He sold roadside gas station. Then built mountain homestead to live freely

Before I came out here, I did everything right. I followed the script to the best of my ability. I drove a nice fancy vehicle. I owned a house in the suburbs. Hell, I even had a credit card with no limit. By all means. On paper, I was successful. But inside, I was hollow. I realized I was spending the best hours of my life working for money so that I could buy a truck and a car and live in a place that I didn't want to be. A place that I felt I no longer belonged. Hi, Ryan. Thanks for meeting us. Do you need one of these around here? On the mountain, you do. We'll hit dirt road here just right around the corner. How did you find this spot? I mean, we're pretty out here. So I had a store. It's a convenience store. And then one day, I was laying in bed, and this piece of land came up for sale. And it was surrounded by national forest. And I was like, I really want that land. So I decided I would list the store. So when you first bought the property, what was it like? This wasn't even a road. If you look right there, that's exactly what it was. You couldn't walk through it. You couldn't do anything. You didn't even know what you had. It was so closed off. That's a lot of work. I mean, you had to build a road. A friend of mine that is a logger came and built this road for my easement. You were looking for just like solitude? I mean, were you really trying to get out here? You know, just you work in the city, and you're around people all day. So I was like, I want to be kind of out here. I do love solitude. I do like to just sit on my porch, not talk to anyone for a couple weeks. I've read a lot of hermit tales, and I love the hermit lifestyle. I love how resourceful a hermit generally is and how little it takes to keep him content. It can be as simple as the birds singing off the porch in the morning, you know. Oh, she got shy. There's all the chickens. I've never seen them that far down. Do you have some plants down here? So that's called pokeweed, and it's an Indian poison weed, but it's poisonous if you eat it the wrong way. But it's also what they call poke salad. You do eat it, but you have to be careful how you cook it. There's a couple apple trees and fruit trees. This is a moonglow pear tree, and that's a Arkansas black apple. And I just planted it, so. And a lot of garden, actually. This is pretty big. Oh, yeah. I want to have kind of like a food forest and kind of wild. So these are all native muscadine. You're gonna have a lot of grapes. Oh, yeah. I can make wine and beer and jellies. I grow quite a bit of food. This hillside's kind of getting bigger every year. I'm cutting a few more trees, trying to make my garden area bigger and then better than it was, like less pine, more native hardwoods, and getting the trees to where they're the size of that big oak where they've branched out and they've had room to grow. Because like this tree, this would have, when I first came here, you couldn't even, you couldn't see 20 yards. It was just so thick here. But I've obviously homesteaded this little hill, but the rest of it is very untouched. You call it a homestead? Kind of. I mean, I feel like I've cleared out enough for me to have solar and have a little garden, and it's kind of homesteaded. I guess that's what the state of Arkansas calls it. There's a term. I didn't realize that. I mean, I guess there used to be. Yeah, there's like an exemption. If you have a homestead, it's a lot cheaper taxes on the property. So you pay less tax because you garden? And because I live here full-time. Because you're full-time homesteading, you have less taxes in the state of Arkansas. And building codes? I don't have it. In rural Arkansas, you don't have building codes. But at the same time, like I can't, if that burned down tomorrow, I would just be out. Because you know, like an insurance company just isn't going to insure that. But that's the risk you run, and you become more careful with what you're doing. The last thing you want to do is like be up on the mountain somewhere and see smoke coming from this area, you know. I just can't risk. That's everything I have is right here. I was 45 years old. My dad had cancer. My mom, he was sick. And I don't want to move away from where they are. I had purchased this land, and I was enthralled with being out here on the land. I just wanted to spend every second of my day, every second of my time on the land. The way I was instantly, instantly able to do that was a shipping container delivered to my property was $5,000. I paid them. Two days later, the shipping container was sitting on my property, and I had a dry place to put clothes and a bed. It was really more about quick convenience than anything. It's easy to do. I've built this 240 square foot fully off grid. I mean, half of my cost was the solar and the batteries. And to me, it's super comfortable. I love it. It's not for everyone. It's just built around