“I just always thought there was something not quite right about this world,” Clay Greathouse said, as his truck climbed out of an arroyo and onto a creosote-studded lot near the town of Tombstone.
It was a Saturday morning in March, an ideal time to be ambling in Arizona’s high desert, though if the truck broke down here I would certainly not want to be without my water bottle. The last street sign I’d seen was for Last Chance Road. Outside our window, a landscape by turns breathtaking and godforsaken appeared through a veil of dust: knuckles of mesquite trees, the dried spines of century plants, a gossamer fray of whitethorn and bunchgrass, all sprouting up from marl and the chaff of dead stuff.
It’s a truism of nature that where one thing ends another begins. I wondered which side of that ledger we were headed toward, as our last chance at turning back to civilization disappeared in the rearview mirror. Too late to worry now. It was my second day in Cochise County, Arizona, where I had come to meet people like Greathouse, who had moved to this place to experience life off the grid. The landscape we drove through was plainly ideal for this purpose.
Cochise County is in the southeastern corner of Arizona, wedged in a slot that sits at the northernmost range of Mexican fauna and the southernmost range of Rocky Mountain flora, making it the most biodiverse pocket of the continental United States. It is home to Arizona’s “sky islands,” a set of mountain ranges that run south to north and shelter wildlife from lowland desert heat. A hike from the base to the summit of one of these sky islands, such as the Chiricahua Mountains, is equivalent in ecological terms to a road trip from Mexico to northern Canada.
People-wise, it is Arizona’s eighth most populous county, home to 126,000 residents, though by population density it ranks near the bottom. Geographically, it is almost a perfect square, with the majority of the population residing in an isosceles triangle whose points are shined by the historic mining towns of Willcox, Tombstone, and Bisbee, the county seat. The area of this triangle is the Sulphur Springs Valley, ancestral home of the Chiricahua Indians, an Apache tribe whose chief Cochise battled the U.S. military and its regional officer, General George R. Crook, before he struck a truce and died from illness, buried in a secret location on a sky island now named Cochise Stronghold.
Before the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, American or European settlement in the region was sparse, though some Spanish land grants were established after the hapless conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, lost to all but the eyes of God, stumbled half-starved across this stretch of the Sonoran Desert in the 16th century. As far as selecting a namesake, the county’s current residents should be pleased its founders made the unorthodox decision of choosing a sworn enemy of the U.S. and a brave war chief, for Crook or Cowhead would be no names to lay much pride in.
Cochise, in fact, has become an apt figurehead for a county that is chiefly known today as a place where one might elude American sprawl and all its attendant indignities. Cochise County is one of just a few American counties allowing landowners to build their own homes with relatively fewer permitting costs and building safety inspections. Known as RU-4 zoning, the system lets the owners of RU-4-zoned parcels purchase an “Opt Out” permit for between $75 and $325 — this allows them to build a single-family dwelling of any size on the property. The Opt Out, as locals call it, is widely considered the most permissive zoning system in the country for homes made from alternative materials, such as adobe earthbags or straw bales. Nearly a third of all homes built in Cochise County since 2015 use the Opt Out, which is eligible for use on 90% of the county’s unincorporated land.
RU-4 zoning still requires paid inspections for certain essential utilities, like septic tanks, wells, and access roads, but each runs no more than a few hundred dollars, a fraction of the thousands one would spend to bring a self-built home up to code in normally zoned cities. The few regulations in place actually lend the RU-4 system a desirable sheen of legitimacy, a sense that opt-outers are not merely tolerated but protected by a county that rightfully sees them as pioneers in America’s housing landscape.
