.
In the summer of 2007, I returned to those hills, to live for a time more or less as my grandfather had, in a hunting cabin constructed from the collapsed remains of the old schoolhouse. I’d get my light from a kerosene lantern, my water from Potato Creek, and my evening entertainment from listening to the elk bellow. The idea was to turn back the clock, to dissolve to a time before clap lights, gated communities, and bathroom spas. How could he have been happy with so little? Was it simply that he didn’t know any better, or was there some other explanation?
I arrived in Spearfish, a small town at the northern tip of the Black Hills, on a Wednesday. There I had arranged to meet with Chris Hills, a local historian. Hills drives a forklift at a lumber mill and in his spare time writes books—a true Black Hills intellectual. He knows everything there is to know about Tinton, my grandfather’s ghost town, including how to get there, a fact I had forgotten since my last visit, decades ago.
We met at a restaurant downtown, and after a brief refresher course on Black Hills history, and an upscale meatball sandwich, I followed his red pickup out of town. The road out of Spearfish rises slowly. One minute from Main Street, the asphalt gives way to packed dirt. Gradually, the houses thin out and the greenery begins to thicken. Soon, it’s just trees and dust and hay wheels in the fields and the occasional deer propelling itself up a near-vertical embankment. Civilization fades like a cheer.
After half an hour we bumped over a cattle gate and turned right on Beaver Creek Road. Progress was slowed by rutted washouts and bovine roadblocks, swinging their great heads around to stare. On the right we passed Beartown, where prospectors camped in the 1870s, when the gold rush was in full swing. “Beartown,” a sign now read, “Population: 1.” Finally, 45 minutes after we headed out, the road wound around a shoestring mining operation and right up to the barbed-wire gate that serves as Tinton’s front door.
With the engines off, the silence flooded in. It stops you, like a bright new color or surprising new taste. After listening for a moment, I popped the trunk to remove my gear. Dust covered the rear bumper in a fine scrim. My guide waited at the gate, holding up the wire so I could step under.
“The Tollefson family lived here and ran the post office,” he said a few minutes later, indicating a buckling pile of tar paper, sun-bleached beams, and burdock. “Diana Tollefson was a very gifted artist, and she put little Walt Disney characters on the wall of her children’s bedroom.” Hills pointed out an interior wall bearing the smudged remains of a deer, a mouse, a little red hen. “And Thumper . . . Did Thumper get . . . ? Well, Thumper’s gone.”
Hills, I soon learned, knew more about my family history than I did. The property, he said—about 500 acres—came into the family in 1926, when a local entrepreneur managed to convince my great-grandfather, an aging Chicago steel baron, to back a tin-mining operation. Named for the ore it sat on, the town had already been built by that point, to support a similar venture that went bust a generation before.
The few times I’d visited Tinton over the years were mostly just to keep an eye on the mine, which my grandfather had cranked up again when he was 92, after a 50-year hiatus. (The family thought this was unwise.) He first caught the mining bug in the ’20s, when his father got involved, but it wasn’t until the early ’40s that he moved out here, with his wife and two daughters, to fulfill a contract with the U.S. Government to mine lithium for the Signal Corps. It was a time when mining, like whaling before the cannon-fired harpoon, still bore a patina of romance. It was man against nature, and the match was more or less even. The ingenuity and grit of one versus the stealth, unpredictability, and sheer staying power of the other. The work engrossed him utterly.
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.
These hills were my grandfather’s empire, and I wanted to know them as thoroughly as he did—the name and story of every gulch and draw, and the geology below. The first step was to acquire a basic command of the terrain. The cabin sat on a ridge, just out of sight of Tinton’s northernmost structure. The porch looked over the eastern slope. Most mornings I headed west, tramping downhill through a pine grove littered with ideally straight, bone-dry walking sticks. The pines soon gave way to scrub oak crowding a trickle of water between two hills. Eventually a cattle path emerged, and after a few hundred yards, it crossed the trickle and wound upward into the neighboring hill. There the understory thinned and the tall pines rose up again out of the prairie grass scattered with mullein and fragrant tansy. Rabbits dodged amid the catapulting crickets, and once I spotted a patch of brown that eventually resolved into a brace of elk. We shared a frozen moment of threat assessment, and then they cantered off. I lost hours this way, wandering the old logging trails, burring my trouser cuffs, but always bearing in mind the compass point that would lead me home.
