New West Series

Off the Grid in Montana, Part 3: Growing Up in the Earthship

By Joshua M. Potter, 3-21-11

	The outside of the Earthship above Florence, where Tom and Tara Leonard raised their two girls. Because they were smaller, the kids crawled through the rafter to insulate the roof with old newspapers.

Holly Leonard returned to the U.S. last year from Kenya, where she had been doing nonprofit work with adoption agencies. As she relocated to Denver to work at Hope’s Promise headquarters, her roommate called her with some bad news: She had found an apartment, but they’d have to share a bathroom.

“I just laughed at her. I grew up sharing a bathroom that is a hallway with my entire family,” Holly says.

Although there is nothing special about the two-bedroom Denver apartment where Holly, 25, lives now, she says it’s the most luxurious place she’s ever had: It has a flush-toilet, electric heat and a TV.

From the camper van where she spent the first years of her life, to the off-the-grid Earthship her family built in the hills above Florence, Montana, to the crammed dorm rooms of the University of Montana, luxuries have been defined as heat, personal space and doors.

Holly will be the first to tell you she’s not the Earthship type. She’s professional-looking, put together and hardly evokes how she lived, in a loft above her parents’ bedroom, mixing peat moss in a composting toilet and chopping wood. Her dad laughs at the image of his girly daughter helping to mix cement, pour concrete and pile stucco.

Back at the Earthship, Holly and her younger sister Maureen wore what they called their “grubby clothes”—tall rubber boots, sweatpants and their dad’s too-big work gloves—to help him plaster tin cans a story high or layer tires into the dirt pit that would become the foundation.

Although Holly remembers grumbling about entire Saturdays lost to this kind of work, Tom is convinced it helped shape her.

“For the kind of work (Holly’s) doing and the places she’s going, it somewhat has prepared her for living conditions other than just the normal American life,” Tom says.

But it was a long time before Holly understood what lessons, exactly, she had learned growing up in an Earthship.

“I would daydream all the time about having a normal home,” Holly says.

Ten-year-old Holly and her family moved into the house in 1995, two years after beginning construction. The walls and the floor were primarily dirt, the windows weren’t in place and the whole family shared one inflatable mattress in front of the wood stove.

“I don’t think it felt real,” Holly says. Boxes were stacked against the stucco walls and she was going to start at a new school in Florence in just a few days. To her, it felt like they were camping, like they were on vacation and that everything would go back to normal soon.

One of the first projects Tom had Holly and Maureen do was help with insulating the roof. The girls’ tiny bodies allowed them to crawl through the rafters, so Tom and Tara had them tunnel through the crawlspace, packing it with shredded newspaper Tom had saved.

“It was pretty much me and my sister that filled the roof with insulation in those tiny little dark holes,” Holly says. “My sister’s a lot better at it than me. She was always the tough, sporty, outdoorsy one and I was the more girly one that they had to convince to get up and help.”

Through high school, it just got more difficult for Holly. In the first year after moving into the Earthship, Holly had wandered around the property and drank water straight from a stream. Within days she was diagnosed with E. Coli. As she got older, residual health problems from that illness, including stomach infections, migraines and the flu, kept her away from school for weeks at a time.

Then came both a fire and flood in what the family refers to as “The Year of the Fs,” when a spark from the refrigerator wiring lit the newspaper insulation on fire and water flooded the house along tree-root systems puncturing the stucco.

Tara became convinced that smoke damage, mold and carbon monoxide from the generator were causing her daughter’s health problems.

“That played a huge role in why, for a while, I felt like I resented where I lived,” Holly says. “Because, what if it really is that? What if it’s because of this house that I’m sick?”

But, Holly says she was able to stay optimistic because she could see the house improving as Tom finished projects. Initially, the family all shared one bedroom. Then, Tom built a small loft for the girls above his and Tara’s bedroom. Finally, he added a room Maureen and Holly shared, which they separated with a curtain. When Tom added an indoor toilet or hot water for the shower, the family would get a little more comfortable with the house, Holly says.

“I got excited when we hit milestones, like when we got a shower, or when we got a TV and could watch movies, or the toilet wasn’t far away,” she says. “I felt like every project he did, everything he was working for, was for us because we were living there. We were his family.”

Holly says that in the future she wants to have a family and move to Kenya to work more closely with the children her organization tries to help.

“I know you don’t need that much to live,” she says. “I can make those sacrifices. But at the same time, I know what it was like being a kid and growing up in that and it being very hard to understand.”

In the end, she says she loves the house mostly because her dad loves the house.

“I get what he was trying to do. I understand now what his position was. I understand that that was his thing. Now that I’m older,” she says, “I can understand that because I have my thing too.”

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