Greathouse, a cheery man in his 60s with a white beard and a ruddy complexion earned from a lifetime outdoors, plays a central role in the opt-out movement as the founder of Arizona Desert Rat Realty, a real estate firm that specializes in RU-4 parcels. When I met him outside his home earlier this morning, he wore a Desert Rat Realty hat with an Eastern Orthodox cross pin (hence the beard) and a Hawaiian shirt that featured cartoon dairy cows dressed in pink tutus frolicking under a banner which read “Cow Girls” (made by his wife and not for sale — I asked). Clay and his family came into the county from Colorado, where they’d been living off-grid for 40 years, and bought a piece of land not far from Tombstone. He’d originally wanted to build a home from adobe brick on his land in Colorado in the 1980s, but even back then, the permitting for such a structure would have run him $4,000. Now he’s on the Opt Out and at work on a big home made of earthbags filled with dirt and clay. His legal name is, in fact, Clay Greathouse.
Clay has sold raw land to many of the county’s opt-outers over the years, and the day I met him, he was preparing for a long day of showing three properties to a client who had recently become disillusioned with urban living and was seriously considering the opt-out life: me.
At the time, my wife and I were living in a 600-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn. We had our first child on the way and had begun planning our return to Arizona, where we’re both from. The image you should banish from your mind right now is that of the prodigal cowboy taking the long trail back to the range of his youth. I’m from the suburbs. My wife is from the suburbs. The closest horses to either of our childhood homes were on Paramount Classic Westerns.
When we began to search for a home in Phoenix, though, we found ourselves trekking to neighborhoods far from the ones we grew up in. Phoenix has been arguably the hottest real estate market in the nation since the pandemic. Maricopa County, where Phoenix sits, received more new residents in 2021 and 2022 than any other county in the country; it was in the top five in growth again in 2023 and 2024.
I get it. Phoenix was a great place to grow up. That was exactly why I wanted to have a kid there. The problem was that families often weren’t the ones buying the city’s homes. In 2021, when Phoenix was inarguably the hottest market in the country, live-in owners bought 2,800 fewer homes than in 2019. Investors, on the other hand, had purchased 6,800 more homes than in 2019. Second-home buyers had purchased 2,400 more. In a 2024 study on the most profitable places to own an Airbnb, seven of the top 10, including numbers one, two, and three, were in the Phoenix metropolitan area. By 2025, a quarter of all homes in Maricopa County were either investor-owned or second homes; almost half of these were owned by people who lived out of state.
Enter into this world an idealistic young couple embarking on the journey of parenthood and homeownership. Ten years ago, we would have joined Phoenix homebuyers looking for homes under $400,000, which represented about 90% of all sales in the area. Those homes now represent less than 40% of all sales. So we stretched our budget, expanded our range, and found it — the dream(ish) home! Never mind that it was half the size of the houses we grew up in and in a less desirable zip code. It had charm. It had spunk. It had potential. And when we went to make an offer, we learned it had something else: an investor who swooped in before we could even submit a bid.
I just always thought there was something not quite right about this world…
So I called Clay. He was happy to put me in touch with people in the county who could give me a taste of the opt-out life before I endeavored to try it myself. In the meantime, he would begin sending me listings that we could check out when the time was right. The first one was an RU-4 property off Last Chance Road. I thought there would be no better place to start.
“In California, we were going to have to install fire sprinklers — in a house that doesn’t burn.”
Nicolette Zatarian
Nicolette and Ian Zatarian are veteran alternative homebuilders who moved to Cochise County a year and a half ago precisely because of its RU-4 zoning. They’ve built superadobe domes — a form of earthbag construction that uses long sandbags, barbed wire, and moist earth sourced on site — in Mexico, Colombia, Joshua Tree, and Utah. Superadobe is among the most popular forms of earth building, valued in dry climates for being fireproof and breathable, and for keeping the structure’s interior reliably cooler than the outside by about 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
Nicolette is an architect in her early 30s, petite and very pretty, wearing turquoise jewelry and a pair of well-loved huaraches. She grew up on a 25-acre homestead in Nebraska with a handyman father who slowly built out a dream home from their mobile home. She had become disillusioned with the traditional world of architecture soon after college — it bothered her to learn how much money it took to experiment with home design — but she did not know about earth building until she met her husband.