me and my life. I just don't want to disturb nature. I would like to be more mixed in with it. That was a big part of the camouflage or the ugly paint job. I don't want people to be able to see the shipping container when they're driving down the highway, you know, three or four miles away. So I camouflaged it. You'll see how well it works. The only way you can see me is from the air. I kind of like not disturbing the scenery, you know. I can take that bow. What is that? It's my bow. It's your bow? That's what you hunt with? Uh, sometimes, yeah. No way. Is it deer? Deer and bear and turkey. You can hunt all of it with a bow and arrow. I love to hunt with a bow. Because? Because you're just so close. You're getting so close to the animal. I think it's a lot more fair to the animal. You're really thinking about the shot you're taking. So you're trying to be very precise and have a quick kill. When did you hunt your first animal? How old are you? Oh, probably five or six. In this area, it was a very traditional thing. It was something that all the kids, you grow up like that. Mostly because this is probably a very poor demographic of the state. And so having that access, that's a great way to have extra food. It's not a new thing that I hunt or that I fish. I grew up doing that. I've always fished. My grandfather used to take me fishing on the river as a kid and some very fond memories. But there was 25, 30 years of my life where I didn't do any of that. In the city, you get in a rat race and you forget about those things. I think it's a great skill to have in our current day and time. And I really enjoy sitting in the woods. You know, I harvest animals, but most of the time, I mean, 90% of it's just being out there, really. This is a freezer. My mom gave me this just last month. This is duck. This is deer summer sausage. That you caught? Yeah, it come off this land and then we take it and get it processed. Deer hamburger. I have friends that vacuum seal, so I'll fillet a bunch of duck up and they'll take and vacuum seal it for me, which makes it do better in the freezer. So they process the whole thing? They give you all the parts? Yeah, so there's some Mennonite ladies and men that live about 20 minutes that way. You kill the deer. I clean it usually. Sometimes I'll quarter it out if I'm not going to get them to process it. I'll take it over, have them just make hamburger meat or summer sausage or whatever you want. You kind of need to have a way to stockpile it. And up here, you need a way to preserve it without it ruining. And the good thing about this is I noticed that the power down in the nearby towns, it goes out three or four times a year. But for the last three years, I've never lost electricity up here. Always solar though. Yeah, always solar. So I'm off the grid and I don't lose power. I've been trapped on this mountain for a week now. An ice storm rolled through and just locked the world down. The self-sufficiency is one of those things, having a freezer and having eggs and chickens. And it's nice to be self-reliant. It's nice to know that I could stay up here pretty much indefinitely with what I have right now. Living out here like this puts you in a different state of mind. Like you start to enjoy things that are just surviving. Running through some firewood this morning. Dampen that down just a hair. The stove is great then. I love it. When you're in a tiny space, you can't put a full-size wood stove in. You have small pieces of wood that go in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I cut all my wood probably five or six inches. It'll hold eight inches, but I pretty much always cut it somewhere in there. And I've got an unlimited supply of firewood. So all the lights are on. Wi-Fi. So I can turn this. Living in this from the time it was a metal container till... You figure out how to make the most out of the space. Like having your closet and your office space underneath your bed. I mean, I can stand under here. In most homes, underneath your bed is wasted space. But in here, I had to make the most of that. So I built a closet. I put my refrigerator. And then my office space was the last thing I got to put under here. But this is a 20-foot high wall, which means it's the nine foot six inches tall, which is what allowed me to have the loft. And you end up with about... You lose about a foot to insulation and studding and walling. So it's about seven foot seven wide. And big enough? It's plenty big for me. Me and Marsh and two cats. You just... You get up here and when you wake up in the morning, you just kind of throw everything off of you. And I like lots of pillows and blankets. So I throw everything off of me. When you get back up here in the evening, that's what you do. You get back and just throw it back over you. It's super soft. It's very comfortable. And very little headroom. Yeah, but it's just me. And all I... I mean, it's just for sleeping. I didn't need a 10-foot ceiling above