June 23, 2022 was a day more than seven years in the making.

Let me back up…

We work in healthcare. We spend our days in the hospital. We routinely walk past closets packed full of equipment with higher price tags than our house. The soundtrack of our careers is a symphony of electronic beeping and alarms. Being good at our jobs means we’re hyper aware and overstimulated.

So, where do we want to go after work? Nowhere. Coming home to the sounds of teenagers peeling out of the school parking lot after the last bell or the backyard neighbors’ BBQ getting a little too rowdy isn’t exactly our idea of decompressing.

In April 2015, we found our nowhere. Sixty acres of timber in south-central Iowa, untouched for decades and within call range of the hospital. The plan? Build a modern homestead, merging our life in today’s world with our passion for self-reliance and self-sustainability. The plan was a ten-year plan, of course, since my student loan balance was larger than our mortgage.

The property was teeming with briars and vines, making some areas impassable. Old barbed wire was haphazardly strewn about, often passing through trees that had grown around it. Herds of deer scampered as we hiked through ravines, and sounds of wild turkey could be heard in the distance. Perfect.

When the pandemic started, our son was eight. He was home from school, forced to be a second grade drop-out. At work, we were in the thick of it, and at home, we were cooped up, still seemingly in the thick of it. So with nowhere to go, we started going to our nowhere, armed with pruning shears and the energy of an 8 year old boy. We prided ourselves on providing him with PE, recess, science, biology, anatomy, and other education without him realizing it, all while starting to build our homestead.

Early on, the guys discovered a giant, metal ring in one of the largest briar patches I’ve ever seen. After extensive excavation, we unearthed the remnants of an old watering trough.

To us, it was a perfect fire ring and the start to our work on the land. We became weekend warriors. Our closets became outfitted in Carhartt, and our garage became outfitted in STIHL. I can only imagine what our suburban neighbors thought when they looked out their windows Saturday mornings and saw us in our coveralls, loading up the pickup with chainsaws, a brush saw, and a gas can. We returned caked in mud, bodies tired, but accomplished. Our son has received more than his fair share of lessons on sweat equity.

Ok, so many months of escaping to nowhere—sans electricity and road access—to work the land, clear our heads, and calm our nerves followed. In our healthcare lives, we toiled away, donning our PPE, caring for patients, silencing alarms, and being sold on the latest and greatest technologies of today. In our homesteading life, we cleared downed trees, branches, and briar. We learned the land and started making plans for it. We worked in areas we thought would be the future sites of driveways, gardens, sheds, barns, and homes. We decided we’d want a machine shed/pole barn first, and we’d need a driveway to get to it. That brings us to June 23, 2022. Sort of.

A path was cleared from the road to the pole barn site, and the site itself was cleared too.

The three of us were there to bear witness to the action. Another momentous occasion along the journey to becoming healthcare homesteaders.