A hole in the forest.

Sometime in the winter of 1997-1998, we began planning for an early and minimal retirement. Our goal was to sell our present home in suburban Atlanta and retire to the woods of northwest Georgia. Boy did things get complicated after that!

After looking about the northern mountainous part of Georgia, we quickly realized that prices in northeast Georgia, long an escape hatch for second homes and those fleeing Atlanta, were beyond our modest means. We also realized that it wouldn't be long before even the remote northwest section of the State would be out of reach. The irrepressible and rapacious Georgia Department of Transportation seemed to be building four lane highways in every possible place. Better transportation, the exodus from Atlanta, and the still relatively reasonable prices of acreage made development inevitable. Northwest Georgia, however, still seemed within reason, and so we began searching.

The criteria

We set several criteria. First, the land had to be relatively remote but, at the same time, not overly far from services such as hospitals, shopping, and colleges. I hoped to teach part-time after retirement. Second, the site needed to be relatively close to supplies of basic needs, food, clothing, etc. We

recognize that we are getting older with each passing day and, at 58, we are beginning to feel it more and more. We also hoped to purchase a piece of land with a small stream and at least one boundary on public land such as a Georgia wildlife management unit or a National Forest.

We began to look. Every other Saturday we would cruise the highways and byways of northwest Georgia. This remains a beautiful and still sparsely developed corner of the Peach State. Most of northwest Georgia is located in the Valley and Ridge geological and ecological province, a strip of crenelated land, housing some of the oldest mountains on earth and stretching from northeast Alabama into the New England States.

We drove and drove and drove. And we searched and searched and searched. We asked and we listened and after about a year we had still found nothing we could afford or that met even some of our requirements. We looked at land on steep hillsides and asked ourselves if we would want to drive down such slopes at age 72. We looked at patches of forest of the right size (about ten acres) but missing a stream or overly close to a highway or busy county road. From one weekend to the next and from one place to the next, we wandered until we were frustrated and near exhaustion. We saw a lot of beautiful, sparsely populated country but began to doubt that we would ever be able to locate a suitable patch of Earth. And then, we visited with a realtor who just happened to know of a man who just might have something that we just might be interested in. And that's how we found and purchased White Oak.

From pines to an oak forest

Sometime during the past decade, the owner, who lives on a piece of property adjacent to the patch we came to own, had removed most of the mature pines. In many cases that would have left a barren hillside that would have been revegetated as a pine plantation. But in our case it left a beautiful oak forest on the side of a hill with a bottom through which a stream ran about half of the year before vanishing under the earth during the summer and early fall. An old roadway, not much more than a couple of faint tracks in the earth, wandered in about a thousand feet from the end of the asphalt road. During wet weather small springs popped out of every hollow on the property and flowed toward the bottom, For a biologist/ecologist such as myself, wildlife and native plants were plentiful. The place met all of the locational needs;, being no more than half an hour from colleges, hospitals, and grocery stores but, even so, it was uniquely remote. Although the National Forest was some distance away, one side of the property shared a boundary with a large timber company and the land was managed, in part, for wildlife values.

It was important to the man we purchased our almost nine-acre patch from, and to the neighbors across the creek (quickly named Half Time Creek because of its seasonal flow), that we not cut the timber from the land. Everyone was relieved when we told them the only trees we planned to cut were the minimum necessary to plant a small cottage in the forest.

We were, however, going to have to cut a hole in this beautiful forest, if we wanted to live here. And to cut the hole we were going to have to develop the existing logging road. Part of the purchase arrangement was that the seller, now our next-door neighbor several low ridges removed, would take the road to the base of the little bench where we planned to build the cottage. The summer of 1998 was a LaNina summer and, after an early wet spring, things became very dry. Our neighbor had a small bulldozer but no water truck or roller. Consequently, road construction staggered from one infrequent rain to the next. It would rain and our neighbor would bring in some fill and push it around and then wait for the next rain. What was supposed to have been accomplished in 30 days took about six months. It was frustrating, but the reality was that we were not yet ready to begin the house.

Helping nature recycle

From the beginning we were concerned that we not over-build. We wanted the house to be a cottage and the road to be a lane, not a superhighway. Each tree removed from the edge of the old roadbed became a matter for discussion. We were also concerned that the slash and trash of all stages of the building not become a burden to the land and unsightly to us. As the little bulldozer inched forward, from one rain storm to the next over the summer, we followed behind with loppers and bow saws, reducing limbs and trunks to small pieces more easily digested by the bacteria of forest decomposition.

The bottom along Half Time Creek was covered with privet, an Asian import that is powerfully invasive and that forces out native vegetation. When we were not able to work on the road, we turned our attention to the privet. Slowly, over the summer, we reduced the privet grove until no mature shrubs were left. Some of these shrubs were over 30 feet tall and the effort involved was substantial. However, by the end of summer a meadow replaced the dark grove that once stood there, and ground that had been barren of most other vegetation began to sprout native grasses. In the fall of 1998, as the temperature cooled, we seeded the half acre with annual rye grass,

Sometime during that same long, hot summer we had selected a builder. We had a choice of allowing the builder to clear the house site, put in the septic system, and drill the well, but at an added cost of 18 percent over the actual costs of each operation. Consequently, we had decided to subcontract all of the pieces up to the building of the home. Over the following weeks we arranged to have the trees, mostly white oak with a few red oak scattered about, removed from the site. The neighbor from whom we'd bought the land felled and bucked the oak and piled the slash for burning. The hole in the forest started to grow. Every time we decided to burn the slash, the limbs and smaller pieces left over from the felling and prepare for the earth movers, it would rain. Finally, however, we reduced the piles of slash to piles of ash and were ready for the heavy equipment.

