In 1970, my old friend Heidi and her new husband Mark bought some nearly inaccessible, mostly vertical land and started building a geodesic dome in the Rocky Mountains. This was an utterly cool thing to do. I helped them for a few days as they were erecting the basic geodesic frame, bolting triangle to triangle, higher and higher toward what was to be the last, triumphal piece at the top.
It was less than a glorious topping, actually, because the different edges didn't align the way they were supposed to. Slight errors of construction at the bottom became magnified at the peak. I remember tugging on ropes and pushing on poles, trying to bring the pieces together, fighting the very rigidity for which domes are famous.
A lot of folk helped. Imagine the barn-raising scene in the movie Witness, but substitute hippies for the Amish, and substitute the Colorado Front Range for the Pennsylvania farmlands, and substitute news reports of four students being shot dead at Kent State for the soaring background music. Then we all faded away, leaving Mark and Heidi with years of hard work.
It leaked, of course. Domes are notorious for that. The driveway was like a bobsled run, and you needed four-wheel drive in the best of weather, so Heidi and Mark wintered in Boulder and camped in the dome during the summers. They bought an old tractor and named it Teddy. They set up a generator. They built an outhouse with a spectacular window view. On a clear day, I swear, you could sit on that throne and see all the way to Kansas.
It was a rugged life. The weather could be merciless. Nothing you bought off-the-shelf would work in the weird architecture of the dome, so life was constant improvisation. Day after day, you'd see Heidi up on the roof, sealing leaks:
But inside, it was spacious, spirit-lifting, lovely. The dome was a magnet gathering friends for food, music, and talk of how to sabotage Nixon, how to stop the stupid war. Their dog Esau ruled the roost:
Mark bought a 1947 Dodge coupe so they could cruise the mountains in high style. They got a kiln and a water pump. A chipmunk lived in their wall. A porcupine hung out in the basement and would eat the plywood, loving the glue. Sometimes it waddled to the outhouse, so if you went there at night you'd have to stand at the window and shoo porky out the door with a broom.
They built that outhouse, by the way, on top of an old mine shaft, which gave them a bottomless pit and also served to discourage anybody from returning to exploit the mineral rights, which Heidi and Mark did not own.
That was forty years ago. The marriage split. A hunter shot Esau in the leg. Heidi ended up with the dome. I don't know what became of Mark. I'll never forget his satisfaction after a hard day's work, resting, reading, relaxing:
Mark was friendly, charismatic, sometimes crude, and he had a few demons. He had one particular philosophy that, as soon as I heard it, I understood its appeal. In fact, it's an idea that seems to have universal appeal, and I've heard it repeated many times in many places — among men. Women, oddly, don't seem to agree. What Mark said was: "A man should live in a place where he can take a piss out his own back door."
And he did.
For a while.
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