Ian had taken a course in earthbag construction in Southeast Asia, which he received in an unorthodox exchange for his old motorcycle. He is now a firefighter and a strong contender for coolest guy in the county. He introduced Nicolette to the world of alternative building, and together they started a superadobe learning center in the Mojave Desert near the California-Nevada border in 2021. Strict zoning laws on the California side of the border and groundwater restrictions on the Nevada side, however, made a dream home project unfeasible.
“They were willing to work with us on some stuff, but the cost was going to be astronomical,” Nicolette said. “To even begin, we calculated it was going to be $15,000 in permitting.”
“So most people living off the grid where you were previously were…”
“Doing it illegally. It’s so much harder in California. Any building style has to be fireproof according to code, so we were going to have to install fire sprinklers — in a house that doesn’t burn. I don’t know if you’ve ever checked on how expensive fire sprinklers are, but they are not cheap. Like 30 grand.”
In 2024, the Zatarians purchased 20 acres in Cochise County that faced the Huachuca Mountains, roughly 25 minutes from the town of Sierra Vista. They started building superadobe domes right away. Eighteen months later, they had erected 12 domes connected by superadobe passageways. They have a fully functional kitchen, two bathrooms, a bedroom, and a fireplace, with plans for an additional two bedrooms and a living room space. The ceilings in the domes are 16 feet tall and plastered using a mixture of clay, sand, and straw. Most of the year, the home stays between 60 and 80 degrees comfortably, but they’ve installed two minisplit air conditioning units for extended heat and cold spells. There’s also an outlet for Ian’s car.
“My husband’s dream was to live in a house where he could plug his car into a dome,” Nicolette explained.
The entire home is powered by solar. Water, which they currently haul, will soon come from a well shared with neighbors. Beside each dome is an inverted dome in the ground from where the dirt used to build it was dug up. They live 20 minutes from the bars and cafes in Bisbee, 25 minutes from Home Depot, and 30 minutes from cheap, delicious food in Mexico. The entire project has cost them $176,000.
Like many on the Opt Out, the Zatarians were drawn to Cochise County not only for its unique zoning laws but for the community that has built up as a result. The county is large geographically — a drive around the perimeter of Sulphur Springs Valley would take well over three hours — but people think of residents who live halfway across it as their neighbors.
This is partly due to the plain fact of population density: An opt-outer’s next-door neighbor may very well be six and a half miles away. But it is also due to the homogenous challenge of living austerely in the high desert: Many residents in the county have done some kind of off-grid work of their own, even if they’re not on the Opt Out. They’ve dug a well, installed rainwater catchment systems, or hooked up solar to the roof.
Those shared experiences give the county a small-town feel. The county guy who inspects septics lives off-grid, so when Nicolette had their own system inspected, she found a helping hand instead of red tape. “We put in a septic, and they came out the same day, helped us do it, helped us fix it,” she told me. “When we submitted our plans to build this, the lady at the county was like, ‘Wow! I can’t wait to see this when it’s done.’”
What Nicolette described is the result of many years of community organizing that has made the opt-out system a celebrated facet of the county — the desire to opt out may be in the historic character of Cochise County, but legitimizing that desire through the law was by no means inevitable.
As Christian Sawyer, a local community leader, chronicled for the Arizona Agenda in December 2025, the county was once prepared to bring its building codes up to the International Building Code, which is standard for most of the country. When the matter was considered for a vote in 2006, locals rallied to instead support an amendment that made it easier for rural landowners to build their own homes. Twenty years later, the county now recognizes every October as Opt-Out Month — the result not only of astute organizing efforts by Sawyer and others but also of the sheer popularity of the opt-out system among the county’s newest residents.
Sawyer told me that he often hears from Democrats in Phoenix who assume the opt-out movement is a Republican thing, the domain of libertarian-types who want the government off their land. That isn’t so. While the instinct to create the Opt Out permit may have rural Republican roots, opt-outers themselves are a remarkably diverse bunch. In a survey Sawyer conducted at the county’s first annual Opt-Out Expo, fewer people reported a Republican affiliation than a Democrat one, and more reported to be independent than affiliated with either party. Sawyer assumes, and I’m inclined to agree, that the reason for this diversity is that the Opt Out is not merely a lifestyle choice but a unique solution to a problem that cuts across political divides: housing.