The site was still wet on the day the "infernal machines" arrived. The flatbed trucks parked in our neighbor's meadow at the end of the asphalt road and the sound of the mechanical invasion clanked and cranked down the lane toward the site. A large dozer, the second largest excavator made, dump trucks, a crew of men and representatives of the builder arrived about the same time.

Clearing trees gets traumatic

What we remember as "The Day of the Bulldozer" was one of the most difficult and traumatic days of our entire journey into the forest. We had a preconceived notion of how much space we would have to clear and how many trees would have to come down. But we hadn't cleared or felled enough. Slowly but surely, the boundaries were pushed back and the site was cleared. By the end of the day, as additional stately white and red oak continued to fall, Penny was in tears and my anger was boiling. But we didn't know who to be angry with and I knew that, as it was, we had cleared just barely enough land for the compact home we planned. It is, however, amazing how quickly the process goes. By five o'clock the dozers and excavators and men were on their way home and we had a septic system and a cleared area that we hoped would be sufficient for the cottage. We also had a hole in the forest bigger than we had planned, but not much bigger.

Each thing we did to the land changed its nature and changed us. Each tree that we felled, each cut with the excavator, each slice with the bulldozer brought White Oak Cottage closer to completion but changed White Oak as a place. There is an irony about returning to the land. We were called by the beauty and the silvan solitude, by the still pools of seasonal water, by the changing colors of the seasons. But simply by being here we brought change, by building here we brought more change, and by living here the ultimate change.

Building a home is an odd, often disturbing business. You must put your dreams and a significant portion of your family "fortune," and faith in the hands of people you hardly know and intrinsically distrust. You have heard all of the horror stories and you're sure they are happening to you.

Even the cadence of the building process is odd. You wait and wait, and wait and then one day the concrete footers are poured. And then you wait again until the concrete cures and is ready to accept the concrete block foundation. This also has to cure before the pressure treated wood of the sill is set in place, all of this before the frame can rise.

All of this was going on while we were hard at work at our respective jobs in Atlanta. Our weekend trips became an agony of trying to find out what had taken place, determining why something hadn't taken place, or trying to contact the builder (not available until Monday, after staff meetings, of course). Had they dug down through the fill to hard earth before pouring the footers? Somehow the porta potty we had requested and set aside money to pay for never arrived. How come we couldn't get the foreman to move the electrical connection for the dining room light 18 inches and why did he move the connection for the living room light 18 inches, and how in God's name were we going to gets things reversed?

Our visits to the country store a couple of miles away became more than quick shopping trips for hot coffee and egg biscuits but were fact-finding missions. It was here that we learned that the driver of the truck carrying the trusses had driven off of the road, had to be rescued by the tow truck driver, who then took the trusses down the creek road to our place.

But slowly at first, and then with an almost frightening rapidity the frame was in place, the ceiling trusses raised, the insulation tacked in place, and the drywall installed.

The building package we had chosen required that we have the floors installed by separate contractors but first we (a.k.a. "the homeowner") had to paint the inside of the entire place. We will always remember that as the week from hell. Timing was tight. We needed to get the painting done, so the flooring could be installed, so we could close on our loan during a time when interest rates were starting to climb (of course) for the first time in years. Each wall of each room had to be covered with a layer of drywall sealer. Once that was dry we applied the paint, cutting-in the corners with small brushes, being careful not to spill, and slowly but inexorably vanquishing one wall after another until finally, by late afternoon of day seven we stopped, exhausted, our vacation time spent, and realized that we had completed the job we had set out to do a week before.

Over the next several weeks the flooring contractors, as good as their word, completed the laminate flooring, the kitchen and bathroom tile, and the heavy duty carpeting we had selected to resist the Georgia mud and other rigors of rural living.

Somewhere toward the end of all of this the builder's foreman quit and panic set in. This was the man we communicated with on every item, every little change, every flaw that needed to be repaired. We had been abandoned. Someone new stepped in and several weeks later we took our "walk through" with punch list in hand, locked in on the interest rate, and closed on the loan.

And then that blessed moment when all the checks were written and all the king's men were gone, and all the trash removed. We stood in front of the cottage with the hope they had put our Humpty Dumpty together in an acceptable fashion, "Lord we are 60. Let it last at least 30 years."

The other day, I woke early, put the coffee on, and when it was ready, took a cup and a book down to a bench we have in the meadow alongside Half Time Creek. From the meadow I looked back up the slope to the cottage and realized that the house, its style, its colors, even its location all looked like it belonged where it sat. Sure it had those annoying pops and creaks where the floor in the study had been poorly nailed. And, yes there was the odd tilt of the garage floor with its crack that came about when the concrete settled. And, if you looked hard the ceiling in the great room had a little wave in it from errors in applying the drywall. But it was no longer just a house. It had become a cottage, White Oak Cottage. And White Oak Cottage nicely filled what, just a short time before had been a hole in the forest.

We have kept the hole in the forest now occupied by the cottage as small as possible. Over the next few years we will revegetate the site, stabilize the slopes, and minimize and repair the damage we caused coming onto the land. And, as we have all of our lives, we will do our best to live in unity and harmony not only with our human neighbors but with the larger community of life with which we share the land.

Tom Baugh is a biologist/ecologist by training and a naturalist by practice. Penny Baugh creates and designs cloth dolls and distributes them through her own company Happenstance Designs.

TOM AND PENNY BAUGH 3340 SHORE LAKE DR. TUCKER, GA 30084