Went to the theater with my wife last night and saw "The
Greatest Showman." I enjoyed the movie, even though there
was an inebriated native american fellow two seats down
from me that I had to ask to stop using his cell phone. He
had an odor, but he was otherwise harmless.
Before the movie started there was an advertisement for
Diet Coke, and in that ad a young woman encouraged viewers
to live the way they wanted to. Her language and tone
indicated that perhaps she thought young people (the clear
target) felt like they had to live a particular way, rather
than doing what they chose. She was there to enlighten them.
The only words I remember from her were: "You want to live
in a yurt? Yurt it up!"
Of course, the only reason that stood out to me at all was
because I do in fact wish to live in a yurt. And this brings
me to the point of these meanderings: you can't just go and
do anything you want to. It's funny, to me, that this young-
lady-reading-a-script used yurt living as an example of
expressing your freedom, because in the U.S. (again, the
target market for this advertisement) you can't just go and
live in a yurt. We have zoning laws and ordinances, land use
regulations, fire codes, building inspections, requirements
for water, waste water, and electricity. On top of all that
we have CPS (child protective services) which dictates
through fear and example-making how a family is permitted to
live- and it's only mainstream living styles that are truly
exempt from their scrutiny.
So, no, Coca-Cola lady, you can't go "Yurt it up," no matter
how badly you want to. At least, not unless you have enough
money to meet all of the legal requirements and keep the
city, county, state, and federal agencies off your back (yes,
this can be done with the right amount of dollars.)
Now that I got that off my chest, I'm in the mood to write
about yurts. I've wanted to live in a yurt for as long as I
can recall, and before that I wanted to live in a tree stump
in the woods ("My Side of the Mountain" I think it was.) But
during my adult life, I seriously looked into the yurt thing.
In the U.S. the laws vary wildly by state, but I was looking
at the laws in Oregon at the time. It wasn't just improbable,
it was all but impossible, at least in my county. Well, at
least on my budget.
Then I moved to Arizona- Phoenix at first, then into a rural
area. In Navajo and Apache counties, the land use laws are
very permissive- pretty much anything you can get an AZ
engineer to sign off on, they'll accept. I saw people living
in hay-bale homes, rock homes, earthships, and all sorts of
things. But now, the kids are getting older, everyone wants
plenty of their own space, and I've got too many other things
to think about to want to struggle through estalishing myself
in a yurt. I suppose I just gave up.
I still have a book on building yurts, so maybe one day I'll
pick up the dream again, to become "mountain man Joe." Who
knows.