“If you have the time, if you work remotely, and every weekend you can go pound some bags, you can build a home dirt cheap,” Sawyer explained to me when I met him outside his home at the south end of the county in the border town of Douglas. His perfect pun draws attention to the cost problem of housing, which has forced many Americans to downshift their expectations for their first home. High-density housing is increasingly becoming a popular path for first-time homebuyers, but buying an apartment on a better salary than what your parents had when they bought their first home isn’t really a solution. It kind of just sucks. Phoenix is hardly the only place in America where families like my own struggle with this problem — prices have doubled across the country over the past decade.
How to make desirable homeownership widely affordable is hotly contested. Should governments aim to increase the supply of housing by easing zoning and permitting rules? Restrict corporate purchases and short-term rentals? Build or subsidize affordable housing directly? On the fringes, you can even find more radical proposals, like a modern version of the Homestead Act, which substitutes vast land grants for interest-free loans and promises of streamlined permitting to incentivize families to rehabilitate America’s rural lands.
The Opt Out is also on the fringes — realistically, most Americans need to live near grid systems, schools, and jobs. But some see it as the most dignified option for housing. They may still not be able to own a swimming pool or two-car garage, but their kids might play carefree in sprinklers fed by rainwater and powered by the Sun. That sucks a little less. It returns to the people the pleasure of being the conduit between the earth and the home, a pleasure which Henry David Thoreau once bemoaned we too hastily resigned to the construction worker. “Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands,” he wrote in Walden, “and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged?”
“There’s something to spending time with someone shoulder to shoulder, doing a thing together. It bonds you in a way.”
Jonathan Longnecker
The family in Cochise County that best embodies this idealism is the Longneckers. Their YouTube channel, Tiny Shiny Home, with its 215,000 subscribers, has become the most visible representation of the opt-out movement. Jonathan and Ashley Longnecker left behind a suburban house in Knoxville 10 years ago to start a life defined, at first, by travel. For nearly five years, they lived out of an Airstream with their four children, the youngest a toddler when the journey began, parking in campgrounds and on public land. They then decided to purchase a parcel of land in Cochise County not far from a wildlife refuge where they had first parked their Airstream three years before. “The very first time we boondocked was outside of Tombstone,” Ashley told me. “And I remember when we pulled in at the time, I was like, ‘I would love to live in a place like this.’”
The Longneckers exemplify the dirt-to-home movement because they were, at the start, complete amateurs. Jonathan’s trade was web design; Ashley’s was homeschooling. Like everyone I spoke to in the county, they were both graduates of “YouTube University,” having learned everything about building an earthbag home from videos online.
They have, in turn, added to that database of knowledge greatly. Their YouTube channel has more than 900 videos, many of them basic guides to building with hyperadobe, a form of earthbag that’s similar to superadobe, except that it uses UV-treated red mesh bags instead of sealed ones, removing the need for barbed wire layering. They have built four earthbag structures, including a bathroom, two bedrooms, and a chicken coop, and are now working on a giant roundhouse that will serve as a central home for their family. It’s not uncommon for them to meet people who moved to the county after watching their videos.
“I think a lot of people see us and think, ‘Oh, they said they had no experience, but they’re doing it,’” Ashley said. “And it really can be done. Most of these builds anybody could do. It’s just a lot of work.”
“How often does somebody buy land down here and not know how to do anything?”
“Often,” they both told me.
That reality is why the Longneckers, along with every other builder I met in Cochise County, belong to one of two community build groups: the Barn Raisers in the north end of the valley or the Homestead Swap in the south. These groups gather on Saturdays at member homesteads and, in exchange for food, build like ants for a full day.
“You end up with all these people who maybe don’t agree politically, or they don’t agree religiously, or, you know, they may not believe in the same things or value the same things that you do,” Jonathan explained. “But there’s something to spending time with someone shoulder to shoulder, doing a thing together. It bonds you in a way. I think that’s missing from a lot of society. Even if you don’t agree on all these different things, it’s like, ‘You helped me build my dream. We’re gonna be friends, right?’”