my bed. I like to have a phone mount and I watch, you know, like a YouTube video. So that's your projector in a sense. Yeah, that's my television for at night. And then it doesn't take a lot to be comfortable. The mattress is comfortable and the pillows are comfortable. But I know a lot of people would think this is very claustrophobic, but I love it. I like how cozy... I feel very safe sleeping up here. So you're elevated even from the outside. But I mean, if you look, if you look out the window, we're like way up in the air. Then you got like a weather radio. Sometimes I fall sleepless in this. A chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. And this is cramming everything you can cram into a 20 by 9 by 8 area. So this is 170 square foot. Less to build out, right? Yeah, it's less to build out. It's less wiring, less plumbing, less wood, board feet. Everything is less. It's comfortable. It's not for everyone for sure, but neither is an outhouse or an outdoor shower. Having to walk 100 feet to your shower or your bathroom. A lot of people think I'm crazy for living like this, but I love it. This is my shower house. I have a composting toilet. It's kind of old fashioned, but I mean, a septic system and connected to water. I think to get electricity ran up the mountain here would have been $70,000 to $100,000, which is more than my entire build. And then a septic system would be $8,000 to $10,000. And the shower is a very cheap Camp Lux shower. You get for like $150. A well would be $10,000. Or you can see the water in here. There's no telling what that would cost. So it doesn't use a lot of propane. No, that'll last me all year. The one bottle. Oh my God. But you have to drain your system every time you take a shower in the winter. Or it'll burst. Yeah, it'll freeze. And these are made kind of for camping and for vans and for stuff like that. So they're kind of made for draining real rapidly. I love how you just kept it. It's really simple, but it looks like it works well. Oh, I love it. And you get sunshine and yeah, you just sit here and enjoy your nice hot water. With a view of the forest. View of the forest. If you live like this, you're more connected to the weather and to the land and to everything. The modern world thrives on convincing you that you need more. The antidote is defining enough. Now, my version of enough is extreme. It involves an outhouse and chopping wood for heat. But finding enough isn't about deprivation. It's about calibration. It's finding that exact point where your genuine needs are met and your genuine wants are satisfied. So there's a roof over the shower house and that's how I collect rain water for the garden and for drinking and everything. It's kind of empty right now, but like this morning an inch and a half of rain, I'm sure. You have some water now. Yeah, so I've got probably 150 gallons when I get to right here. And how much are you using? I don't use very much. Like I'll come out here and fill a five-gallon jug and that'll last me three or four days inside with me and the animals. This is where I brush my teeth and then garden goes off. I've got timers and it goes off for two minutes every morning and every evening. So you're automated. Yeah, because I may go off and work for a month, but when I come back I want to make sure that I have food. So it gets filtered going into the gutter and then it filters in right here. There's a screen right there and then there's a screen inside this first tote where this drops in. And then the water is pretty clean. Oh, it's really clean and I put like, I'll take a cap full of bleach and put in this first tote probably once every 30 days or so and that just keeps any algae from growing. I've got these sun blockers on it. Keeps the sunlight from getting in there. I'm growing the plants on it to shade it even more. Just keep planting everywhere. I had some big culverts. They ended up not getting used by the loggers, so I made them into raised beds. I make sure there's no bottom in them so that they can get worms and bugs in them and stuff. Every improvement, no matter how small, adds another layer to this life. Today's job is the chicken coop and I'm building it under part of the solar array. Not just to give it some built-in shelter, but to save a little on materials too. This frame is coming off the old futon that I hauled out of the cabin a while back. It'll make a great door frame for the coop. I like reusing materials not just to save money, but because there's something honest about it. Eggs? Eggs, yes, lots of eggs and I don't know if I have any right now because I let the chickens out pretty early this morning. Oh, there is an egg. It just didn't roll out. In the springtime, they get kind of broody and they want to just sit on them and so she wants babies, but she's been like this for almost 45 days, so she quits laying and she gets fussy and she don't like anybody coming near. You have to convince her to go outside and eat