Once, when it was nearing sunset, I stumbled on a forest-service trail that took me to an overlook cleared by the shoestring mining operation. There, my grandfather’s empire came into full view: rolling woodlands as far as the eye could see. For a moment I felt what he must have felt, a concentric sort of euphoria binding you to the heart of your own empire, under an open sky. It was a large feeling, one that combined confidence, rapport, and dominion in a single package.
Such feelings are hard to come by in most of our lives. Our empires aren’t nearly so visible as my grandfather’s was. We glimpse them in the size of our investment portfolios or bank balances, but you can’t stand in the middle of your bank balance and watch the sun set over the decimal points. The entirety of my grandfather’s life was right here. The fruit of his work was fully evident to him, as it was to everyone. You could see it pouring off the conveyor belt. You could see it stacked in burlap sacks waiting to be trucked down to Jolly Siding, on the Burlington Line, halfway between Spearfish and Belle Fourche. He had nothing to prove to anyone. Anyone wanting to know what he was about didn’t need to look to the size of his house for clues; they could walk down to Mallory Gulch and see for themselves.
It’s not that status wasn’t important in my grandfather’s day. His house sat among five others on what was called Boss’s Row. Even today you can see that the houses on Boss’s Row are noticeably larger than the shacks on Slab Alley, where the miners lived. But in a remote mining town with no police station and no town hall, the distinction served a specific purpose: It reinforced the social order. And that, in turn, helped my grandfather get the job done. It didn’t take much—a big fireplace and a few extra square feet was enough—because everyone already knew my grandfather was the man. His leadership spoke for itself.
The same is not true for most of us today. We drive to work. The production circuits that in my grandfather’s time reached from mine to mill now reach around the globe. The bulk of our holdings are not underfoot, carpeted by pine needles, but suspended overhead somewhere in the electronic ether. We live in cities, with hundreds of thousands of others. No one knows what you do until you tell them, and even then they want to know what kind of doctor you are, what kind of executive—the kind that brings home a five-figure bonus or a six-figure bonus? The kind they want to be friends with or the kind they’d rather avoid? Until you sit down and tell them, all anyone has to go on is the size of your house, the neighborhood you live in, and maybe the kind of car you drive. In fact, you may not have any sense yourself of how successful you are, until you build a house that shows it.
On my last day in Tinton, I stopped again at my grandfather’s cabin for a final look around. The place has been picked clean by vandals over the years, but on the walls of my mother’s old room you can still see shreds of wallpaper, a red weave pattern, with a line of roses along the ceiling. It was a luxury that folks like the Tollefsons, with their hand-drawn Disney characters, couldn’t afford. The contrast
suggests a final explanation for the ardor that we pour into home building.
The fact is, the quest for comfort and security is often less a product of personal acquisitiveness or ego than a desire to provide the best for one’s loved ones.9 So the question is not what’s good enough for you, but rather what’s good enough for those you love. It’s a much more difficult question to answer, because how can you say you love someone and at the same time say that anything less than first rate will suffice?
In the course of my 10 days in the cabin, I spent many evening hours on the porch, sitting in a ravaged rocking chair, the bottom hanging out and the arms spilling fluff. It suited me fine, but would my grandfather have let his wife sit in it? And what about the rough plank floor? It supported the rocking chair well enough, but how would I feel if it gave my children splinters? The floors of my grandfather’s cottage, Chris Hills had told me, were made from imported Arkansas oak.
Each generation gives to the next. We all owe a debt to the past. The tantalite taken from these hills gave us the stainless steel that keeps our kitchen appliances from rusting. The mica gave us electrical insulators and Christmas ornaments. The feldspar replaced the jakes with porcelain flush toilets. And the lithium gave us our first antidepressant. All that my grandfather gave to his daughter, from the roses on the wall to the smooth oak floors and everything else, in turn made possible all that she later gave me. And those gifts will one day filter down to my children.
The greatest gift of all may be Tinton itself, a raw piece of the past, a place to reflect on where it all came from. Because this, too, is home. The place you come from, the place you keep returning to, even as my grandfather did, at age 92. The mine never panned out. We knew it wouldn’t. But who could begrudge him the desire to return home at the end of the day? Especially to a home as bright and spacious as this. MensHealthLiving.com/studio.