Other residents of Cochise County told me, with barely concealed envy, that the Longneckers were able to accomplish so much in particular because they had their own private army: four rough-and-tumble kids. Ada, Jax, Jett, and Adali were 9, 11, 13, and 15 when they came into the county five years ago, and they’ve helped their parents with every project on the place; in Adali’s case, she even has an earthbag bunkhouse for herself.
Meeting the kids was a window into another way of life. They were tanned and curious and a little shy, their faces recently washed with rainwater. They had spent the vast majority of their life outdoors, often with only the wind for close company. It took me half an hour before I realized the kids had been carefully listening to me speaking with their parents without having said a word themselves. I taught teenagers for many years. Let me tell you that such a quality of pure attention is a rare thing among that tribe.
“If you guys had to put together a manual for kids your age on how to not go crazy on your family’s opt-out land, what would be some tips you would give them?”
“Tough it out,” Jax said. They all laughed. Jax, despite the hard-nosed answer, looked like a lovable all-American teen in his soft-brimmed white hat and black T-shirt with a graphic of skulls and hearts.
“Do you think anyone your age could learn to do this? Do you think it takes a certain something?”
“Motivation, I think,” Adali, the eldest, said. “Stubborn commitment.”
“Is there a part of teenage culture online that shocks you?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Which part?”
“All of it.”
Her brother Jett, a blond, curly-haired 18-year-old in heavyweight jeans and a handsome wool military shirt, concurred. This was not to say the kids were impoverished socially; they frequently meet strangers during their community builds. Fellow teenagers, not so much. Sometimes they visit the library to play Dungeons & Dragons with other kids, but Jett confessed he finds it hard to connect, a sentiment his siblings share.
“That’s our biggest struggle,” Jonathan said. “There’s not a lot of families here our age. We’re kind of this weird in between.”
The kids stayed busy, though. Jett had a job at a regenerative ranch, while the others took advantage of Arizona’s universal voucher program to buy materials to support their hobbies, which seemed innumerable: microbiology, animal husbandry, music, video production, midcentury menswear. Probity — the quality of having a strong character — is a good word to describe them. Ralph Waldo Emerson used it in his essay “Society and Solitude,” and it came to mind during our conversation. In a world where kids like stuff, these kids like things.
Adali showed me around a project she spearheaded on the property: a storage unit repurposed to house and feed a small herd of goats she tends. She wore practical long sleeves, canvas pants, and a ballcap with a dog stitched onto the front. Now 20, she could strike out on her own any day. I remember being 20. I asked her why she hadn’t yet. She told me she wants to buy a piece of RU-4 land and build a little homestead with goats and chickens that people can rent on Airbnb for a month at a time. The goal, she said, is to give people the opportunity to see if they’re actually cut out for opt-out life. She hopes doing so will lead to fewer people who, as she puts it, “come out, get all the animals, then leave in six months,” leaving it to long-timers like her family to find the animals new homes.
She stood stroking the neck of a nanny goat she had helped through delivery one week before. Little dabs of silver spray glistened where she’d recently disbudded the kids’ horns. She’d start milking them soon. The Sun, after shining hard all day, was now settling into a detumescent glow behind Cochise Stronghold, where I’d pitched my tent for the night. You can feel when heat leaves the desert at nightfall, like the earth is molting. You could feel it now.
“I don’t see leaving anytime soon,” Adali said. “I’m happy with it.”
“Not a lot of 20-year-olds can say that in America.”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “I think that’s why I don’t get along well with people my age.”
My impression was that this would be a poor place to raise a family, but a fine place to escape one.
“I always check before I go in one of these places,” Clay said as he shouldered open the door to an abandoned hunting cabin the next morning. After meeting the Zatarians and Longneckers, I told Clay I was ready to start shopping for land myself. We were at the first listing of the day, a 70-acre parcel off Last Chance Road near the town of Elfrida, priced at a premium: $195,000. The road to Last Chance Road was itself perditious; it had taken great effort just to write the words “not a very nice place” in my notebook as Clay bounded over the boulders. (Clay was in his element, having driven Jeep tours in the Rockies for many years when he lived in Colorado.)
