Missoula News

New West Series

Off the Grid in Montana, Part 4: A Change in the Seasons

By Joshua M. Potter, 3-28-11

The Leonards' indoor garden, more for aesthetics than food, keeps the home green during bleak winter days. The garden out front, where they grow beans and vegetables, doesn't need all the reusable water from the sink, shower and washing machine, so Tom planted banana trees that thrive in the channeled sunlight next to tilted windows.

A few days ago, Holly Leonard left her parents’ Earthship in Florence, Montana, to get back to work at her new job in Denver. Today, her mother, Tara Leonard, is at work. Holly’s younger sister, Maureen, graduated from college last year and moved away. And once again Tom Leonard is left in the home he built on a quiet weekday, alone to his chores and to his thoughts.

The single track road leading up to the pink-stucco one-story is turning to mud, and water trickles from the berm behind the home all the way down to the creek at the end of the neighborhood. Although the mountains adjacent to his house are still frozen under near-record snowpacks, it’s already predicted the rivers will flow higher than average this April and May. Spring is coming, and Tom knows that means he’s going to be very busy.

“March comes, so now I’ve got essentially two months to get stuff done in the house before I head out to work,” Tom says.

He works seasonally in the wilderness around Western Montana, doing inventory on entire swaths of land for companies interested in logging and other natural resources. It’s been his lifestyle for more than 20 years, leaving for months in the summer to come home to a frozen landscape and, sometimes, a near freezing family, to continue work on the Earthship.

The colder months are now his down time, when his time off from his job isn’t filled with huge building projects.

“You’re kind of glad when winter comes, when you can slow down, read a book,” he says.

Living out here, in extremely close contact with both his land and his family, Tom’s become more attuned to the small changes around him. He can tell he’ll have a fewer workdays this summer since the winter was so snowy. He knows exactly what that means for his daughters, who are just becoming financially independent. He can tell before Tara leaves her office in Missoula that he should get his truck warmed up to pull her up the muddy driveway. But his family’s growth and their patterns after nearly two decades of living in the Earthship has been so gradual, sometimes Tom has to remind himself what he’s accomplished.

“Our goal was somewhat self-sufficiency, to be the stereotype back-to-the-land people,” he says. “I’m still not where I’d like to be.”

His family still requires a generator when they need a little extra power for household chores. He never wanted to dig a well and to only live off the water from his cistern.

But his friend David Bassler, who began building his Earthship within a year of Tom in the same neighborhood, says that the Leonards have accomplished something much bigger than Tom may give himself credit for.

“You’re not going to save a whole lot of money until you’re willing to live with this: less energy, less gadgets,” Bassler says. “The No. 1 issue here is the alternative builder and the alternative person that lives in that building has to undergo a lifestyle change to make it successful.”

The primary deterrent for people looking to build a house like his and Tom’s is the amount of work it would take. Not just the actual labor of erecting it, but the work it takes to live in a less-consumptive way.

Bassler says people approach him regularly with questions about building an Earthship. Most aren’t the “greenies” with which Bassler said these houses are associated. They’re people simply looking to build without a contractor and in the most economical way possible. But when it’s time to follow through, a lot of the time it turns out most people aren’t willing to make the leap into alternative living.

Tom may have made that leap because he didn’t think through all the ramifications: his young daughters, his wife with the commute, his job that takes him away in the summer. But Tom just doesn’t think that way.

His next project is pouring concrete for a set of counter tops to replace the sheet wood he now has in the kitchen. But it’ll have to stay above freezing consistently for the cement to dry.

He plans to mess them up first. He knows the first couple will be pock-marked, porous and not the right size.

“The important part of the experience is you learn what questions to ask,” he says. “The first time I do anything, it doesn’t turn out how I want to. But, you experiment and figure it out.”

Ask his wife Tara and she’ll say Tom did this because he wanted to raise a family in a sustainable way. Ask his daughters Holly and Maureen and they’ll probably just shake their heads.

Ask his friend David Bassler and it’s a matter of economics.

Ask Tom, and it’s all a lot simpler than that.

“I do what I do because I love it,” he says. 

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