A busy summer
Summers in Alaska meant 24-hour sun and enormous vegetables! We will miss that and the fishing and hunting.
Big changes are in store for the Hansons, and yes these changes are going to impact our field arts offerings (such as the next Around the World in 80 Rocks sessions, which is delayed, and our shop offerings, which are limited).
Last year we decided for multiple reasons to consolidate our properties and pursue a dream. A few years ago we had bought a place in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the intent to live part-time there and part-time in Arizona. We loved living in Alaska—really loved the people, the wildness (above the Arctic Circle in less than 6 hours!), the access to hunting, fishing, and foraging—but we ended up forced to decide on choosing to live only in one place because health care insurance for most of us is no longer portable across state lines, so I was uninsured in Alaska; any catastrophic medical need would not be covered beyond a day in emergency room care. Minus forty degrees Fahrenheit winters with a broken furnace thrown in for fun, plus earthquakes, plus the cost of going back and forth and trying to manage our businesses were too much, so reluctantly we sold our 1900s cabin and regrouped in Tucson, Arizona. This once-beloved city is no longer an option for us; we love our historic mid-town house, but the city, after COVID, became a miasma of horrible noise-machines (all those uncorked Mustangs and Dodge Chargers roaring around at all hours) and unsafe driving (death to us bicyclists). We just were not at peace here, and additionally post-COVID we pretty much stopped going out to eat and never resumed. Why stay in such a noisy, unsafe city?
Then we found a 38-acre parcel in one of our favorite landscapes on earth, an hour and a bit southeast of Tucson: the foothills of the Dragoon Mountains, just a mile from Cochise Stronghold, where the Apache leader holed up and was ultimately buried secretly. I knew the development well, having worked with the developer 30 years ago to help establish wildlife corridors and conservation easements when I was executive director of a grassroots conservation organization. With a well, and impressive covenant restrictions making it a dark-sky community with buried utilities and gated access, we secured an amazing purchase price and jumped. Our new home will be just minutes from thousands of acres of National Forest protected lands, with trails for hiking, mountain biking, field arts, and exploring by motorcycle (I’m so excited to be getting a new motorcycle soon—not just for exploring, but for delivering field arts orders to the mailbox on a little 100-mpg steed!).
After way too many delays and problems, our custom steel home-plus-garage is finally up and ready for us to move down, with the next few years dedicated to Jonathan finishing the interior. Home in the meantime will be another serendipitous purchase: a 1970 Airstream Overlander we stumbled on for an incredible price, from an Apache family in Oracle, Arizona (the grandfather has memories of living off the land in Aravaipa Canyon, in the heart of Apache country—where we hold our annual Sonoran Desert Field Arts Bootcamp).
The day we moved the Airstream down to Ravenskeld*, I walked around the corner and found a gorgeous little diamondback rattlesnake caterpillaring across the porch and into the cool shade of the siding. A perfect welcoming committee, offering us free rodent control as a gift. We were home.
(*Over the decades we’ve been privileged to share three properties with ravens who were the original inhabitants and accepted our co-habitation: our Ravenrock southwest of Tucson; our Ravens’ Cabin in Alaska; and now Ravenskeld in the Dragoons. On a daily basis our ravens come to inspect our work, make a few criticisms and suggestions, and generally are greatly amused by our silly humanness.)