As we approached, Clay told me what he knew about the place: It had a private well, 50 miles of visibility, and a private road. Also, the guy trying to sell it had been hospitalized after falling off the stairs leading to the front porch. We bypassed those same stairs when we arrived; they were now completely collapsed, the bare boards suntanning leisurely across the gravel.
The hunting cabin came furnished with a molding couch, bunk beds, rocking chairs, and a rusty stove. The pantry was stocked with canned goods and a bottle of clear alcohol that singed my nostrils when I took a whiff. The cabin also had a truly eccentric collection of framed art, including an oil painting of a cowboy squatting over a tortilla press, a drawing of two German shorthaired pointers, and a print of John William Waterhouse’s “Hylas and the Nymphs.” A plywood shed behind the property contained empty coffee cans and a toilet seat nailed to the wall, like a Duchamp sculpture in exile. The outhouse had a charmingly square toilet cover; unfortunately, it was surrounded by rat turds. My impression was that this would be a poor place to raise a family, but a fine place to escape one.
From the porch, which was easily the best feature, one could see Sulphur Springs Valley spread out in the distance. Clay pointed out the playa, a light patch of land where excess rainwater collects. Near it, demarcated by alien swaths of green, were the alfalfa farms that feed the dairy cattle owned by Riverview, a Minnesota-based company that is the county’s largest water user.
It was an opt-outer’s worst fear to see one of Riverview’s high-volume sprinkler systems, colloquially known as “pivots,” pop up near their property. Herein lies a prime example of why zoning matters. The majority of rural Arizona counties place no limits on groundwater pumping, and consequently, their aquifers are vulnerable to concentrated agricultural operations. The county saw some reprieve from Riverview’s rapaciousness earlier this year when the company settled an agreement with the state’s attorney general that will reduce its groundwater usage and compensate neighboring landowners who experienced dry wells or ground fissures as a result of excessive pumping.
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in Cochise County without strong opinions on water, which is as it should be. Water is the desert’s most precious resource, and opt-outers preserve it like their life depends on it. Everyone understands that men and women and babies need their milk, but alfalfa can be grown elsewhere. Some may see the juxtaposition of the playa and the crop field as barrenness beside abundance. I see it and think of Wallace Stegner’s words about the ameliorative power of the West’s open spaces: “It is a good question whether we may not need that silence, space, and solitude for the healing of our raw spirits more than we need surplus cotton and alfalfa, produced for private profit at great public expense.”
Onward from the outlaw shack and Riverview’s pivots, then, and toward another listing. Clay wanted to show this suburbanite something that might be more his speed, so we drove an hour south down U.S. 191 toward Douglas. Douglas appeals to me for superficial reasons: The novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder broke down outside the town in 1962 and stayed for a year and a half, writing much of the National Book Award-winning novel The Eighth Day during his sojourn. I could use one of those. Clay referred to the listing outside of Douglas as “the new American dream.”
The phrase, I found out, was tongue-in-cheek. The property was a two-room shed that had been converted into a home. It was parked on only a third of an acre, surrounded by nothingness, set off from a paved road by only 50 yards, and priced at $55,000. Inside, there was a microwave atop a TV stand, an oven surrounded on both sides by washing machines, and a gun safe as big as a refrigerator. It was somehow more like an art installation than a home, a satire of an earlier generation’s American dream, an upside-down world where a housewife bakes a Winchester in the dryer while her husband plops down to see what’s playing on the microwave.
Clay explained that this property was, incredibly, part of a subdivision called La Costa Estates. A developer had bought up larger parcels of land around the shed house and split them into sub-acre plots. In doing so, they had disentitled the land from its RU-4 zoning and condemned it to standard building code, albeit in miniature. Though by all appearances the shed sat on a wide expanse of open land, it was, in fact, surrounded by an invisible empire of cookie-cutter plots like its own, just waiting for development.