worms and play and drink water, so it's 3,000 watts of solar. It powers all my batteries, which are over here. I have like a little garage area. It's a great spot to put a shed or a workshop. I mean, it's just a sliver of your house. I mean, you don't take much of the house. I couldn't risk taking much, but I knew I had to have these electrical components and that I didn't want them inside the house with me, so I built this wall. That was one of the best decisions I made because this was going to be my entry into the house and then I was like this would just be a better garage. What do you need all the tools for? Building out the inside and the decks. I was going to say because then you kind of went wild with the decks instead of just having a front porch. I was going to cover the roof in sheet metal anyway. Yep. So why not just raise that up? Right. And it only costs like an extra maybe two or three hundred dollars to put the post in and raise that roof up. So why not have that space? And then the nice thing is in the summertime, it gets to be 110 degrees outside and now that I have this porch, it's not as hard on the tin can. Building the decks, it wasn't just about adding square footage. It was more about blurring the lines between inside and out. Oh, the hummingbird just went right behind me. Yeah, they're not bothered by us at all, but I just built these last week. I've been using a ladder to get up here for the last couple months. Last year it was just a metal box. These trees are great, right? The view here. Oh, in the wintertime when the leaves are off, you can see for a hundred miles. You can see so far. What are these mountains? So we're in the Ouachita Mountains. It's different than it runs. If you notice, that's south and these mountains are running east and west. It's the only mountains in the United States that run east-west like that. So on the south-facing slopes, you get so much baking sun. Winter solstice, you get sun coming in your front windows, but your summer solstice, you have a lot of direct sunlight that comes beating down on you. So these roofs have really helped me out for the summertime to keep me cooler. And the roof is probably just standard for water capture? Yeah, it will be because that is a lot more water for me. I'm excited about that. That'll give me running water in my cabin. And I built it with the expectation that someday I would probably finish it out. And at least then my loft could be a secondary bed for someone and I could sleep up here. And there would be a little platform for a bed right here, because you would have to frame around this. Setting these posts, we had a hard time. So I used my winch on my ATV and we pulled them up, me and a buddy. Gotta make it work when you're on your own, huh? That's the hardest and slowest part, is working alone. I built this lower deck by myself and I built most of that upper deck by myself. But every once in a while, just to hang those 2x10s on that container edge, you have to have an extra person. So you have to wait maybe a week for someone to be available on a weekend or someone to come up and be able to help you. This is one of those things I had to have help. I mean, the rock. You actually put in rock, like real rock. There's a river down here. I went down and got all these stones. Some of these are quite big. Yeah, this one was, I got it up here in my buggy. I got it inside and I took this cedar log and had a buddy come up and help me lift the rock in place. So I tried for a couple hours to drill a hole using the cordless hammer drill and it just, it was more drill than hammer. You drilled into the stone. How soft is this? It's not soft. You have to have a hammer drill. You want to go real slow, but I drilled three holes and screwed it down. So now it's really solid. And so you had to drill little screw holes and screw it into the timber. I've still got to find a good stone to go up there at the top. You know, it's going to have to be a long skinny rock. I like the contrast between how industrial a shipping container looks and modern from our times and more organic things. Yeah, you want a cabin, especially as tiny as this is. You want it to feel very cozy, especially in the winter time when it's cold and dark so much. You want to have a lot of nature inside and a lot of warmth. Your counter space and all your shelves are also quite organic. You know, you have like a nice pieces of wood. Yeah, I bought two slabs and they were 14 foot long. They cost me almost $700. That was the most expensive thing in the whole deal was these slabs that I used to make these shelves. So these you just braced? I built the shelves first, so they're actually resting on the studs in the wall. They're built into the wall. Sometimes I'll cook in here if the weather's really bad, but I tend to cook outside. This is just a camp stove. I like to be able to put it away and not have anything on my counter space. You know, if I want to work here or do something, I