Kitkiddizze (the Snyder home)

Building a cabin in the woods (Thoreau, the Unabomber) is the all American form of dissent and Gary Snyder, the favourite essayist of all cryptoforesters, has followed the tradition. Kitkitdizze (the native name for bearclover) was built in the summer of 1970 in the deforested gold-mined foothills of the Sierra Nevada and has become something of an emblem in his personal mythology: the sage-poet living on a 100-acre homestead where "He pays the property tax, but claims no more right to the land than the other creatures that live on it". Kitkitdizze lives the philosophy of "reinhabitation: moving back into a terrain that has been abused and half forgotten – and then replanting trees, dechannelizing streambeds, breaking up asphalt". Snyder is a man of practical skill and his house combines features of traditional Japanese farmhouses and native American earthlodges.

Listen to the Guardian:

Deer peep through the foliage at the visitor on the three-mile unpaved road to Snyder's ranch. On a walk in the surrounding pine and black-oak forest, he points out claw marks on a tree-trunk made by a bear - the same bear, perhaps, that features in a recent poem eating all the pears from a fenced-off tree by the house. A wildcat dispatched his chickens. Until recently, the family had only an outside lavatory some 50 yards away, which, he says wryly, "could be dangerous in the mornings" - pumas also lurk among the pines, though seldom seen - but the Snyders now have the luxury of an inside bathroom with a polished wooden tub. He called the place Kitkitdizze, a local Wintun Indian word for the surrounding low ground-cover bush, also known as mountain misery. "We had our hands full the first 10 years getting up walls and roofs, bathhouse, barn, the woodshed. I set up my library and wrote poems and essays by lantern light." Kai, Snyder's eldest son, was a child when work on the house began in 1969. He has memories "of heat and dust and a lot of people working, and me getting underfoot". In the beginning, says Kai, now in his late 30s, "all our water had to be pumped by hand, which my dad did every day for about 40 minutes. It was good exercise, I guess. All the cooking was done on a wood stove, and our heating was produced by the same method. It was like a 19th-century lifestyle in lots of ways."

The Unabomber's cabin

According to Wikipedia Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, built his own cabin in remote Montana, and I have to say: what a total failure of imagination. You would expect that a child prodigy in math would come up with a creative way of solving some obscure problem in geodesic dome design to underscore energy effiency and sustainability. Instead kaczynski constructed the dullest cabin ever: a stereotypical middle-class free-standing family house in mini-format based on the Walden template. Where is the garden gnome Ted? What strikes me the most is that it doens't seem that he has used locally sourced wood, in fact his cabin seems to been made from materials bought at the hardware store. This tells us that his body may have have been in the woods but that this mind was still in the city.  
The cabin was exhibited in 2008



Thoreau and Cryptoforest Philosophy

Thoreau's walden, the stones mark the location of his cottage.

Listen to Henry David Thoreau (Chesuncook part six) and let's capitalize the key words:

The kings of England formerly had their forests ‘to hold the king’s game,’ for sport or food, sometimes destroying villages to create or extend them; and I think that they were impelled by a true instinct. Why should not we, who have renounced the king's authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth,’ — our forests, not to hold the king's game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation, — not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true re-creation? or shall we, like villains, grub them all up, poaching on our own national domains?

Here is another random quote:

In fact, the deeper you penetrate into the woods, the more intelligent, and, in one sense, less countrified do you find the inhabitants; for always the pioneer has been a traveler, and, to some extent, a man of the world; and, as the distances with which he is familiar are greater, so is his information more general and far reaching than the villager’s.