“It’s like a suburban lot,” Clay said. “You can’t use the Opt Out, so nobody wants it.”
It was at this point that I realized Clay had intended this visit to be instructive. His point was well taken. I grew up in a subdivision called La Cuesta, and standing now in La Costa, I thought how weird it was that we ever built places like this in the desert. Instead of allowing the landscape to reshape us, we bent it to fit our existing habits and desires. This, in turn, made us too reliant on large-scale federal reclamation efforts, particularly dams, that subsidized the creation of utility monopolies.
C.S. Lewis once wrote that “what we call man’s power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its instrument.” Among the opt-outers, I had the keen sense that these were people who had reclaimed power over themselves, and in doing so, they had robbed utility companies and land developers of the power to dictate their relationship with their surroundings. The temptation to relinquish that power is great — I like microwaved TV dinners on demand as much as anyone — but standing in that surreal subdivision in the desert, I thought of a line from the conservationist Mary Hunter Austin: “The manner of the country makes the usage of life there, and the land will not be lived in except in its own fashion.”
Kenny would tell us sensible things that would seem like nonsense and nonsensical things that, after spending a half hour with him, began to make a great deal of sense.
To refresh our spirits, Clay made a detour to visit Kenny Quinn. Clay told me Kenny “does a lot of alternative stuff” and that he “has got a big heart for people.”
“Oh, he also doesn’t wear shoes. Ever.”
When we drove up to his property, Kenny was suspended 20 feet in the air, working on a geodesic dome. He scrambled down and walked up to us, wearing a shaggy-dog smile, barefoot as the day he was born. He showed us into his open-air dome.
“So this is going to be a dance floor right here. This is going to get opened up,” he said, pointing to one side of the dome where the crude outline of a figure was taking shape. “It might be turning into a dragon, with its head poking out. We’re going to elevate the stage for a guitarist and a drummer because I want the band to totally be connected. At the same time, this is a playground, a play gym. You can climb this. It’s very friendly for kids. It’s a community thing. I want to have a dance floor for everyone.”
Kenny got his first taste of off-grid living as a young employee of the Forest Service, one of those federal government jobs that is a gateway for so many Americans to discover a life outside suburban sprawl. He visited a friend one weekend whose brother was working on an Earthship home.
“I was very inspired when I got to see an off-grid home that was heated by the Sun, where the water you drink was captured off your roof into cisterns, and all your cabinets and doors were sourced and built on site. Just the epitome of living sustainably. That changed everything for me.”
Kenny now spends fall, winter, and spring in Cochise County, then heads up to Taos for the summer. He lives off-grid in both places, and appreciates the challenges of staying cool in Arizona and warm in New Mexico. Taos has a long history of earth-building communities — “long” as in ancient, given the resplendent adobe homes of the Pueblo peoples — but it does not yet have RU-4 zoning laws like Cochise County. Instead, it has what Kenny called “renegade areas” where the local county doesn’t quite legitimize off-gridders but tolerates them, mostly because there’s “just too many of them and the shit’s too cool.”
Kenny came into the county 12 years ago on a bicycle. He stayed “for a moon,” he told me, and before leaving, asked his sister for a small loan so that he and some friends could buy a piece of RU-4 land. Since then, he and his community group, the Homestead Swap, along with other passersby on the cosmic road of life, have built four structures on the property, including a kiva bunkhouse, a greenhouse, and the aforementioned geodesic dancefloor. Kenny is a self-described purist. No AC minisplits. No added insulation on the walls. No hauled water or private well.
“I was corrupted by the Earthshippers,” he said. “There’s only one well in the greater world, and that’s the community well that’s barely getting used.”
Kenny lived in what I would describe as a permanent flow state. When encountering him, you got the sense that you had not interrupted this state but rather merged with it. He had the bearing and mobility of a man half his age and a childlike playfulness of mind. He would tell us sensible things that would seem like nonsense — like how, for 28 years, he’s been pooping in a bucket and making his own soil from it — and nonsensical things that, after spending a half hour with him, began to make a great deal of sense — like how a geodesic dome dance floor needs a disco ball to “cancel out the potential harmful energy that’s in the center.” But, of course.