can. So you just pull that out. I've got the max air fan, so it does a good job. It'll really suck a lot of fumes out of here, but and it's nice. There's certain times of the year where you can open the window up in the loft and turn this on low and it just pulls air through the structure. I cook a lot of my meals outside just to keep from having the smell inside. Just some cast iron, propane, and the bottles underneath the porch. A lot of camping kind of stuff with a shower and this. Well, yeah, and that's the cheapest, easiest way to go. I would love to have a RV oven so I can cook this. I love biscuits, buttermilk biscuits. I was, I looked at, you have a lot of information in that screen there at that corner, so I'm curious to see what you can look at from your desk. Oh, the MET station. This up here is the weather. There's a MET station just right out here on a post, and so I have very local weather. Because? I do a lot of burning on the land in the wintertime, but I've just found here the wind can change. So you're supposed to call the forestry service and get a weather update from them, and it doesn't match my data. So I always try to have my own weather forecast. Every three years I try to burn 100 acres. Is that because it was logged? Were things out of balance? I mean, are you trying to get it back to a more natural balance? So it is out of balance in the fact that if you read the Spanish surveyors that came through here, there were lots of glades. These south-facing slopes had a lot of glades. If I took y'all over to the north side of the mountain, y'all would see hardwoods that are just 30 inches. They're huge. The soil's better over there, but on the south-facing slopes you get so much baking sun and so much runoff water that it it just creates a different... Normally there wouldn't be all these pine trees and all these oak trees and all these small trees. There would be a tree, there would be a glade that was 100 yards, and there'd be a couple more trees, and that was the normal south-facing slopes in the Ouachita's. If you read the geographical surveys that came through here, there weren't this many trees. Because they were being managed by the natives. Yeah, the Caddo and all the Indians that lived here, they would set fire. They would burn these mountains, and they did that regularly to make sure that the animals had lots to eat, to make sure that the hunting grounds were easy to get through and traverse. They did burn a lot. So it's protecting your food source. Yeah, part of what Ouachita means is premium hunting grounds. Burning up here is really scary on the slope because it's easy for it to get uphill. So I always try to start as high up and burn down. And I do that for wildfire season and for the wildlife. All the green stuff that comes up after a fire is just amazing. So deer eat mostly like woody browse that's close to the ground. They eat shrubs and plants, not grass. So I plant the cereal rye, which is a grain. You see a lot of the tall grass around here? I plant that. And it's mostly an annual, but if you let it grow to seed and then push it over, it comes back every year. So I don't have very good soil. So I have to haul soil up here from the bottom land and put it in these. And then I try to cover it with pine straw and leaves and stuff. So then I have humanure. And then this is like chickens. I scrape out their pen probably once every six months or so. Then I throw that on my compost as nitrogen fixer. And then I put all my trash, all my paper trash, mail, paper towels, everything goes in there. You mix that with your cuttings. Like when you have greens and you put the greens in there, that's your browns, your paper, and your leaves. I have lots of leaves in the fall. So I try to make as much soil with that as I can. What I've noticed is that soil is really hard to come by. But if you go to places that haven't been logged, like this is what it looks like when it's been logged. It's real brown and sandy. So there's a lot of logging around here. This is log country. So if you see here is native shortleaf pine. And then just below me, that's all a loblolly pine that is not native to here. Being up here, you do get in sync with nature. You get in sync with the seasons. You get in sync with, you kind of roll with the chores that you have to do. And you do things in the order that they seem to be the most beneficiary to you at the time. Most days, it's just me in the trees. There's peace in the quiet. No grid, no schedule. Just work, the land, the life I'm building with my own two hands. I value my solitude as much as any money in the bank. And I believe that solitude shouldn't be confused with loneliness. Instead, it's clarity. Each quiet morning, each task done by hand, it all means something. No grid, no distractions. Just a life built with purpose. Self-sufficiency isn't a goal. It's a way of being. Out here, growing my own vegetables, catching my own food. This is where I found peace.