On the merits of the Opt Out, though, he is crystal clear: “It’s self-empowering. It radiates. It ripples out of this county and brings a lot of creativity and freedom into it. And the beautiful thing is, when people are just left to their own devices, they can create amazing things.”
He walked us back through the dome as we headed to the car, and I asked, before leaving, if we could snap a photo of him hanging from its supporters. His eyes lit up. “No, I’ll get a photo of you up there.”
I paced the boundaries of the property and felt my heart rate pick up. Watching a monsoon unfold from this vantage would be like front row tickets to an opera.
We had time for one more listing before the sunset, and this time, I’m going to be vague about the details. Let’s just say it was a 20-acre plot of raw land that had recently become available, listed for $39,500, but Clay thought we could get it for cheaper.
It sat below the Mule Mountains and looked across the San Pedro River toward the Huachucas. Skirting the river as it ran north to the horizon were cottonwoods that stood like sentinels, the biggest, greenest cottonwoods I’d ever seen. The plot contained a mesquite copse above a shallow arroyo and was high enough in elevation for juniper to grow. Proximity to the river meant the water table wouldn’t be too low and the soil would have the right amount of clay. Proximity to Bisbee and Sierra Vista meant that schools, groceries, hardware stores, and live music were only 20 minutes away. You’re crazy if you think I’m going to tell you the crossroads.
“This is good land,” Clay said, nodding. The wind blew his hat brim up, and his eyes widened to take in the place. “This right here is a nice piece of land.”
I paced the boundaries of the property and felt my heart rate pick up. The thing I was most looking forward to in moving back to Arizona was the monsoon season, when the hellish summer heat breaks for thunderstorms that light up the sky with purple swaths of lightning and fill the air with an electrified scent of new beginnings. Watching a monsoon unfold from this vantage would be like front row tickets to an opera. I could hardly imagine a better way for a child to learn to love a landscape, and for two people to find a sense of purpose in the place they call home. Still, I remembered some wise advice that Clay’s real estate partner, Sammy Klein, had given me before we set out that morning.
“Let’s get your head on straight about it. The reality of the situation on the ground is that opting out is really sweaty, gritty, dirty work,” Klein had said. “Failure after failure before you have success. Even if you have the backing of a network of community-minded folk, there’s just so many deterrents. It’s not this romanticized homestead dream that people believe it is, where you’re going to get out of the city and catch your own rain and make your own power. It’s a huge headache. You’re always repairing something. You or your animals are always going to be sick. There’s always something going on with the weather: extreme heat, extreme wind. People living in the suburbs who have a garden out back, maybe a couple goats and chickens, think it’s going to be just like that but with more acres. It’s not.”
“If you really want independent, off-grid systems, they need constant maintenance,” Klein continued. “You have to wear all the hats, like Clay and I do. I had to learn how to do floors and foundations and windows and doors and roofs and electrical and framing and plumbing. It’s like the difference between having a coloring book and a blank canvas. In the suburbs, you have a coloring book with all these neat lines already set for you to color in, but homesteading out here is like staring down a length of blank canvas. You could have the artistic vision, but then you go with your medium to the canvas, and you just are stunted. I have plenty of days like that. I just don’t know what to do next because I don’t have any lines to color in. It’s totally up to you. You have finite time and energy and money, and you’re likely to make so many mistakes that burn up tons of your time and tons of your energy and tons of your money. To make any of this happen, you have to be willing to push through that.”
“So why do you do it?” I asked him.
“Because we’re modeling what civilization could look like going forward. Where we still have our own little kingdoms and our own independence, but where we share what we know between us. Among all of us in the county, there are no problems we can’t solve if we all collectively put our heads to it. What’s happening here is a fractal of the larger situation of our global society. It really is. There are no problems that we face that we can’t solve if we put our minds to it.”
I watched Clay pick up a handful of dirt and let it fall in between his fingers. I already knew the future was going to take a lot of work. Maybe it starts here.
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